21 Feb 2003 (updated 21 Feb 2003 at 04:30 UTC)
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That was a long week.
I am working on a robot project with the Palm-powered robot from Acroname. Unfortunately, they are not particuarly gcc friendly. I need to figure out how to make the palm compiler dynamically link against palm libraries. I'm sure it's in the docs somewhere.
Photography is Dead. Long live Photography.
I'm going to be getting a Canon PowerShot G3 digital camera for a graduation/birthday present. The day after I learned that I wound up borrowing the CS department's G1. I must say: Wow. I've done analog photography for quite some time and I really don't follow the consumer electronics market as much as many CS majors. I really hadn't realized just how good digital has gotten. The roll of film I have in my camera now may well be the last roll of film I have processed in several years. With digital, in adition to being able to control apature, shutter and focus manually (or automatically), I can jump between film speeds at any time. Plus I can look at the picture when I take it so I know if it came out right. Also, flash ram is less than a dollar per picture and is rewritable. (Obviously.)
I'm sure I this all sounds silly. I knew all of this technology was there, I just had no idea how cool it was until I could play with it. I'm eagerly awaiting my camera. :-)
This got me to finally set up my USB port. It turned out all I neded to do was apt-get a few things. Now I have my optical mouse working simultaniously with my TrackPoint, both with a good refresh rate, and with the scroll wheel working. This makes me very happy.
Feature idea for presentation software: Give an estimate of presentation time. Simply t = A×NumSlides + B×TextLength + C×NumPictures + D×MediaLength + E.
The constants would have to be determined approximately. If the user were able to give feedback (as in “it took 20 minutes and I'm only to slide 12”) then the constants could be adjusted to match the user's style. (Or polite suggestions could be made regarding the style of the user's presentation.)
No. Of course I didn't see an overly-long powerpoint presentation today.