I see mobile devices as an exciting platform due to their ability to stay up-to-date. There are many issues with web standards, and browser compatibility issues that will be absent from most current and future mobile platforms. Right now Apple, Google, and Palm use Safari, Android Browser, and WebOS as their mobile web browsers. All of these browsers are based on the WebKit layout engine. This commonality will help make web applications share a similar aesthetic and feel across these various devices.

The ability to easily update your mobile device by pushed updates or syncing with your laptop are also a cause of excitement. Today we see how many users still use out-dated versions of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, causing many security and layout issues for developers. Now that devices can be updated more easily, updates to mobile browsers are even easier.

With mobile browsers in mind, I wonder what HTML 5 features will be incorporated into mobile browsers. The new features of HTML 5 are really exciting — If you have not had a chance to read about HTML 5, I would recommend reading Dive Into HTML 5, a book written by Mark Pilgrim. Dive Into HTML 5 is available on the web, reads easy, and is free!

Should be interesting to see just how many new mobile browsers come online within the next year.

Physical Computing is an art that blends software, hardware, and human interaction. I’ve been incredibly interested in this process from both an art standpoint (I’m a musician and a designer at heart) and from the software and hardware standpoint (I’ve been programming for as long as I can remember).

I bought the Arduino platform as well as the Parallax RFID reader and keychain tags a while ago when I first got serious about making the jump into the hardware side of things. During that time, I’ve created a device that will Tweet what beer you pull out of the fridge (Code, I need to put the movie up).

In our apartment, I have a cat and my roommate has a dog. Besides the occasional roughhousing between them, we have stumbled upon another problem. While my cat can jump to a high place to get his food, the dog cannot. In fact, we have yet to find a place to keep the dog’s food where the cat cannot get to it. This has become a problem as 1)I don’t want my cat to get sick eating dog food and 2)my roommate would rather not pay for my cat’s dinner.

Our ultimate plan is to let the pets roam free; however, we can’t leave their food unattended or each one will eat the other’s food. After verbalizing the problem, I immediately had the solution:

We will put both bowls out in the kitchen (this isn’t necessary, nor is it desired as the cat, for the moment, spends most of his day in my room). We will also rig up a piece of cardboard on a stick that’s the diameter of the bowls. Each bowl will have it’s own cardboard cover. We’ll attach the sticks to servos and connect the servos to the Arduino. Additionally, we’ll have the RFID reader plugged into the Arduino, and we’ll put the tags on the pets. When a pet comes next to the bowl, the RFID reader will pick up his tag and know, based on the tag’s serial number, which arm to lift. They will only be able to get their own food (unless they decide to collude, walk together, and eat the other’s food). Problem solved!

I know there’s probably a much simpler, non-technical solution, but where’s the fun in that

Given the task to create a dashboard for a client, I went through the usual steps of building a project – the initial frustration of finding a library to handle the more intricate portions of the project, figuring how everything will be laid out, etc. Luckily, I stumbled across an amazing library for handling graph generation in C# called ZedGraph.

You can find the source code here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/zedgraph/

A wiki is also available:
http://zedgraph.org

And a handy startup tutorial:
http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/zedgraph.asp