Yesterday I started on the first part of my home projects related to classroom presentation tools to help use Google Earth. This first part of these projects was to construct and set up an ‘Atlas Gloves’ controller for Google Earth. I have already talked about what this system is and how it is supposed to work (see my January 26th post…).
Last night I glued ping pong balls to a couple LED keychain lights. This completed the construction portion of this project, the next was to download, unzip, and ‘fire up’ the Atlas Gloves software. I set this up on my rather ubiquitous Dell laptop with an integrated web-cam. I had the latest versions of Java and QuickTime on the system, and I was (in an expectant manner) hoping to see something…
Nothing happened… I got some sort of an empty dialog box from some Java code, and that was it…
So, I am now feeling a little discouraged, especially since I can almost guess that I will have to download the source code to find out what exactly went wrong (I should mention that I hate debugging other people’s code!!!). In the mean time there are a few subsidiary tasks I can do to ensure that I have every possibility covered. For instance: I will be checking this ‘system’ out on several other computers (unfortunately, I only have access to some Windows platforms right now…XP, Vista, and Windows 7…),and I will also be trying out a couple other (external) web-cams too…
While this is certainly a bit discouraging, it isn’t that uncommon when trying to get some unknown code to run (with literally no documentation, or even some rudimentary directions for use!). This did, however, allow me to see something else which has me more discouraged about the nature of the legions of reviewers, commentators, and bloggers out there…
I searched hundreds of sites which purported to have any sort of information about the ‘atlasgloves.org’ site, project, or for that matter…anything related to this topic. All I found were about 30 to 40 sites ‘reviewing’ this ‘concept’ with the same (attached) YouTube video and some sort of blurb about this being a great weekend project. My problem was that I never saw any evidence that there reviewers (or anyone else for that matter) actually trying this system out. I was seeing a veritable ‘echo-chamber’ of techno-coolness, There must be literally hundreds of sites out there of people who pass on what others are also passing on. I may be a bit indignant right now, but this reminds me of…SPAM… Now that is a lot more discouraging than my having to look over some Java code.
So, with due respect to Ayn Rand, I am at the point where ‘Atlas’ may indeed be starting to shrug…
P.S. I will continue to work on this system and will present all of the things I did, and hopefully I will have 1: a system which works, and 2: some information for others, in case they end up in the same situation I am in…
