Tuesday, November 23, 1999

Uuuuugh. I feel like Rice Krispies left in the bowl for an hour.

I stayed up waaaay too late last night. First it was talking to Saalon. Then it was talking to Brennen. Then it was working on Informant. I only got something like 3 or 4 hours of sleep, on top of shaving hours off of my sleep for the past week or so. Tonight, I plan to eat dinner, and go straight to bed.

On the plus side, Informant continues to improve. I’ve got it so that it’s close to printing out messages properly (it’s got a slight bug in reading the body of the message, which I can fix easily enough). It’s very close to being functional, which is a frightening thought. Of course, then I’ll have to work out all the little details like header sorting and dynamically-displaying fields and resizing windows and so forth and so on. Still, it’s a good feeling.

In part of my talks with Saalon, he suggested an excellent pricing scheme: the first version will be cost USD $10 (a special deal for the first release), and all registered users can buy future releases at half-price. That means that registered users will get a good deal, but will also have to pay for further features. It also means that registered users won’t have to pay full-price for a version far down the line, as is the situation with common “registered users only get minor updates free” methods.

Lots of cool stuff happening today, though.

There’s a very cool Geek Gift Guide on BeDope. There are some things on there that I’d never heard of. Hmmm, a couple of more things to go onto my wish list.

Star Wars Episode I will be re-released this December for one week, and every cent will go to charity. Now that, I like.

Australian engineers are working on a functioning exoskeleton that works basically just like the one used by Sigourney Weaver in the movie Aliens, according to a story on SpaceDaily. NASA‘s also working on a full-scale human waldo, e.g. a robot that’s the same size and shape of a human, controlled by a human operator simply by moving his/her body. The human makes a fist, and the robot makes a fist. It’ll be used for extravehicular activities when it’s inconvenient (or dangerous, or too slow) to send out an individual.

(The term “waldo” comes from a science fiction story by Robert A. Heinlein, for what it’s worth.)