Audio versions of all the talks from HOPE are now on-line. Also, there are torrents of some of the videos on-line at http://hopetracker.donthax.me/.

I found out because someone downloaded my talk and emailed me some questions/suggestions about it. That just rocks!

The Last HOPE Talks Now On-line

Adrian (left) and Vik (right) with a parent RepRap machine, made on a conventional rapid prototyper, and the first complete working child RepRap machine, made by the RepRap on the left. The child machine made its first successful grandchild part at 14:00 hours UTC on 29 May 2008 at Bath University in the UK, a few minutes after it was assembled.

I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.

Fabrication machine reproduces. Has off spring.

As CCD sensors cool, tiny "fingerprint-like" imperfections lead to recognizable noise artifacts in images. Given enough processor power, it seems plausible that photos could be linked back to a particular camera based on these noise patterns.

HOWTO anonymize your digital photos - Boing Boing

Sir Tim Burners-Lee's workstation that hosted the first web site.

The NEXT that hosted the world's first website

The Georgia Tech Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC) is announcing that on May 15th they’re going to be holding their annual Entrepreneurs Showcase down near Tech Square in Atlanta, GA.

ATDC is saying that the event is expected to attract around 500 entrepreneurs, investors and business leaders from across the Southeast. If I remember, last year was about 1/2 that or so - or at least that small conference room where the main presentation was couldn’t have held 500. This year’s event will be at the Biltmore Hotel, presumably because of the increased size of the event. Way to go guys!

ATDC Entrepreneurs Showcase coming May 15th

QR Code stencil cut into a business card. Yes, some pixels fall out, but error correction makes the code work anyway.

qr code business card - with a twist

So, I have a project for a client that has some huge SQL queries and I finally forked out the kilobucks to hire MySQL to optimize them.

When I teach databases, I usually take students back to an old library or doctor's office to examine how information was stored before computers. You probably remember the Title Cards, Author Cards, and Subject Cards. If you wanted to search by something else, you were screwed.

As I've watched this complex set of queries drop from 4 hours to 5 minutes 34 seconds, I'm reminded of how much the right method matters.

So, this article on organizing Lego blocks just hit home with me today.

Organizing Lego

The New Zeland police have launched a wiki open at anyone wanting to edit and make suggestions to the Police Act as part of a wider revamp. New Zealand's current Police Act is nearly 50 years old. In March 2006 a review undertaken. Following this a new website wiki.policeact.govt.nz has been launched to allow people to suggest wording for the new Policing Act. It uses similar wiki technology to the popular user-generated site Wikipedia. The wiki version of the Policing Act will be viewed by New Zealand parliamentarians, before an official bill is introduced into Parliament.

Via BoingBoing!

New Zealand puts its law on a wiki for public editing

Okay, so a customer of mine HAD to install Outlook (in order to sync his stuff to his iPhone, which conveniently enough does not work with any other mail software, apparently). Anyway, Microsoft has a funky package design and we couldn't figure out how to open it without using enough force to break the disc inside (an x-ray machine and band-saw were unavailable at the time.) So, while we played with the Rubik's cube, we called Microsoft technical support just to screw with them (we did figure it out before they did) but they eventually sent us this Flickr page showing how to do it.

It feels good to know we weren't the only ones, but was also nice that they only transferred us twice and none of them really knew either. For that matter, they probably never handled the product.

Anyway, I wish they would stop trying to make cool packages like Apple, and just make programs that work right. We're two hours into the installation now...

How to open Microsoft Office 2007 Product Box

At CitiGroup's Technology Summit in New York this week, Google's Business Product Manager for Ads Quality Nicholas Fox said the company will be moving ahead with integration of video and image ads within sponsored search results. Does that mean you will soon be seeing TV commercials at the top of Google search results page?

Sigh... Okay, everyone meet at my place to work on the next search engine. Then we can sell out.

Nevermind that 'no evil' thing - Google gets video ads