Damian Brady’s Blog

I stumbled across this Slashdot post the other day which talks about the potential for mobile phones to generate enough power to run by using piezoelectric materials.  In short, the vibrations you and those around you make when you talk could generate enough electricity to keep your phone going.

Now here’s the point in this post where I really wish I could remember the word I want to use.  You know when you hear about something for the first time in your life, then amazingly you hear about it several times in the next short while?  You wonder how you’re suddenly being bombarded with this new concept when you only just found out about it?  Yeah, there’s a word for that and I’ve forgotten what it is.  That word goes here.

I picked up a Popular Science magazine a few days before I found this Slashdot post and amazingly, there was a whole section in it about “free” energy.  Awesome concept.

There’s a whole host of low-powered devices in common use today, and there’s superfluous energy being expended everywhere.  Surely this energy can be used to power these low-powered devices?

The simplest example in the Popsci magazine was the humble light switch.  When you wire up a house, you have wire for power going to the actual light, as well as wire for control going from the light to the light switch.  When you flick the switch to turn the light on, you’re expending energy.  Not much, granted, put apparently enough to send a wireless signal to the light (or a controller next to it) to tell it to turn on.  With a setup like this, there’s no need for wire to run down the walls to the switches.  Yeah, it’s not much of a power saving and it’s probably not worth the extra initial cost right now, but in the future it could, and combining a few dozen simple ideas like this in every house could surely save some energy.

The fact is, we expend a lot of energy when we do anything.  There’s also ambient energy all over the place – the obvious ones like wind and light, but also vibrations and body heat.  If we could capture a fraction of that energy and put it to use, we’d have much less need for power plants.

There are thousands of options out there.  If you go for a walk, chuck your mobile phone in the little holster on your belt, and as you walk, the up-down motion of your steps can charge it.  Or maybe the energy absorbed when rain lands on your car roof could be enough to power your windscreen wipers.

Perhaps after a time, when it becomes cheap enough, device manufacturers may get into the habit of building these “free” power sources into their devices.  A mobile you didn’t have to plug into a wall or a sound-powered LED light you could just stick onto a ceiling would certainly have a market.

Clearly this stuff interests me.

So it’s been a long time since posts but I have an excuse.  Every time I thought about throwing up a new post, it occured to me that there’s only one thing I really want to write about, and I couldn’t.  Until now.

I’m moving on from my current job.

I won’t delve too deeply into the reasons, but the short version is that I’ve really done all I can for my career at Global MoneyLine at the moment.  I assume it’s the same with most financial institutions, but times are tough and the emphasis is understandably not on exciting new projects and new technologies.  Consequently, I’m not really learning new things and expanding myself any more and for me, that means its time to go.  It will turn around, sure, but I guess I’m just impatient.

So I start my new job with The Systems Works (www.tsw.com.au) on Monday next week.  Excited, anxious, slightly nervous, but very much looking forward to the change.  I’ll keep you posted.

I just read a fantastic article by John Miano called, “The Myth of the Interchangeable Programmer: Can’t We Just Offshore Him?“.

Basically, the premise is that there’s a very common misconception that all programmers are alike and have the same productivity.  It’s definitely worth a read.

While his article focuses on the practice of offshoring programming to cheap overseas countries, the idea is also relevant when talking about hiring new (local) programmers either to replace others or in response to increased workload.

The misconception that all programmers are the same can lead to an almost apathetic approach to hiring by managers.  If someone quits, that’s fine, we’ll just hire another programmer to take over the work.  If there are new requirements that mean we need a new developer, then fine, we’ll just hire another one.  One problem is that there’s usually a significant lead time filled with learning about the project before even the best programmer can be truly productive.  The other problem is that which is outlined in Miano’s article; one programmer can be many times more effective than another.

I’m not sure what the solution to this is.  I’ve preached this line many a time but because it’s in such stark contrast to the person x time = fixed productivity formula that is relatively true for most other professions, it falls on deaf ears.

David from 37signals posted a blog entry about people who have succeeded with ideas you may have thought of a while ago.

He’s right about it all of course – an idea by itself it worth nothing.  If you do nothing with it, then you have nobody to blame but yourself if someone else makes a whole lot of money from a similar idea.

Of course this doesn’t necessarily stop the nagging feeling that it could have been you with all that income…

My big idea that I did nothing with?  I think it was around 1998 when I thought it would be useful to have a real estate website to which rental agencies could submit available properties complete with photos and searchable descriptions.  Seriously.  Oh well.

I read a Coding Horror post in March about testing localisation code for Turkey to make sure it’s correct.  Apparently Turkey has one of the hardest languages to write Internationalisation code for.

Anyway, it appears that a localisation fault on a mobile phone in Turkey has resulted in two deaths and three jailings.  Warning – bad language in this link!

Wow.  That’s a very bad side-effect…

Yeah, I finally bit the bullet and changed my blog tagline…

ramblings of a mid-late 20s IT nerd / volleyball junkie / semi-professional drinker

…how depressing…

The book was called The House of God.  Nervousness makes me forget things!

Damo

if (thisWeekend.Contains(easter))
{
  thursday = friday;
  tuesday = monday;
}

Obviously I post very rarely. It’s been a long time since my last one.

So, in an effort to actually make this something that gets updated, I’m changing the way I’m going to do it. I’m not going to wait until I have an essay to write, because it’s clear that doesn’t work. Instead, I’m going to write short posts.

This is the first one. Hope you enjoyed it. Read it again if you like.

Damo

I read this article in CNet that talks about functionality we can expect in the next generation of digital cameras. Cameras that have face detection are already fairly standard, and Sony’s new Smile Shutter feature takes it one step further; only taking the photo when someone in the shot smiles.

The CNet article mentions a few technologies that are interesting, and the combination of these technologies look to make the sorting of photos a lot more hassle-free. There’s the possibility of automatic tagging of photos for location based on GPS, tagging of people based on face recognition, and tagging of emotion based on expression detection. I could imagine extensions into analysis of the scenery in the background too. Identification of buildings in the background, perhaps the weather, whether it’s night or day, indoors or outdoors, etc. The possibilities seem nearly endless given the gigantic leaps that are being made in computerized pattern recognition.

Give it a few years, and automatic tagging could mean that you could just snap away wherever and whenever you are, transfer the photos when you get home, and have some basic photo software organise and name your photos for you. Without doing any manual tagging yourself, you might be able to search for all photos of John in Paris, or even photos of at least three people with the Eiffel Tower behind them when it’s raining and at least one person is looking miserable.

The prevalence of digital cameras and the plummeting price of solid-state memory has basically meant that you don’t need to wait for a great shot to start snapping away. Consequently, it’s not uncommon for people to come back from a two week holiday with over 1000 photos. Who wants to sort through all of that?

I’m heading to Thailand soon and I’m likely to come back with more photos than I know what to do with. With the technology where it is right now, I’ll be spending a very long time sorting through those photos when I get back. I’m dreading it even now. I’m sure I’ll long for the day when I don’t have to do it at all.

Damo