It's been a while since I've been this giddy in one day. 

But I can't help it.  I don't even feel like working on any of the stuff that I'm supposed to be working on. 

A video posted at channel9 demonstrates what Microsoft has been craftily hiding with "Sparkle". 

Wow.

It's really hard to describe my internal feeling at the moment; it's a childish giddy-ness.  I started jumping around, trying to tell people about how awesome this really is and the implications it has for software development.  No longer are we constrained to plain-Jane UIs!

In addition, it's also incredibly impressive that they've basically integrated a 2D design environment, a 3D design environment, and animation tool, and VisualStudio in one.  It's quite a task to surmount and I'm really, really juiced about getting my hand on this.

Engadget has a purported sneak peak at the Nintendo Revolution controller.

This is perhaps the most important point:

"The controller part acts like a mouse as you move it around in 3D space."

I've recently been talking with Igor, one of my co-workers, about the human-machine interface and this was one of the points that he made.  He wasn't really that impressed with the Windows Vista UI improvements since it really doesn't change the way we interact with the programs.

As the discussion continued, I started forming a mental picture in my head of what it would be like if we interacted with our programs in a 3D manner.  Imagine that each application is a room floating in space.  If you want to use an application, you summon the room and walk into it (my mental picture is of a room moving towards a person while the person is also moving towards the room).  Inside the room, the interfaces are the surfaces of the objects in the room.  If you need to use two applications at once, you kinda wave your hand and a wall opens up into another room which serves as the context of the second application.  So for example, a user using Excel might have a different spreadsheet on each wall (it may not be a four-sided room).  Now the user wants to load a graph into a Word document.  The user would "extrude" the wall and kinda create another room which would be the context for Word.  The graph would be a painting or a wall poster which I could just move into the Word "room" and put it on a wall where I have a document loaded.

Then it hit me.  It's not that it's impossible to do this now.  We can easily create highly detailed 3D worlds and render them on mid-high end PCs (Doom III, Halo, Battlefield 2), it's that the primary human-machine interface, the mouse and keyboard, were not designed to interact with a 3D world. 

I mentioned this to Igor and he said "Yah, that's exactly the problem" (or something along that line) and started to move his hand around as if he were controlling a mouse in 3D space instead of a 2D plane.  It's a catch-22 situation since no one will make a fully 3D interface until there is a proper interface and no one will waste time developing this interface unless there is some application for it.

So, to me at least, this controller could really be "revolutionary".  The first mouse came into existence in 1964 and has remained pretty much the same since.  Yeah, it may be wireless and use lasers now, but the mouse is a limiting factor in the ways we design our software interfaces because it only understands 2D space.

After reading more about the controller at IGN, I've come to the conclusion that this is totally badass.  I mean, think about having two of these controllers in a fighting game (DoA, Soul Caliber, etc.).  One controller would be used for attacking.  You can slash, jab, and punch by moving the controller in 3D space.  With the second controller, you control the viewport; if you move the controller forward very quickly, you dash in that direction.  Move it to the right, and you turn.  Hold down a button on the controller and move it to the right, and you strafe.  The possibilities are mind-numbing and if Nintendo can pull this off (get lots of 3rd party developer support), it would truly revolutionize the way we interface with our machines.

Every once in a while, I'll put my resume up on Dice.com just to see what types of offers come my way.  I'm beginning to think I might be a masochist. Perhaps the thing that peeves me the most is when recruiters/headhunters call me and kind of nonchalantly ask my graduation year.

Yes, I'm 24.  But I've been doing web work since I was 18.  At 20, I was better than a lot of the guys I've worked with in the last few years who've been doing development "professionally" for 5+ years (I use that term loosely).  At 22, my knowledge of XML, ASP, and SQL were strong enough that a sizeable engineering company would hire me as a consultant to do the work that their internal developers couldn't do.

"So when exactly did you graduate?".  I despise this question.  It's a ludicrous question to ask, of course.  I've been doing the same type of work (and getting paid) since I was in college.  So what's the difference between the for-money work I did the day before I graduated and all the work I've done since I've graduated?  Nothing.  Not only that, in fact, the work that I did for my high level computer science classes?  Leaps and bounds above the typical work that most developers do in their careers.

What annoys me even more is that most of these recruiters have no idea about the technologies they're dealing with in their requirements.  I constantly have to explain that DTS is not much more than T-SQL + VBScript, how VB.Net and C# are pretty much identical, and JavaScript is not the same thing as Java.  Not only that, many don't seem to be able to read.  I get calls, not automated emails, about positions in California.  I could swear that I wrote it clearly in my resume (the HTML version posted on dice) that I'm only interested in positions in metro NY area and NJ.

Oy.  It makes the whole exprience so frustrating.

I had enough of it today when Renee called and started asking me to doctor my resume.  I've never hung up on any recruiter (I've been hung up on a few times).  I just couldn't handle it any more.

Took me a while to figure out how I wanted to set up my site.  After dabbling in a little home made CMS and evaluating several other open source CMS/portal solutions, I finally decided on dasBlog.

So far so good.  Setup is a breeze, just copy the files to your webserver and make some minor changes to your configuration XML files and you're all set to go.  Templating is also very flexible, however, there is no UI for doing it at the moment (no UI to select a macro and insert into an HTML template).  Currently, everything has to be done by hand in a text editor, which is sure to turn certain people off to this application.

On the downside, the list of available macros is somewhat limited beyond the standard blog/item macros.  Not only that, the list is poorly documented.  I can't seem to find a complete and up-to-date list of macros.

Well, in any case, I still have lots of work to do in terms of skinning and working on the CSS files.  All of the links at the top are dead for the moment, but I plan on filling them in (eventually).