2007 - 04 - 18

Stop And Smell The Roses

This is quite possibly one of the most powerful things I've read in a long time.

I'm not a huge fan of classical music as a genre, mind you (although I can still enjoy it in the right context). But the article still spoke to me. Particularly because I feel like I'm falling more and more into that unfortunate American rhythm of life (or lack thereof) that makes you feel like you oughtn't do things like stop and listen to/watch a street performer. I need reminders every once in a while to actively fight that.

2007 - 03 - 31

Natural Docs

I've been intending for quite some time to buckle down and learn Doxygen, due both to its usefulness in maintaining large programming projects (which I'm increasingly becoming involved with) and its widespread use within the open source community.

For those of you who aren't familiar with it, the idea behind Doxygen is that you write code documentation in your source code files using a specific format, and then Doxygen will process the source files and automatically generate developer documentation. It's really quite nifty.

So the other day I decided, "Hey, I should learn Doxygen." Of course, being me, I couldn't just go and learn Doxygen with blinders on. No, I had to take a look at the alternatives out there first. And as it so happens, there are quite a few. However, none of them really perked my interest except for one: Natural Docs. Which I will now discuss.

The main difference between Natural Docs and Doxygen is that Natural Docs places a heavy emphasis on making the documentation readable in the source files, not just the generated documentation. That's not to say that the Doxygen syntax is particularly obtuse or anything. It's not. But Natural Docs is just so... natural. It's so intuitive that it's almost scary.

Human Computation... Plus Fun Games!

Google has recently started bringing in people to speak on various tech subjects. They are recording the talks and putting them up on Google Video. These talks are known as "Google Tech Talks".

If you're a geek at all, many of these tech talks are quite interesting. But I found one in particular that I absolutely adore. It's a presentation given by Luis Von Ahn about "Human Computation", or utilizing people on a massive scale to solve conceptually simple problems that computers can't.

You can watch the video here. It's both informative and quite entertaining.

The basic idea is to turn these problems into fun online games. The two games that are out so far are The ESP Game and Peekaboom. Both are quite fun, but the best part is that by playing them you are doing something genuinely useful!

UPDATE:

They have a new game out now, called Phetch. Apparently it's still in beta, but it's very fun as it is.

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