Picture This

It's time to get real about Dr. Dobb's Wide World of Programmers Photo Album. So here's today's deal: For the first 100 of you who send me a photo of yourself holding a copy of Dr. Dobb's Journal, I'll send you a Dr. Dobb's DVD. Worldwide. The quirkier the place, the better. Your favorite coffee house, your office, wherever. Send your photo to ddj.photos@gmail.com , along with your mailing address and a short bio. What a deal.

As for my recent foot-in-the-mouth missive on GPS-enabled footwear, the best submitted pun was by Marty Quire who offered up (drum roll please) "The Sole of a New Machine". Nice job Marty. Wish I'd thought of that. Then Les Newport offered up the slogan "Knows were you are even if you don't," and pointed out that "For this product to work the 'lost soul' would have to be wearing this footware to begin with." Carl Zmola corrected me, thank you, by noting that the lost boy scouts I alluded to did have cell phones, but they were out of range. Stephen Hoffer zeroed in on the real point of my article which was the patent process, rather than the concept. Like me, Stephen thinks the wacky part was actually granting a patent for this rather obvious device. As Carl Zmola also pointed out, Nextel has been embedding GPS in its products (cell phones) for more than five years. And finally, Bruce Hartley says "If the shoe transmits .... wear it!"

Returning to the topic of DVDs, I'd like to ask for your help again. For the past few years, we've been using Shawn Garbett's excellent jFind as our search engine of choice for the Dr. Dobb's DVD. It's portable, cross-platform, open source, and an all around nice piece of work. Still, I'm curious as to similar search engines that are out there. Anything come to mind? Please let me know.

-- Jonathan Erickson
jerickson@ddj.com

Posted by Jon Erickson at 04:31 PM  Permalink