Adobe prereleases 64-bit version of Flash

I just found this blog post about a new way to install 64-bit Flash on an amd 64 without using nspluginwrapper. I haven't tried it yet though.

New Mersenne prime number

UCLA found a new Mersenne Prime in August.

Mathematical sculpture

http://www.bathsheba.com/math/

closures in functional programming

i ran across this blog posting about the use of a closure to make code maintenance and organization easier. i could use more information, but it seemed useful in terms of getting to know when a function like that would be helpful. i don't really understand very well exactly what a closure is, but i have an idea from the example and from the wikipedia article. it is function that may be used when doing functional programming and may involve anonymous functions accessing variables outside the function's scope.

Houdini Training Product for Python scripting

A friend sent me this link for a training product called "Python: Creating Tools in Houdini". It sounds interesting because I've wanted to make a graphics related tool for some time now.

panda 3d

I played a little with Panda 3d on a couple of nights. It has a Python interface and Linux installer that makes trying the initial tutorial pretty easy, but the engine is written in C++ for speed.

Robot wall climber

An interesting article about a climbing robot is here.

console/window hybrid application

Some message board postings discuss a console/window hybrid application in C#. I'd like to see if adding a console interface during development to a program that is normally a gui might help with debugging.

functional programming

According to this article, closures and anonymous lambda functions are related to functional programming. I'm still gathering information about this. It does not look easy enough to use yet.

Talking Signs

More information about the Talking Signs project may be found here.

closures

This article discusses closures a bit. Perhaps it is one of the reasons for some people switching to Ruby. I heard of anonymous classes before and perhaps they are related to this topic, but I don't use them and am not familiar with when they should be used.

SanDisk Boosts SD Card Speed by Fifty Percent

SanDisk Boosts SD Card Speed by Fifty Percent.

The New SanDisk Extreme III 30MB/s Edition SDHC Line Easily Supports Continuous Shooting Performance in Nikon's New D90 Digital SLR Camera

Concurrency Friendly Data Structures

This article describes how linked lists and balanced trees should perform within a concurrent program. To me it sounds like something fundamental that should be learned, but I have avoided doing concurrent programming for quite a while now.

Problem with Windows XP SP 3 upgrade

Error message after you upgrade a computer that uses a processor other than an Intel processor to Windows XP Service Pack 2 or to Windows XP Service Pack 3: "STOP: 0x0000007E"

You receive a “Stop 0x0000007E” error message after you upgrade to Windows XP Service Pack 2 or Service Pack 3 on a non-Intel-processor-based computer

RIAS

Talking Signs Remote Infrared Audible Signage project:
http://www.geog.ucsb.edu/RIAS/

This technology is designed to substitute for missing visual cues for those with limited or no sight.

Gram-Vaani

How Community Radio Becomes 'Voice of the Village'

Researchers developed a low cost hardware and software platform for doing radio and wish to deploy it in India.

Houdini Apprentice

Side Effects Software is offering a program called Houdini Apprentice for free. I tried out the 64 bit version for Ubuntu 7.10 on Ubuntu 8.04. Initially it had some GUI problems but a quick search of the forums helped by suggesting a change to the threading for the interface. The windowing still seems a bit unstable with the refreshes sometimes, but it is usable now. My friend and I tried to render an animation on the dual core machine and it did well relative to a pc with a single core processor.

world's biggest 3D display

world's biggest 3D display

Cellular Automata

A game of life applet on the web is related to cellular automata. This should be looked into later.

Joel article about Hungarian notation

The Joel on software blog had an article on Hungarian notation. I don't use it, but he has some ideas that might help make use of it in a sensible way in the future. It helped me with an assembly language project at school when I had handles and pointers to deal with, but I'm looking into learning higher level languages now. He describes a rebellion against it starting around the initial .Net release time. He also mentions something written by Raymond Chen about exceptions hindering the safety of code. I've read people use exceptions differently in Python versus C#, but I need to actually find some code to see the difference. I'll need to look into this further later.

LiMo & android

Some other platforms planned for programming mobile phones are LiMo and Android. An article about them is at arstechnica. Android will be used by an organization called the Open Handset Alliance (OHA).

Chandler 1.0 released

An article noting the release of Chandler 1.0 and describing some of its history is here.

Python development for Nokia S60

Nokia has a web site for development for the Nokia S60 here. It sounds interesting, but I don't know much about it yet. I've seen stuff mentioned about iphone development as well. I'm leaning toward the Nokia platform currently since it sounds cheaper and this would be done as a hobby project.

Moe the hedgehog

I'm helping develop a site for Moe the hedgehog.

picture of 27 hd monitor computer setup

A picture of a 27 hd monitor computer setup is on the web. The comments note that apparently the picture shown on the monitors is a desktop image with a menu option altered to "you wish".

invisible sphere

A invisible sphere monitoring device is mentioned at this site. It is kind of funny to see it labeled as invisible after seeing it.

HyperTransport

An article at Wikipedia describes HyperTransport as a possible replacement for the front side bus.

Making of Spiderwick Chronicles

Gnomon School of Visual Effects has a video about how some of the special effects were done in the movie Spiderwick Chronicles.

wii nunchuk hacked for 3D animation

Gizmodo.com has an article about the wii nunchuk being hacked for 3-D animation.

file corruption bug with 64 bit ubuntu

suspend ruins hardy file system:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/203537/

3-d demo using Processing language

http://www.vimeo.com/615344

A video of digital ink.

bmw concept car covered by cloth with Chris Bangle commentary

threading & gpgpu

This article describes threading and using a gpgpu for parallelizing work.

From the article, he compares the slowdown when threads need to share a resource to something like two people having to share a piece of paper. Also, stuff like the overhead for creating a process and communication of a gpgpu back to the main cpu will also cause a slowdown. In addition, the work needs to be suitable to separation into pieces that may be worked on independently. He also mentions the driver and disk i/o may also be bottlenecks.

freeduino

A modified Arduino kit is available here.

Texas Instruments & DSP chips

Yahoo has an article about finding uses for more advanced multicore DSP chips. It states:
"While the new multicore chips from Intel and AMD always get a lot of press, TI has quietly shipped more than 1 billion multicore chips since 1996."

amilo graphicbooster

This page describes an external graphics card booster.

scribus

The scribus (open source desktop publishing program) wiki has a page on scaling an image to fill a frame proportionally with a python script. Also on the wiki it is suggested on the DTP vs. word processing page that database driven publishing can be a challenge but they attempt to allow that through the script interface. InDesign may allow javascript to do this kind of scripting, but I haven't tried either program out yet to see how this would actually work. I plan on looking at scribus and alternatives as a means of learning how to generate pdf's with python.

pong game tutorial video with python

3dbuzz discusses the design and implementation of a pong game. The preview mentions the design includes some classes such as actor, vector, ball, and player. the pygame library is used. it costs $24.99 but the previews are free.

python resources video

Showmedo has a video on Python resources. It looked useful for those starting out. He mentions some videos, books, blogs and other web sites.

I would like to checkout Python pdf support some time to see how difficult it would be to work with text for printing.

Continuing with the web development topic, the video mentions they use TurboGears for the ShowMeDo site.

python web frameworks

Jonathan Ellis has a post of his opinion about some Python web frameworks.

Currently I use BlueHost for a very basic web site. They advertise support for Python and Ruby on Rails. I've heard of some videos for Ruby on Rails. I believe they are on the official site here, but I'm planning on continuing with the Python route instead for now since I'm working on getting more familiar with that language. His post mentions TurboGears or Django or Pylons as alternatives. However, so far I don't see any response to a forum post asking about Pylons support about a year ago, and it seems like some other forum posts describe how to manually install the other two frameworks (I haven't tried their scripts yet). Since this isn't urgent I plan on continuing to look for more information about this. Perhaps eventually Bluehost will have more support and that will make things easier.

wikipedia chinese cuisine article

Wikipedia has an article about Chinese cuisine. It has some information I hadn't heard before and seems like a start for learning more about it. I don't eat as much Chinese food as I used too but perhaps learning about it will be interesting.

learning python

There is a blog called learning python that look like it might be helpful. The author published some stuff in Python magazine and has some posts about programming games with Python.

pycon

There is a Python podcast on the python.org web site that I'll be checking out today. It has some excerpts from Pycon, an annual Python conference.

Also, Yahoo news has an interesting story about carbon nanontubes mimicing asbestos.

Arduino ide on 64 bit Ubuntu gutsy

Arduino ide on 64 bit Ubuntu gutsy

This site was helpful when trying to get the Arduino IDE working on 64 bit Ubuntu. It used to crash with a message about incompatible word size after showing a window to pick the sketch directory. I just recently upgraded my pc to the 64 bit AMD version to try it out and ran into this problem.

memristor

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor

Some news recently announced about a new circuit element. Apparently it will be quite useful in the near future. NPR has more information that I'd like to check out later.

Programming video site

I'm checking out http://www.showmedo.com for Python video material.

Also, http://snippets.dzone.com has examples of usages for Python and other languages to read and learn from. The local interpreter helps with this kind of learning.

Jon Bentley has a blog that looks interesting, but I haven't had time to find something interesting in it. He mentions he works with IronPython now.

Blender Awarded 6 GSOC Projects

Blender Nation has a note about Google Summer of Code projects.

97k demo program

http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=537

This blog describes a 97k game demo program. He writes that procedural programming helps make the game look good while keeping the usage of space minimal.

The Art of Motion Control

The Art of Motion Control

The front page has video demo of a robot painting an egg.

Fog generating algorithm

Computer Science Fog Machine Improves Computer Graphics

The article mentions a movement toward more ray tracing based algorithms lately.

more python information

http://socal-piggies.org/scp

There is a SoCal Python users group and they had a meeting at Disney in LA about how it is used by their animation people.

comp.lang.python

This newsgroup had some information about GUI kits.

They mentioned Qt & PyQt, wxPython, and Tkinter.

python development continued

I found some links related to Python development with an IDE and a standalone debugger:

http://spyced.blogspot.com/2008/04/python-ides.html

http://prabhuramachandran.blogspot.com

I'm not sure where to start yet. There's idle and scite to keep it simple. Eclipse could be an option too because I've used it for some Java development before. Finally, some one at the first link commented about looking for an ide with a good gui designer. That sounds like it would be useful.

Python related to computer graphics

I was given some Python related information about computer graphics.

After some more looking around, it turns out 3d buzz has some information about using it for scripting in Houdini and Maya, but it is not free.

Also the python.org site has an article about ILM using the language.

From the article it mentions how some companies developed their own software as an insurance policy for the future because of the possibility of needing custom extensions or improvements.

Basically, it sounds like they gradually used it for their toolset:
"As Python was applied in more ways, it slowly crowded out a plethora of competing technologies for shell scripting and batch control, embedded scripting, component software development, database application development, and so forth. Python's versatility ultimately simplified the developers' toolset and reduced the number of technologies that needed to be deployed to ILM's thousands of production computers. This new, simpler toolset translated directly into an easier to manage and more reliable development and production process."

So it does sound like they used it as a "glue" for their various software assets.

Code metrics in Visual Studio 2008

MSDN blog entry about code metrics in Visual Studio 2008

Some other blogs have commented about this already. For example, here is an entry from a guy in Russia.

The blogger warns about problems with the lines of code metric. I was just reading Code Complete about the topic. The guideline given there is to limit the number of lines of code per routine to around one screen or one or two pages of program listing, or about 50 to 150 lines. He warns against routines longer than 200 lines and notes that there has been some inconclusive research on the quality of routines less than 200 lines. I've also heard of another guideline that an entire class should be less than 300 lines.

Boston Dynamics Robot

This looked interesting.

Arduino board

Arduino board

I am interested about electronics and have started playing with an Arduino board to learn more. I am not familiar with the tools to assemble it and ended up playing with very basic things such as a soldering iron, 22 gauge solder, a board holder, magnifier, a clipper, a holder for the soldering iron, a multimeter. Besides the tools, other basics such as figuring out the ratings of capacitors and resistors had to be done. With some help from some other people, the hardware has now passed a simple blinking led test.

rfid for horse riding

High tech for horses

This article describes a system where cameras are aided by rfid tags and sensors to help videotape horse riders.

Snake Robots

This video had some interesting demos of the capabilities of snakebots: climbing poles, looking in boxes, and swimming.

This video was done at CMU, but there are other places working on similar projects as well: NASA, University of Michigan, and University of Washington.

Podcast about Blender

http://www.twit.tv/floss25

This podcast looks interesting. The site looks like it has a bunch of other neat stuff as well.

Ubuntu sound capture

I've started trying out Ubuntu.

This program helped:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alsamixer

I am currently using 7.10 and the console program mentioned there still worked.

After getting the gnome sound recorder to work, I went to Audacity and chose Edit -> Preferences . . . ->Audio I/O->Device: ALSA:default



to get it to use the new settings since I had changed them earlier trying to get it to work.

VIA's next-gen Isaiah x86 cpu architecture

http://techreport.com/articles.x/13996

from the article:
"A look at VIA's next-gen Isaiah x86 CPU architecture
An all-new design from a surprising source
by Scott Wasson — 3:29 PM on January 24, 2008

A brand-new x86 processor microarchitecture doesn't come along every day, but today, we have just that."

Note of a Wish List for Blender Game Engine

http://apricot.blender.org/?page_id=14

Some stuff is for humor (GGG button) and much of it is beyond me, but they did remind me about the concept of static code analysis tools. Many years ago I heard of one for C by Parasoft and that it was kind of slow if there was a lot of code to analyze. But I plan to look into this. PC's have gotten faster and certainly the technology should have improved.

Peach Open Movie Renderfarm Note

http://peach.blender.org/index.php/our-renderfarm-and-how-it-works/

This site shares some experience of working on a renderfarm grid owned by Sun. They used Blender on 64 bit machines to do the rendering.

Robotics store closing

http://www.tinmanrobotics.com/

The robotics store in town is going out of business unfortunately.

Of course, there are still options through the internet. It was nice having a place so close though where people could learn and purchase things about robots.

software skeleton when doing development

Lately I've been spending more time reviewing software development basics than studying graphics. I've heard of building a software "skeleton" and then adding meat to it but am looking for a definition of the concept in specific software development terms. The integration chapter of Code Complete has some information about it. He organizes it under the topic of incremental integration and describes the skeleton as a small, functional system. It is the smallest functional, difficult, critical, or some combination of those qualities that will run. After thoroughly debugging and testing it, new classes may be added a little at a time after they have been tested on their own. This helps make debugging the entire system easier.

The way classes are added is described in the later part of the chapter. For example, there are bottom up, top down, T-shaped methods.

notes for an old programming project

Sometime between 1991 - 1995 I helped a couple other guys with an attempt at programming a game. These are some technical notes about it drawn from my memory of what others said and did and my own recollection.

what went well

1. Usage of C/C++. This went well to the extent that it didn't get in the way much. An earlier attempt at a different project for the Mac in Pascal encountered problems with memory possibly due to code module restrictions. An attempt was made to use overlays, but as far as I can recall that was unpleasant. Also on the plus side it allowed some low level stuff like some inline assembly and an ISR for the keyboard. Some other language compatible code found was a mode X graphics library by Michael Abrash. The main negative experience I recall was a situation with linking with some C routines that should have been compiled as C++. In terms of code it was all procedural because that's all we knew.
   
2. Tool development. This was an interesting aspect of the project. A paint program and brick editor were developed. Some DOS batch scripts were made. The paint program had a zoom feature and its own file format.
   
3. Design. The project was not finished so it was not proven, but there were some interesting ideas. It was 2-d platform. Kind of like Prince of Persia. There was going to be some sort of weapon power acquisition by interaction with other characters. For example, a fist was implemented. Abilities could be enhanced temporarily. For example the main character could get better leaping ability. There was a spin move kind of like the Metroid Prime MorphBall. The game would be broken up into worlds and each world would break into a series of screens. Also, there was some sort of scheme for a family of actions.
   
4. Prototype. Enough of the program got running to show to people. Thankfully it did not get stuck in the planning stages.
   
5. Low overhead. Majority of the work/decisions were done by one guy (not me).
   

what could have been done differently

1. Version control. An additional tool that would have been nice is a version control program. A bunch of images were accidentally deleted on a floppy. Some sort of source code and data file management system would have helped avoid the work to restore them.
   
2. AI. NPC control was handled basically by a state machine. Looking back something table based and maybe even another tool for creating/editing such a table might have been better.
3. Data structure. There was a doubly linked list implemented but a singly linked list might have been better. A more generic implementation of the data structure would've been nice.
4. Unit testing. There was a bug with relative positioning. Maybe a unit test with some sample numbers could've helped avoid it. Some diagnostic information was added but I don't recall the details of it.
   

Gigaman was a working title for it. It was for the PC. It didn't have sound effects. VGA required. Keyboard control, no other stuff needed.

multicore programming class using ps3

http://cag.csail.mit.edu/ps3/index.shtml

A class uses ps3's as a platform to learn about multicore programming. There are some instructions on installing Yellow Dog Linux on a ps3.

integrating mysql and blender

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/BlenderDev/DbBlender

There is some news about an attempt at integrating MySQL and Blender. Apparently databases are an important part of graphics packages such as Blender.

3-d tree model web site

http://dryad.stanford.edu/

This looks like an interesting idea. People may move through a space of computer generated tree models and then pick one for their own use. There is some organization to the trees so that the trees in one area tend to look more similar compared to each other.

reinventing the wheel

http://hardware.processing.org/

The Processing language and environment is used for software development with the Arduino controller board.

I have been trying to put together the board recently. This process itself has been a learning experience.

After the hardware is ready, I'll need to decide what to do with it. Many projects are described online. Or, I could try to think a use for it for something of my own. I had some ideas before buying it, but now it seems a path that is easy and well documented is going to be better than a path that is more interesting but not as well described.

So the result of this exercise will be a duplicate of limited usefulness. I will be reinventing the wheel but learning something by doing. It will cost me time, money, and effort. I don't believe it will be for ego, but this is not something every one knows how to do. Some advocate reinventing the wheel as much as possible when learning to get insight into the problem and solution. I'll still look for software to reuse.

Recently an end to the Chandler project was reported in CNet. Their goal was a new solution to personal information management. They did not want to reinvent the wheel, but did not end up with a breakthrough.