Ask E.T.: Project Management Graphics (or Gantt Charts) - came across this forum from a newsletter email from brucemaudesign. A fantastic forum discussion thread still active after 4 years!! Lots of posts from large civil projects to novels to movies to F1 teams regarding how to visualise the many interdependencies in managing multivariant projects - did they use a Gannt chart for the great wall of china.

From one of the posts a link to good PM resource from ex Columbia uni prof: http://www.projectreference.com/

One Day, That Economy Ticket May Buy You a Place to Stand - New York Times Charles forwarded me this link after our recent workshop on Airport Retail. Inevitably part of the discussion ended up around the future of airline interiors and the kind of services that may become available.

What i liked about this article was the standing *harnesses* if only they would make them horizontal for the same cost.....

Airbus has been quietly pitching the standing-room-only option to Asian carriers, though none have agreed to it yet. Passengers in the standing section would be propped against a padded backboard, held in place with a harness, according to experts who have seen a proposal.

Intelligent Sensing Programme
Intelligent Sensing Programme Meeting
Venue: Riverside Room, IEE (IET), Savoy Place, London, WC2R 0BL
To see meeting handouts and delegate list contact Duncan Wilson x52794

Programmer’s Notepad 2 - i started using PN when developing in NesC for Crossbow motes and have just come across this updated version - a great simple code editor for windows.

Sun SPOT should be rolled out in May - looking forward to getting my hands on these. Here is an intro for information:

Based on a 32 bit ARM CPU and an 11 channel 2.4GHz radio, Sun SPOT radically simplifies the process of developing wireless sensor and transducer applications. The platform enables developers to build wireless transducer applications in Java using a sensor board for I/O, an 802.15.4 radio for wireless communication, and use familiar Integrated Development Environments (IDEs), such as NetBeans to write code.

The Sun SPOT system features the "Squawk VM," a small J2ME virtual machine (VM) written almost entirely in Java. It provides the ability to run wireless transducer applications "on the metal," (directly on the CPU without any underlying OS), saving overhead and improving performance. End users also gain the flexibility to experiment with different implementations of low-level services, such as networking protocols, which are typically buried inside an OS. A set of Java libraries under development will provide access to the sensors, the I/O pins on the sensor application board, and the integrated on-board radio. By running multiple applications on the one virtual machine, and by using a more compact representation of class files, the Squawk VM makes better use of the small memory space available on SPOT devices.

Howstuffworks "How Motes Work" - came across this great intro again...

Discovery Channel Video - on the use of motes for monitoring vineyard growing conditions - had seen the articles about this but good to see a video of the environment and the packaging they are using.

WSN Update - News and Information About Zigbee & Wireless Mesh Sensor Networks a handy blog to review what is going on in the world of WSN - has a US focus.

Paper in IEEE Computer and course info for
CSE 466: Software for Embedded Systems (Wi'06) a great demo of ad hoc networks and emergent behaviour. Each mote in the network sings a bird song. If another mote near by is also singing the same song it reinforces that tune. If they all sing the same then someone starts a new one. If no one nearby is singing the same then they try a new one. This way an emergent flocking starts - nice...

follow up with Bruce Hemingway to request a way to replicate demo.

GpsActionReplay have been looking for this kind of GPS tool for a while - should have thought to look for an application made by / for windsurf speed sailors... Just need to download a .gpx xml file (i use easygps) containing data for a route and then load it into the gps actionreply applet to analyse your speed over a journey (on the bike, motorbike, snowboard or windsurf session)

Chris Jofeh, Director, Ove Arup & Partners will be presenting on Drivers of Change to an audience at the R&D Society - all welcome - Tuesday 25 April 2006, 6.00pm http://www.rdsoc.org/06L4notice.html

Chris is passionate about the role of engineers in dealing with the challenges posed by the consequences of human activities. Until a generation ago many of these consequences were unforeseen or poorly understood. Now they are becoming all too clear. Four major drivers of change of the built environment are climate, energy, water and demographics.

MoteWorks Wireless Sensor Network Platform has been launched by Crossbow - this should mean out the box configuration of wireless sensor networks (given the apps that ship with it and those that can be used as plugins...) Watch this space... will report more when I have installed and played with it.

Another thing blogs and open source software have in common is that they're often made by people working at home. That may not seem surprising. But it should be. It's the architectural equivalent of a home-made aircraft shooting down an F-18. Companies spend millions to build office buildings for a single purpose: to be a place to work. And yet people working in their own homes, which aren't even designed to be workplaces, end up being more productive.

This proves something a lot of us have suspected. The average office is a miserable place to get work done. And a lot of what makes offices bad are the very qualities we associate with professionalism. The sterility of offices is supposed to suggest efficiency. But suggesting efficiency is a different thing from actually being efficient.

That last point from Paul Grahams essay on what business can learn from open source is curious when you add it to a comment he makes further down:

The basic idea behind office hours is that if you can't make people work, you can at least prevent them from having fun. If employees have to be in the building a certain number of hours a day, and are forbidden to do non-work things while there, then they must be working. In theory. In practice they spend a lot of their time in a no-man's land, where they're neither working nor having fun.

If we believe in our gut that this is true how can we start to quantify this? To change a system or organisation we need to modify what is measured as input and output...

A nice way of getting the message across...

Want to find images on Flickr? Just sketch the kind of image you want on retievr. Here is my effort to find trees in a field with blue skies and green grass.

Working for experimental company Cloud9, James Clar is building a working prototype for a model of the Habitat Hotel, near Barcelona. He says:

It is a hotel with a light mesh that wraps the whole building. The light mesh has sensors that will read the daylight sun amplitude and then at night each node will give off color according to how much that node collected sun. Therefore, the mesh reflects the energy levels of each day, it will change over seasons and due to weather.

Two great examples of persistence of vision. One is at the planned public library in Minneapolis where LED's on the outside of the lift reveal letter by letter words describing the titles of books being checked out. The second came via Make magazine - one for the kids - SpokePOV - LED bike wheel images - look at the how to on instructables...

From Arup Bike User Group - gmap-pedometer. You can plot routes, work out distances and even get plots of elevation along the route - great for cycling.

Came across mashups of earth lights on google maps and Moon maps showing moon landings - excellent. On the former i was amazed to see the comparison of light levels in Middlesbrough and the NE compared to London and SE.

One to consider if you don't want the bundled apps that come with crossbow networks.

Another cool example of people visualising energy usage but also developing the theme of ambient devices....

[from information aesthetics]

This technology has been around for 30 years (Mecanum wheel, Wikipedia) or so but this is the first time I have seen it in action. The movie is much more compelling than an image or sketch of the concept.

[from - Signal vs. Noise by 37signals]