Archive for October, 2007
Twitter. Searching and bookmarking.
30
Oct
It’s time when I have to move from Del.icio.us and Google Bookmarks. Twitter Atom subscription gives quite good opportunity of tracking all the interesting things caught from Twitter on daily basis. A combination of GoogleReader and Twitter gives a nice service with:
- Tags and categories can be made in GReader.
- Accessing your bookmarks from phone by following Twitter updates.
- Encapsulated Google Search in GReader won’t give a chance to miss any information once it was tracked through RSS/Atom feeds.
- You can update your twits from phone/IM: fast and easy and clicking less.
Europeans, robotics and Cyprus
29
Oct
Some of you already know that for my senior Bachelor project I decided to do Robotics & Automation, since it is a brand new field of study for me.
Due to the fact that this project includes a lot of sensor fusion techniques and algorithms for positioning, I had to go through lots of IEEE research papers, since our university library in Limassol doesn’t have many books on the subject.
What I noticed was the fact that most of the research work goes from Northern Europe and Northern part of the USA:
This is just a shallow list of countries involved in the research, however there are more to add. I’m not taking Japan or South Korea in account since this field of science is quiet popular there and it’s Asia – it’s completely different story. The main question of this article is: will this type of computer science and engineering become popular in Cyprus?
Cross-browser apologies from j4vk.com
23
Oct
After adding Personalized Google search in the sidebar, I didn’t have a chance to test my blog template with all web browsers.
Thus, I make apologize to 24% of j4vk blog visitors using IE6, Google searchbar screwed up the sidebar layout (which you could have found at the bottom of the site).
Now everything seems to be fine in IE6, IE7, Firefox 2.0.0.8, and Safari 3.
Lego NXT programming tools
23
Oct
After few days of surging, I came out with few NXT programming solutions:
- RobotC
- Microsoft Robotics Studio (MRS)
- LeJOS
Basic C-language interface from umc.edu, which works with NXT and RCX model
Nice and easy way of programming Robots with GUI interface, with almost no interaction with code.
For Java programmers: NXT and RCX Java Open Source interface with simple Java Eclipse installation Plug-in.
To be continued…
Adobe moves to Web apps with Hydra
22
Oct
Seems that a company leader for image graphics software – Adobe, is about to release a new language which will enhance the capacities of image filtering on the Web. Language’s codename is Hydra, and you can find it at Adobe Labs section. T
That’s what John Nack said about nice advanced technology:
“Hydra is tuned to run ridiculously fast on modern graphics cards (GPUs), and it’ll be tuned for multi-core CPUs as well…Here’s a key point, though: the same Hydra technology is being used to power the fast filters in After Effects CS3. Therefore an AE plug-in developer could effectively also develop runtime effects for Flash, while a Flash developer could leverage her work inside AE.”
Here are some benefits of Hydra language:
- Familiar syntax that is based on GLSL, which is C-based
- Allows the same filter to run efficiently on different GPU and CPU architectures, including multi-core and multiprocessor systems in a future update
- Abstracts out the complexity of executing on heterogeneous hardware
- Supports 3rd party creation and sharing of filters and effects
- Delivers excellent image processing performance in Adobe products
Some of the filtering examples you can find at Kevin Goldsmith’s blog.
7.04 to 7.10 Ubuntu desktop
22
Oct
Heck! I was expecting some power consumption improvements, but still 4 hours XP vs. 2 hours Gusty.
Trying to make this post useful, follow these lines:
sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude upgrade
sudo aptitude dist-upgrade
And remember: the more you misspell these three lines the longer upgrade will be! Be aware of grammar mistakes, folks!
Licenses, patents and ideas
17
Oct
I’ll try to make things short by quoting Richard Stallman:
Control over the use of one’s ideas really constitutes control over other people’s lives; and it is usually used to make their lives more difficult.
Watching these patent wars between Novell, Red Hat versus IP Innovation just makes me wondering: how hard will it be to distribute ideas in the world where everything is patented?
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