I like pancakes. Hey, everyone likes pancakes! Check out Kyle's awesome mod of his Pancake Express game for the SMALLab installation. It's a really great test of the kind of work we can do with new Render Engines. And it's a ton of fun.

Kyle and I have made a lot of progress since the install went up for SMALLab. To date, we have the beginnings of Render Engine Managers for Python, Processing, and Flash (via XMLSocket).

The Python version, PyREM, can create engines and pass properties based on responses from SCREM. I still need to get it to destroy engines, as well as accept and display media library files, but it's moving along pretty well.

The ASU folks put together a really nice and flexible system. I'm really encouraged by how quickly we've gotten up to speed now. I'll post pics once more interesting work gets rolling.

Couple of awesome updates. The most important is that Shawn and Kelly from ASU helped Kyle and me set up the SMALLab installation at Parsons. Very, very cool.

Distortion: Me with a checkerboard as the SMALLab team tries to fix the distortion on the fisheye lenses.

Kyle and I got processing communicating with the system in about a half hour and made a couple of nice sketches with two balls tracking. Should be a good kick off for making lessons starting two weeks from now. Here's a YouTube video of that:

CiteULike is awesome. Man, how did I miss this for my entire thesis year? In any event, I have my latest links coming through to this site so that everyone can see what I'm up to.

Hey, no sense keeping this hidden on my hard drive. And until we get a full and working archive of all the thesis documents back at the department, this seems like the most logical place for it to go. Plus it will allow me to link it into CiteseerX, which I'm currently doing research with and loving. While I'm thinking about it, I"m also loving JabRef, the open-source citation manager. Just wish I'd discovered these last year.

I just read a great article on interfaces by Baobab's Mike McKay entitled Text Editors and Electric Kettles. It's really worth a read. It's the kind of thing I'd show to design students, it's so good. And it also does a nice job summing up some of the challenges and solutions that they're working with specifically down in Malawi. And, hey, if you have a digg account, bump the story up!

So, I'm stuck here in Heathrow instead of being on a plane back home. Ethiopian Airlines screws me again. They took about an hour longer than they had to to get out of the gate. What was announced as a "mechanical problem" turns out to have been a misalignment between the plane and the jetway. In other words, they didn't park the plane right. Awesome.

Now I'm just killing time here in Terminal 4, rocking out on the N800 and the BlueTooth keyboard. I've hit a few UI snags, but, on the whole, it's nice. Nothing quite like having a laptop that fits in your pocket. I'm considering using this as my class notetaking tool. Beats hauling around the Death Star just to type things up. No good mind-mapping software yet, though. I probably should just suck it up and write some of my own.

Today's observations in pictures:

Battle of the Bands: Nurses in Kamuzu Central Hospital's Children's Ward C, which is dedicated to therapeutic nutrition, compare the UNICEF-style MUAC band with the prototype we've created.

Paper Records: One of the driving forces behind implementing Baobab's patient-manage system in hospitals is to help reduce the problems associated with keeping paper records. Here we see the destination of many records that are only a few years old.

Rashid Demonstrates the X-Ray Process: One of the best-loved features of the Baobab system is its use with tracking and reporting on x-rays.

Just a very brief video message from me here in Malawi.

A great amount of work got done thanks to the help of everyone here. Below is the latest prototype. It's printed on paper, but another version is making the rounds that was printed on indestructible HP LaserJet tough paper, a kind of polyester film available in consumer sizes.

The Latest Prototype

I was also able to get the ART system up and running for the AIDS clinics. Based on the observations we made earlier in the week, I was able to hack into the Ruby on Rails app and get it to work along with the bar-code scanner. Now MUAC data goes straight into the database--a full prototype system, working end to end! Sweet! And it works pretty much as expected (minus bar-code reader) on my touchscreen Nokia internet tablet.

ART application on the Nokia 800

So, next week is testing and observations. That should give me ample time to make adjustments before heading back to the states.