To further my understanding of frequency analysis and the fast fourier transform, I have created an application that just turns on the microphone and continually plots the FFT magnitude of what it records. It allows control over the window size and sampling rate.
Because the FFT of a real valued function is even, we only display the first half.
It's fun to whistle and see the result. I think it would be cool to make a game out of this. For example, you could make pong and control the paddle with sound. I plan to call it Whistle Hero.
For some more fun, run soundlab at the same time as WaveStudio, an older application I made that lets you draw a waveform and hear it. That way you can see a waveform that you create in the time domain in the frequency domain, and hear it all at the same time. Its actually quite challenging to try to make a perfect soundwave, and eliminate all of the harmonics.
For a micro-ISV, selling to businesses can be more lucrative than selling to consumers. Instead of making a few dollars per sale and hoping for thousands of sales, you sell to only a few customers, and charge much higher rates. But the rates are high for a reason. It takes more time and money to sell to businesses.
Rant: Why can't anyone make a good settings screen?
Even though I saw through their tricks at every step along the way, I am now a customer and proud of it. It is worthwhile to look at what they did, because these are simple things that you can do to improve your software business.
A netbook can be ideal for a home web server. They are cheap, and use less power
than a CFL light bulb.
Is 2009 the year of the linux desktop malware? How long until we see headlines like, "Researchers find massive botnet based on linux 2.30"?
People thought it was a comic, so I never corrected them.