Things new to me, or things to remind myself about:

• Arrays.deepToString() & Arrays.deepEquals()
• Queue & PriorityQueue
• Overriding return types!
• Erasure
• Type wildcards <?> and generic types
• Enums (.valueOf(), .ordinal(), .values()) & EnumMaps & EnumSet
• varargs
• import static
• printf() = format()
• BlockingQueue
• TimeUnit
• new threading with return values -> Future, FutureTask; and thread scheduling -> Callable, Executor, ExecutorService

The creator Arnold is, though the sun of a rich father, living in the streets of a future US to flee his father and his strong will – and to pursue AI and robotics research, culminating in a robot so humanlike that it can fool all people. She is called Maggie and her story – though she is a robot – is a some kind of story how to become human.
Looking at the humans in the world, with some senses more powerful than humans, she sometimes can understand humans better than humans themselves – as she is certainly less preoccupied.
It is fascinating to see how she learns about the world and the humans she meets – how she is drawn to the other AIs on the net because they have a much deeper relationship (faster for example), but still likes to live in the ‘real world’. The story contains also very different responses of humans who eventually find out or get told that she is a robot.
Contained in the story are also some more philosophical thoughts about what makes a person, including what it means to be able to copy one and have duplicates, and what it means to be ‘programmed’ – which basically are the same questions coming up for humans too, if you think about it …

All in all it is a very positive and quite moving story about robots and AIs, in a more or less paranoid and somewhat dystopian environment of humans.

Very good explanation how to get Tomcat running under Mac OS X!

This seems interesting to me – use a mobile device like a phone to collect information in pictures, words and sounds, combine it with time & place information (if the devices supports). Use this information to provide a memory aid in the computer, bringing together related information – analyze e.g. via optical character recognition, then analyze for semantic content (names, phone numbers, …) and match up with other applications (e.g. the address book). A nice integration and usability are key here.

I would consider it helpful …

• IBM R&D Labs in Israel | Pensieve -
• IBM software acts as human memory backup -

I like this view of Michael Sheehan very much which gives some structure to this range:

“I would like to propose a ‘Cloud Pyramid’ to help differentiate the various Cloud offerings out there. [At the top of the pyramind] users are truly restricted to only what the application is and can do. Some of the notable companies here are the public email providers (Gmail, Hotmail, Quicken Online, etc.). Almost any Software as a Service (SaaS) provider can be lumped into this group.

As you move further down the pyramid, you gain increased flexibility and control but your a still fairly restricted to what you can and cannot do. Within this Category things get more complicated to achieve. Products and companies like Google App Engine, Heroku, Mosso, Engine Yard, Joyent or force.com (SalesForce platform) fall into this segment.

At the bottom of the pyramid are the infrastructure providers like Amazon’s EC2, GoGrid, RightScale and Linode. Companies providing infrastructure enable Cloud Platforms and Cloud Applications. Most companies within this segment operate their own infrastructure, allowing them to provide more features, services and control than others within the pyramid.”

And from IBM’s Irving Wladawsky Berger:

“When virtualizing applications to be used by people who care nothing about computers or technology – as is mostly the case with Clouds – the key thing we want to virtualize or hide from the user is complexity. Most people want to deal with an application or a service, not software. … The more intelligent we want [computers and computer applications] to be – that is, intuitive, exhibiting common sense and not making us have to constantly take care of them – the more smart software it will take. But with cloud computing, our expectation is that all that software will be virtualized or hidden from us and taken care of by systems and/or professionals that are somewhere else – out there in The Cloud.”

• get minority report real
• cheap smart board, on the wall or anywhere, or create a multi-touch laptop LCD
• turn your monitor into a 3D ‘window’ through head tracking

Amazing – check out the videos.

This is possible, because the Wii remote not only has acceleration sensors, but also an Infrared camera of fairly high resolution (1024×768), tracking of up to 4 points at 100Hz.

Shai Avidan, Ariel Shamir: Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing
ACM Transactions on Graphics, Volume 26, Number 3,
SIGGRAPH 2007

• Paper: http://www.faculty.idc.ac.il/arik/imret.pdf
• Video (high-res): http://www.faculty.idc.ac.il/arik/IMRet-All.mov
• Video (low-res): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIFCV2spKtg

Email you receive that isn’t spam… And isn’t personal mail. It’s the middle class of email. It’s notifications of a new post to your Facebook wall or a new follower on Twitter. It’s the Google alert for your name and the newsletter from your favorite company.

See also the Bacn website – nice T-Shirt, with a shorter definition:

Email you want, but not right now.

• Individuals read Web pages in an “F” pattern. They’re more inclined to read longer sentences at the top of a page and less and less as they scroll down. That makes the first two words of a sentence very important.
• Surfers connect well with images of people looking directly at them. It helps if the person in the photo is attractive, but not too good looking. Photos of people who are clearly professional models are a turnoff. “The person has to be approachable,” Pernice Coyne says.
• Images in the middle of a page can present an obstacle course.

There is another article showing the F-pattern nicely in pictures from Jakob Nielsen.