Brain Strainer Game

http://www.globalspec.com/brainstrainer/?id=345&uid=%2D1712143477&uh=d4cc27&campid=661&md=090228&mh=e358d7&mailingid=1&type=%2D2

Rules of Thumb - Code Coversage Testing

Assuming that the cyclometric complexity of each method is available to to you:

1. Cyclometric complexity ~ 0-2 => 0% code coverage testing is required.
2. Cyclometric complexity ~ 3-5 => 20% code coverage testing is required.
3. Cyclometric complexity ~ 6-10 => 42% code coverage testing is required.
4. Cyclometric complexity ~ 25-30 => 57%-80% code coverage testing is required
5. Cyclometric complexity > 30 => More than 100% code coverage testing is required.

Beauty & Brain

Beauty and the brain, women use more than men . . .

A Story About ‘Magic'

http://catb.org/esr/jargon/html/magic-story.html

Face Research Laboratory

Interesting research on human faces @ http://www.facelab.org/

The publications may be found @ http://www.facelab.org/Publications/articles

Latin Script To Persian Script Editor

Fast transliteration into Persian script:

http://www.behnevis.com/

Free Tool for MS Outlook

OutlookTools is a support and advanced settings tool for Microsoft Office Outlook. It gives you easy access to Outlook settings and data folders and allows you to change settings that are normally only possible through the Windows Registry.

Find it @ http://www.howto-outlook.com/products/outlooktools.htm

FME Software

FME is an spatial ETL solution that enables GIS Professionals to quickly translate, transform, integrate and distribute spatial data. It has the following features:

1. Convert and integrate data in 225+ formats
2. Manipulate data into the exact data model you need
3. Share spatial data and ETL tasks over the web

Find it @ http://www.safe.com/

BIDS Helper

BIDS Helper is a Visual Studio.Net add-in with features that extend and enhance the functionality of the SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008 BI Development Studio (BIDS).

Towards eBooks

Color e-ink @ http://www.e-ink.com/press/releases/pr86.html

Plastic logic demo @ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0znv3V-GsNk&feature=related

Old clip from sigraph @ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wgh6CM6D-hY

Robotic book scanner @ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y16rNqnxj0U

Sony OLED @ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDuP8PtDJbE&feature=related

Fujitsu's E-Reader @ http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/kit-eaton/technomix/forget-kindle-2-fujitsus-e-reader-screen-bigger-color

iRex Digital Reader @ http://www.irextechnologies.com/irexdr1000

Mary Lou Jepsen's wbelog @ http://www.pixelqi.com/blog1/

Flexible E-Paper @ http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2003/05/58765

Razor-thin TV screen @ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-457670/Razor-TV-screen-wear-T-shirt.html

3 Useful Economic Weblogs

You have to read Weblogs to get a more accurate take on events. These 3 are among the few economics Weblogs that have shed some light on the current global financial crisis:

1. Mish's Global Economic Analysis (rated #1 Economics Blog by 24/7 Wall St and Time)
2. Market Ticker
3. Naked Capitalism

All About IronPython 2.0

IronPython 2.0 is Microsoft’s flagship of the Dynamic Language Runtime. It has the ability to glue together interesting libraries and tools from both the .NET and the Python worlds.

A useful book for learning how to use IronPython is “IronPython in Action” by Michael Foord and Christian Muirhead with topics such as test-driven development, mocks and meta-programming, along with clear discussions of .NET’s CLR structure, Windows Presentation Foundation, and even programming PowerShell with Python.

I’ve posted Resolver One, the spreadsheet powered by and programmable in IronPython before. After the IronPython 2.0 release, Resolver Systems announced a programming contest for Resolver One (first prize: US$15,000—read more @ http://www.resolversystems.com/).

I think Resolver One is one of the best ways to do exploratory programming.

Blue Reference's Inference for .NET is a tool for literate programming in Microsoft Office; i.e. a mashup of programming and word processing (or spreadsheet processing). It enables you to use the .NET dynamic scripting languages (IronPython, IronRuby, Managed Jscript, Dynamic VB) within the familiar Microsoft Excel and Word environment.

Approaches to Parallelism

A new model for writing concurrent applications is based on a structure called an actor. An actor is a computation entity whose primary actions are performing operations that are passed to it, passing data to other actors, and creating new actors.

These operations are entirely local; they have no effects on other actors. To affect other actors, an actor must pass a message to them, including the data they need or the new instructions.
This parallel-programming technique does not use variable but constants – like Java strings - as data cannot be unexpectedly changed by another thread.

Data changes among actors are done by sending messages to one another. Because of this built-in mutual exclusion, actors are a good match for parallelism

Erlang is the language with the greatest commercial acceptance that uses actor-like constructs. For Java, there is an actor framework called ActorFoundry. But, on the JVM, the best choice is the emerging language Scala, which provides support for traditional object-oriented-style programming as well.

This approach is similar to dataflow, a design that was first expounded in the 1960s. It too uses message passing and adds a built-in capability to monitor the relationship between two data items, such that if one changes, the other is automatically updated.

Pervasive Software is releasing DataRush Java library which has handled massive amounts of data in tests with only modest hardware platforms. The product has the ability to leverage data-flow across all the processor cores.

It seems that message-passing parallelism (think OpenMP) is likely to become more prominent during the next few years as a way to leverage the many cores in today’s PCs and servers.

Microsoft's Latest Robotics Tools

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/robotics/default.aspx