Andrey Vystavkin Blog

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.

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:

• Germany
• USA (particularly UMC and MIT research centres)
• Finland

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?

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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.

After few days of surging, I came out with few NXT programming solutions:

• RobotC

Basic C-language interface from umc.edu, which works with NXT and RCX model

• Microsoft Robotics Studio (MRS)

Nice and easy way of programming Robots with GUI interface, with almost no interaction with code.

• LeJOS

For Java programmers: NXT and RCX Java Open Source interface with simple Java Eclipse installation Plug-in.

To be continued…

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.