Input paradigms for wearable computing I’ve been tracking various input methods over the course of this blog, providing commentary on tablets, the death (and possible rebirth) of the stylus, touch computing and now with the Google Glass – wearable computing. I hesitate to call the Glass a wearable computing device, putting it in the company of the clunky hardware of…

Inner sourcing to open sourcing Ahmet Alp Balkan wrote an interesting piece on what you should open source at your company recently. I like his assertion that anything you’d likely need at another job should be open sourced. Some other influential programmers have asserted more aggressive stances on this, but I think Ahmet’s idea is a good start. You should…

Migrating between Linux virtual hosting services I’ve been shuffling my sites around lately, canceling some virtual machines that I don’t use much and consolidating sites that get less traffic onto cheaper hosting. I’m mostly using Apache and MySql on these sites along with Node.js. I’m looking at moving to Nginx in front of the Node.js sites though. Anyway, most of…

Google Glass – enabling new layers of context If you’ve followed me for a while on this blog you know I’ve written about some different UI/UX paradigms in the past, mostly focusing on the rise of tablets and touch computing and the passing of the stylus into niche areas and near obscurity. The scary and exciting thing about all of…

Hacking on local Ruby gems I’m playing around with some ideas posed by a friend of mine lately in Ruby. I’ve done some Rails hacking in the past but I don’t usually get far off the beaten path in Ruby. Well, except for that time that I hacked up a version of Mongrel to try to make it a streaming…

Working with Jekyll static blog generator on Mac A while ago I started moving a bunch of my WordPress and Posterous blogs to Octopress. Octopress is a static website generator that uses Jekyll under the hood. On Linux this was pretty easy to get working, but on Mac I had to figure out a bunch of things related to ruby…

Making system calls in OS X I’ve been hacking away on my new Mac ever since I got it last month, and I’m slowly getting all of the native stuff I used to do under Linux moved over to my new environment. Some of the things I’ve gotten installed so far are homebrew (needed to install just about anything that…

Ultraportable I’m in the middle of reconfiguring my computing environment for the new year, and I’m splitting up the role that my laptop has served for the last year or two. I ditched having a desktop a while back, settling on getting a pretty powerful laptop instead. That was something of a tradeoff since the then-current generations of desktops were…

Palm Pre as an ARM development environment As I play around with my Raspberry PI, I keep having these flashbacks to the days when I first put my Palm Pre into developer mode. I logged into the phone as root and it was a Linux box! That was a bit of a revelation to me then. I went ahead and…

First thoughts on the 13″ Retina Macbook I recently got a new retina Macbook Pro for my main work machine. I had been using a Thinkpad X200 and then a 13″ Macbook Air. I’m very opinionated when it comes to computing devices and the Thinkpad X series is actually one of my favorite laptop designs of all time. I know…