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NOVA program on autonomous driving
April 10, 2006
A couple of weeks ago I watched a wonderful NOVA program on PBS that followed several university teams as they built the hardware and software necessary to compete in the Grand Challenge. To succeed, each team had to design a vehicle to traverse over a hundred miles of back country terrain, following a rugged trail that switchbacked through the mountains and looped back around to the starting line... all without a human driver or remote control.
I've always been fascinated by the problem of designing an autonomous vehicle, so I was like a kid in a candy store as I watched. The profiles of the team leaders were also a pleasure. The red team was led by a former military man, while the blue team was lead by a bright, friendly man with a Norwegian accent. I would love to compete in something like this some day. The Terrarium challenge that I competed in a few yeas ago had this sort of flavor to it, but on a much smaller and simpler scale.
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Ruby on Rails
March 29, 2006
I've been hearing more and more about Ruby on Rails these days. It won't be long before I download the language and start hacking, but you know what they say about time. That's something that I miss about university -- although had lots to do, there seemed to be more opportunities to procrastinate and explore :)
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Google Page Creator
March 21, 2006
It's fascinating to compare Google Page Creator with the idea of a wiki... they're quite similar in that they both allow web pages to be edited in vivo without having to first download them via FTP. I created a wiki at work that has been really useful for creating and editing documentation, but in the end having to use a bunch of confusing markup is never going to be a great solution for less technical people.
Something that I really like about Google Page Creator is that it limits what you can do. This may sound odd, but when you present a toolbar with 40 buttons to a new user, it's pretty overwhelming. And giving them 40 bells and whistles to play with means that they're very free to make a big mess. Constrain that to headings, subheadings, bulleted lists, and then package that all with a consistant font and colorings, and whala, you have some good looking content.
My page on Google Page Creator
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