Caffeine-induced insomnia strikes again. I was having a brutal time trying to sleep last night, so I decided to give up at about 7AM and try and bore myself to sleep by writing a random binary calculator program in Perl. As you can see, it’s an hour later and it has done nothing to help the situation because I now can’t help thinking how it can be perfected. Oh, and I installed a few WP plugins that I’ve been meaning to try out too.

It is an extremely simple program with very little room for refactoring but; take a look. What can be improved here? It’s probably just the fatigue talking; but it seems like it’s taking up more room on my screen than it should.

Today, The Register speaks of “L3DGEWorld“, a GNU network administration tool like no other. Taking a very fresh approach to user interface, L3DGEWorld drops the user in the familiar setting (well, familiar to us geeks) of Quake III, allowing the user to pretty much run amok about their network gunning down rogue processes and locking down firewalls instantly.

To those viewing this as just a geek-bait gimmick, the story at ‘Reg brings up some very valid points about the inherent advantages of such an environment, but here are a couple advantages I can see myself — things I will be trying out myself later today on my own little mini-network (if it supports such a lowly thing):

1. The semantics behind the weapons provide a very expressive interface to some of the features. Like I said above, “gunning down rogue processes” isn’t just fun, it provides a concise parallel into the world of FPS games — where if you don’t want something there, you shoot it and it’s gone.
2. Assuming distance between machines is appropriately visualised within (perhaps by polling ping times), this kind of interface could provide ample opportunity to spot and diagnose bottlenecks or areas of your network setup that aren’t performing as well as they could be. Nobody likes traveling long, boring distances in any FPS game so this could very easily prompt your sysadmins to do something about that — probably more efficiently than the users’ emails they conveniently filter as “spam”.
3. And finally, there’s no way this kind of thing won’t appeal to the user — a more (or less?) civilised implementation of how children nowadays are exposed to “education through play”, masking the fact that they are learning behind fun and games.

In closing, I award the highest form of congratulation to the L3DGEWorld team at Swinburne University, Melbourne. It’s always great to see HCI and visualisation progressing in such imaginative ways. I wanna watch Tron now…

Just had to make a quick post to exclaim my love for the new album A Mutual Antipathy by Scuba. Available at Beatport and some other places, I highly reccomend it.

Also, I thought this was pretty awesome. Noisia’s “Gutterpump” was featured in a pretty good dutch Heineken ad: