Saturday, March 17, 2007

Back from CeBIT 2007

Yup! Made it to Hanover this year. Couldn't afford to miss it again. Here's what Wikipedia says about CeBIT:

CeBIT is the world's largest computer expo. It is held each spring on the fairground in Hanover, Germany, and is a barometer of the state of the art in information technology. With an exhibition area of roughly 450,000 m² (~ 5 million ft²) and up to 700,000 visitors, it is larger than COMPUTEX and the no-longer held COMDEX.


And it's true - the whole thing is HUGE. Each exhibition hall is roughly the size of 1 or 2 football fields, and there are ... twenty seven such halls. :-\ No wonder it's the world's largest. What could be better than 27 stadium sized halls full of tech gadgets (and chicks).

There were lots of cool things to see, although for the most part the halls were occupied by Chinese/Tiawanese companies demonstrating such technological wonders as... a mouse! A webcam!! Holy damn, LAPTOP BAGS!

Anyway, some highlights were: natural 3D displays, eye tracked video conversations (also on 3d displays), huge point-to-choose displays where you simply point at the screen with your finger, from a distance, to select objects (it was guided by a green overhead laser and some cams). Face trackers (it tracked people's faces, eyes, lips, and shows the gender, mood of the person etc.). Audio cubes (new way to compose music, crappy, in my opinion).

And the above was all from ONE single section of ONE hall (the Fraunhoffer IIS section)! The World Cyber Games 2007's Euro championship finals were being held there, as well as some Germany high school robotics competition.

More details, pics etc. will follow later. I'm too tired right now to write anything more. For now, satisfy yourselves from this: Videos of CeBIT 2007 on Google.

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Pi Day

It's here. 3/14. Also happens to be the birthdays of Albert Einstein (scientist) and Johann Strauss (composer). Great day indeed.

Thursday, March 01, 2007

Took a personality test with a twist

The whole Software Engineering Lab course is getting on my nerves.. in a sort of good way.

Your programmer personality type is:

DHTB

You're a Doer.
You are very quick at getting tasks done. You believe the outcome is the most important part of a task and the faster you can reach that outcome the better. After all, time is money.


You like coding at a High level.
The world is made up of objects and components, you should create your programs in the same way.


You work best in a Team.
A good group is better than the sum of it's parts. The only thing better than a genius programmer is a cohesive group of genius programmers.


You are a liBeral programmer.
Programming is a complex task and you should use white space and comments as freely as possible to help simplify the task. We're not writing on paper anymore so we can take up as much room as we need.