No - not directly. I saw an article about Biomimetic Ocean Power on WorldChanging this evening.
I’ve always thought there was huge untapped potential in waves. Maybe because it’s kicked me around so damn much when I’ve been in the ocean…
It’s definitely not going to be your “typical” “Giant Turbine” power source, where you scale by making more and more monstrous turbines. It is fundamentally an inverse, to my mind - going for the small and scattering it widely. The challenges for building this sort of device and system for power have got to be pretty amazing - reducing tranmission overhead to nearly nothing, dealing with forces that tear islands apart… One hell of a challenge. Really interesting though. I hope these guys can do something with it.
I knew it was in there… but it took me a while to find it, so before I loose it - the feed to my blog on just “django” topics is:
http://www.rhonabwy.com/wp/category/geekstuff/django/feed/
Quite the little hackery - Django running on a WinCE phone.
I’ll be curious to see it using a database somewhere (although Django doesn’t need a db to work…) and if it’s useful enough to really make a mini-app…
A couple of beers and a burger can cure the most amazing things…
I was completely exhausted when I got home from work this evening. Just knackered. But I’d planned on heading to our XCoders meeting, so I was up and out, picking up Brent to give his C4 presentation to the group this evening.
The presentation was excellent - a topic I’ve been thrumming around in my rear-brain for a while. And the after-meeting beer/dinner was its usual chaotic, beer drinkin’ sort of environment. The exhaustion faded away with the food and the lively discussion over just about anything - geek or not.
The only downside is that it’s 12:30am and I’m still feeling pretty awake - which I’d rather definitely NOT be at this hour. Guess you win some, loose some.
I don’t get to do it all that often, but every now and then, I bring home the laptop, connect in the VPN, and scratch and scribble code from home.
And I’ve got to say, one of the best things about working from home is being able to make your own lunch that doesn’t mandate something being microwaved or cold. Today, its grilled cheese. Gus makes his own pizzas… Anyone, one of those nice benefits.
I haven’t been writing much, frankly, because I haven’t had much to write about. I’ve been busy, work has kept me booked during the day, and a separate project has kept me busy at night. I’ve not even been doing a great job at keeping up on my daily reading. Thank god for RSS.
The first - a Wired article entitled Rebuilding Microsoft. It is a well written, and I think accurate (from the outside, of course) assessment of what Microsoft is and where it’s going. Right now, Microsoft is in that “pretty screwed” position of having their oil tanker sort of stuck cross-wise in a river. I have a deep suspicious that if anyone can unjam that mess, it’s going to be Ozzie - and while I haven’t a clue where they’ll be in 5 years, I think it’s definitely worth watching.
The other is entitled Google Puts Lid on New Products - but I think it would be better entitled “Let’s see how Google does when it has to get real…” or “The test begins”. I’ve got a number of friends (some of whom read this blog, I’m sure) working at Google. Most of them love it, but from an outsiders position (again), I suspect they’re gotten “too big” and are beginning to really see the impacts of their massive growth. Ironically, that “yeah, Google’s too big, they’re stumbling” was the topic of more than one beer/evening conversation at WWDC of all places.
The wired article is much longer
Yeah, It’s been pretty quiet from me lately. I don’t have all that much to report, and far too much that I could comment on. But it would all be rehash commentary, so I’ll just keep it to myself.
I’ve been in a funk the past week, and events of the past couple of days have only deepened it. I’m not even really sure what’s originally got me down, and at this point there’s just too many weird and freaky things happen to be able to discern any one item from all the others.
Still, tomorrow is friday, and I’m determined to actually get something useful done tomorrow. Then there’s the weekend…
