I’d like these to work with button-pushes-without-haptics instead of a mouse interface.

It works by induction. As you’re running you pass over magnetic plates (usually at the start and end, but they can be used for checkpoints as well). The field induces current in the wire coil which powers the tiny radio transmitter (no batteries) and causes it to emit a unique identification number. The receiving computer logs your start and end transmission times. Subtracting the former from the latter gives your race time.

Simple! Their cost-per-unit is pennies so the chips are given away free and are designed-for-dumpsters. Really, they’re trivial to recycle — good business opportunity! You’d have to go bulk, but you could beat even the pennies-per-unit price from the manufacturers (pennies-per-every-other-unit, eg).

This also implies a small optimization: runners should try to cross the line with their chipped foot forward, and with the chip attached as far forward as possible on their shoe. It also implies a hack: get your chip early, copy the unique ID, write it to another chip, and have someone cross the finish just after you cross the start — run a sub-second 10k!

I don’t take panoramas often at home, so I don’t have it installed. Now that I’m on vacation taking panoramas like crazy I need it — and it’s not available for free download. It’s just available free, on disc, with your purchase of a camera. Free, on disc, but on the other side of the planet.

This has got to be a common use-case: being caught on vacation without software. I’m forced to wonder if they’re trying to extort another $20 from me or if they’re just incompetent. Poor form.

I’ve been forced — by the company — to switch to open source. They must be quite confident in PhotoStitch — they’re driving their users into the open arms of development communes, confident we’ll come running back.

We’ll see how wise that turns out to be.

Elections BC has just published a report explaining how a Canadian electoral agency works. It includes a section on voting, but it’s mostly about what goes on behind the scenes to result in an “elector” putting a ballot in a box. There’s a bit of a bias toward BC and federal jurisdictions, but an attempt has been made to generalize it for all provinces.

This report is mostly of interest to very hardcore politics geeks. The report notes that running an election is the largest project undertaken in a country (the Vancouver Olympics had 25,000 volunteers; Elections BC had 32,000 employees on May 12, 2009), so it might also be of interest to business geeks.

You should probably read it if you’re going to apply to be BC’s next Chief Electoral Officer. It’s also a manual on how to start a private election services provider, which I think is a fascinating thing to privatize.

This is all, essentially, polish. I still need to do sound and music, for example. It’s just fun to polish because I know how to work with features I’ve already implemented — they have a high tweak/reward ratio.

In professional development, which is what I’m ostensibly doing, there are three(-ish) key project management trail markers you’re looking to hit, the ABCs of game development:

1. Alpha: The game is feature-complete. No new features need to be written, existing code needs debugging. All art/sound assets should exist, if not in final form.
2. Beta: All art/sound assets should be final. Code should be stable and fixes limited to high-priority bugs.
3. Candidate: Good for submission to your publisher. Fixes limited to crashes (shouldn’t exist), guideline violations (breaking the rules of your publisher’s platform), or legal issues.

You then iterate on candidates until one is accepted and released. My game, under these definitions, is still pre-alpha — I’d like to get it there before I leave for Europe next week. Then any work I do on it in Amsterdam will be improvement, not implementation.

And now they’re buying the last-place mobile maker because they’re late to that market as well.

Business majors like nothing better than bandwagons and irrational merger prices.

Note the two responses from administrators: some ban the technology, some work with it. This leaves only one question: How do we fire all the former and promote all the latter?

Here’s the system I use, which almost worked perfectly — and would have if I had followed it more religiously (as I am this year). This is a system that any fledgling microbusinessperson should be able to implement:

1. I bought an accordion file and labeled it “SIN Hard Records 2009″.
2. I scanned all hard (paper) receipts for business expenses and self-emailed them, then stored the original* in the accordion.
3. All digital receipts not emailed to me are printed-to-PDF (hooray, Apple!) and self-emailed.
4. All receipts (and invoices) now live in the cloud, specifically under a Gmail label called “2009 Taxes – SIN” (there’s also a “2009 Taxes – Personal” for things like stock statements).
5. Last, I balled up everything in the tag and emailed it off with a one page summary.

For example, I bought a bunch of graphic design and software engineering books in 2009, about $200-worth, from Chapters. Those receipts all lived in the hard file until today, when I scanned them and emailed them off to claim a deduction against revenue. Now those paper records are back in the file, archived, and also live in the cloud.

[Aside: remember to keep the receipt for the accordion in the accordion. I lost mine ]

As an indie operator 20% of each of your paid invoices should go into an account to handle end-of-year taxes. No one does this, but we all should.

* Apparently you still have to keep originals around — otherwise this is where you shred.

I’ve been thinking about development methodologies beyond agile scrums — Zero Meetings, or One Minute Meetings — in prep for heading back into the Industry, hopefully in a production role.

Fuck I hate offices.

Prepare for the iPhone to get even sexier this Summer.