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I bought my partner an ambient device a year or two ago. It’s basically a frosted glass orb with some LEDs on the inside and a wireless receiver. The LEDs change color and can pulse at different rates, based on the command received by wireless (same coverage as cell phones). As we were living apart at the time, I paid for the subscription (about $7/month) to be able to change the color of the orb over the internet (it’s called the developer’s channel). I wrote some PHP to map the colors to my mood or my work level, things like that.

The purpose of Ambient Devices’ products are to convey information in neither a pull method (i.e. polling your email for new mail) or a push method (i.e. your phone ringing). In reality, it does both, just at a very low priority. Some people set it to stocks or the weather, or traffic, and whenever they want that information, they can glance at it to see the current state of their chosen subject.

So, with my partner moving in with me next month, I got the hardware developer kit, which is essentially a circuit board that connects to the serial port on your computer, and the other end into a connector on the orb. This way, I can send my own signals, and not pay to use their server to send the wireless commands. They include a small Java GUI to show you how you can control it, and the Java API they’ve created allows you to specify the color and pulse, and then through native code, push that out to the orb.

It’s unclear whether the orb must stay connected to the PC to keep its current state, as it is set to receive wireless signals through Ambient’s servers. These would overwrite the most recent computer command if it were not connected to the computer still.

I’m looking forward to creating something to control it, probably a servlet, although I could use some practice with RMI.

The strangest thing that has ever happened to me on a PC happened today. I was going about my work, with Eclipse open, debugging a few apps, an email program was running, and there were some background applications (antivirus, firewall, etc.). Just for completeness sake, I’m running Windows XP, up to date on updates, and it’s on an IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad.

So, something glitchy happened when I went to click on something near the system tray, and in a matter of seconds, 30 to 40 program windows opened up, in all states of display – with or without titles, with or without minimize, maximize or close buttons, with or without screen real estate inside the windows. The computer was all but halted as I tried to close each window separately, since I imagine it was paging everything back and forth, trying to juggle so many windows.

But what was curious was that the windows were apparently visual manifestations of each (or a large portion of) my processes – there was svchost.exe, ctfmon.exe, ccApp.exe, winlogon.exe, and many others. Some of them were grouped according to which application started them, apparently – Firefox had at least 3, only one of which was named, and it was something like HkUpdate.

It took about 5 minutes of closing windows nicely then forcibly, and I still had to reboot, but I’ve never seen anything like that. A quick google doesn’t help, either, since “processes as windows” isn’t really precise. I’d be fascinated to find out what really happened, though.