Gurgitations

A Manager’s Segway

Blake Byrnes — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 23:20:10 +0000

In December of 2001, the world was given a taste of the Segway, the self balancing scooter. For quite some time leading up to that unveling, speculation loomed large about what the “IT” project, by legendary inventor Dean Kamen, could be. People guessed everything from anti-gravity machines to personal jetpacks, frictionless skateboards, [...]

Mobile Shadow Puppets

Blake Byrnes — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 01:50:53 +0000

As a follow up to the last post, I wanted to share another cool mobile interface I came across. Some researchers at a Microsoft and Mitsubishi electric research labs have created a mobile interface they’re calling “lucid touch”. The prototype uses the back of the device as a multi-touch interface that you use [...]

Mobile Interfaces

Blake Byrnes — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 20:35:22 +0000

This is not a massive idea, and I’m going to keep this short as apparently my posts are a bit too “essay”-like in length. I was playing with the iPhone at the Apple store yesterday, and the novelty of some of their tricks to make the interface feel natural got me thinking about more ways you [...]

Live Stalk

Blake Byrnes — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 02:23:01 +0000

A new age of social networking is coming… to your cell phone. I don’t know when, but I do know it will come. It will start secretly (to you) on high school and college kids’ phones. It will likely involve sharing something that you feel is far too private to be publicly [...]

Stored Proc-livities

Blake Byrnes — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 17:13:41 +0000

The debate over using stored procedures is long and heated. At the core, people were arguing over the merits of when and why to use them. Clearly, the implementation options available now are unpopular. With the introduction of Ruby on Rails, Domain Specific Languages, and scripting languages in general, is a new option available? I want to know: If you could offload logic to the database that requires multiple transactions or loops through large data sets, but you could write all of your code in plain old Ruby, never even being aware of the database code being generated, would you? You could reuse your existing Domain Model classes and encapsulate all of your logic in these models using some conventions and some extra parameters.

String Theory

Blake Byrnes — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 17:10:40 +0000

What we call fundamental changes with time. Atoms were once thought to be fundamental, elementary building blocks of nature; protons were then thought to be fundamental, then quarks. Now we say the string is fundamental. So there still are fundamental building blocks: they are the different modes of the string. - David Gross “Strings” [...]

11 Whole Meals of Food a Week

Blake Byrnes — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 18:53:16 +0000

I am a terrible cook Well, technically, I’m not terrible… A more apt description would be not a cook. I just usually get home and want to do other things. Pretty much the same thing happens to me during lunch. I’d just rather go eat somewhere. Their food is usually better [...]

First Gurgitation

Blake Byrnes — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 00:21:11 +0000

This is my first blog entry. Look for lots of crazy, innovative, and funny ideas to come up on this blog. Some of them will be good, some of them will already exist, some of them will boggle your mind because they are so dumb. All in all, the site should either [...]