Ibis Mojo

Looks like I won a Mojo in a raffle for the benefit of Sierra Buttes Trail Stewardship. Mountain biking is one of my favorite activities. My buddy Tony has been making fun of my bikes lately, so now he'll be the one with the old bike!

Note the mismatched logos I'm wearing. The Truveo fleece and the Yahoo hat don't really go together. Truveo is an AOL company. My brother-in-law Chris gave me the hat, that's my excuse!

Thanks to Ibis for donating the bike! Thanks to Nica for organizing the trail days, and Passion Trail Bikes for such a great newsletter.

Funky Camera

Here's a clever network camera, the Digital Window D7, that captures a bunch of different views at once. According to the Times article the images are stitched together and streamed as one. They call this technique Scallop Imaging. I call it clever.

This is a great alternative to fish eye cameras or PTZ (pan, tilt, zoom). I can understand that PTZ would be an issue if it's not pointed where you want it. Fish eye distortion is ugly. It seems to me that the fish eye problem could be taken care of in software though. I would imagine that removing the distortion wouldn't be that difficult. (Maybe less difficult than stitching together 5 images in real time.)

I've been playing around with network cameras and this one looks like a winner. Of course at $800 it's a bit pricey. You could buy more than 8 decent network cameras for that price. Of course you would have to deal with a jungle of wires and mounting all the cameras would be a nightmare. (Even the WiFi cameras need power cables, at least until we get that wireless power working well.) The photo shows an Ethernet jack on the bottom. The data sheet says it supports Power of Ethernet and H.264. I want one.

Thanks to CAK for pointing this out to me.

Tesla Model S Ride

Just got a ride in the Model S prototype at the Menlo Park store.
Spacious and zippy. Can't wait for production. Thanks Zak!

Noisebridge

Fun with circuits at the hacker space in SF.

Agile Development, Hitler's Build

If you've ever worked on a software development team, you should find this entertaining. At Inktomi we used to hang a cute stuffed pink fuzzy pig above the cube of the developer who broke the build. This was a much more gentle reminder than a Hitler rant, but effective none the less.