introspectiveH » ewH

Protecting the Earth's Blue Heart

ewH — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 23:07:37 +0000

Last year, a big eye opener for me was watching Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth. More recently, I have been reading Thomas Friedman's new book Hot, Flat, and Crowded. It's sad and depressing to watch, even in the span of my own lifetime, what we are doing to our precious planet.

In a world of chaos, it's great to see leadership in these areas shining like a beacon of light amongst the mass ignorance. Today, I came across this inspiring TED talk by Sylvia Earle about saving the blue heart of our planet. It's 18 minutes well spent, and I highly recommend it. My favorite quote from Sylvia was about two minutes in as a response to an earlier TED talk by Jill Tarter from SETI on the search for intelligent life elsewhere. She says "My hope, Jill, is that someday we will find evidence that there is intelligent life among humans on this planet." It drew a big laugh, but sadly it's true. You can watch below, or go to TED directly here. Enjoy.

In a related talk, check out Captain Charles Moore on Sailing the Great Pacific Garbage Patch as he talks about the sea of plastic we are leaving in the wake of wastefulness of our throw away world.

Feedly – RSS with Style

ewH — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 23:35:53 +0000

Last week, I was introduced to an application called feedly by one of my fellow Enterprise Irregulars, Anshu Sharma. From the home page, it's described as "…a firefox extension which weaves twitter and Google Reader into a magazine like experience." In Anhsu's blog post, his focus is on the new service called feedly mini; however, I must admit, that I never tried feedly at all. After only week, I am hooked, and here's why:

Beauty – Feedly is very pleasing to the eyes. The flow, design, navigation, and page layout just work very well together. It enhances your reading experience and makes browsing feel less like homework and more like a hobby. This is one thing I have missed since subscribing to the many blogs I follow. If I am going to spend multiple hours a day keeping up, it helps when it's comfortable and fun.
Full Google Reader integration – I was highly impressed with the Google reader integration and how easy it was to setup. Actually, it was so easy that I didn't have to do anything at all. Once installed, it gathered all my Google reader information and built my page automatically. The picture above was what I got straight out of the box, no configuration necessary. It organizes all your content based on your current feeds and categories. Just in case you are worried that you won't be sold on feedly and you may want to go back to Google reader, do not fret. When you read, share, or save a post in feedly, it automatically does the same action in Google reader. It even synchronizes between the two when you subscribe or unsubscribe to a feed. It also works in reverse, so anything you do in Google reader, is reflected in feedly. Even as a bonus, when I went to email a post to a friend, it was able to do a live lookup from my gmail address book…sweet! Hey, hold on here, do I see a Google acquisition coming on?
Keyboard Shortcuts – If you are a shortcut geek like me, that is the first thing you will check when trying a new tool. Well, good news, feedly uses most of the same shortcuts as GReader. So if you are already used to and addicted to these, you will be very pleased. There are many extras available too that aren't available on GReader. The only one I miss that I haven't seen on feedly is the Shift-A shortcut for marking all items in a category as read. They have a button, but no shortcut (yet?).
Feedly mini – I have used feedly mini a little too, and it's also a neat add-on. When you visit a page, you can see if others are talking about it on twitter, digg, etc. You can also save, share, or email the current page from the mini feedly toolbar.
New Content Discovery – based on your current subscriptions and current friends, feedly builds recommendations to other content. I have already found and subscribed to a couple of blogs using this service. Maybe the crew at feedly should go talk to the guys at pressflip and really get some powerful content suggestion going on.
Other cool toys – twitter integration, friendfeed integration, and a neat semantic web feature that uses open calais, which has much potential to change the way we search and organize web content.

Feedly breaks the mold of a traditional RSS reader and makes for a very enjoyable reading experience. I never had complaints about Google reader, but after using feedly and seeing the difference that beautiful visual aesthetics can make, I won't be going back anytime soon. Feedly is a winner and my new RSS reader of choice. I just put in my pre-order for the Kindle 2, so I hope the guys over at feedly are working on a Kindle friendly version; that would just be the icing on the cake.

Disclaimer: Even though it may sound like it, I do not work for feedly as a product evangelist.

Ice Yachting in Lake Hopatcong, New Jersey

ewH — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 20:22:06 +0000

A lot of people ask me if the the lake that I live on in New Jersey freezes in the winter. It does indeed freeze solid, and it's really cool to see the different winter activities on the lake. Some things you would expect, and some others that are a little less known. I have seen people ice skating, playing ice hockey, ice fishing, snowmobiling, ATV quad riding, and just playing around and having fun.

However, one of the coolest things that I have seen is Ice Yachting. Picture a sail boat on oversized ice skate blades. These things really fly and the sound they make as they whoosh around completes the experience. They were out today, so I took this short video of them in action. I was pretty far way, so you can't hear the sounds of the blades, but it's still awesome to see. Next step for me is to con someone to let me actually try it!

Enterprise Geeks

ewH — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 22:41:46 +0000

Last year, a small group of some of my fellow enterprise developers decided to form a small group known as the Enterprise Geeks. Right now the group members are as follows:

This week we have launched the new site where we will be maintaining a blog, podcast, and all kinds of other good stuff. Please check it out, bookmark it, subscribe to it, love on it, and tell all your geek friends about it at http://enterprisegeeks.com

We are proud to be an officially approved Blogger Content Community with the SAP Blogger Relations group ran be Mike Prosceno and Stacey Fish.

Note: Many of us are already affiliated with similar groups like the SAP Mentors and the Enterprise Irregulars. The goal of the new group is not meant to replace our involvement in these, but be complementary instead.

Star Wars: Force Unleashed – this isn't your daddy's Atari

ewH — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 04:53:55 +0000

Since developing Majority Desk, I have really been appreciative, intrigued, and amazed by the potential of using simulated physics as the engine for allowing objects to interact in games and other software. For Majority Desk, we used the open source Open Dynamics Engine, and it gave us all we needed and more to simulate a fully interactive, 3D environment.

Today, I came across some news about the new, upcoming game from LucasArts, Star Wars: Force Unleashed.

The Star Wars saga will continue in Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, a videogame developed by LucasArts, which casts players as Darth Vader's "Secret Apprentice" and promises to unveil new revelations about the Star Wars galaxy.

Yes, like any self respecting geek, I am a Star Wars fan, and the evil thought of being Darth Vader's secret apprentice, is more than a little exciting. However, this isn't what interested me the most.

As its name implies, The Force Unleashed completely re-imagines the scope and scale of the Force by taking full advantage of newly developed technologies that will be seen and experienced for the first time: Digital Molecular Matter (DMM), by Pixelux Entertainment, and euphoria by NaturalMotion Ltd. Paired with the powerful Havok Physics? system, these new technologies create gameplay only possible on the new generation of consoles. DMM incorporates the physical properties of anything in the environment so that everything reacts exactly like it should – wood breaks like wood, glass shatters like glass, plants on the planet Felucia bend like plants on the planet Felucia would, and more. Meanwhile, as a revolutionary behavioral-simulation engine, euphoria enables interactive characters to move, act and even think like actual human beings, adapting their behavior on the fly and resulting in a different payoff every single time.

This stuff is so freakin' cool that I had to search around a little more. After looking around, I stumbled across this baby, which will set your geekiness levels through the roof. No matter if you are a gamer or a Star Wars fan, this is six minutes of video that you have to watch. The trailer shows and explains the three technologies they integrated for the game. This will not only change gaming, but it also opens up whole new worlds in areas that involve real life simulations for both entertainment and business purposes. Geek overload warning ahead.

My favorite quotes from the trailer

Havok Physics 2 SDK – Continuous Physics engine:
"allows us to move a great number of objects on the screen at any given time."
NaturalMotion euphoria – Dynamic Motion Synthesis (DMS): "[the game characters] have a sense of self preservation, a sense of self awareness…"
DMM by Pixelux – Digital Molecular Matter – Game Asset Synthesis Technology: "is a way of simulating the substance of objects, sort of pretending that their molecules"

Bonus footage #1 – Euphoria Engine Tech Demo

Bonus footage #2 – Digital Molecular Matter Tech Demo