As I'm sitting at my desk all day, reading tons of pages of software architecture theory, my concentration fluctuates. At times I'm totally focused, then it fades out and I have to snap out of it and re-read what I just read. My mind wanders sometimes, in the middle of a paragraph I start thinking about something completely different. But I've noticed that the room temperature has an effect on my ability to focus. It's a balance of opposites. Too cold and I'm cold. Too hot and my head grows tired rapidly. There isn't an ideal temperature. Ideally, I would maintain a different temperature in my head than in my feet.

But regulating the temperature in the room is a good measure. The temperature outside right now is about 3-(-2) degrees, day time-night time. When I open the window and I feel the cool air, I focus much better.

You could potentially create an appliance to regulate the temperature instead of opening/closing the window and fiddling with the dial on the heater. And there could be several ways to do this.

The you deserve to be beaten with a bag of oranges for contemplating this way

Setting the temperature to fluctuate within a given range, at set intervals. This is really stupid, because a constant, mechanical motion like this is almost certain not to be produce the desired effects.

The acceptable way

An acceptable way of doing this would be through statistical analysis of human behavior. Statics are boring, but they kick ass. If you analyzed how and when the temperature was changed by the user, you could model that behavior mechanically. This might depend on the temperature outside, it might depend on the time of the day, it might depend on my form that particular day and so on.

The perfect way

Keeping tabs on the body's functions and responding accordingly. This would address all concerns, because if you can determine the state of the body, then your rationale for response would be just as good as a human's.

I just thought of a fandamntastic idea for a company name. It actually came from reading a paper and misreading a name, which surprised me, as it would be an odd name if my misreading were correct.

Ready for it? Abysmal. How awesome would it be to run a company called Abysmal? :cool: Abysmal Technologies. Abysmal Investment. Abysmal Insurance. And just Abysmal for short, in conversation, stock listings and so on.

It's a total winner. Names like Microsoft, Sun, Oracle, Google would never stack up against Abysmal. There have been suggestive company names in the form of adjectives in the past, like Smart, Rational and Ahead, but Abysmal totally blows that away.

Contrast Abysmal with product names like Oracle's upcoming Unbreakable Linux. Geez, how idiotic is that name? Not only is it going to set off a stream of bad puns, it also directly undermines the perceived quality of the product. You wouldn't buy a car from Honest Pete just because he calls himself Honest, in fact that would make you suspicious and make you steer clear of Pete. In contrast, Abysmal Linux would set off that "hey, wait a minute" reaction.

It would also open up a whole new platform for silly ads and slogans, like "The worst thing you can say about us is the name" and "Are your profits abysmal? We understand like no other".

There is actually a strong precedent for self deprecating names in internet culture. Lots of sites have enjoyed great success with names like Deviantart.

Man, that's the best idea I've had all year, by far! (That is, in 2006, although publication was deferred to let the new year embrace the ingenious idea.)

*turns last page*

Oy, that was a serious load. The early estimate was way off, the total number of pages accumulates to 787 in four weeks :/ And slightly half of which I've covered in the last four days. I think that's probably the biggest volume of reading I've undertaken in that space of time.

Reading a master's thesis I thought would be awfully technical, but it turned out to be a ripping good yarn.

Tomorrow there's a test, and then it's off on holiday. :party:

As I'm reading about enterprise integration patterns, which is a study of common software design solutions in enterprises, it strikes me how many points of failure these technologies have. And that instills in me a sense of compassion for the deployment of such solutions, there are so many angles to cover. And to our benefit as consumers, these complex structures appear simple.

Making an airline reservation can be a process which requires several different systems on different machines to co-operate. There is recording the order, which could be handled by an Order Processing System. Then there is recording customer data (address, date of birth etc), which could be stored in a special Customer Database Registry. Then there is checking for flight availability (websites currently have browseable calendars where dates/times of available flights are highlighted), and this would require checking a Flight Database and a Flight Booking Database, to 1) find flights and 2) see if they have open seats. Then there is processing payment, which is often handled by a third party, like Visa. Then, once a flight has been selected, it has to be recorded in the Flight Booking Database, upon which a confirmation is sent and the order is complete. This whole transaction has to be handled alongside another thousand bookings happening right at the same time.

All of this appears to the customer as a series of simple web pages, sometimes poorly designed and annoying to use, marred by server outages. But it's not just the web server displaying the pages that can face problems, any of the systems can give out and the booking procedure would face a serious problem. Now, as a developer involved in building this infrastructure, I would certainly appreciate the possibility for errors, and how errors anywhere in the chain could be very damaging. But as a customer, I have no sympathy nor patience for problems. I demand to be served, and that's that. It is, in a sense, a curious contrast between the two worlds.

But if technology is considered by critics as "unreliable", just imagine what it would be like if we didn't mind waiting for our bookings, didn't mind our reservations being canceled, didn't mind our tickets becoming invalidated through glitches and so on. Our standards at least drive technology to excel, heads to roll, companies to go out of business, and customer services to improve.

As fate would have it, a perfect example of the lack of patience we have with technology: getting pictures from a camera.

My camera: a Canon Powershot S1 IS (bought in the summer 2004)

• Start VMware.
• Plug in camera.
• Windows wizard for camera comes up, next next finish etc.
• Transfer files to VMware host.

Previous attempts at extracting pictures *gasp* without VMware.

• gphoto2 - error
• sudo gphoto2 - error
• su - ; gphoto2
• digikam - error
• kdesu digikam - error (used to work until recently)
• gthumb - error
• sudo gthumb - error
• su - ; gthumb - error

How friggin embarrassing is it that the same usb signal passing through the kernel and into VMware can be correctly processed in VMware, but not in linux?

I've searched high and low for a solution, this problem goes back a year. I've gone through various kernels, various versions of different libraries and applications, and the only thing that used to work was digikam in root mode. For some reason that doesn't work anymore.

UPDATE: After some renewed research (been months since last time I gave up on getting this fixed), it looks like the bug has been figured out. Installing gphoto2-2.2.0 (still marked unstable on x86) finally took care of it.

What a load off. And to think Windows helped fix it. :/