Erik's Blog

Several weeks ago, I was contacted by a representative of Proporta.com, a manufacturer of cases and accessories for mobile phones, asking if I would be willing to review three of their products on my blog. I’m always up for new internet experiences, so I agreed. I scanned their website to find the most expensive products that might benefit me. I found nothing over £30. I ended up choosing an Antimicrobial Silicone Case with SteriTouch for the iPhone 3G, a Ted Baker Leather iPhone 3G Case, and a Handy Travel Bundle. I chose the travel bundle because the week before I had lost my airline audio jack and I also needed a new wallet.
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I started and finished Dan Brown’s new novel, The Lost Symbolthis past weekend. While it was a heck of a can’t-put-it-down thrill ride, the overall message and theme of the book was very disturbing to me. It seems like, after pissing off The Church with The Da Vinci Code,Brown has decided to do a 180° and fire in the other direction, at Science.

Spoiler Alert: I will not discuss any aspects of the plot in this post, nor any of the puzzles that are solved along the way. What I will discuss is thematic elements, particularly as they relate to the “science” in the book. If you want to be completely surprised by everything you read in The Lost Symbol,read no further, but I promise you can read this post and still enjoy the exciting twists of the book.

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I started and finished Dan Brown’s new novel, The Lost Symbolthis past weekend. It was quite the page turner. What follows are a few comments on Dan Brown’s writing style.
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I’ve spent the past few days playing around with Clojure. Clojure is an implementation of Lisp, the most powerful programming language, that compiles to byte code that runs on the Java Virtual Machine. I won’t go into just how awesome that is, but there are many technical reasons why this platform decision is equivalent to standing on the shoulders of giants.

Clojure comes with a built-in library for parsing XML files into Clojure data structures, but, for the life of me, I could absolutely not find any implementations that went the other way, to render XML from the Clojure structure that the default parser creates. So I wrote one…in 25 lines of code.
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Back in April, my friend sgazzetti sent me an invite to particpate in a new social networking site I’d never heard of, called Aardvark [vark.com]. I’ve been using it for several months now, and I must say that I’m very impressed and fascinated. Aardvark is a question-answering engine that uses its users to answer the questions of other users. It functions on several principles…
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One year ago today, I got an iPhone 3G. It is, without a doubt, the most advanced gadget I’ve ever seen. Millions of words have been written on the internet about the iPhone, so I won’t say much else. But there is one benefit that I have yet to see mentioned:

The iPhone has helped RSS news feeds invade the last room of the house where newspapers still had a stronghold.

Nora, yesterday we received a package from your Rasmussen grandparents. In it were a few toys, some bedtime story books, a lovely blanket, and, at your three week birthday, your initiation into Apple Geekdom: an iPod Shuffle. I had never seen one of the new talking Shuffles, so I was rather perplexed by the earring-box-sized plastic box with an Apple logo on it. The card with it said, "Tell Daddy to load this with some good tunes." Once again, I am awestruck by the sheer aesthetic beauty of Apple’s products. This thing, like it’s new owner, is absolutely adorable! It’s smaller than either of my two USB pen drives and weighs so little that you can’t tell at all when it’s clipped to your clothing.
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I recently tweeted about some cool new technology that is fast approaching and has been dubbed "augmented reality". The basic gist is that some sensors read information about a real scene and then a computer somehow projects additional virtual objects onto the scene. The easiest sensor type at the moment is the lowly computer "web"cam. The optimal setup for augmented reality, in my mind, would be transparent glasses with camera that can both see and figure their orientation. This technology already mass produced and demonstrated in the Wii Remote. Then the virtual elements of the scene would be drawn on the glasses the user is wearing. I see this as being the ultimate medium for what some people are calling Sixth Sense technology, an always online digital assistant that helps you navigate your life without ever touching an actual interface or looking at what we now consider a screen. You’d just have a little Clippy-like assistant with you at all times.
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My 20" Apple Cinema display that I bought on December 12, 2003, when I bought my G5 for the price of a small automobile, finally died. Well, it didn’t actually die. I think the point of failure was the adapter from my MacBook Pro’s DVI output to the oldskool proprietary ADC connector. I suspect that the Cinema Display will still work just fine with the G5 it was purchased with. The problem is that I don’t have the desk space to plug it in nor the need to have that computer running with a display. So for now the old monitor is going into storage. That was the sad news. Here comes the good news…
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My parents gave us a globe as a first anniversary present last year. When Marga was opening it, I said, "What in the world is that?", and my father replied, "How’d you guess it so quick?" It’s really a pretty cool object. I can’t even begin to imagine how something like this would be manufactured. It’s a perfect sphere representing the Earth, and each country is a different gemstone. While technically you could make a map with only four colors, this globe has twenty-five different kinds of rock.
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