Digikata

Phase Change Capsules in Drywall

2010-02-03T21:38:00.000-08:00

What a great idea. Daytime heat is absorbed into little capsules of a material that changes phase. The material is mixed into drywall plaster. Rooms stay cool. At night the heat is released. Great primary function, but the material is made from a process that coats Paraffin wax. I have to wonder how that does for fire resistance.

iPad and Interface Single Tasking

2010-01-28T17:14:00.000-08:00

Geeks of the world went through a collective wave of anticipation and lament yesterday at the unveling of the Apple iPad. If there was a single most missed feature, it was probably the lack of multitasking. I'm going to say something contrarian here. The iPad doesn't need multitasking now, and possibly not ever.With the iPad, Apple is taking a step down the path where separation between

Healthcare Soda: Predictably Broken Competitive Markets

2009-08-11T21:49:00.000-07:00

Interesting data on health care by Umair Haque at the Harvard Business Review in this article. (he actually has a lot of interesting articles in HBR.) I've been thinking that the private healthcare industry as a competitive market is pretty broken in the US. It's not really surprising to me that a competitive market works very poorly with its characteristics. For a market to work best, a purchase

Touchable Holograms

2009-08-06T21:23:00.000-07:00

Popular Science posted this article and video about touchable holograms at Siggraph '09, this year. It's a combination of three items: a 3d display using concave mirrors something like this 3D mirascope toy, two wii-motes strapped statically for position detection, and a home-brewed (university-brewed?) phased array of ultrasound drivers.

A Sheeva Plug Computer would make a great NAS

2009-03-24T20:43:00.000-07:00

I've been looking at the Sheeva Plug dev kit from Marvell. It seems to be an ARM core System-on-Chip (SoC), Linux compatible, with an interesting combo of device controllers hanging off of it, including ethernet, USB, and SATA ports.The dev kit seems to be the size of a large wall wart and part of Marvell's "Plug Computing" marketing drive. Not sure about plug computing bit, but I'd love to fit

Telephones over the Internet, a Skype vs Gizmo5 comparison

2009-02-26T19:02:00.000-08:00

Engineers are always trying to optimize value - sometime's we choose the wrong values to optimize on, but thats a discussion for another day. Recently, I've been looking through different VoIP services to see how viable they are as ways of augmenting or replacing my residential land-line phone service. VoIP is Voice over Internet Protocol. The per-minute prices for VoIP are free-to-low, with

ATT U-Verse vs. ?

2009-02-21T13:46:00.000-08:00

About a year ago ATT started rolling out U-Verse in my neighborhood. Since then, every quarter or so, I get an ATT marketing visitor to my door trying to sell me the service which is, at its full glory, a combined phone-internet-cable service. (and I think, is fiber-optic to some sort of neighborhood box, but not to your house). Today was the latest visit, but the first marketer was the worst,

Etch-A-Sketch Patent

2009-02-09T19:23:00.000-08:00

Here's a link to the patent for Etch-a-Sketch - originally called the GrandJean Tracing Device on Google Patents.

Olympics Siverlight missing?

2008-11-25T04:00:00.000-08:00

Hmm, cleaning out my bookmarks, I opened up the NBC Olympics site. At the height of the 2008 Olympics they had been running Microsoft's Silverlight pretty heavily all over the place. Today, because I run NoScript on Firefox, I see a big pre-loading box saying - download Adobe flash 7 or higher all over the place. The videos still seem to use silverlight though... Ah I'm probably just remembering

Sun Images

2008-11-22T04:00:00.000-08:00

I love these solar images. Nature is beautiful. #9 is one of my favorites. Once you're through with looking at the sun imagery, look at some of the other Big Picture columns. Who says that newspapers can't figure out the web. The Boston Globe seems to be doing well in the medium in this case.(from Digg)

Bailout Opinion

2008-11-21T03:00:00.000-08:00

Not that it would ever happen, but I think that if the taxpayers are bailing out the Big 3 automakers, we should basically require them to be broken up into smaller independent companies. Down the line, if they waste the opportunity (ahem Chrysler), then at that point, they should be small enough to fail and would be replaced by healthier, more responsive companies that can restart from a fresh

Eclipse DTLK and Ruby

2008-11-18T20:59:00.000-08:00

I've started playing with the Eclipse in general and the Eclipse dynamic languages toolkit (DTLK) specifically for it's Ruby support. The 1.0M3 version doesn't seem to be the update servers so I downloaded the full package version and unzipped it into my local eclipse install. The "Mx" numbers must be prerelease milestones.So far the experience has been much better in general than past forays

Lego Sifting Box

2008-10-16T04:00:00.000-07:00

I recently purchased a Lego organizing case for my son called Box4Blox. It was a little overpriced if one was comparing cost at the material level, but it had a great feature of being able to sift and grade Lego parts. The item has four trays with different sized gridded grilles underneath three of them. From top to bottom, the grills get increasingly smaller, sifting out larger Lego pieces and

U.S. Farmers Save By Installing Manure Digesters

2008-10-04T12:33:00.000-07:00

Popular Mechanics has posted an article interviewing dairy farmer Shawn Saylor. Saylor describes the multiple benefits of the anarobic biodigester system he installed. I've always thought that there was an archetype of a small, savvy, independent citizen-farmer at the heart of the image of a pragmatic can-do attitude of America. It's great to see that showing in the article.The digester system is

Residential Wind Turbines

2008-09-22T04:00:00.000-07:00

EcoGeek has a comparative review of residential wind turbines. None of these turbines would be a single-item install to replace all your electricity use, but they're affordable and if your electricty structure is anything like mine, taking the most expensive tier out of the bill would actually give you a financial payback pretty fast. It's on my list of back-of-the-envelope modelling articles to

Miscellania: Basic Aerodynamics

2008-09-18T08:00:00.000-07:00

For anyone with curious kids (or is a curious kid) who want to know more about how airplanes fly, NASA has posted some material in an index of informations meant for K-12 education. My favorite part is the FoilSim Java applet with controls and displays to illustrate what is going on with various parameters with a 2D airfoil.

Medical UAVs

2008-09-15T17:46:00.000-07:00

This has to be one of the coolest UAV uses I've come across in a while - delivery of medical samples or critical supplies like snake anti-venom between remote locations and labs. New Scientist quotes TB researcher Ruth McNerney Ruth McNerney of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in the UK, "It's a very exciting idea. We need to know if it's reliable enough from a technological

Gov't Blocks Private Testing for Mad Cow Disease

2008-08-30T17:48:00.000-07:00

I had intended to keep this blog mostly technical, but this just makes me angry. Creekstone Farms Premium Beef was blocked from performing "mad-cow" tests on 100% of its beef by U.S. Dept. of Agriculture and USDA. This is an issue that affects both free market practice within the the United States and an international competitiveness issue as Creekstone was trying to use the testing to increase

History of Agile Software Principles

2008-08-30T10:00:00.000-07:00

In an article inside Crosstalk, the Air Force Journal of Software Engineering, Alistar Cockburn reviews a 1968 NATO software engineering conference. He observes that many of the core beliefs and techniques of the modern Agile software development movement aren't such recent developments after all. Both the 1968 conference and the Agile movement focus on the central effect of people over

Ending Oil Dependence in Ten Years

2008-08-29T06:20:00.000-07:00

I'll probably be trying to examine both Obama's and McCain's technology policies a little more closely, but for today, just a little note:Last night, at the Democratic National Convention, Barack Obama's acceptance speech mentioned that he would set a goal to "in ten years, we will finally end our dependence on oil from the Middle East." The technologies Barak cited in the speech were numerous,

Lung Popping Wind Turbines

2008-08-25T20:33:00.000-07:00

New Scientist writes on a report of wind turbines killing bats, two species in particular accounting for 60% of winged animal deaths. The bats lungs are apparently being damaged by the low-pressure region surrounding wind turbine blades.Though one could trade off the cost-benefit of bat deaths vs general power generation pollution deaths, maybe we need to install ultra-sonic whistles on turbine

Health and the Anti-Kidnapping RFID Implant

2008-08-22T18:55:00.000-07:00

A Gizmodo article describes Radio-Frequency IDentification (RFID) tags being implanted into people as an anti-kidnapping measure by a company called Xega in Mexico. The system reportedly involves an external GPS unit keeping in contact with the RFID tag. Besides the problem of getting separated from the external GPS, there may be some health implications too. I don't know if Xega uses the same

Introduction

2008-08-21T20:12:00.000-07:00

After a long intense period of focusing for a workplace milestone, I finally have some time to work on the Digikata site. The site has been re-hosted onto Blogger and Google Apps. On Digikata, I'll be posting notes about various topics of personal and some of professional interest to me. My profession is software engineering, and my specialty is in the aerospace industry. Educated as an aerospace