As the Arduino only supports 14 output digital pins, I ordered some shift registers a while back from eBay. They took 7 days to arrive but are finally here.
As a small project to get my feet wet with serial/parallel output, shift registers etc. I’ve set about building a 25 (5×5) RGB LED matrix display. I may extend it in the future to 7×5 for larger fonts.
I’m using circuit board from RadioShack to which I’m soldering the LEDs. I intend on using breadboard for the chips until I get …

After all the show-biz broadway-esque performances at last night’s Oscars, it was great to see Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova win for "Falling Slowly" from the movie "Once".

Glen is a fellow dubliner (hard not to notice based on his acceptance speech) that you may remember from "The Commitments" (another good movie).
I haven’t seen "Once" but I’ve heard the soundtrack and can honestly say "Falling Slowly" is not the only great song here. Checkout "When Your Mind’s Made Up" [LINK] and "Leave" also.
Glen is also the lead …

The Maserati Logo is a thing of beauty.

There are a handful of Ferraris and Lamborghinis to be seen here in town but I have only ever seen 1 Maserati in real life, I can still remember it to this day. I was walking in a town about 5 miles from where I live when I came across a GranTurismo just sitting there, unattended. It was a bright sunny day and that thing looked entirely out of place. An inanimate object brimming confidence.
If I were a rap star I surely …

I came across some amazing art on Peter Callesen’s website [LINK]. It pretty much speaks for itself. I love this because it challenges the way you look at paper. It’s almost as if there’s a strange fantasy world living in there, in another dimension, that we are getting brief glimpses of through Peter’s art. Very creative, instantly accessible and yet so dramatic.

"Impossible Meeting"

"Impenetrable Castle"

"The Other Side"

Here’s a quick video of my first experiments with an Arduino.

and a few tweaks gave me this

Preliminary interoperability testing results of my Identity Provider [LINK] with other Relying Parties yield 5 Failures, 8 Working exchanges and 4 Not Applicables.
It’s a beautiful thing when the RP and IdP just "work". Checkout the results here [LINK].
For a semi-homegrown solution I’d say that’s not bad. Maybe instead of "trusting" someone with my valuable identity information, I can just be my OWN identity provider?

OSIS Interop testing has kicked off with the launch of the results Wiki [http://
osis.idcommons.net]
As mentioned in an earlier post, my Cardspace Relying Party Test Harness[LINK] as well as my Identity Provider [LINK] are in the testing this year. I get a big kick out of seeing the interoperability work between my hacked-together test harness and the other implementations out there.
Results are being gathered in the following matrix and will likely be reviewed at RSA 2008 this year.
[http://osis.idcommons.net/wiki/I3:Cross_Solution_Results]
After some initial testing it seems my RP/IdP works reasonably …

Nova proposes defining a universal scale to measure intelligence in a recent post [LINK].
This is an interesting topic and not one I’m sure I can fully comment on in one sitting. The first task in defining such a scale would be to define "intelligence". Is recognizing a pattern a form of intelligence? Say a 2D pattern vs 3D? What about 4D? E.g. A pattern of events over time?  Is learning from prior behaviour? Is it the ability to sustain one’s own life? Or is it something else?
In thinking …

My buddy Marc [LINK] is on the panel at next week’s [LINK] 2008 Web Services/SOA on Wall Street (Monday, February 11th).
Here is a blurb about the panel:
Beyond Web 2.0…What Enterprise 2.0 Is…And What It Means For Wall Street

Beyond Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 is about deploying these new technologies and social practices in a corporate business context.
This session will explore the drivers pushing Enterprise 2.0 adoption, survey relevant technologies, and discuss how Wall Street and the financial markets are benefiting.
Tom Steinthal, Managing Director, Financial Services, BSG Alliance (Moderator)
Marc Adler, Senior …

I have been lurking around the world of PICs and Micro Controllers of late and came across the beautifully minimalist Monome device [LINK]. I don’t know what it is, perhaps Asperger’s or latent autism but there’s something about this thing that I’m drawn to.
What is it? Well from the site it’s described as…
"a reconfigurable grid of backlit keypads which connects to a computer. interaction between the keys and lights is determined by the application running on the computer. there is no hard-wired functionality."
It’s a box of …