Eye-Fi is on sale

I can't tell you how happy the last few days have made my inner geek. Last week the Chumby started shipping and today the be-far-coolest idea ever is available for order.

Do you have a digital camera? Snap a lot of shots? Forget to get around to uploading them to your PC and your online site of choice Have we got a solution for you, just get a Eye-Fi SD memory card, configure from your PC/Mac and then install it in your camera. It'll store 2GB of pictures and every time it gets near to a wi-fi network that you have configured it to use, poof instant uploads to your online site. This baby supports all the players (except WinkFlash, what's up with THAT?).

For those of you with CF cards instead... PFFFTT!

Eye-Fi

New release of UriTemplate / UriPattern library

Today I released a new version of the UriPattern and UriTemplate library on CodePlex (previously announced here). There are two changes in this release:

1. A bug reported by Darrel Miller where the meta character that have special meaning in Regex expressions are not properly escaped. I inherited this bug in the original implementation I based the library on, but no excuses, this was stupid. Sorry to anyone bit by this.
2. I've added the ability to specify that a UriPattern should be compiled. This should speed up patterns that are used very frequently.

Pick up Release 1.1 on CodePlex

Can a Lack of Sleep Set Back Your Child's Cognitive Abilities?

With a new baby around, you can imagine that our family's sleep patterns are changing. To say that we are tired misses the point entirely... we're all a "bit slow" round the house. Arianna doesn't want to get up for the Montessori school that she dearly loves to go to, Beth is stressed and struggling with emotion... and mellow me is actually not catching those "snaps of testosterone". That's just the emotionaly impact... the cognitive impact is much worse. I've found it difficult to grok code-review changes that occured in the last 5 days at work... I couldn't even recognize a bad web.config connection-string issue (something that would have jumped out before the problem description was finished a mere week ago). It's getting better, though... today is better than yesterday by far... and the biggest difference is in how much sleep we've gotten. I can easily see the pattern in myself--I even might generalize to Beth--but did I extend this to a general behavior pattern for Arianna, or kids in general? I am not that smart (today?).

Today, I read an article by Po Bronson, who authored an article a while back that really resounded with me. I wrote about it here back in March. This new article shows astonishing evidence for the direct link between how much sleep a child gets and thier cognitive ability the next (and following days). In one study of 77 kids (half asked to stay up a little later and half asked to go to bed a little earlier) the resulting merely one hour difference in the amount of sleep showed the same cognitive difference after three days as that between an average 4th and 6th grader. In other words, three hours of sleep difference cost two years worth of cognitive ability.

So let, no MAKE, your kids (and you) get that extra sleep. Read more at: Can a Lack of Sleep Set Back Your Child's Cognitive Abilities?

Oh no, there's another Brooks in the world!

I am happy to announce the birth of Xavier Eli Brooks at 1322 of October 4th.

After faking us out by turning himself around the night before the inversion, he resumed his (dad mirroring) ways and refused to turn the crown fully upside down. After 12 hours of Cervidil and 18 hours of contractions standing on his ear, he wasn't coming any closer to finding the stage door so we opened a new one just to his right.

He emerged warping space-time at a mass of 7 pounds 6 ounces, and a length of 19 3/4 inches, not that those numbers actually tell you anything about him.

Beth and baby are both fine, thanks for asking.

Brooks... Xen Brooks