« October 2004 | Main | February 2005 »
November 30, 2004
What do you want to do with your life?
A nifty collaborative webapp for keeping track of next year's resolutions.
Posted by Devon at 04:02 PM | Comments (0)
November 29, 2004
Raw Link Dump
An embarrassment of riches from my RSS backlog:
Other:
Benoit Mandelbrot interview
Mathematica's Google Aptitude: apparently, Sergey Brin interned at Wolfram prior to making a billion dollars
Tree of Life poster
Virtual teams are indeed productive
Japanese sewer architecture, as envisioned by Quake level designers :)
The new Kings of Capitalism: private equity honchos edge out junk bond dealers and investment bankers as this decade's "It" money wizards
Ulysses: text editor for creative writers
Internet:
The Web Really is an API
Industrial Revolution, Information Revolution, Relationship Revolution.
Cool maps of the dark side of the internet on Postini's website
Newsworld: a 3D VRML RSS reader
Google, Yahoo, Microsoft building TV search engines
Software Development
A Taxonomy for "Bad Code Smells"
The IDE Divide, by Oliver Steele, and comments, and more comments
Google Deskbar API .Net-only
OOVM, provider of world's smallest Smalltalk implementation for embedded devices, acquired by Esmertec
Monad Shell Standard Verb Set
MVC, Model 2, Java WebApps, (and callcc, why not)
Amazon Simple Queue Service: the beginnings of an Amazon.com Tuple Space.
Posted by Devon at 07:09 PM | Comments (0)
Search Heating Up, Yet Again
Mamma.com went and bought Copernic over Thanksgiving. Why Copernic? Jupiter Research analyst Gary Stein opines that Mamma's doing this to stay in the game. I'd argue that they're just trying to get in the game. Whoever heard of Mamma.com, anyway? Not me, but apparently Mark Cuban is a large shareholder and their stock maxed out at around $150 a share back in 2000. Both companies are at the bottom of the mindshare barrel--maybe this move will do them good (if only they can pick a better name). I do agree with Gary that BlinkX is the bomb. (By way of the extremely worthy Search Engine Lowdown).
In other news, there's growing interest in building an open source desktop search engine powered by Lucene. What's Lucene, you say? According to search expert and entrepreneur Tim Bray, it's the only open search API that gets the architecture right. If only someone would provide a front-end for Search::ContextGraph...
Posted by Devon at 05:08 PM | Comments (0)
November 26, 2004
Grid, SOA, Linda, and TurboWorx
Just read an article about TurboWorx in the September issue of Doctor Dobb's Journal. The full article is available here. The TurboWorx platform is a combination of several cool concepts for building robust distributed apps:
(1) Simple component architecture to encapsulate scripts and executables
(2) Visual programming language to build workflows from components
(3) Runtime for component execution, load-balancing
(4) Servers for tuple storage
TurboWorx's founders are one-degree of separation from David Gelernter, the professor who developed the Linda distributed computing model which powers the TurboWorx platform (among other things--check out his Lifestreams project).
What's TurboWorx useful for? The current killer app is large-scale biometrics R&D, which requires integrating massive databases and scripts running on multiple platforms. From my initial impressions, it seems feasible to implement a miniature version of the Google Cluster Architecture on this platform and integrate some server-side goodies like Spidering Hacks and an autonomous citation indexing engine.
Posted by Devon at 03:50 PM | Comments (0)
November 25, 2004
Clifford Ross's 900 Megapixel R1 Camera
Clifford Ross's Ross1 camera captures a ridiculous amount of detail. After scanning, the analog photos weigh in at 2.5 gigabytes, or roughly 900 megapixels.
Posted by Devon at 09:59 PM | Comments (0)
Skateboarding Dog Video
Check this out.
And if that doesn't slake your thirst for extreme sports, Tyson has his own website. There's plans to build him a custom snowboard so he can hit the slopes dawgy-style.
By way of Achewood.
Posted by Devon at 12:03 PM | Comments (0)
November 24, 2004
Layered Depth Image Viewer
Layered Depth Images is an image-based rendering technique that captures the depth of a 3D scene as viewed from a single vantage point.
Go here to download the real-time LDIViewer and data sets.
Posted by Devon at 11:12 AM | Comments (0)
November 21, 2004
The Wiki Wars
Was cleaning out my inbox and ran across an interesting Red Herring article.
Apparently "George W. Bush" is the #1 most hotly-contested entry in the Wikipedia, coming in right after "John Kerry", "Jesus", and various sexual slang terms (so I'm not the only one who looks up dirty words in Wikipedia :). The malicous edits have gotten so bad that the pages are on periodic lock-down to prevent vandalism.
On a related note, IBM's History Flow infoviz project aims to visualize the collaborative editing trends of wiki pages. The project is a distant cousin of PNNL's ThemeRiver. It's a highly-evolved adaptation of the "diff" tool used by programmers to compare source code revisions. The History Flow gallery shows just how rich a visualization of a collaboratively-edited document's history can be.
Given the information overload we're all suffering from and the exponential growth of hard drive size, I'm predicting this will be adapted for filesystem exploration before the end of the decade. It'd be great to get a "core sample" of storage trends: using color-coded fault lines to identify accumulation patterns and find files by age.
Posted by Devon at 10:45 PM | Comments (0)
November 20, 2004
MycroXaml - a Xaml Parser in <300 Lines of C#
Marc Clifton, author of MyXaml has released MycroXaml, a Xaml parser implemented in less than 300 lines of code.
Posted by Devon at 12:55 PM | Comments (0)
November 14, 2004
The Beautiful Picasa UI is Made of Dynamic PSD Files
I was snooping around in Picasa's "runtime" folder and found a bunch of Photoshop .PSD files. Sure enough, large parts of the UI are built in Photoshop. Layers are used to organize buttons, stand-ins, and cursors. Roll-overs are achieved with image replacement similar to JavaScript/DHTML. For example, the timeline view is just a 640x480 image with a tagged layer to hold the selected group's thumbnail and custom cursors defined in their own layer set.
Picasa's underlying graphics engine is most likely a simplified "Photoshop runtime" with a DOM to make it easy to target tagged elements imported from .PSD files. This is a smart architecture because it provides rapid UI prototyping and a consistent look-and-feel across different platforms. Designers can make changes in Photoshop then re-launch Picasa to see the results. Even better, end users can skin the application without having to learn any new tools.
The "runtime" folder also contains some simple scripts that bind UI elements to their .PSD counterparts, and define layout placement and visibility.
Posted by Devon at 04:48 PM | Comments (0)
November 09, 2004
Ambient Design's Art Rage
Art Rage is a free natural media illustration app similar to Corel Painter and Alias SketchBook Pro. It's smart, minimal and written by MetaCreations expats.
The UI features smooth animated transitions, transparent widgets, and anti-aliased graphics thanks to Goblin, Ambient Design's cross-platform GUI framework. It used to be difficult to find decent class libraries for this kind of stuff, but now it appears that they're growing on trees.
Posted by Devon at 11:21 PM | Comments (0)
November 08, 2004
3D Reconstruction Animations
Some animations from Hans P. Moravec's paper: Robots: Re-Evolving Mind:
Imagine this functionality in a consumer product. Digital Image Pro comes close with its panoramic photo stitching feature, but I don't know of any tool for extracting 3D geometry from image sets.
Posted by Devon at 10:21 PM | Comments (0)
November 07, 2004
Google, Picasa, Flickr, and Rich Clients
Haig Shahinian writes that Google should have bought Flickr, arguing that recently-acquired Picasa doesn't fit with Google's software-as-service model. Anonymonk concurs.
I disagree.
Picasa is the best buy for two reasons. First, images are CPU-intensive, high-bandwidth objects. Web-based image organizers lag behind their client app counterparts because the pipe between your DRAM and CPU is so much faster and wider than the pipe from your NIC to Google's (or Akamai's) data centers. On top of that, Picasa is fast even for a client app. It just plain books.
Second, it takes more resources to build a rich client to accompany a web app like Flickr than it takes to extend a client app web-ward. Google already knows the web--Flickr can't teach them anything new here. What Google doesn't know is rich client apps. The Picasa acquistion nets them valuable rich client expertise. The desktop is where Google wants to be, and Picasa is a strong beachhead.
Google is staving off commoditization and imitation by moving some of its services off the web. If one of these products takes off, Yahoo and Microsoft will be forced to play catch-up, again.
Posted by Devon at 07:00 PM | Comments (1)
