Basecamp from 37signals is a really interesting (and potentially excellent), full-fledged web application for project management and collaboration. It looks like it would work well with a looming large project of mine, with a lot of potential communication pitfalls. The Project (with a capital “P”) involves sales, product management, HW and SW engineers and at least 4 or 5 different companies as consultants, contractors and/or clients.  Basecamp appeals for a variety of reasons.  Here’s some:

• It has a simple, easy and quick user interface (this increases the chance of the product managers and salespeople actually using it)
• It integrates with Beanstalk’s hosted Subversion source control service which I’m also considering using (need to share the source among at least 3 of the companies)
• It has a nice-looking time-tracking feature which could also be useful for keeping track of some of the hours that need to be billed back

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Ok, so this is pretty much the epitome of geekiness, but I so want one. The BUGbase ‘Hiro P’ Edition for $299. It’s a modular open source computer/gadget system with a Java-based development kit. The base unit specs look like this:

ARM1136JF-S-based microprocessor
1 USB 2.0 HS host interface/4 hub port connections
1 USB OTG HS interface
4 UART serial links
4 channel SPI interface
I2C (400 kbits) interface/4 channels
I2S interface/2 channels
Smart LCD interface
Camera sensor interface
Micro memory card interface
MPEG4 hardware encoding/decoding
Hardware graphic acceleration
10/100 Ethernet MAC
and more...

No wireless, but coming and at cost when released to early adopters. The first four modules (due Q1/2008 are a GPS, a 2MP camera, a motion detection/accelerometor unit and a 320×240 touch sensitive color LCD display.

Much more including more specs, pictures and screenshots of the dev kit at Bug Labs. Their Bug Blogger entries also have a lot of information on what they’ve got going on and some of the thinking behind things.

Link sent from my even geekier brother E.

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Excellent op-ed by Maureen Dowd at the NY Times on Hillary:

“Hillary Clinton denounced Dick Cheney as Darth Vader, but she did not absorb the ultimate lesson of the destructive vice president:
Don’t become so paranoid that you let yourself be overwhelmed by a dark vision.”

The New York Times, Feb. 5, 2008
Read the full thing here.

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75 degrees F in NC today.  Honeybees are out, flowers blooming in the backyard…  It’s February for fuck’s sake!

Images
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Alright, first, I know it’s uncool to mix politics with programming (or photography, or whatever other geeky subject we’re focused on). But I can’t help it.

Second, I am a cynical bastard on the surface but sometimes things get to me… Sometimes these are really, really stupid things that make me reflexively teary-eyed (yes, that’s right, like the ending of Legally Blonde). Sometimes, they’re more serious things. Right now, Super Tuesday morning, I want to believe that we are on the verge of a change in this country for the better…

So, I can’t vote in the primaries this morning (NC doesn’t do it until freaking May), but if you can, please check out the “Yes, we can” YouTube video from will.i.am in support of Barack Obama.

Trust me, it’s way better than the Toilet Trained Cat video…

Politics
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Codegear just got a 1 million seat site license deal with the Russion Federal Agency of Education for Codegear RAD Studio (Delphi, Delphi.net and C++).  Nice.  Now if only they could break into the US market that big…  Read more at InfoWorld.

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From Ben Watson’s great essay, “Top 5 Attributes of Highly Effective Programmers”: 

There’s a world of difference between someone who just programs and someone who loves to program. Someone who just programs will probably not be familiar with the latest tools, practices, techniques, or technologies making their way down the pipeline. They won’t think about programming outside of business hours. On the weekends, they do their best to forget about computers. They have no personal projects, no favorite technologies, no blogs they like to read, and no drive to excel. They have a hard time learning new things and can be a large burden on an effective development team.  

This describes so many of the programmers I’ve been subjected to over the years. Read more at the Philosophical Geek.

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The insult generation obsession renewed and continued…  I cleaned up the javascript code for both the classic and iPhone versions of the Textual Abuse page.  It was seriously ugly to get around some really old misbehavior of random numbers in Netscape and because I was a doofus when I originally wrote it.  Ok, still a doofus, but now at least one with some pride. Besides, de-dumbassing the code, I also added a method of emailing the insult, thus making this quite possibly the most useful application I’ve ever written. Now with just a couple of taps of your finger, you can send a classy message like this to your fat, ugly, stupid republican female friends in just seconds:

You vermin-ridden, Huckabee-loving, obtuse, bovine, vomit-inspiring, hog-humping hag!!!!      

 My next task is to actually improve the insults a bit, they’re still pretty lame and very much in the mentality of me as a 26 year old. I’m older and dirtier now… I also have to improve that icon…

I also spent some time researching a javascript method of detecting the iPhone (and iPod Touch) users when they come to the “classic” version of the Textual Abuse page.  Most methods I found depend on finding the string “iPhone” in the user agent string.  This is a problem now because of the iPod Touch users - certainly wouldn’t want to lock them out of the fun.  So the solution can be found at the Apple-hosted, open source WebKit development project, where they’ve put together a nice javascript library for just this purpose.  Apple has more info on this subject and the user agent at their developer site as well.

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