Rosey
August 13, 2006 Posted by Al Castle
1 comment so far Categories: Science, Segway
Slap on an outer shell for this thing from Carnegie Mellon and it could pass for the housemaid Rosey from the Jetsons cartoon. Although, it looks like Rosey may have had multiple wheels, never the less this is a pretty cool implementation of alternative robotic mobility.
The gist being that their robot balances and moves by using a single ball, sorta like a ball point pen. They claim this allows the robot to take up less space and allow for greater freedom of movement and speed. The release states, “Because it is omnidirectional, it can move easily in any direction without having to turn first.” Apparently it still has three legs which it uses to stay upright when it’s not actually in motion.
For me I’d like to have a robot that has the option to go on legs for rugged terrain and on a wheel or wheels for speed and elegance. Of course while I’m wishing for magickal ponies, my bot would have it’s own AI and double as my mech suit.
Another balancing robotic system, this one using two wheels has been out for quite awhile from the good folks at Segway, which have the Robotic Mobility Platform. It has to turn first, but is also probably ready to go for commercial applications. Ooow. Looks like Segway has some other items I haven’t spotted before here.
WildBlue
August 13, 2006 Posted by Al Castle
add a comment Categories: Puter Stuff
My parents live way, way, way out past Acme,WA two houses down from Mordor. They have dial up, and a refurbished 2Ghz PC that I put together for them. It takes my Mom half and hour to load a page with a picture of the grandkids. There’s no hope of ever getting broadband out there, or so I thought. I recently heard on the radio a plug for a company called WildBlue, which is Internet over satellite and claims to have about 1.5Mbs download speeds or the equivalent of a T1 line. The cost is comparative to ordering Comcast Internet which is rant unto itself, that I will save for latter.
I think my folks may be moving so I might never get a chance to try it, but I’m curious to hear any feedback about the service.
Pretty Feeds
August 13, 2006 Posted by Al Castle
add a comment Categories: PRWeb, Puter Stuff, Web Design & Dev
It’s still a work in progress, but last week I quietly made some alterations to a few hundred thousand PRWeb RSS 2.0 feeds. I added in an XML StyleSheet (XSL). Which basically renders the feed with some HTML if users try to view the feed via a web browser which supports XSL ( IE and Firefox ), Safari for OSX seems to refuse and renders feeds in their own way regardless of the wishes of the feed creator.
This modification provides a message for customers that do not understand what they’ve clicked on, or what an RSS feed is. Users can also add that feed easily to their Google, Yahoo, or MSN news readers via standard looking chicklets. It needs some cleanup, and a few things need to be expanded, but it should provides some assistance to the new user or PRWeb and RSS in general.
News readers/aggregators should process the feed as normal ignoring the stylesheet.
Google Meatforge
August 13, 2006 Posted by Al Castle
add a comment Categories: Puter Stuff
I’m cruising about online minding my own business when one of my search results takes me to Google Code. I seem to recall something like that where they have their API’s listed. The page I’m on though is for a hosted project, hence the name of this blog post. Seems to be something along the lines of Freshmeat and Sourceforge. Looks like you can get a project page, source control hosting via what appears to be Subversion and a bug tracking system as well. Some Google specific items seem to include the use of labels and integration into Google Groups. Additionally and a bit of an annoyance is that there are no tarballs to download, you seem to have to use subversion to get any code. This is probably old news, but I’m surprised I hadn’t heard about previously.
Alternative titles included Meatforgle, GoogleForge, ForgeGoEat.
In Vocus
August 13, 2006 Posted by Al Castle
add a comment Categories: PRWeb
Recently David McInnis sold PRWeb to Vocus - more info. I’ve been retained with the same basic duties and responsibilities and you should continue to see the same great pace of development and ingenuity which have always made PRWeb a leader. Additionally there should be some goodness of co-mingling of our two services to the benefit of all in the coming months.
The many weeks leading up to the big day of signing, hence forth known as The Big Day of Signing, we stayed up late every night looking over legal documents reviewed and modified by so many attorneys, each leaving a colored MS Word track-changes mark. These documents became almost like one of those pictures where you had to look at it out of focus to see the image. There was data gathering, report building, statistics generating, number crunching, and just general lack of sleep. During the last leg we were in Manhattan, NY trying to get some other business rolling along, where we ended up over taking the offices and fax machine of some friends who were most gracious and made with the inking. There’s many more details involved but those are stories for the fireside, for now it’s enough to know that a vacation is in order and here’s some pictures.
The first one is of the exact moment David signed. So that is the face a person makes when they earn $28 million. The second is a nice celebratory toast with kosher wine (grape juice). A congratulations to all involved. I know Bas and Steve from Vocus were probably up as late every night as we were and it was a team effort to make this close as quickly as it did. A few other notable mentions would have to goto Alex and Joel who came with us to the Vocus corporate offices in Maryland and managed to make sense of the raw data provided to them.
