August 20, 2005
Small is beautiful
For some reason I find this notion of a micro compact home wholly intriguing. 
Is it really possible to create a living space in a 2.6 metre cube?
The design of the micro compact home has been informed by the classic scale and order of a Japanese tea house, combined with advanced concepts and technologies in Europe.
The tiny cube provides a double bed on an upper level and working table and dining space for four or five people on a lower level. The kitchen bar is accordingly arranged to serve these two levels. The entrance lobby has triple use and functions as a bathroom and drying space for clothing. Storage is provided off each of these four functioning spaces.
To emphasize how small it really is, here's a picture of a unit being hauled by an SUV. There are more details at We-Make-Money-Not-Art (definitely worth a browse), and more pictures (with German text) at sueddeutsche.de. Apparently you can buy one for 50,000 Euros....
(Via BoingBoing, not surprisingly.)
June 27, 2005
Visualising chaos
Over at whitelabel.org there's a brilliant analysis of the state of the London Underground: 
"In Britain, where trains are so routinely late that punctuality has been redefined as 'within 20 minutes of scheduled time' and even then only around 80% can make it, the people have forgotten that it doesn't have to be this way, and that in the rest of world, including the really poor parts, it just isn't."
The writer grabbed the realtime disruption maps published by TfL and turned them into a three minute Quicktime movie. Tufte would be proud (I think).
While I sympathize with the author, I think he needs to get out more. The riders of the T in Boston would kill for any kind of information like that provided by TfL; disruption is a way of life over here.
(Via Boing-boing, of course.)
May 31, 2005
My joke
Before the web, the best Internet jokes were disseminated via the Usenet group rec.humor.funny, run by Brad Templeton. A discussion on an internal Sun email alias just now reminded me of my one and only r.h.f contribution
Music, maestro
Seen in yesterday's Parade magazine that probably accompanied a couple of million Sunday papers: an advertisement for a beautiful little scale model violin. According to the ad, it's a 1/24 scale replica, measuring 8 inches long.
Screw the violin, I want to see the fiddler who can tuck a 16 foot violin under his or her chin....
[This was posted to r.h.f on Sunday April 25, 1993, at 4:30 am EDT, apparently from my Sun workstation called tyger.east.sun.com. I wonder was I was doing at the office that early on a Sunday morning. Or maybe I was travelling, and logged in remotely. On reflection, I suspect that I emailed it to the moderator, Maddi, and she finally posted it to r.h.f. on Sunday. Just think of the mind-boggling level of detail that the web captures for posterity....]
April 26, 2005
Thread convergence: Formula 1 and Jini
Regular readers will have noted that two of my greatest enthusiasms are for Formula 1 motor racing and Sun's Jini™ distributed computing technology. So one item in today's quarterly "customer wins" press release from Sun is particularly sweet:
"Magneti Marelli Holding (Italy) -- Sun designed, for Magneti Marelli Racing Department, a new system to manage telemetry data for Formula 1 teams in real time, using Java and Jini(TM)/Rio technology with the aim of achieving the required performance, to support multiple platforms, such as Linux and Windows, and to provide high availability and location transparency of components."
I don't think I'm supposed to identify individual teams, but every time you see a car with this logo, think Jini. 
January 20, 2005
So many T-shirts, so little time
Just stumbled across J!NX, a delightfully bizarre collection of l33t T-shirts. I can imagine wearing at least half of them to work.... Favourites: Computers are fun and useful, Your skill in Reading has increased by 1 point (one for the Fellowship, I fancy), It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue. (how I spent the early 1980s), and neurochemistry hacker. Very cool. (Even the gross and edgy stuff.)