After getting an iPhone with a decent built-in camera, I was under the impression that point-and-shoot cameras, like the Canon IXUS 55 (aka PowerShot SD450) I own, are all but dead. In an unusually interesting story, CNET’s Leonard Goh reports about an unofficial “expansion pack” for Canon cameras. The expansion pack’s purpose is to workaround the fact that the camera’s firmware – not necessarily its hardware – is what limits what the camera can and cannot do.
I installed the CHDK (Canon Hacker’s Development Kit) version that fits my camera model, and was amazed to see it in action. It provides, for instance, improved control over shutter speed, enabling one to take these fabulous photos using a relatively cheap camera.

The word is on the street that Facebook Chat is now in public beta, with selected networks already able to use it.
Being a member of the Tel Aviv University network, I’m still unable to use it myself.

My brother Ori is rolling his own home automation project, which includes designing and manufacturing the hardware and developing a software application that would control the hardware (the part that makes it truly smart ). By sending and receiving simple instructions through the serial port, the software would be able to perform such simple tasks as turning on the light when a switch it turned on, as well as more sophisticated stuff like automatically turning on the dishwasher when a random car drives into the driveway.

Ori is an extremely talented electrical engineer, but he’s a little lazy when it comes to software. He approached me a while ago and suggested that I participate in the project, and be responsible for the software part of it.

Since the hardware is proprietary (the hardware as well as the protocol it supports are completely unique), a question that we asked ourselves early on in the project was whether we can use an existing piece of software to control the hardware. One problem with many existing open source solutions, though, is that they tend to mix the implementation of the hardware protocols they support with the rest of the application code, making it hard to re-use existing code or add support for new protocols.

One solution that does look different in this aspect is HouseBot, a plain old shareware program. HouseBot has a plug-in architecture that supports two main concepts: Hardware Interfaces and Devices. By defining a Hardware Interface that supports our cryptic hardware protocol, and Devices that represent real world appliances that interact with this Hardware Interface, we can write only the parts necessary to support our unique protocol, while harnessing the user interface and generic application logic provided by HouseBot. At $80 a pop for such a niche product, it would definitely be a bargain.

I’ll post more information on the project as it develops.