Wired is carrying a story on the certification of the Active Denial System (ADS) for use in Iraq. The ADS is a millimeter wave weapon that uses a reportedly non-lethal energy beam to inflict short term pain on its targets, encouraging them to leave an area, what experimenters call the "Goodbye effect." Some crunchy bits from the article:

The ADS shoots a beam of millimeters waves, which are longer in wavelength than x-rays but shorter than microwaves -- 94 GHz (= 3 mm wavelength) compared to 2.45 GHz (= 12 cm wavelength) in a standard microwave oven.

...while subjects may feel like they have sustained serious burns, the documents claim effects are not long-lasting. At most, "some volunteers who tolerate the heat may experience prolonged redness or even small blisters," ...

There has been no independent checking of the military's claims.

I can see using this in a wartime situation, but how long before we see these things mounted to the top of S.W.A.T. vans for domestic crowd control? And, is that a bad idea? I can't really tell from where I sit.

Reported this morning in Gizmag, the Trimersion head-mounted display looks to be a step in the right direction toward full-immersion VR. From the article:

The wireless Trimersion head tracking HMD and tracking gun replace the mouse/keyboard or gamepad controllers with a realistic and natural interface (for killing things).

The Trimersion is now in full production and a vast improvement from the initial prototype shown at the E3 2005 show. The new units have been completely redesigned from scratch. The new features are a double rocker trigger for main fire and alternate fire. The gun also has all of the controls of a standard Xbox or Playstaion game pad. The tracking device has been simplified and miniturized to a fraction of it's former self. This means better performance, less cost and less weight. The most significant improvement is the freedom of movement. Once you put the Trimersion on, you can move and turn around freely without worrying about wires or connections. The headset and gun are powered by a standard 9v battery. The wireless connection goes back to a base station that has a video and VGA input.

Now where are the productivity studies showing how office workers get so much more done when their displays are replaced with one of these rigs?

I find myself in a position to influence, if not define our corporate deployment of development tools on our Unix servers, a mixture of Solaris and AIX environments, and asking Slashdot seemed to be a prudent stop on my research trail.

Our environment is like this: Most of the development is in Perl and KShell with a little CShell, Ruby and Python for flavor. Development teams are expected to maintain their own libraries of Perl modules and whatnot, so access to bulid tools for .pm files is required. Access to systems is done through SSH, typically using PuTTY or some similar commercial SSH client, with file access done through SFTP or SCP. Most of our users edit with vi; vim would add syntax highlighting if we deployed it. What other features should I be looking for? What tool suggestions do you have?

Reported in Gizmag today, Panoptic is proposing a new security system that is composed of deep integration of existing technologies to provide a security system that gives an operator Superman-like X-ray vision. From the article:

...security-critical events and alerts are adapted into one system then correlated against each other based upon defined security policy and rules. This automated, root cause analysis enables disparate real-time security data to be combined into "an integrated panoptic security command centre (over)view."

It evidently uses new data compression technology called IHC:

[Panoptic] describes IHC as "an object oriented wavelet-based compression system for security and surveillance applications" and a "programmable compression hardware and software solution.". IHC enables object selection and extraction and features high-resolution viewing while conserving bandwidth, meaning high quality images can be selected and viewed with higher data rates and higher frame rates than the significantly reduced background.

It will be interesting to see if they can bring this thing to fruition. The deep integration of technologies is always a good thing. The rule writing for alarms would be the hardest to manage, for instance figuring out the difference between someone wearing a balaclava and someone just bundled up for winter.

Images of the proposed system include pics of one of the 360-degree cameras.

In the wake of today's news from Apple's WWDC, and considering that Redmond has killed the development of a Universal Binary for VirtualPC, I started to wonder what happened to Microsoft's promised cordless keyboard and mouse for the Mac. A quick trip to Microsoft's web site, and I wasn't disappointed. Big box stores have it for around $80, according to Microsoft's site. I, for one, am looking forward to purchasing one and getting away from the generally uncomfortable stock Apple keyboard that came with my iMac. If the scroll wheel turns out better than the little BB on my Apple mouse, so much the better.

[Update 8/30] I purchased one of the aforementioned keyboards only to discover that it included a USB-based radio adapter and was not Bluetooth compatible. I took it back. It may seem silly, but I spent a lot of money on a computer that is sleek and nearly cable-free (you should see the underside of my desk at work with all the WIntel box cables dangling down). The last thing I want is to start cluttering it up with unnecessary cables. And how difficult would it be for MS to build the keyboard and mouse as Bluetooth and include an adapter instead of their proprietary radio thing? I'm displeased.

Any suggestions for good multi-function keyboards on a Mac?

IBM and Marnlen RFiD are collaborating on an RFID tag format called a "Clipped Tag." From the article,

"Clipped Tag technology allows consumers to tear off a section of the tag which in turn reduces the tag's read range to just a few inches, protecting consumer privacy while maintaining the benefits of the technology, such as product authentication or recalls.

I wonder why they don't just break the loop of the antenna. If someone needs to read the tag at a later date, a couple of contacts, left bare, could reconnect the loop and make the tag readable again.

Students from the Ashland School of Environmental Technology in Oregon have come up with a method for creating building materials from straw and other harvest waste by weaving it into cables and binding them together in various fashions. This technology shows promise for developing countries that have more agricultural waste than timber. Developers are planning hand-fed machines for areas where grain is harvested manually, as well as modifications to full-sized combine tractors that will harvest grain and weave cables all at once.

This story covers research into increasing cognitive function by passing small currents through the frontal cortex. It won't be long before everyone is wearing little battery-operated headbands to work every day. Maybe the'll be the next great fashion statement in singles bars, where increased cognition would be a welcome change.

I read today that John Kerry could "de-fang" the DMCA. That got me thinking about content and media, and how music and movies have come to be treated more like traditional software than ever before. I had some thoughts on digital content licensing, and put them down in my blog. Yes, this is a shameless plug for the content I just created, but hey, it's a free download with a Personal Use license attached to it, so what the heck, right?

The cube farm is all a twitter right now, as Mt. St. Helens is spewing out a steam plume, and you can see if from our building. The cam for the volcano seems to be down, but we just saw a news helicopter from KATU, one of our local news stations, headed that direction. They should have some content up shortly.

Posted as a story!

Space.com is carrying this story about the Genesis return capsule that returned to Earth today in a big way. I guess there won't be any trophies for the stunt pilots.

In today's news on NPR, the sheriff's department of Jefferson County, Ala., is organizing citizens to keep an eye on suspicious activity and report it to the police. Authorities say they began the "Cell Phone Posse" not because of an increase in crime but to help a budget-strapped department. And, since it's a radio network, you don't even have to RTFA!

Dig out your tinfoil hats. CIO Magazine has an interview with John Poindexter, resigned head of the TIA. In it, he tells us that many projects from the dissolved agency have gone underground but are still being funded, out of sight of public scrutiny. Similar reports have been seen on Slashdot before. He also says that he "never intended to build a single, central database to collect data on every transaction by every American." Gee, what was he planning, then? When asked what he'd do different, given the chance, Poindexter says he would've put more resources on spin control, or what he calls "getting the public diplomacy part stronger."

A local historical society has a huge collection of photographs (2.5 million images) depicting almost 150 years of life in the Pacific Northwest. While many of the photographs have been digitized for reproduction, a vast number of them have not. Furthermore, browsing the photographs for relevant information is difficult, particularly when the photographs are extremely small. I would like to help by setting up a photograph browsing workstation where visitors could wander through the archives, zooming in on details of photograps quickly and easily, search a keyword database, and mark (possibly cropped) photos for printing. Most of the Open Source packages I can find are geared toward putting personal photo albums on the web, and don't offer the level of pan and zoom that this sort of solution would require. I'm looking for a Linux- or BSD-based solution. What experience does anyone here have with sort of thing?

Those Brits are up to it again. They seem to have invented a machine that can design and run experiments, getting the same results as a class full of grad students. They mention possible application to forensics, though I can think of a huge variety of things that this sort of intelligence could do.