This study is about a device which is probably the best joypad of all times: the Dual Shock. It has many variants and we can expect it to keep evolving in the coming years, however, we will focus here on the current version, the Dual Shock 3. In this article, we will go through the history of the game controller in general and then focus on the history of the Dual Shock itself, so that we understand in which context and how it was built. In a next part, we will then analyse the controller by studying its specifications and comparing it to its most direct competitor, the Xbox 360 controller. Basics There are many categories of game controllers, among which we will retain the most popular one, the gamepad, as that’s exactly what the Dual Shock is. Gamepads, also known as joypads, can have many action buttons combined with one or more omnidirectional control sticks or buttons. They are held using both hands with fingers (typically thumbs) used to provide input; as mentioned on Wikipedia, most modern game controllers are a variation of a standard gamepad. Common additions include shoulder buttons placed along the edges of the pad, joysticks, centrally placed buttons and internal motors that provide haptic feedback (as in, they typically vibrate). Some history In his article intituled “History of the game controller”, Catalin Ivan stated “Ever since the very beginning of video gaming, the controller has been the best (and usually the only) way of man-machine interaction.” That’s actually an interesting fact, and it would be good to follow the evolution from that “very beginning” to see how we reached the current gamepad technologies. There had actually been many, many gamepads released throughout the history, we are not going to study all of them, we are just going to review those who appear like important milestones that we observed from a study by John Honnibal and that we are summing up in the following table:...

In this post I will show you two methods to configure your .NET applications so that they would launch as soon as Windows starts. These two methods do not require any change to the registry, hence you don't need to worry about cleaning up that database if the user uninstalls your application. The first method: From the Windows Installer Deployment Project, follow these steps:...

Last week, I had to make a paper prototype for a mobile application I was working on. I ended up building a quite nice thing (picture above) but at the beginning I was not sure about how to go about it. So I just thought I would write about it to share how I proceeded....

Let's start with the dark part of this post. When you decide to start running a blog, you are likely to fail before the end of the first three months. It is not easy to write, and moreover, to write things that interest others. Professional life and personal constraints (family, schedule, etc.) are often the first causes of slacking. In the same vein, one can also note the useless pressures and deadlines that we impose upon ourselves. For example, some may start by committing to writing at least one article every day at a given time. This is not really necessary because you need a minimum degree of inspiration to write. And when you don't have it, you should have a way to get it....

Shopping is a time consuming process; the rhythm of our lives, jobs and other activities goes so fast that we hardly find time to shop properly. The current technologies provide us solutions to speed up the process by shopping online. But even online, shopping remains a task that involves some effort, thinking and time for every purchase. Sometimes you just don’t feel like doing it; or you got a lot of other things to do. Further, we are sometimes so busy that we may just forget to do it. Another thing is that it may be such a pain. Sure, it's fun to shop for new clothes and shoes. But it’s not fun to go get vegetables and meat every week. The solution What if you could just decide once what should be there in your fridge at all times and not worry about it again? You could just have what you want at all time without having to regularly spend the effort, time and thinking that food shopping require. And that's what the new Google Supply Search Engine (GOOSE) is all about....

This study is a comparative study of two particular types of visualization techniques in detail. We chose to study the map-based visualization and the bubble charts because they had been the most fascinating visualizations throughout this study. We are going to compare those two types on many factors. Defining the visualizations A thematic map is a type of map or chart especially designed to show a particular theme connected with a specific geographic area. These maps can portray physical, social, political, cultural, economic, sociological, agricultural, or any other aspects of a city, state, region, nation or continent....

This study is about the production and the description of some advanced visualization charts related to the higher education in South West Wales. Some real data had been made available to complete this task and the objective is to get some meaningful and interesting insight about the data. The tool used is IBM Many Eyes. It’s a web service that lets user upload data sets and can turn them into various visualizations. There were a lot of choices but only advanced visualization types (especially maps) had been highly recommended rather than basic charts. Further, graphs that show rises and falls over time had to be avoided as the provided data was not time oriented. So the five visualization types demonstrated here are block histograms, bubble charts, maps, matrix charts and tree maps....

This article is a follow up to my previous article on my internship at General Electric. It’s just a short note to sum up some important things I learnt. 1. Theory learnt in class is actually applied in the industry: there are some things that you learn in university you will probably never use again but other things you will use every day of your life. At the beginning I was like, who cares if the 7 layers of the OSI model are the application, the presentation, etc.? And who care about normalising the databases until it is in Boyce-Codd normal form? Actually a lot of people take those things very seriously. 2. Documentation is important. I used to see it as a time consuming process that was barely worth doing. Now I understand how it increases teamwork efficiency....

General Electric is a USA based multi-national company, where I worked as an intern over this summer. This 100+ years old corporation operates in more than 180 countries with more than 300,000 employees. GE's broad range of products are from jet engines to power generation equipments, financial services to media content. The unit I have been working for was GE Energy....

I spend a good deal of my time trying to understand what is unusual about successful start-ups founders and product creators, that is, what is special about their way of doing things. Hence we can infer some attitudes and "design patterns" that are often found among these people. Here is a (non-exhaustive) list of traits that I have noticed in these people....