Rich Burridge's BlogRich Burridge's BlogLinks for 30th May 2008- May 30, 2008 Three accessibility related ones. Disability Statistics for 2006 from the U.S. Census Bureau (thanks Michele). Blind Win Court Ruling on U.S. Currency "Size, color, feel of paper bills could change." Emphasis on could. I see the U.S. Treasury Department is fighting this all the way. Your government inaction in action. Note that changing to money with different size, color and feel can benefit sighted people too. .http://blogs.sun.com/richb/entry/links_for_30th_may_2008 A GNOME Lock Screen Accessibility Hack- May 29, 2008 One of the things I like about working on Orca, is the challenge of trying to make a poorly designed application accessible to blind people. Here's the bug. The GNOME lock screen application has started on the user's desktop. When they press any key, it invites them to type in a password. If they type in their password incorrectly, they will first see some text appearing in a label under the password text area saying "Checking...". Then...http://blogs.sun.com/richb/entry/a_gnome_lock_screen_accessibility TV Season Finales - Spoilers- May 26, 2008 I think we've now had the season finales of all the shows I watch (although in a couple of cases it was hard to tell). I couldn't let them go without a few comments and speculate on what's going to happen for some of them, at the beginning of the next season. If you still have some of these on the Tivo and haven't viewed them yet, then don't read this. There are some major spoilers ahead. Same for folks in other countries who haven't...http://blogs.sun.com/richb/entry/tv_season_finales_spoilers Making Things Talk - Project 1- May 25, 2008 After going through the various Hello World programs that are described in chapter one of the in the Making Things Talk book, I moved on to the first real project. The goal here is to take a small pink monkey called monski, attach (or implant) a couple of flex sensors to its arms, and use them to control the two paddles in a video pong game running on your computer. If you don't have a small pink monkey, any other small stuffed animal will do. I'm hoping with the various projects.http://blogs.sun.com/richb/entry/making_things_talk_project_1 Try Ruby! - An Interactive Online Ruby Tutorial- May 23, 2008 I spent some time today, starting to learn Ruby, something I've been meaning to do for a long time. There is an interesting online tutorial available. If you've heard of Ruby, but didn't know exactly what it is and you have limited time to find out, then this tutorial is a good starting place for you. It'll take about "15 minutes". It helped that I knew Python, but there is nothing hard here. For me, it was a way of learning...http://blogs.sun.com/richb/entry/try_ruby_an_interactive_online Links for 22nd May 2008- May 23, 2008 I've been catching up on some of the various RSS feeds I started monitoring several months ago. Here's three from the MAKE blog BigDog Robot As Marc says, if you don't have time to watch all this video, just skip to 0:41 seconds in and 1:25. I was also impressed with it at 3:07. The sound it makes is chilling. It's balance is frighteningly lifelike. And Boston Dynamics is DARPA funded. I wonder what the future may hold. Fun With...http://blogs.sun.com/richb/entry/links_for_22nd_may_2008 Make3D- May 21, 2008 Make3D converts your single picture into a 3-D model, completely automatically. To quote their web site: It takes a two-dimensional image and creates a three-dimensional "fly around" model, giving the viewers access to the scene's depth and a range of points of view. How does it work It uses powerful machine learning techniques to learn the 3-D structure of a scene as a function of the (single) image features. The team at Stanford...http://blogs.sun.com/richb/entry/make3d Initial Observations On Wii Fit- May 21, 2008 We popped down the local GameStop store this morning and picked up our pre-ordered Wii Fit. These are in BIG demand. I see the Amazon sharks sellers have already hiked up the price by about 40-50 dollars. I predict at Christmas time, it'll be hundreds of dollars over recommended retail price. The guy at Gamestop said they took about 150 pre-orders. They had to stop taking them, as they knew that's all they would...http://blogs.sun.com/richb/entry/initial_observations_on_wii_fit Rating Your Book Collection- May 20, 2008 Now that I've nicely got my book collection under tellico, I thought it would be interesting to see how well each book rated, and what were the ones that garnered the most stars and number of reviews on Amazon. This Python script will read in my book collection data on standard input, extract out a list of ISBN's, and for each one will look up the average Amazon customer star rating and the number of reviews. It then sorts the...http://blogs.sun.com/richb/entry/rating_your_book_collection Laptop Shuffle- May 19, 2008 Last week, my wife got a new MacBook (maxed out at 4GB memory and 250 GB of disk). A really nice computer. Duncan now gets her old iBook (768 MB memory and 60 GB of disk), and I get his old HP pavillion xt125 (256 MB memory and 20 GB of disk). I don't plan to use it as my main laptop (I have a Powerbook for that), but I thought I'd set it up as a spare laptop that can be used around the house. I thought about putting OpenSolaris...http://blogs.sun.com/richb/entry/laptop_shuffle |