Sitting in an airport lounge, nondescript, wood paneled walls and leather
seats. With Foo Camp over,
waiting for the redeye back to BOS from SFO. Glass of wine as I hack.
At the start: self-organization
As with last year,
Foo Camp was invigorating, an insight into tomorrow's innovation. Lots of
interesting people were among the ranks of the campers. I waxed with
Jordan Hubbard about
inotify
and Darwin, had spirited
debates with r0ml, chatted with
Tim, was able to meet the awesome
Steven Levy (who needs to update
that picture) and a wonderful gentleman who worked on
Corona and
Jimmy Wales and
others.
Eventually we had to leave, undoubtedly sooner than anyone wanted to,
but with raised spirits. Talking is fun, but doing is better, anyhow.
Do this, don't do that, can't you read the sign?
On the plane ride up and now in this lounge, I have been working on a driver
for the Hard Drive Active Protection System (hdaps) in recent IBM ThinkPads.
They bill the hardware as an accelerometer, but its a glorified two-axis
position sensor in my eyes, which is actually preferred: You can do a lot
more with the first-order values, and you can always derive acceleration and
whatever else if needed.
My driver exports both a device node and some sysfs files. I guess we
could park the drive heads in an emergency. Or something. But the cool
hack--really cute, I must say--is to use the hdaps as an input device,
replacing your mouse with the laptop itself, which is now acting like a pinball
machine, albeit with a second axis.
When Segways Get Even
So here I am, dropping my laptop to test the acceleration-sensing user-space
program I wrote, and tilting the laptop to and fro to select windows.
Wait, one second, need to tilt this baby to the left, little more, there
we go, to select this window. Okay.
Why does this kid keep dropping his laptop?
So, okay: Parking the disk heads in an emergency fall is perhaps more
practical. But a mouse replacement is a lot more fun.
We have some fun ideas for
Xgl
plugins, next.
Anyhow, I will post the code soon as I land and recover from the overnight
transcontinental flight.
