Acetio | Blogma

From CraftZine (the online descendant of the now-defunct Craft magazine), an MIT student project that uses conductive paint and thread inside a pop-up book. Opening and closing the pages not only slides tabs of paper around, but also activates switches that can then activate lights.

IBM's website has photos and information about their Antique Attic exhibit, showcasing their collection of mechanical calculating devices.

"The nearly 400-year history of mechanized calculation was created by men and women with varying and diverse talents, temperaments, backgrounds and education, working in such fields as mathematics, the sciences, government, business and commerce. It is a history not just of singular inspiration and genius but also the continuing, collective discovery of new materials, skills, technologies and techniques to implement and enhance the plans and dreams of individual inventors and scientists."

Above, a Babbage Analytical Engine

My first job in New York City was as 'Content Editor' at PC Magazine in 1997. That meant I hand-coded all their articles, sometimes up to 200/day. The idea of a dynamic, database-driven site was still new and there were no good solutions at the time. The best was to use Microsoft Word's mail-merge function, placing all the content in an Excel file and opening the HTML template in Word, then merging them together to generate the static pages.

I came across this unattributed story: A tale of Electrical Engineering vs. Computer Science:

"Once upon a time, in a kingdom not far from here, a king summoned two of his advisors for a test. He showed them both a shiny metal box with two slots in the top, a control knob, and a lever. "What do you think this is?"

One advisor, an engineer, answered first. "It is a toaster," he said. The king asked, "How would you design an embedded computer for it?" The engineer replied, "Using a four-bit microcontroller, I would write a simple program that reads the darkness knob and quantizes its position to one of 16 shades of darkness, from snow white to coal black. The program would use that darkness level as the index to a 16-element table of initial timer values. Then it would turn on the heating elements and start the timer with the initial value selected from the table. At the end of the time delay, it would turn off the heat and pop up the toast. Come back next week, and I'll show you a working prototype."

The second advisor, a computer scientist, immediately recognized the danger of such short-sighted thinking. He said, "Toasters don't just turn bread into toast, they are also used to warm frozen waffles. What you see before you is really a breakfast food cooker. As the subjects of your kingdom become more sophisticated, they will demand more capabilities. They will need a breakfast food cooker that can also cook sausage, fry bacon, and make scrambled eggs. A toaster that only makes toast will soon be obsolete. If we don't look to the future, we will have to completely redesign the toaster in just a few years."

Roedy Green has a funny (and very long) guide called How To Write Unmaintainable Code [Ensure a job for life ;-)]

Misleading names

Make sure that every method does a little bit more (or less) than its name suggests. As a simple example, a method named isValid(x) should as a side effect convert x to binary and store the result in a database.

AT&T has done good work on their text-to-speech work.

This is a demo where you can type in a sentence or two and hear it 'spoken' by one of several voices.

It's surprisingly good, especially in comparison to what was available just a year ago. I can't tell if it's produced entirely via AM/RM/FM sythesis, or uses samples of human voice. Either way, try it out. You'll be hearing lots of it in the near future, in those automated telephone labyrinths, as well as radio and TV eventually.