I felt pretty unproductive at work today, but I got a few things done: notably, making an appointment to set my classes for next term. After work I got back to work on my program, with a brief interruption for dinner and some CD recording.
I should tell you what my new program does. It’s fairly simple, really: it measures the distance between two computers. It does this by making a sound with the speakers of one computer and listening with the microphone of the other. There’s a lot of sophistication, but the bottom line is, it measures the amount of time it takes for sound to get from one laptop to the other and multiplies by the speed of sound.
“Does” is a bit an overstatement. It might. I only have one computer that I can use to test it, and I need two, so I have no idea if it actually works. In fact, the chance that it works is really quite slim. Nonetheless, it’s complete, and debugging it shouldn’t be too hard.
You might well ask why anyone would want to use computers to measure distances, especially given that accuracy of this technique is likely to be fairly low, perhaps a 5% margin of error. Surely it would be better to use a tape measure and save several thousand dollars. You’d be right. But the new One Laptop Per Child project is going to create an unusual situation, where millions of (young) people own well-equipped computers but lack basic education supplies like rulers, notebooks, and chalk. Thus, I am building a software ruler. There might also be other advantages, like being able to work over distances of 20+ feet, which no ruler and only extra-long tape measures will do. But that’s only if it works.