They both blink

This is my ELF Membership card (in the black box) running a 12 byte program that adds up to 255 then turns off the light, normally this would be about 1 per second, but I’ve been tweeking the speed dial as it has no ‘realtime’ clock. Using this in comparsion to the new Arduino Uno running it’s ‘Blink’ program. It is blinking to a realtime clock timed to the 1000 of a second and matches the ajacent clock. The Arduino (aside from the 1024 byte boot loader) required 998 Bytes to perfom it’s feat.



Both the RCA 1802 CPU in the ELF and the Arduino Uno CPU (ATmega328) are both 8bit processors with 32Kbytes of memory, the 1802 is (mostly) clocked to 2Mhz, and the Uno is running at 16Mhz.

Sync Me Up



How do you keep your connected devices connected?
How many different services do you depend on to keep your ‘stuff’ safe and available from anywhere?
Could you imagine a better way?
I can, and I almost have it working with my ‘stuff’,
now I’m just working on a way to make it easy for everyone else to do the same.

Perfect purposing for an E-Book reader.

With all the iPad hype from the past week or so you would think that the E-Book market was dead. But I have thought of a niche for such things, and it’s one that even the iPad can’t fill. That of a personal printer replacement. My wife is a notorious printer user. Partly as she collects vast amounts of bits of paper in her researches, but she finds it easier to read printed paper rather than a computer screen. Hence our recent replacement of our old, broken, and much used printer with a new HP F4850 .

But what if an E-Book reader manufacture produced a ‘Printer’ dock that would allow the E-Book to act as a printer. You could ‘print’ your web research, documents, and any other output normally assigned to paper, to your chosen E-Book? Sounds like a solution to me. Readability without the cost of printer ink. Most E-Books support Postscript and PDF formats, so it’s unlikely that any special hardware would be required, just a dock that emulates a usb or WiFi printer.

Sounds like a project to me, anyone?

I’m an Ass H__e

I’ve being rude at Gateway Ireland I’m an Ass H__e. But I’m a Ass h__e that gets things done! I have spent my whole life moving from project to project simply on my reputation of being a high tech firefighter. I stomp out project fires, and make things work. I complete projects that are spinning out of control and either cash in the reality check and close them, or bring them to fruition. And the one thing that gets my blood up are projects without any clear goal, or ones that have floating goals. This Gateway Ireland project sounds great, but is clearly unfocused and directionless. Doomed to failure, much like the Mobhaile.ie project which I could see from it’s outset would fail. And the aftermath shows that there had to be ulterior motives at work here. Observing the expense items listed, points directly at a government rip off, a government money laundering operation. Clearly meant as a payoff to political friends.

What Ireland needs now, is a clearly defined, and completed project to demonstrate real Irish skills, not another political farce to act the maggot. Real developers, operating on clearly defined goals to solve clearly defined problems. There is no such thing as an all encompassing solution in this recessionary environment. Fix as many of the small problems, the big ones will take care of themselves.

Google begins to crumble

With all the press at MWC and for that matter, everyplace else, Google is King of the internet. But it’s crumbling. Right in front of everyone, their entire infrastructure is beginning to fail. Not in the obvious way like a server outage or service unavailability. It’s the control structure.

I’ve never been a big user of Google, I only really got a Google Mail account when I started searching for a smartphone, which may have been an Android model. I had heard that this gmail account was needed to be set up in advance to load contacts and what not. But then the office IT manager thought Google Wave was a great way to keep all our remote activities documented, in other words, a tool to herd cats. Then he discovered Google Docs and gee isn’t that a great way to share document creation. Now there’s Google Buzz …. and then … and then. Google just can’t stop, and beyond that, they can’t integrate either. All these systems seem disjointed to the point I can’t even sign on and get to them, they must each be logged on to, no single sign-on. THE single most important step in services, and they can’t seem to make it work. It’s quite apparent that there is no single share point in the login process where all the services can be accessed, in a way, Google is competing against itself. And to quote verse:

‘A house divided, cannot stand’

Google is crumbling.

They have grown so fast and so broad, they have not built out the infrastructure required to support the entire breadth of their development groups. Which from empirical evidence, seems to need some method of communication, not currently visible to the outside world. To quote again;

The right hand does not know what the left hand is doing

Google is stumbling

Watching fall will not be pretty.

Selling your self

I’ve been engaged in a discussion on facebook on a subject proposed by Bernard Goldbach. The subject has shifted a bit into what ‘marketing’ is. Or more so perhaps to what discussions in a public forum are. It’s also the basis of why the Delphi Method and my Idea Forecasting project are so important. But the only way I can illustrate this is like a 3 year old would do, with the ‘Why’ drill down to find the basic question. So here is my attempt;

Why do you blog, or post on any public forum?

To participate in the dusscussion.

(good, nobel thought. ed)

Why?

Well I think it’s a good disscusion.

Why?

Well I think I have some thoughts on the idea which I wish to contribute.

Why?

Well I think my Ideas are good.

Why?

Well I’ve had these experiences which have taught me a lot, and I think everyone should hear them.

Why?

Well I think everyone should know them, they can learn from them as well.

Why?

because they are important

Why?

because they are great ideas.

Why?

etc ad nauseam …

They are personal, you deem them valuable, and wish to give (read sell, promote, peddle) them to others.

The Delphi Method is a way to remove the ‘Personal‘ the Ego from the the Idea. The idea, and the discussion is on the merits of the Idea, and the comments, not on the personality, or the need of the individual to promote that Idea.

Free Beer, not a good advertising campaign

In the area of advertising, outside of posting nude pictures of celebrities and offering Free Beer I’m out of my league. When I talked about my new projects to the Open Coffee Cork gang, I got what I thought was pleasant interest. But outside of the amusing use of my @querynetTwitterBot asking about jaegerbombs, no one else bothered to visit my projects.

I have been seeking any feedback on Idea Forecasting, Query-The.net (@querynet) and fleetingthoght.com (@fleetthoughts) but if I can’t get a reaction from a more or less friendly crowd, it’s unlikely to get much of a reception from anyone else.

My Query The Net Project – Part One

My current project, query-the.net now has a prototype, but you don’t have to visit the website, which is more or less a placeholder. Instead, use your favorite Twitter client and direct a question at @querynet {and a question} and wait for a reply. You should (assuming it’s working) get a Twitter response to your query. It’s currently only sending responses every 15 minutes so don’t expect an instant response. Let me know what you think.

Idea Forecasting Project

I continue to work on my Idea Forecasting Project. But I’m not completely satisfied with it. I also have an idea that the process I have in place could also be used as an electronic Corporate ‘Suggestion Box‘. After all, Ideas are suggestions, which can be either anonymous or presented with ownership. I will probably have to get some other ‘Eyes’ on the site to get some feedback on this prototype.