http://blog.monstuff.com/ Julien Couvreur's programming blog and more en-us 2009-06-01T22:45:43-08:00 http://blog.monstuff.com/archives/000358.html A few quick notes on Google Wave, which already seems an interesting system. For some details, watch the developer preview presentation and related whitepapers, linked below. A wave can be seen as a conversation which lives on a server (like forums, rather than emails). It is modeled as a tree of messages, where a reply can be inserted between any two paragraphs. The editor offers rich formatting and spell checking (based on statistical language model). Parts of the conversation can be restricted to a sub-set of participants (private replies). Changes are distributed real-time to other connected participants, as you... Seen on the web Julien 2009-06-01T22:45:43-08:00 http://blog.monstuff.com/archives/000357.html Last week-end I watched a few episodes of Lie to me on Hulu. It's a detective show with a focus on the science of expressions. It is a good watch so far, with strong acting by Tim Roth and Kelli Williams (Lindsay in "The Practice"). We will have to see how the show maintains interest long-term (the pattern may not bear that much repetition). As I suspected, the science behind the show is based on Paul Ekman's research on micro-expressions. It shows that emotions surface in ways that are both unconscious and hard to control, and surprisingly universal across... Not computer related Julien 2009-03-22T22:10:33-08:00 http://blog.monstuff.com/archives/000354.html The Android OS architecture is fairly traditional, but the service and application framework is interesting and modular. In the 3 part video below the Android team introduces the key concepts: Intent A class which encapsulates the intent of the user to go to another Activity. For example “send mail” or “call number”. When an Intent is emitted, the system will try and find the registered Activity to handle it, and will start it on top of the Activity Stack. Activity A class implementing the UI screen to accomplish a task (like an applet). There are some default Activities available (map,... Learning Julien 2009-03-20T23:58:45-08:00