Technology

This is a robotics application I’ve never run into before, but it is actually being used in the Netherlands: a gas pumping robot. The video shown makes it look like it works pretty well too, and while it seems slow the article says it speeds things up enough to actually increase their number of sales per pump. I do wonder how much of that is the fact that, to use the pump, you preregister with your credit card number and preferred type of gas (so that you don’t interact with the robot at all, you just pull up and sit … Continue reading Does not yet wash the bugs off my windows

The news from earlier in the week that Google is committing to providing users easy and free ways to move their data in and out of Google products addresses one of the concerns I have had about cloud computing. I understand the appeal in terms of expense, and I have had good experiences when I have used Google Docs for collaboration. But often the content being created is stuff that I may want around many years in the future, or also available off-line on a flash drive (we can pretend the entire world is networked, but in just the past … Continue reading Data Liberation

We’ve been talking about various types of scheduling problems in my AI class, so this local article about computer modeling used to schedule sports games caught my eye. It is an interesting constraint problem – not just the number of games, mix of who plays who, and frequency of games, but particular rules based on amount of time needed to set aside for travel and other issues of fairness. It is particularly worthwhile to think about the advantages this system offers when changes occur that make a planned upon schedule no longer acceptable. Often, the human response to that is … Continue reading A “fair” schedule lets me sleep in until at least 7

I love the Google logo for the day – not just because it looks great, but because it kept me from missing Tetris’s 25th birthday. Like, well, everybody I remember losing hours and hours to playing Tetris. I remember exactly where I first played it – in the summer of 1990 I was at the PA Governor’s School for the Sciences on the CMU campus, and Tetris was installed on the computers at the tiny computer cluster just down the hill from our dorm. It was an odd little computer cluster, shoehorned into a storefront space next to a laundromat … Continue reading 25 Years of Falling Blocks

Coding Horror is often fun, and a good read, particularly for aspiring techies who want an inside glimpse of some of the details that would make up your life if you pursue that path. But when I read Jeff’s post on spaces versus tabs in code formatting I both cracked up and immediately thought of one of my Data Structures students who has to reformat any piece of code he is given before he starts working with it. With my students deep into their team projects, I wonder if they are running into the conflict that Jeff claims is inevitable: … Continue reading Yeah but assignment operators are cheap…

I like the discussion here about an article finding that font choice influences how likely someone is to act on material they are reading. It is pointed out in the comments that the appropriate interpretation is not that Arial is the best font, but that cutesy fonts that get used to add interest or make documents look more “friendly” may actually be reducing the impact of the document. I have seen studies about reading comprehension based on font choice, but this is the first I have seen that talks about how likely a person is to take a particular action … Continue reading Who doesn’t love a little Zapf Chancery sometimes?

RouteShout is a new service being piloted in Pittsburgh (but available for purchase to any city) that lets riders text a number posted on a bus stop and get texted back the arrival time of the next buses scheduled to reach that stop. [via Pittsburgh Metblogs] I love how simple and yet useful this idea seems. They don’t seem to be trying to solve the entire “where is my bus” question – you can’t go to a website and see maps of all the buses, you can’t send complex queries about fares or what transfers are needed to get from … Continue reading Where is my bus?

From earlier this week, a report that Windows is producing a limited version of Windows 7 that will be cheaper and faster for netbooks to run. The big difference being discussed? You can run a maximum of three applications at a time…. The company claims most users wouldn’t be affected by the three-app limit. “We ran a study which suggested that the average consumer has open just over two applications [at any time],” Painell claims. “We would expect the limit of three applications wouldn’t affect very many people.” However, Microsoft told journalists at last year’s Professional Developers Conference that 70% … Continue reading I want allllll my apps

It seems that either Google has been hacked or its security settings have been upgraded to be excessively paranoid. It will be interesting to hear what ended up happening to produce these results….

It’s the time of year to get yourself a new calendar – or invest in a perpetual calendar so you never have to worry about it again. If you’ve got twelve cents and a piece of cardboard, you can build yourself this little desk calendar that shows you the day’s date….. so long as you’re proficient with binary. I’d actually probably get more screwed up by remembering whether I started numbering the days of the week from zero or one, but (note to self) it would be a fun exercise to convince yourself that this is the minimum number of … Continue reading Still can’t figure out when that leap second happened