A site devoted mostly to everything related to Information Technology under the sun - among other things.

Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Lovely Bridge

The Millau viaduct is part of the new E11 expressway connecting Paris and Barcelona and features the highest bridge piers ever constructed. The tallest is 240 meters High and the overall height will be an impressive 336 meters, making This the highest bridge in the world.




Click on the image to see a larger one.

Friday, August 24, 2007

DIY Drones

Check out how to build a drone (airplane) using Lego Mindstorms at Chris Anderson's wb page @ http://diydrones.com/profile/zlitezlite.

Coherent Object Software Architecture

Coherent Object Software Architecture (COSA) is an approach invented by Gordon Morrison which uses state machine approach to the construction of software for multi-core processors.

COSA defines a set of rules applied to a table-driven state machine, using a tree data structure to create behaviors that interact with one another and can alter the state of the system.

Learn more about it @ http://www.rebelscience.org/Cosas/COSA.htm

Saturday, August 18, 2007

The Chimera of Software Quality

From the August 2007 issue of the IEEE Computer Magazine:

http://www.computer.org/portal/site/computer/menuitem.5d61c1d591162e4b0ef1bd108bcd45f3/index.jsp?&pName=computer_level1_article&TheCat=1015&path=computer/homepage/Aug07&file=profession.xml&xsl=article.xsl&

Integrating (Business) Intelligence

InfoSense 4.0 is the new business analytics platform from InfoSense that supports repeatable work flow-based analytics for all SQL compliant databases (MS SQL Server, MySQL, IBM DB2, Oracle). Check it out @ http://www.infosense.com/.

Visualizing the Semantic Web

EXHIBIT is a tool for visualizing semantic data. It does not require any back-end databases (relational or RDF triple-store) and enables anyone to render RDF data using HTML and a Web browser.

EXHIBIT is developed as part of the Simile Project and uses JavaScript.

A companion tool, BABEL converts your data (including spreadsheet files) into authentic RDF.

There is also an effort to develop visualization standards called Fresnel (named after Augustin-Jean Fresnel) @ http://www.w3.org/2005/04/fresnel-info/fsl/.

Free Intel Threading Library

Intel has released its Thready Building Blocks 2.0 (in C++) for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. It is available as a free download (licensed under GPLv2) @ http://www.threadingbuildingblocks.org/.

This is an open source project for supporting multicore processing.

Friday, August 17, 2007

Innovation Generation

This is a new software tool & Web site for getting children interested in science & engineering. The beta is available @ http://www.igenstudio.com/ and will be a subscription-based from November of 2007.

The effort is funded by CPM's parent company United Business Media and the software was developed by the recently acquired "How Machines Work" team led by Steve Arend.

Monday, August 13, 2007

Learning Ruby

Ruby is a single-inheritance object-oriented interpreted language invented by Matsumoto Yukihiro first released in 1995. Ruby on Rails is David Hansson's "full-stack framework for developing database-backed Web applications according to the Model-View-Controller pattern" released in 2004.

The following 2 books might prove useful in learning Ruby; Michael Fitzgerald's "Learning Ruby" (O'Reilly, 2007), is an outstanding initial introduction to Ruby, Rails and object-oriented programming as well. It's very well organized and gives you more than enough information to get started.

The second book, "Ruby by Example: Concepts and Code" (No Starch Press, 2007) by Kevin C. Baird delves deeper into the Ruby language and how to use it. It offers numerous examples of code that not only shows one how to get non-trivial things done with Ruby, but provides practically (re-) usable code samples as well. It rounds out the more basic introduction to Ruby in Fitzgerald's book.

You actually don't need a book to get started with Ruby. Check out "Programming Ruby" at http://www.rubycentral.com/book/.

You can download Ruby itself at http://www.ruby-lang.org/ and the Rails framework at http://www.rubyonrails.org/.

Excellent and extensive documentation for Rails can be found at http://api.rubyonrails.org/.

Microsoft has announced a .NET implementation named IronRuby, look @ http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9748973-7.html

Somewhere in Africa


































Paintings by Iman Maliki






















Flower Carnival



















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I am a senior software developer working for General Motors Corporation.. I am interested in intelligent computing and scientific computing. I am passionate about computers as enablers for human imagination. The contents of this site are not in any way, shape, or form endorsed, approved, or otherwise authorized by HP, its subsidiaries, or its officers and shareholders.

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