MoneyTracker

MoneyTracker is side-project that emerged as a tool for my Monopoly sessions; being the “banker” all the time, I was doing lots of repetitive work to keep track of the money exchanges while instead I wanted to focus on the more strategic part of the game. The result is MoneyTracker, which takes care of the boring logistics of board games by introducing digital money that players exchange by typing it rather than counting it. MoneyTracker can help with any game that requires exchanging and keeping track of money or points, such as Monopoly and Scrabble. MoneyTracker provides real-time statistics about who has paid whom the most and graphs of player wealth over time.

You can create as many games as you want and email game results to your friends!

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Facebook – A new country is born!

This is an option I found in country drop-down box while browsing for domains at domain.by. Did I miss something? ”Where are you from? Facebook!”

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Loading the FTDI serial module on the SheevaPlug

I had some trouble loading the FTDI serial module that allows me to access the console of the SheevaPlug. Thanks to Matt, I found out that in the recent past the vendor and product codes that the kernel module uses have changed and therefore when the module loads it can’t find the hardware that is already plugged into my USB port and, therefore, no /dev/ttyUSBx devices show up.

The vendor and product codes used to be vendor=0x9e88 product=0x9e8f, but now I load the ftdi_sio module as follows:

# modprobe ftdi_sio vendor=0x1c0c product=0x0102

and the ttyUSBx devices show up happily thereafter. You can find the new codes by doing a:

# lsusb

which should show a line that looks like:

Bus 002 Device 023: ID 1c0c:0102

enjoy.

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The Glass Infrastructure

This project builds an open, social information window into the Media Lab using 30 touch-sensitive screens, strategically placed throughout both build- ings in the complex. The experience of using them is optimized for guests and visitors to collaboratively explore, share, and uncover the people, ideas, and connections behind the research of the Lab. An RFID infrastructure allows us to customize the experience for each visitor, allowing them to save pointers to projects and people for their future reference.

Press:

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Keywon’s wiki

I stumbled upon Keywon’s page and I was very impressed but its comprehensiveness and detail. While it seems to replicate a great deal of material that already lives elsewhere, the end result seems impressive and a very useful reference point. Indeed, I’ve come to realize that there is no reason why I should keep bookmarks of “useful” content on other sites and not copy over the useful parts on mine.

I just finished reading a seminal paper by Kleinberg on a web search algorithm. This was written back when people used to maintain “favorites lists” on their homepage and the most comprehensive and accurate ones are considered to be “hubs” in Kleinberg’s paper. While reading this I thought “there are no longer such things as hubs!”. I don’t consider the likes of del.iciou.us to be “hubs” because they strike me more like a centralized service, or maybe they’re the hubs in Web 2.o.

Keywon’s page is a little bit of both because she maintains so many links to useful content but at the same time she maintains a copy of the most useful parts of the content she points to. For example, I used to have a link in my favorites to the coloring codes for resistors (who doesn’t?), but Keywon keeps a copy handy on her wiki. Why not!? Why am I not doing the same? Why do I still use pointers? What am I optimizing for? Disk space? Has C damaged my brain? Keeping a copy on my page saves me having to click away and puts the material in my own context, not the other site’s. On the downside, I have more work to do…. Oh well!

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