The Tomorrow Project

Check out the Tomorrow Project and he anthology of Science-Fiction stories there- available as a free download:

http://uk.tomorrow-projects.com/2012/09/the-tomorrow-project-anthology-imagining-the-future-and-building-it/

BigHouse Simulator

BigHouse is a simulation infrastructure for data center systems to help understand issues such as performance, power management, and fault tolerance.   Freely available @ http://www.eecs.umich.edu/BigHouse/ 

The paper is @ http://web.eecs.umich.edu/~twenisch/papers/ispass12.pdf 

Screw Art

Once Again: Creativity is Everything!

2012 Redmond Channel Partner Salary Survey

From the Redmond Channel Partner magazine:

"By all accounts, the market for technical employees is tight. Even as national unemployment remains high, partners across the country report low tech unemployment and intense competition for talent."

Simulating Cells

This is a computer model of a bacterium which accounts for gene function and predicts unexpected emergent properties.  The paper may be found @ http://covertlab.stanford.edu/publicationpdfs/mgenitalium_whole_cell_2012_07_20.pdf

Beautiful Birds

Large Collection of Free Microsoft eBooks

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mssmallbiz/archive/2012/07/27/large-collection-of-free-microsoft-ebooks-for-you-including-sharepoint-visual-studio-windows-phone-windows-8-office-365-office-2010-sql-server-2012-azure-and-more.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mssmallbiz/archive/2012/07/30/another-large-collection-of-free-microsoft-ebooks-and-resource-kits-for-you-including-sharepoint-2013-office-2013-office-365-duet-2-0-azure-cloud-windows-phone-lync-dynamics-crm-and-more.aspx?wa=wsignin1.0

Cyber Offense is King

From the Atlantic Council

http://www.acus.org/new_atlanticist/cyber-offense-king

Art from Garbage

 

Free Microsoft eBooks

"Introducing Windows Server 2012" @ http://blogs.msdn.com/b/microsoft_press/archive/2012/06/04/free-ebook-introducing-windows-server-2012.aspx "Introducing MS SQL Server 2012" @ http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/en/us/default.aspx

2012 IT Salary Survey

From the Redmonde Magazine:

http://redmondmag.com/articles/2012/08/03/2012-it-salary-survey-news.aspx

Backbone

Backbone.js provides models with key-value binding and custom events, collections with an API of enumerable functions, views with declarative event handling, and connects it all to  existing API over a RESTful JSON interface.

Find it @ http://backbonejs.org/

Cyber-security Pipe Dreams

From the National Interest:

http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/cyber-security-pipe-dreams-7254

200-Dollar Wireless Robotics Kit

An easy-to-use mechatronics development and demonstration platform for the Freescale's Robot Kit operating with the TWR-MECH Board is available @ http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=FSLBOT&tid=vanMECHBOT for $ 200.00.

Check it out!

Why Big Data Matters

Read "The Perfect Milk Machine"

Books on Web Design

Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug

Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right by Bill Buxton

About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design by Alan Cooper

The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity by Alan Cooper

Brave NUI World: Designing Natural User Interfaces for Touch and Gesture by Daniel Wigdor

Designing Mobile Interfaces by Steven Hoober

Mobile Design Pattern Gallery by Theresa Neil

Go Programming Language

Go is an open source project developed by a team at Google.  See the example of Fibonacci Closure below:

package main
// fib returns a function that returns
// successive Fibonacci numbers.
func fib() func() int {
 a, b := 0, 1
 return func() int {
  a, b = b, a+b
  return a
 }
}


func main() {
 f := fib()
 // Function calls are evaluated left-to-right.
 println(f(), f(), f(), f(), f())
}

Go is garbage collected and supports a concurrency model derived from "Communicating Sequential Processes," which is a message-passing model.

Go is available @ http://golang.org/#

There are 2 books on it:

David Chisnall's "The Go Programming Language Phrasebook"

and

Mark Summerfield's "Programming in Go: Creating Applications for the 21st Century"

Version 1.0 of the language was released in late March 2012 and binary distributions are available for Linux, FreeBSD, OS X and Windows. The language is open source and BSD-licensed.

Software To Design Genes & Networks

"...many synthetic biologists ... are developing software of their own. Some programs make drawing up the plans for a new plasmid so effortless that high school students and untrained bio-hobbyists can do it. Others include simulators so researchers can predict how a new genetic circuit will work..."

Racket Programming Language

Racket (formerly called PLT Scheme) is a multi-paradigm programming language in the Lisp/Scheme family, that also serves as a platform for language creation, design, and implementation.

Learn more about it @ http://racket-lang.org and @ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racket_(programming_language)

There is an intriguing introduction @ http://docs.racket-lang.org/quick/