I grew up with Commodore computers, starting with the Vic20, graduating through C-64, C-128, and finally, a smoking Amiga 1000. One of the best things I remember from the Amiga was a game called Marble Madness. A truly great game, but it's been basically lost since those days.

I got a nice little announcement from Apple today. As a bonus for .Mac subscribers, they are throwing in a license for the game Marble Blast. It had "Marble" in the title, so I had to check it out.

I've been playing around with Macromedia Contribute 2, which is now available for MacOSX. It seems like an extremely useful utility for editing existing websites, but falls short for creating them. That's a reflection of the market they're looking at - newbies editing content (change a phone number on an intranet, update an image...).

For that, it rocks quite nicely. I'm curious to see how/if it mangles a modern web page, since it seems to have some heavy table editing tools, but nothing for divs or css...

Tim Bray has another excellent post on searching. This time he's talking about metadata. How to collect it. What some limitations of collection are. Etc.

We've seen the same limitations he lists for "hand collected metadata" - metadata that's manually entered by users. If you give them too many fields (like, say, maybe IMS LOM?) they just won't do it. Or, even worse, they'll do a crappy job. Even CanCore isn't small enough to be done efficiently and effectively. Heck, even DublinCore is too big for most users to regularly enter all fields completely.

I just got back from a very cool demo by Brad Behm, who works in Dr. J.R. Parker's Computer Vision Lab here on campus. Very VERY cool stuff. They've got an app set up so that you can feed it an image, and it will search its database of several hundred images and return similar images. They run several comparisons simultaneously, checking edges, colours, etc...

It's not perfect yet, but they're batting over .500, which is much higher than the other computer-vision search groups are getting (apparently Brad's software averages about 57% accuracy, but this can go much higher to almost 100% depending on the images in the database and the source query image).

I'm finally able to run Safari in full screen mode, thanks to a little InputManager plugin called Saft. Very cool. I now have Safari running full screen in desktop #2 on my 18-desktop VirtualDesktop setup. Works like a champ. It even drops the dock and menu bar out of the way (have to remember the menu keyboard shortcuts...)

Saft is a little, well, quirky. It's not fully integrated, and appears to do some funky patching of the running Safari app. But, it works.

Rick Lillie is planning an interesting experiment this fall. He will teach 3 sections of the same class, using various methodologies to see their effect. Traditional (lightly blended learning) vs. 2 online learning scenarios. He'll post info and results this fall.

From Rick's post:

I had initially planned on handing my Merlot conference co-presentation on RSS and Learning Objects over to Mike, but I just bit the bullet and got approval to attend the conference myself. I'm planning on arriving in Vancouver on Aug. 4, and leaving the evening of the 8th. I'm hoping I can book a room in the Hyatt Regency, where the conference is taking place, but it may be a bit late to get room there...

We're working on a new architecture for the next version of the software that drives CAREO et al. One thing we want to do is rip some of the core data functionality into a separate framework (actually a set of frameworks) and have a server host application manage communication between core data and client apps (i.e., CAREO, ALOHA, etc...).

It would be nice if, in addition to web services (SOAP, XML-RPC), if we could use a higher performance messaging system for client applications residing on the same box (or at least on the LAN) than SOAP can provide (latency, marshalling, etc...)

Sweet. James Dempsey made his ModelViewController song from WWDC2003 available online, with lyrics too! Thanks, James!

I'm working on a prototype application for viewing embryology slides (and having HUGE flashbacks from when I took the course back when the earth was young).

As a result, I get to play around in DirectorMX again, and am rather amazed at how quickly my Mad Lingo Skillz are coming back. Imaging Lingo rocks. 3D Lingo rocks.

I'm building 2 versions of the app. The first used Imaging Lingo to do a zoom/pan over a high resolution image. That worked well, but took a good chunk of CPU power to do the manipulations. The second version is using 3D Lingo to power an OpenGL image viewer, with a high resolution bitmap used as a texture on a plane, which is then moved in front of a camera to generate smooth panning and zooming (ala MacOSX Quartz). Very cool. Now, to play around with controlling the movement of the plane.

I mentioned how Expose (the coolest way to manage a billion open windows) had a quirk with keyboard navigation. There was an update to Panther, which included some fixes to Mail, some other stuff, and Expose. Keyboard navigation now appears to work flawlessly. Yay.

Alan, Brian, and myself will be giving a presentation to the EduCause LOVCOP (Learning Objects Virtual Community of Practice) on Friday. We'll be talking about some of the work we've done on sharing learning objects using RSS, and what that pattern of resource sharing/distribution could mean to practicing teachers. We'll also be giving an overview of the background that led up to the RSS/LO work, and will talk a bit about future directions and implications.