This page is focuses on sciences and technologies of particular interest to me. These would be mainly related to nanotechnology, and computer software. I am a member of AAAS, IEEE and ACM, and I skim through Science, Scientific American, Planetary Report, Wired, Interactive Week and a few IEEE and ACM publications. I subscribe to few list groups including those for XML, Java Web Server, Java Servlets, Scout Reports, and the metroplex JavaMUG.

The Digital Library of the ACM, and Science Magazine On-line are outstanding, as is the Foresight Institute web site. IEEE's on-line publications are okay, but too circuitous for me.

I have always loved science and the scientific method. In high school I thought that thermonuclear fusion would be solved before I had a crack at it. Ha! Many years later and it's still not a reality. Of course, by my junior year in college I realized that I was not cut out to be a physicist, theoretical or otherwise.

Three Body Problem Check out the AMS article, A new solution to the three body problem - and more by Bill Casselman. There is a new solution called choreographed systems whereby three equal mass bodies in Newtonian motion follow figure-8 orbits. Fascinating!

The Next 1,000 Years The March 2001 (Vol. 44, No. 3) issue of the Communications of the ACM is devoted to insights of over 60 industry leaders about what the next 1,000 years will bring. I've only gotten about 1/2 way through the essays but so far my observation is that most of the leaders seem very limited in their futuristic ideas. I am surprised so few mention nanotech, and that the ones that do don't really get beyond trite phrases.

Universe's Unseen Dimensions Very readable article in SciAm, August 2000, about how extra dimensions might explain why gravity is so weak. I haven't quite figured out some of the diagrams though.

Digital Photography I have a Nikon CoolPix 990 digital camera. I love it, except for its feeble flash which is very close to the lens. The CoolPix is not a good camera for portraits if built-in flash is needed, but otherwise it fills the bill. The lens part of the camera swivels 270 degrees. That means I can mount the camera on a tripod, and manipulate the camera & lens so that the LCD display is optimal for me.

E-Commerce XML is good way to communicate semantics on the web and its application to trading partners and B2C is significant. It is catching on but not as fast as I expected. See my small business XML example. My pet desire in e-commerce is to dream up a way to put the web consumer in complete charge of the ads he is subjected too. More on this later.

Wireless Internet Well, we all know what WML is good for now don't we. I imagine old colleagues at TI are getting a chuckle out of the pasting that WAP/WML is getting these days. My interest is in applying agent technology to wireless. The tool I like is Voyager from ObjectSpace, a few releases ago.

Software Process Improvement Doing it right the first time is not something many software organizations abide by. If they did, then they would have improvement processes in place. Amusingly, they don't have time to do it right the first time, but they have time to redo it, and redo it, and redo it. My pet interest is in small project/small team software processes. I like the idea of process toolkits and document templates. In fact I did one for TI some years ago.

Software Component Architectures How are reusability and reliability maximized in a complex application domain? JavaBeans are well-suited for enterprise domains but what component architecture is best for real-time, embedded domains?

Linux Any new applications I would build to target Linux, and I'd want to use Java. Microsoft OS'es are just too darned bloated, as are the MS applications.

Internet The noise level is starting to drown out the signal!

Object Oriented What comes after OO? Well, Patterns, I guess. What then? Maybe we can recycle stuff. Remember CAR/CDR?

Computer Architecture My interest in computer architecture centers around nanocomputers. How they be programmed; how will they be made program-fault tolerant?