Computing the Neutral Zone

Have you ever add to decide, you and your colleagues, where to go for lunch? Each time, it ends up being a committee, of course. It gets even worse when not only you have many colleagues, but also two offices, or two groups, at different locations. Since we work in a rather large city, we want to walk to the chosen restaurant, rather than drive, but in a way that is fair to either group.

So to settle the argument about where are the restaurants midway of both locations, we need a map, and some math.

Bad Laptop Colors: Why?

In Calibrating your LCD for Better Results I presented a few techniques to adjust your LCD so that you get better colors, even though it’s not a perfect calibration.

I have a couple of laptops and their screens aren’t all equal. Not all all. The Vaio gives beautiful, vibrant colors. The Dell Mini 10 HD also gives rather cromulent colors. The E6500, on the other hand, is dreadful. Not the whole computer of course, because otherwise it’s a rather good machine. But the screen is just disappointing. And the thing is, you can’t adjust anything besides the brightness—which defaults to blinding bright. What would it take to make such a screen acceptable?

Sohcahtoa!

Mathematics can ask you to remember things that have no obvious connection to common sense. Either because it’s arbitrary (the name of a function in respect to what it computes) or because you haven’t quite figured all the details out. In either cases, a few mnemonics are always useful!

Features I’d like to see in my Editor.

Do you ever have pipe-dreams about what you should be able to do with your computer? Like those crazy virtual interfaces like they had in the movie Minority Report or like every CSI lab seems to have? (well, that’s at the movies, of course). What about just more down-to-earth matters such as making large, complex documents such as source code more legible? I have few ideas—maybe a bit wacky.