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.