I took a Research In Motion BlackBerry Storm 9550 and an Apple iPhone 3GS (just released in Ireland) and took pictures of various subjects in typical situations – outside, inside and with sub-par lighting conditions. The rules are eleganty simple:
Take 3 Pictures of any given subject with each device, try to move as little as possible.
Pick the best representative sample of the three photos.
Compare….
The following images are direct from the devices, no manipulation was performed. This explains why some photos are oriented in a different direction:
iPhone 3GS
BlackBerry Storm
* I made numerous attempts, but it seems anytime I take a photo of the iPhone 3GS with the BlackBerry, the screen has a significant green hue.
The latest and greatest phone to come out of Apple’s iPhone camp, the iPhone3GS will hit O2 stores from 8am tomorrow morning.
Apple’s iPhone3GS (’upto 2x faster’) brings with it a faster processor, more ram, slightly improved battery life, video recording and editing, MMS, Copy & Paste, voice recording, improved GPS thanks to the included compass and more from €199 for the 16GB and €299 for the 32GB models on billpay starting at €40 p/m or alternatively €519 and €609 respectively for speakeasy customers.
Unfortunately, only black models will be available at launch. Customers prefering a white model may request one from staff in participating o2 stores or online.
For eager iPhone3GS customers, the following stores will open at 8am to cater to your technolust:
To my great shame I haven’t been updating this blog anywhere near as often as I had once before. Unfortunately I’ve been busy with other more important things, the one of most significance is co-founding The National College of Ireland Computing Society (NCICS) in addition to my usual roles at Atamia and QHC Consulting.
That wont be true for very long as I’ve just ordered a Mac Pro and will be starting iPhone App Development in the very near future… as soon as the Mac Pro arrives in all its 8 Core, 8 GB, Quad Screen, Aluminium glory. Of course I dont need a Mac to design an iPhone App, so I’ll leave you with some tantalizing sneak peaks of some of the Apps I will be developing and with any luck releasing later this year:
Readers who don’t religiously follow my twitter are likely unaware of the current discussion surrounding a ‘Homebrew/Indie Game Development’ book.
Ever since my first foray into programming with ClickTeam Klik N’ Play back in ‘99, I’ve just stumbled into situations where I’m surrounded by independent game developers. Over the years I’ve grown a great respect for what they do, and admittedly a little jealousy for what some have achieved with dedication (*cough* James Silva *cough*); I was never really that ‘into’ game programming, just programming in general, after all making apps can often be far simpler than creating an entire game with little reward for your hard graft.
I’m thinking its about time to give back a little to those who give so much, and all just for the love of it.
For the past 3 months (give or take) I’ve been spending most of my time researching console development and much of that time was concentrated on finding out as much as humanly possible about Developer Kits (SDK’s, DevKits), which are the cool magical boxes from which awesomeness springs (video games mostly). The difficulty being the sparse information available without a publishing deal and various non disclosure agreements (NDA’s) being signed.
So the book idea is basically a compilation of all the information I’ve gathered, and will continue to gather, about how independant developers can get the tools required to develop games on the Xbox360, Wii, PS3 and so on. Of course, I’d likely want to interview independant publishers who’ve survived and continue to develop indie games.
So what I’m looking for is feedback from people, I’m totally at concept phase now, so I’m taking on board all opinions people have. Please contact me with your comments or suggestions using the forms on this website.
I just finished watching Pirates of Silicon Valley. Undeniably Steve Jobs came out pretty poorly from the film.
From the cult of personality that Jobs would appear to have been fostering, to the abandonment of his child, Bill Gates and Microsoft came out pretty much unscathed. There were some dirty business tactics, that much is true, but nothing so damning.
Docu-drama of course, this should be taken with a pinch of salt, but wikipedia seems to verify much of the details. I’ve always been highly suspicious of the apparent cult of mac and its been quite unclear where it started, this film definitely explained that aspect of Apple for me.
DevDays 2009 is Ireland’s first iPhone developers’ workshop, hosted by Digital Circle, in conjunction with the Digital Media Forum and Create Ireland. Catering for everyone from complete novices to experienced hands looking for some extra advice, this free event gives attendees the chance to meet iPhone developers and interact with official Apple engineers.
There are people I know who will remain nameless, who have at one point in time operated Internet Relay Chatrooms (IRC). These people could be ordinary folk in regular conversation, perhaps a little socially awkward, but not always or obviously so. Transport these very same people into the dank cave-like environment where IRC resides and they transmogrify themselves into Golems.
I should mention, for the unintiated: IRC is an ancient (by Internet standards) communication standard which lets people from all over the globe create chatrooms and talk about how emo they are, or how particularly important their world view is, despite how disjointed or warped. Just like everywhere else on the Intertubes, only seedier.
I cant explain it and I dont know why but as soon as ordinary people are given even a minute amount of power over others, regardless of the context or environment, they go bonkers. absolutely.
It has been so rare that I have experienced a civilised, well thinking and sensible person in an IRC channel, that I cant be entirely sure that I didnt imagine them out of pure desperation.
Of those who I have known to become moderators, operators and/or admins of IRC servers, once they believe they have power they go power mad. Sabre rattling as and when the mood hits them, ostensibly claiming omnipotence over all that is ‘the chat’ and omniscience over everything else.
One can easily lose faith in humanity with the types of individuals that lurke in the cellar of the Internet that is, the IRC channels.
IRC is only of value whilst it lets people talk freely without despotic administration or political back biting. To those who think that IRC is the be-all and end-all, you need to re-evaluate yourself, there are more important things in life than watching a monitor waiting for someone to slip up so you can crack down your personal brand of justice upon them.
The Internet is meant to be about the free exchange of ideas, not an exercise in ‘how best can I control my sheep so they worship me most’.
Omegle is yet another Web 2.0 social networking experiment. Visitors are anonymised to the monikers ‘You’ and ‘Stranger’, such that your almost guaranteed to always be talking to someone new… and strange.
Omegle is essentially an ajax chat portal where you are more than encouraged to talk to strangers, thats the only people you can talk to.
There is something strangely intriguing about talking to absolute strangers, that you know nothing about and who also know nothing about you. It does have some negative drawbacks, as would any site based on such a minimalist concept, namely spammers and for some unknown reason alot of non-english speaking people trying to learn english, mostly Chineese for some reason.
If your bored, why not give Omegle a go, worst thing that can happen is you’ll purpetually be accused of being a 57 year old pervert.
I don’t blog as a profession, the fact that I do has never gotten me an interview; for the mostpart not even so much as an interested ‘hmm’ from people I want a job – or to do buisness with.
This is I suppose part of the reasoning behind the eclectic nature of this blog, I post about various things, I’ve gone off on tangents – I’ve even made innocent remarks that have led to extremely abusive comments that resulted in police enquiries. Like most bloggers I imagine, I actually dislike any sort of negativity toward my blogging – its a hobby for me, not a lifestyle choice; I doubt it would be any different for a ‘pro’; but I like to at least selfishly believe that what I do here, is valuable to some of you who visit.
People often don’t realise the work thats involved in keeping an active blog even remotely interesting: if all your going to talk about is the meanderings of your inner world, you might end up developing a following after a very long time, but the effort-value trade off to me, and the whole revealing personal details, they’re not my style. This might explain, if you ever wondered why I post those articles from ezinearticles.com every so often. Apart from the obvious ploy to get people to click on the banner advert (which I make no bones about, they’re a good host, I use them and I get something if you click on the link and use their service. seems fair to me), I usually do it to keep an active ‘conversation’ going. Theres nothing worse than a silent blog!
Without speaking for other bloggers, when I make a post I generally try to research the subject, at least enough so I know enough about the subject that I can carry a short conversation about it. Mainly because, perhaps, thats how I like to write – as if I’m having a conversation with you; only inexplicably you’re letting me do all the talking.
If you blog as a hobby, why not post a link in the comments?
I went to the Dublin Twestival (@dubwestival on twitter) last night. It’s described as a ‘festival’ of twitterers to meet, drink and chat, and to give to charity.
In fairness ‘festival’ is a bit of a stretch, the Dublin Twestival was hilarious for the pure fact that me and Phil were quite possibly the youngest people at the event, of about 120+ and had somewhat of a 30-40s singles club vibe for a while.
That said, it was good fun! Free drinks were definitely had, while they were available. It was all for a good cause, the water charity, so a couple of raffles were held…..I won twice!!! how awesome is that?!
We spent most the night just joking about how we were the youngest there, talking geek, and how the crowed seemed much more ‘normal’ than we expected.
I won a ‘vibrating directors chair’ and a normal wooden directors chair – carrying them home, in addition to my bag which was already overladen with two laptops (my new laptop was delivered to work a couple of hours earlier), after having a few drinks, was…interesting!
It was only a matter of time that someone would hack together a system to link up a Neural Impulse Actuator (NIA) by OCZ to make a pretty simulation of a mind controlling the input of a computer program.
This is a video of mind-control of the Besmoke fluid simulation project.
With a combination of software and hardware, the Wiremap project aims to create 3D wiremaps in real 3D space using materials and tools as simple as projectors and thread.
The Future of Computing is Google – Should We Be Worried? By Jonathan Huie
I didn’t just say that Google is the future of the Internet – that is scary enough – and virtually true today. I said, The Future of COMPUTING.
Google has always been a gentle giant – unlike the bravado Microsoft. No rantings and ravings – no pronouncement that “our way is best,” or “we know what is good for you.” No, Google’s way is to welcome open standards and actively promote their competition. For example, their tool to move a blog off their (free) Blogger service is fully as complete and usable as their their tool to transfer a blog onto Blogger. Try getting your data out of a Microsoft product such as Outlook or Hotmail.
Perhaps Google has learned from Microsoft’s mistakes. Gentle wins in the long run. This is really good for Google, but is it good for the rest of us. Because Google take such great pains to offend no one, because it is so capable, and because it now has tremendous momentum, Google is taking over more of the world of technology every day.
Google completely dominates my own professional life as an author and blogger to an extent that is more than a little concerning. Google search and Gmail are the least of it. My blogs are on Blogger, but I could use another service. It’s not even Picasa, or YouTube, or FeedBurner.
AdSense/AdWords – that’s the stranglehold. Google is essentially the only channel for a small business to either advertise of receive advertising revenue on a website or blog. Yahoo and others aren’t even on the radar. If I had to, I could use Yahoo’s search engine, but if I lost AdSense/AdWords, 80% of my professional activity would vaporize.
In its own gentle giant kind of way, Google is now creeping up on computing and enterprise information sharing. Shared calendars and shared documents for starters – moving quickly toward a complete collaborative computing environment. Just watch – for most users, personal and corporate, the only local software will be a browser, perhaps Google’s Chrome. Google’s individual and collaborative on-line productivity and authoring applications will dominate for all but the most demanding users.
Should we be worried? Perhaps not, but don’t become too complacent.
Jonathan Lockwood Huie is an author of self-awareness books. He has been dubbed “The Philosopher of Happiness” by those closest to him, in recognition of his on-going commitment to seeing Joy in all of life.
** “Today is your day to dance lightly with life. It really is.” – jonathan lockwood huie**
SmartGate is an electronic learning game, that aims to teach and measure the performance of the players. It is fun and engaging, whilst also teaching the player and improving maths skills.
The game focuses on mathematics, each level with their own varying degrees of perceived difficulty. The player should never presented with precisely the same set of puzzles or puzzle types, thus giving the game a high replay value.
The project was completed on the Microsoft XNA framework, using the XNA game studio software; as such the programming language used was C# and where necessary XML.
Microsoft research are developing Kodu (previously Boku), a visual games programming environment.
Kodu is a programming environment which is designed to be accessible by children and adults alike, where you can create games on the Xbox using just the controller.
The core of the Kodu project is the programming user interface. The language is simple and entirely icon-based. Programs are composed of pages, which are broken down into rules, which are further divided into conditions and actions. Conditions are evaluated simultaneously.
Although Kodu is aimed at developing a programming environment for games programming, I think the project presents great promise for human-computer-interaction. Thirty years with computers has given us many technological achievments: wireless communication, gigahertz processors, almost inexaustable amounts of storage, but one thing computer technology has left by the way side is human interface. The interface between the computer and humans is vital, its the way we interact with a device which defines its importance – I personally believe this is why the Apple iPhone is so incredibly popular, it got the human-computer-interface just right. I’d go so far to say even that above all other technologies today, interfaces are where we are going to see the most progress and the most profound changes in our lives.
I believe that this is the way of the future, its projects like this where programming will become mainstream, and with our modern world the way it is – and unlikely to change anytime soon, everyone will at some point want to or be required to do some programming in the future. Text based syntax and grammar restrictive languages such as C++, Java etc require a wealth of knowledge before you can concieve of working with code.
If we could all move to a visual programming medium, where intuition and perception are the rules of the game, computer programming could definitely become a mainstream activity.
image courtesy of 
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