I've started reading the first volume of Christopher Alexander's four-volume work The Nature Of Order. It has apparently taken him twenty-seven years to research and write, and it looks to contain some fairly heavy ideas. As such, it'll be a challenge to make it right through to the other end of book four, but I believe that there could be some profoundly significant ideas in it that could have a great impact on what I could do with Ngake.

If he can deliver on his promise to provide "a theory in which statements about relative degree of harmony, or life, or wholeness - basic aspects of order - are understood as potentially true or false," and generally rescue architecture from its apparently dire state, then this should be very useful in designing information architectures that people will find effective and satisfying to work with. Or so I imagine.

Anyway, it occurred to me that if I kept notes in my weblog about my reactions to the books, things that I found particularly useful or startling or thought-provoking, and ideas about how I might be able to apply what I'm learning, then this might help me persevere right through the series where otherwise I'd run out of steam.

So we'll see how we go.

[t-n-o-o] # .

I'm tweaking the CCL parse-c-decls.lisp (yes, I'm still working on the CCL-Maverik FFI) and I found this paper by Kurt Nørmark about Lisp hooks.

Also, I see that Luke Crook has written a HOWTO for the CCL FFI.

[Update: I've implemented my own version of the Lisp hooks, based on Kurt's paper.]

[lisp] # .

OK. On the 17th, we switch to a new Paradise.net plan, and our monthly bandwidth quota goes from 500MB to 1536MB (or possibly 1536MiB). But apparently there's no way to avoid getting stung for the extra 600MB or so of ICMP traffic that the Welchia worm generated for us.

I'm moving synchromesh.co.nz and micro.co.nz to Free Parking, 'cause they're cheaper and they have online DIY DNS management.

Here are a few links I'll come back and check out next week (I've started reading BoingBoing again):

• A Taiwanese shirt folding video
• Some groovy Shockwave art
• A demo of a new 3D desktop in Java
• A fan-assembled trailer for the movie The Hobbit

I did "splurge" on some NASA images to use as wallpaper on my laptop:

• The space shuttle over Cook Strait
• Mir over New Zealand
• And there's more at NASA's Visible Earth: New Zealand, including this 11.6MB monster, described here.

[random] # .

As the latest chunk of Tranz Rail work nears completion, I am of course distracted by other things. Such as the next phase of my AP5HID library.

The story so far:

I did a little dynamic programming to figure out an approximate solution to the positions of the LEDs. I have made a little VRML model of my results, and it definitely looks a lot like my P5 glove, which is good.

I checked the Essential Reality discussion fora, and it seems that ER have gone into survival mode, which is not entirely surprising I suppose, but it does imply that we won't be getting any driver updates for a while.

However, I did find a few quoted IRC comments attributed to Jason McMullan, author of the open-source Linux driver the C source of which I used to decode the USB datastream. Some choice quotes:

I'm working on a "best fit plane" technique to derive tilt from the IR data points.

Interestingly, only 4 leds are returned by the device at a time. The other leds are interpolated.

Everytime you poll the P5 device for info, the mouse device sends a mouse position packet. ... Actually, that the *only* time it sends mouse data.

Interestingly, if you poll the P5 "too fast", it resets the device.

"[I] draw the current IR positions, and the ***puted [sic] surface normal of the hand (which is, currently, often wrong).

So, I plugged best fit plane into Google and found this, which smells like the right direction to me. Verily, the mighty Google has been a tremendous boon to the solo R&D-er.

[p5] # .

Last night at about 2015, my sister Kate gave birth to a healthy 8 pound baby girl. Mother and daughter are doing well, much to everyone's relief. Chris is looking pretty cheerful about it all, too. ;) No name has been decided on as yet.

Perhaps now we can get back to work...

[Update: It has been confirmed, the name is to be "Holly."]

[cool] # .

While composing an email to Mark Billinghurst about his GloveGRASP work, I followed a few more links and found some other potentially useful stuff:

• 3DUI mailing list (not sure whether it's still alive, though)
• OWorld
• Evaluation of Virtual Grabbing/Manipulation Techniques (via this page)
• 3D Widgets Library (apparently this is "available for public use")
• 3DUI Tutorial

Lots of interesting stuff to read in amongst that lot. Although some of it does look a little stale... Oh, and I think something like this done in glorious VR would be pretty cool, also.

[ngake] # .

Via a Joel Spolsky article, we have ESR's book The Art of Unix Programming. Looks like it could actually be worth a read. If only for other interesting links to be found within.

And now I've just ordered Christopher Alexander's magnum opus. I'm pretty sure it'll be worth the money. Not that I've actually yet tackled the last such book I bought.

[interesting] # .