The keyboard works fairly well even with my paws.

On the other hand, sometimes the tests are just too hard:

The Feynman point is the first instance of six consecutive 9s in π

Feinman said he wanted to be able to recite the 700-odd digits of π up to that sequence, and then say “nine nine nine nine nine nine nine and so on”. Brilliant.

Early programmer Maurice Wilkes is attributed as saying:

As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn’t as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs.

It’s still true today, despite the amazing tools that now exist to support programmers.

One of the great problems is that the human brain is so good at decoding information, it’s very hard to decide what is helpful to a user. Many of the tasks that are feasible with a computer are so trivial to a human that when they go wrong even a small number of times, they create real anger. A small insight into the power of the brain can be perceived with the following experiment on Sine Wave Speech. I was blown away by the gap in understanding before and after the process.

I am usually resistant to the notion that times are permanently changed. There seems to be a real trend towards making things sound as bad or as good as possible, and to feel that each new event is totally unprecedented. It’s in the interest of a large swathe of people to believe that. The media, both in terms of the traditional broadcasters and the internet echo chamber need to generate hype as hard as they can, and are interested in presenting things in that fashion.

At the same time, I have to admit that a 2,500+ drop in the Dow over the last month makes me a little worried. I know that stock prices have little direct economic impact on a non-investor such as me, but at the same time I also feel that it does have some barometric value.

(found on VentureBeat)
I particularly find the notes about advertising and mobile interesting. They are often claimed to be immune or shelters, but I think that if there is a real drop in consumer spending, that will have an impact. Even oil is down, there’s a 12% drop year-on-year for Brent Crude for September. It seems like there is a retrenching throughout the global economy, and the Valley is far from immune

Engadget point out an ‘error’ by Vodafone marketing. This could cause some serious stir. On the other hand, they also report that they are ‘in love’ with the Storm’s keyboards. Could be an interesting phone.

Other neighbors of mine with interesting pictures include:

• Lockheed Martin, who have great shots of ships and aircraft (including the photo above)
• The Library of Congress, which is hoping you will help a small part of their massive photo collection.

There are dozens of great groups to join, including the photogamer group for those of you who need inspiration.

A more important discovery that I have made is that there is a free way to sync ical with google calendar bi-directionally. This is really important to me because I have a load of different calendars which I use for work and I really need to be able to add and track events on different calendars.

The google web client is nice, but iCal integrates really well with the rest of the OS and feels right for usability. There are commercial clients such as Spanning Sync and Busy Sync, but as I am a cheap bas believer in freedom, I prefer not to pay for software.

It turns out that there is an application for both OSX and Windows called ‘Calgoo’ that will do the syncing for you. Their website is at calgoo.com.

One really nice feature is that it will let you create iCal calendars as you set up connectors.

Java

Java can be a bit of a bugbear for linux users, because of the choices between Icedtea, openjdk and the Sun hotspot. Since I do a lot of Java development, I really want the real thing.

On the Mac, the official JVM seems to come from