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2004/5
28 January 2005
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My blog will from now on be available from this link.
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Robots with guns. Real ones! The US military is investigating their
possible use. See here
and here.
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It has been a while! I've been working hard, the end of year is near and there
are many work to do. But I must confess, I have been too lazy to update the
page.
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In the last two months I became good friends with Python. I'm actively using
it for a few projects at work and home.
For one of the projects at work I'm using Matplotlib to create graphs for
an HTML report. Matplotlib is a Python package that provides plotting API that
will be familiar to Matlab users. The module provides a lot of
functionality and output options (PNG, PS, Interactive windows, etc.). I
can highly recommend the package.
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I also started to play with the Atmel AVR 8-bit RISC
micro-controllers. The AVR MCU family offers a fast, flexible and easy to
use, flash programmable processors for a variety of embedded applications. The
MCUs offer integrated 8/16-bit timers, ADC, analog comparators, SPI,
UART/USART, USI, watch-dog timers, SRAM, EEPROM, many IO ports, PWM and many
more. Ideal for robotics!
I'm in the process of writing a few example programs in WinAVR. I'll make them available on
the site once I'm done.
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Does your budget only allow you to buy the cheap variant of your favourite
alcoholic beverage? The esteemed scientist at Oh My God It Burns! have done an experiment
that can certainly qualify for some kind of award (Nobel comes to mind). They
used a standard commercially available water filter to purify cheap and nasty
Vodka and then compared it to the good (expensive) stuff. They claim that
after a few filtration cycles the nasty stuff starts to taste as good, and to
some participants even better, than the good stuff.
While their methodology is certainly not water tight, it is an experiment
worth replicating!
15 September 2004
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An old friend of mine, Sarita Terblanche, is playing in a band in
Britain. The band is called Oskar. Check out their web page
and listen to their samples. If you are in their area, go watch them
live.
10 September 2004
9 September 2004
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Paul Graham wrote another nice
essay called: The Age of
the Essay. He explores the history and purpose of the essay and why
so few people like writing them. He then went forth and discuss what an
essay means to him and proposes how one should write one. A very
inspiring peace of work.
19 August 2004
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I just stumbled onto the Self
Improvement Patterns wiki entry. Worth a read! The site is full of
other useful information as well and it is easy to get entangled.
6 August 2004
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The past few weeks I played with Skype (also available for
Linux). Skype is an instant messenger (IM) and voice over IP (VOIP)
program. I was interested in testing the VOIP capability. I tried to
talk to my friend Louis, less than 50 km away, at his office. It
didn't work very well (not due to Skype though!). While the sound
quality was good, I only received about half of the data. Louis could
however talk to a friend in Switzerland without any problems. So it
cames down to good old bandwidth, which I don't have much of. It seems
that I'm stuck with email and IM for the foreseeable future. When will
ordinary folks here in South Africa have access to fast, cheap,
reliable internet connections? If it is up to Telkom, not very soon!
23 July 2004
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My friend Louis pointed me to these two great sites: eMachineShop and Pad2Pad. These sites make it easy
to design and order custom mechanical and electronic parts. Their
prices are a bit stiff for me, but the concept is pretty neat. Check
it out!
19 July 2004
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We were in Robertson for Chantal's memorial service most of last
week. The service was very moving. I hope this will bring some closure
to everyone.
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Friday morning we went to Birds Paradise
in Robertson. Besides the birds, which we haven't visited, there is a
bunch of other animals and a restaurant. The real reason we visited
was for the lamas and ponies, Adele totally adores them! When we
approached their pen, the one pony went over to his friend, which was
lying on the ground, and "called" him before walking over to us for
some quality patting. That was very sweet! I would definitely
recommend Birds Paradise to visitors.
9 July 2004
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I'm so bloody angry!
Yesterday my brother's girlfriend (Chantal van der Westhuizen) died in
a terrible motor accident just outside of Robertson. Some asshole in a
truck overtook another truck; on a hill, around a blind corner!
It is so unnecessary. It didn't only rob a young girl (19) of her
life, it also causes a huge amount of pain for her family and
friends.
I can only hope that justice will be served.
My deepest sympathy for her family, friends and especially my
brother. Riaan, I wish I could fix it ...
16 June 2004
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The 24 dotcom experiment is
over. The business has been sold for $2,026.00, not to bad for
one day (the three days support, plus ...) project. This has the
potential to catch on. Maybe they can do this kind of thing on a
regular basis. One of them ought to make them lots of money.
14 June 2004
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From the jDip site I found
a link to a group of
people aiming to write an AI for the Diplomacy board game.
It is something I wanted to get involved with before. I feel like a
game ...
13 June 2004
12 June 2004
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BBC news is running a story
about an effort by the British Library to put 19th century British
newspapers on-line.
One thing that has always bothered me is that it is very difficult to
find historic information. I think it is a good thing if more people
add old information on the web.
11 June 2004
8 June 2004
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I've discoved the website for Alexkor today. Old residents of
Alexander Bay might enjoy the read.
7 June 2004
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My Cybot is going on well. I
can now remote control it via the handset. I still haven't put the
construction pictures I took with my cell phone online, but hopefully
I will get to that soon.
If you want to know more about Cybot's internals and maybe want to
modify it, you will find these links useful:
31 May 2004
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If you are looking for technical information about stepper motors, this tutorial by
Douglas Jones is worth a read.
21 May 2004
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Python meets robotics with Pyro. Pyro is
a library for artificial intelligence (AI) and Robotics research. It
looks like the guys are using it for some serious research.
Thanks to Andre du Toit for the link.
14 May 2004
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OpenVIDIA is a project
where computer vision algorithms are implemented on computer graphics
hardware using OpenGL and Cg.
Look at the last screenshot on their screenshot
page. There is 7 GeForce FX 5200 cards in that machine. Impressive!
13 May 2004
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Looking for a flexible real-time graphing component? At Stone Three we did. Jaco van der
Merwe from SunSpace pointed
us to IOComp. These guys make a
very powerful plot package as well as an instrumentation package. We
will probably use the plot pack in our upcoming product.
11 May 2004
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I'm busy learning about the Atmel AVR 8-bit RISK
microcontroller family. Atmel's site is actually quite useful. I've
also got lots of information from AVRFreaks. I intend to use these
small, but powerful, processors as the brains for my own robot. I've
been building Real Robot's Cybot for a while now. Its quite
cute. I will post some construction photos at some time.
4 May 2004
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I had some trouble getting FTP access running on the new hosting
server, but everything is sorted out now. My thanks go to Michael at
the webaxxs support central. The
website is now fully operational again!
1 May 2004
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After one day the stupid Sahara optical mouse that I got as part of my
system died. The buttons still work, but there is no movement. I assume the
optical movement sensor circuitry went to hell. The tragic thing is that,
due to courier costs, it is will cost me almost as much as the price of the
mouse to send it back to the supplier for a replacement.
30 April 2004
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Today I'm getting my new workstation. Actually, it is the first computer I
bought for myself, so I'm quite excited. The system is a prebuild
black Sahara
Extreme Pentium-4 with Hyperthreading. I ordered some extra storage
space, but I still need to decide on a 3D graphics device. If anyone has
good value for money suggestion please contact me.
26 April 2004
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This website will be offline soon. The new pages will be up in the
next few days.
23 April 2004
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This week I tried to get an MSI
nVidia GeForce 4 MX440-8X graphics card to work with an Elitegroup
P4VMM2 motherboard. I also tested the Gigabyte MX440
offering, but no luck there either. Expect get the same problem with
other MX440 based cards as well.
The problem is that you don't get any video signal out of the graphic
card, only from the on-board S3 ProSavage8 card. I've updated
the BIOS and tried about every BIOS setting available. Tech support
from both the local supplier and Elitegroup sucks! I'm still waiting
for a reply from Elitegroup.
If you are trying to do the same, don't bother, get a different
card. I eventually used an MSI nVidia FX5200 graphics
card.
PS: I suspect that all VIA P4M266A/VT8235 based motherboards
will have this problem.
22 April 2004
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I've upgraded my hosting plan and will be moving to a new server soon. I had
to change my DNS information as well. The site might therefore not be
available for a while.
20 April 2004
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Ladies and gentlemen, meet the D language. D is
the new kid in the C/C++ family. It aims to take the family of
languages to the next level, by increasing productivity, making
programs more reliable and easier to understand.
The good people at OSNews has a
short overview of
the basic language features. If you are a C/C++ programmer, I think
you should check D out.
19 April 2004
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I don't know for how long it has been available, but Microsoft has released
the Microsoft
Visual C++ Toolkit 2003. This package provides a free edition of:
- Their C/C++ Compiler and Linker (Optimised, not crippled!)
- The C runtime library, C++ standard library with STL
- The .NET Framework Common Language Runtime
Whatever their strategy is behind this, I'm excited. If you want to
write cross platform libraries and applications you can now do it
without forking out a lot of bucks for Visual Studio!
By using a cross platform build tools, such as SCons and a good editor (and
development environemnt), such as XEmacs, you can go a long way. All
that you need is a good free debuger and maybe an IDE (for those who
just cannot work without one).
Remember that you can also download the Windows Platform SDK, DirectX,
.Net Framwork SDK and even the MSDN library. You can get all this and
more at MSDN.
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CNN has an article about 3D
search engines. The name provides quite a vague description of the
subject, since it might mean a number of different things. However, in
this case the author talks about searching for mechanical parts, such
as components of a plane or some other machinery. However, the
technology can obviously be extended to most real life (3D) objects,
such as your coffee mug.
The idea is that before you spend valuable time to design, build and
test a new component you require in a system, you first make a rough
sketch of what you want and then you use the search engine to look for
similar parts.
It sounds pretty cool, but at this stage the search engines will be
limited to specific domains, such as mechanical parts. Maybe one day
Google will add a "structural search" option to their offerings.
16 April 2004
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I saw an interesting article at japan.com about an electric motor
that uses permanent magnets to "generate" power. The motor uses the
permanent magnets to drive the rotor. However, the permanent magnets
will form natural lockup points (you just cannot get perpetual
motion). The motor then uses two electromagnetic stators to drive the
rotors past the lockup points created by the permanent magnets.
The inventor claims that the motor is 80% more efficient (in power
consumption) than conventional motors with the same torque and power
output. The inventor's company has already sold 48000 cooling units
(fans) in Japan and they are working on a number other products.
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Wireless
USB is coming.
15 April 2004
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Yesterday, we (South Africans) had the opportunity to cast our votes
in the third democratic elections. I'm proud to say that voting went
very smooth all over the country. However, I'm pretty concerned about
the number of intelligent young (mostly white) people who didn't
vote. It is pretty sad that people don't want to give an hour (which is
nothing in a period of five years) of their lives to say to the
politicians that they agree/disagree with their policies.
South Africa is heading to become a one party state. This is not
because all the people in the country has the same political view. I
mean, I just can't see how a few million people can agree on the same
thing. Rather, the reason will be that people really just don't
care. It is easier to vote for the "heroes" of the struggle than to
think about their policies. It is also easier to enjoy the extra
holiday, than to get off your ass and vote!
Anyway, enough ranting. You can view the latest results at the
IEC's site.
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Amazon has released a new search engine called A9. Apparently it is
build on top of Google.
It looks pretty sweet, go check it out!
13 April 2004
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Trogdor
strikes again! I've rediscovered this little gem again. Trogdor has
invaded my thoughts. The whole bloody time I think about burninating
things. Anyway, there are many more "Strong Bad" cartoons, so go over
to homestarrunner.com and
check them out.
26 March 2004
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O the pain! I've been working my butt of recently, but it has been
mostly fun. I now know BOINC
fairly well. At some stage I'll put up some tutorials and tips. I've
also ventured into the world of Python and I must say that the time
I've spend working with it was a pleasure. I'm looking forward to
using it more often, maybe scaling down on the the good old C/C++.
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I plan to revamp this site in the next two months. I would like to
write down more of my knowledge and experience related to programming,
signal processing, pattern recognition and AI. I'm order to make this
easier, I'm thinking of making the primary site a wiki. This will
allow me to easily add and modify content. A wiki will also open up
the possibly for people to contribute to the site. We have setup a
wiki at Stone Three to share knowledge (and recently it became our
primary intranet home page). Its working quite well, so I'm looking
forward to doing the same here.
6 February 2004
20 January 2004
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For a project at Stone Three
we have been investigating some cluster, grid and distributed
computing systems. If you are interested in building a distributed
system, I will definitely suggest that you have a look at BOINC. BOINC is developed by
some guys at Berkeley and is used by SETI@Home.
For those interested in grid computing, have a look at Globus.
12 January 2004
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Greetings everyone!
Hope everyone had a nice break, if not, tough :)
I'm back at work and fired up for the new year. My prediction is that
this year will be a year full of great changes, hopefully all for the best.
2003
23 December 2003
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I've been very quite lately. Too much work and socialising leaves
little time to update my website :)
In the last month or so we bought a new car, a very dark blue (almost
black) VW Golf Chico 1.3 2002 model. The old car were starting too
cost us too much! So far we are very happy with the car.
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South African engineers should check out Engineering News's website. They have a
number of their articles on-line. Also, if you are into the mining
industry, check out Mining Weekly's website.
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Finally, enjoy the festive season and good luck for the new year!
15 October 2003
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Skittlebrau
is a mix from beer and skittles (candy). The project was motivated by
a scene from the Simpsons. If you are into bitter sweet things, it is
the brew for you.
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We all know that incompetent people don't know just know incompetent
they are. Some even think they know whats going on, or worse, a large
subset of these induhviduals
claim (and really believe) that they are experts in their field of
incompetence. Just yesterday a colleague and I met with the
representatives of a big, well known software company. They reminded
me of this phenomenon. Just the other day I read a psychological paper on
this subject. Go there and be educated!
29 September 2003
23 September 2003
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I rediscovered Neil Gaiman's website today. You should
definitely go for a visit if you are a Gaiman fan.
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This guy
claims to be the world's leading expert in the origin of Murphy's Law. Very
interesting read.
18 September 2003
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Do you want to spice up your Windows life with some Open Source
software? Check out GnuWinII,
they have a collection of free goodies, such as GIMP (image manipulation program,
think Photo Shop), my favourite text editor XEmacs (well, its more like a tool
for gods), development tools such as compilers, office tools, games,
multimedia tools and many more.
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Sometimes I just have to work on Windows. It can be painful! In order
to ease the pain I'm on a never ending quest to make Windows more Unix
like. Fortunately I'm not alone! As part of the GNUWinII distro you
get a nifty window manager (replacement for the Explorer shell) called
LiteStep. LiteStep brings me one
step closer to this goal. It is easy to configure (text files), very
modular (you only add the modules you want, such as virtual desktop,
clocks, system tray, etc) and you don't even have to restart the OS to
get your settings activated.
I'm very happy with LiteStep, but it
does seem to chow more memory than I would expect, but I will look
into that.
15 September 2003
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I had a great lunch at Bloemendal yesterday! A friend of mine got
older last week and as part of the festivities we tried to gain some
weight. Unfortunately we succeeded.
The restaurant is located on
one of the Durbanville (Cape Town) hills. The location offers a
panoramic view over the majority of Cape Town. The building has a
medieval look and feel (it seems as if they also host medieval dungeon
parties).
As for the food, they offer a wide variety of traditional
South Africa food, such as salads, "plaas brood", bobotie, chicken
pie, backed potatoes, many other veggies, six different potjies, a
lamb spit and of course deserts to make any stomach happy.
4 September 2003
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I've been out of office last week and spend most of this week catching
up and taking some time off from work. I've spend last week at
Amandelbult, one of Anglo Platinum's concentrator plants near
Thabazimbi, together with a few of the engineers from Anglo research
centre (ARC) and operations. I learnt a lot more about the principals
and operation of the plant (and thus concentrator plants in
general). All in all it was lots of fun.
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During this time I once again was very pleased with Qt, it served me well and helped
in projecting a very positive image of the work we (Stone Three) do.
Here is a short summary of
what is expected in Qt 4.0.
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I recently finished reading "Guns, Germs and Steel" (see entry for 29
April 2003). It was extremely fascinating and provided answers to a
number of questions about humanity's past.
He concluded that the
ultimate factors that played a role in humanity's development has a
lot to do with the environment, food production, organisational
structure and knowledge sharing, etc. It will be an interesting
exercise to apply these principals to companies (see 29 April 2003 for
more info).
13 August 2003
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I've spend last week in Pretoria to attend a CSence course. Stone Three was nice enough to
send my wife with me.
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Wired has an article
about the current shape of the synthetic diamond industry. The article
discusses two existing methods that produce big high quality
diamonds. Besides the obvious use as jewellery, the article also
mention the use of diamonds as a semiconductor of the future. Now all
we need is to make synthetic gold, platinum ...
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Power
from blood? Now all we need is intelligent machines to enslave
mankind :)
22 July 2003
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Do you want to build your own Gauss gun? Off course you do! Just check
this site for
plans and pictures.
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I've just read an article
about a group of researchers who used genetic algorithms to
evolve an walking animated character. You can get more information at
their company called NaturalMotion.
21 July 2003
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My brother had his birthday on Sunday, so I want to wish him good luck
and all the best for the future.
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My wife got her drivers licence last week, so no she is speeding
around everywhere in town. Honk if you see her:)
10 July 2003
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We recently started using Qt
at Stone Three for some of
our commercial products. I'm very impressed with how quickly I was
able to learn it. In a few minutes I was able to find my way around
the code that one of my colleagues, Andre (he broke the ice for us),
wrote. A few hours later I was creating a somewhat complex GUI with
impunity. I accredit their fine documentation and consistent naming
scheme for making it so easy to use. The signals and slots mechanism
took some time getting use to, but once you fully realised its power,
you will probably not write another GUI using plain old callbacks. One
drawback of Qt is that it is quite expensive for us South Africans,
but I'm fairly convinces that we make the money back in extra
productivity.
8 July 2003
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Ed Lu is a science officer on board the ISS. He has an on-line blog
where he shares his experience in space. It is a very nice read and I
especially enjoys reading about all the zero gravity effects.
2 July 2003
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The Euro Atlas site
contain 21 maps of the state of Europe at the end of each century. It
looks pretty neat if you download all the maps and animate them from 1
AD to 2000 AD.
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A while ago a friend send me a link to LUSH. To quote them: "Lush is
an object-oriented programming language designed for researchers,
experimenters, and engineers interested in large-scale numerical and
graphic applications. Lush is designed to be used in situations where
one would want to combine the flexibility of a high-level,
loosely-typed interpreted language, with the efficiency of a
strongly-typed, natively-compiled language, and with the easy
integration of code written in C, C++, or other languages."
26 May 2003
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This guy discovered
that PostScript is actually a programming language and wrote Conway's
game of life as an exercise.
22 May 2003
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I just want to wish my sister a happy 25 birthday! May there be many more!
15 May 2003
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Today is my dad's birthday. He is very close to 50 now. Happy Birthday dad!
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This last week I've read a number of Paul Graham's articles,
especially those related to Lisp. A particularly interesting one is:
The Roots of
Lisp. He takes you step by step through the basic axioms of Lisp
(presented in John
McCarty's original Lisp paper),
up to the point where he demonstrates how to use these axioms to write
a function that can interpret Lisp itself. Lisp is therefore closer to
a computational machine than to a computer language. I also read
John's original paper. This helped me to understand where this whole
lambda and label stuff originated from. Besides that,
the math in the paper actually provides a lot of insight into the
nature of Lisp. I'll not claim to have grasp the consequences and
power of Lisp yet, but I'm pretty excited to learn more!
9 May 2003
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I've just finished reading an article by Paul Graham called Hackers and Painters. It
is quite a lengthy article that explains why he thinks hackers has
much more in common with other makers (painters, writers, architects,
etc.) than with scientists.
He also touches a topic that is also covered in a book I'm currently
reading called Peopleware:
Why has start-ups (following a hacker approach), compared to big
corporation, so much more potential to do great things.
29 April 2003
16 April 2003
- So whats happening? As you can see, I've been very lazy
(or should I say busy) again. However, I have been working on some
things for this webpage that may go public in the near future.
- The last week I have revived my old interest in robotics. This
was largly due to the release of the Real Robots magazine here in
South Africa. In each issue you get some of the parts necessary to
build Cybot (that is what they call the robot). I plan to modify Cybot
as soon as it has most of its sensors. I would really like to replace
its micro processor and program it myself. If you continue to buy the
magazine (for about two years) you will be able to program it, but I'm
not that patient.
- While we are on the subject of robots. Would you like to have a
little critter
that can message your back? Sure you would! That is why these guys in the
Netherlands build one. Also check out the rest of their creations.
- In this
article Brian Hayes is trying to paint/scribble a picture of the
post-OOP era. There is nothing new or revolutionary in there, but
worth a read.
18 March 2003
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I got a new cell phone, Panasonic GD-87, yesterday. It has a build-in camera, 16 bit colour screen, 16-tone polyphonic ring tones, voice memos, bla, bla, bla. So far I'm very impressed with the display quality,the capture quality of the camera (even though the resolution is very small 132x176) and the general feel of the phone. I'm just waiting for my GPRS service to be enabled by my operator and then the real fun will start.
Check Panasonic's mobile webpage for more info.
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Here is a very nice article about open source in big business. Its written in a language that any PHB (Pointy haired boss, see Dilbert) can understand. It talks about how a number of CIOs is starting to consider open source products (Linux, Apache, etc) for their businesses in order to reduce IT costs.
13 March 2003
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Last week I heard an interview on 5 FM about a website called SA Reunited. Today Swannie showed it to me again and I decided to check it out. Basically, the site contains a list of South African schools, universities, etc. You then register and add yourself to these institutions. You can also add notes and photos of yourself. I was actually very surprised to see both my primary and high school already on the list. What I did not like about the site is that you need to register to be able to contact any of your friends, but hey they want to make money from the service so what the hell.
11 March 2003
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I'm using the Sawfish window manager as my Linux desktop. I was trying to figure out how to customise the popup menu. It used to be in the .sawfishrc file, but with the new versions I was not sure. I did not learn anything useful by reading the "info" files for Sawfish, even a Google search turned up little info. Eventually I decided to read the code in user.jl and saw that the file I was looking for is .sawfish/rc. Tou can actually still use .sawfishrc, .sawmillrc.
10 March 2003
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I went to The Awakening show this weekend at Mercury Lice in Cape Town. As always, I enjoyed it thoroughly. Their sound has become a bit harder since the last time I listened to them. Andre Hatting made a big difference on the guitar!
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Well, I'm in a Gothic mode after The Awakening show, so I looked around for some Gothic art and found this site: view from the dark side by Lord Heathcliff. I've crossed paths with him and his work before some years ago and made a nice background for myself. (It did ask his permission to use his work :)
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A dairy farmer in Minnesota is using the dung from his 780 cows to generate electricity for the farm and the community. The farm is producing about 3000 kilowatt hours of electricity a day. This is not a new technology, but I still like it. Cow Power rule! They should do that with human crap as well. Read more here.
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There is a heavy flue going around here in Cape Town, so all visitors should remember to pack their Vitamin C supplements and a big bag of tissues. You can also buy these items here to support the local economy.
14 February 2003
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Happy Valentine's day to all!
Almost every women I saw so far today seems to be on a hormone happy
high. This is obviously a trick to solicit more pampering. Fortunately
for us this can be a win-win situation. I therefore advise all men to
take full advantage of this opportunity, for you might just get extra
lucky today.
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I use ncftp a lot to fulfil my FTP needs. Among other things, I use
it to update this website, but it is actually quite a pain to login,
change to the correct directories and then put/get the data. There is
however light at the end of the tunnel. This morning I "discovered"
ncftp's buddies called ncftpget, ncftpput and ncftpls. Live is
wonderful!
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I have used CPAN today to install dependencies for Slashcode, which I'm installing our company intranet, and I must say I'm quite impressed. Installation is so seamless and user friendly in that they give you good descriptions of questions you must answer. It would also seem that it automatically install all the dependencies of a package for you, now that is sweet.
21 January 2003
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According to an article in the Business Day, the South African government has been declared a Open Source zone.
This is good news for all our techno South Africans!
The article also states that the government hopes that this will help the local software developers to flourish.
I hope that this will help to put the local talent on the global map and that we will see more contributions from locals to the Open Source code base!
17 January 2003
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Cringely's latest article, What lies beneath, proposes that Microsoft builds Windows on top of Linux. This has a number of advantages for both the Microsoft and the Linux community. Microsoft gets a more stable foundation to work from and obviously don't have to write their own OS. Linux obviously will gain all the drivers that the Windows people take for granted. The obvious problem is that if Windows is build on top of Linux it will be easier for vendor's to port their code over to work on "native" Linux (maybe through KDE or Gnome). So I guess Microsoft will never fall for this. It's a shame though :)
15 January 2003
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I added myself to GeoURL. They
use your physical location to generate a list of other websites close
to you. Check out their website for more information.
14 January 2003
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The new year is here. Fresh updates will follow soon.
2002
29 May 2002
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The Tasmanian Tiger might pretty soon be back from extinction. The
Australian Museum has successfully replicated the tiger's genes. This
brings them one step closer to their goal, which is to clone the
extinct tiger. Read more about it here
28 May 2002
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Yesterday, while reading Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, a though
popped into my head. Does London have skyscrapers?
I could not
recall seeing one in movies of pictures of London. It turns out that
there were some limitations to the height of buildings in London in
earlier years. As a result there is only two buildings higher than 800
feet (244 m) and about two dozen higher than 300 feet (92 m).
For
more information on this go to Architronic and
Skyscraper News.
-
Here
is a book review / interview about an upcoming book called A New
Kind of Science. It looks set to change the world. Have a look and
decide for yourself.
12 April 2002
-
There is very nice article in The Atlantic about artificial society research.
8 April 2002
-
Ronald Mallett, a physics professor at the University of Connecticut, claims
to be able to build a time machine. He plans to have one available in the next
few months. Read more about it here.
-
The first (?) human clone is on its way. A woman is now eight weeks pregnant
according to the Italian docter, Dr Severino Antinori, who is working on the
human cloning project as part of his infertility study.
28 March 2002
-
An
article in the Economist talked about a new theory why people
exhibit altruist behaviour.
27 March 2002
-
Does black holes really exist? Read more about the issue here.
-
A number of the big guns in MMORPGs have met at the 2002 Game
Developers Conference to talk about the future of the genre. Game Spy
wrote a summary
about the event.
26 March 2002
25 March 2002
-
NASA is doing some research into anti-gravity technology for propulsion purposes.
-
If your cat drags all types of rodents into your home to play with you
need to get your claws on this technology. It is called Flo control and uses image recognition, see if the cat has
something in its mouth, to determine if the cat door should open or
not. This is a very neat project.
-
A device
that induce orgasms in women has been patented in the USA. They also
say that there is no reason that it shouldn't work for men as well. Now
imagine everyone had one installed. At the push of a button you can
have endless pleasure.
22 March 2002
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Two math processors (Andrew Nestler and Sarah J. Greenwald) are using
"The Simpsons" in their lectures. They have compiled a list
of all the references to mathematics in Simpson episodes. There is
also an article about there that you can read.
20 March 2002
-
The world is busy. Mugabe took the Zim presidency, the Americans and
Afghans blows the Taliban to pieces and Microsoft is still a
monopoly. Read all about it in the latest edition of the
Economist.
4 March 2002
-
Three MIT students have build a network switch into a Teddy bear. The
result is the Teddy
Borg. They have a number of very cool pictures on the site. I like the
'action shot' with the green (LED) eyes.
-
Want to build a magnetic Gauss gun, go read about it
here.
28 February 2002
-
Piro from MegaTokyo is ripping
off the dot-coms in
this rant.
Here is my favorite part:
For years, I've been sending out Blue Mountain Arts cards to Seraphim,
often forgetting that i had already sent her that particular card
(bear themed cards are popular between us) but even so, i don't do it
THAT regularly. So imagine my surprise when i pulled up Blue Mountain
Arts that day and discovered that this once free service was now
something you had to pay for.
So, as a loving boyfriend, did i pony up the dough and send her a
card? Hell no.
-
I have just stumbled onto Captain Crunch's webpage. He is the
legendary phone phreak of a few decades ago. There is some phreaking
stories on the site and info about his latest project, the intrusion detection firewall called the CrunchBox.
27 February 2002
-
The first Biohackathon is taking place in Camps Bay, Cape Town here in
South Africa. Business Day has a
story about the effort.
25 February 2002
-
Hope you all had a pleasant weekend. All you Matrix fans should go visit
their webpage.
It has been updated lately.
-
Cringely
is talking about the death and rise of internet radio broadcasting. He also
talks about Xanadu, a model to make the
use of copyrighted material easier.
22 February 2002
-
The clever people at CERN claims to have captured antimatter atoms. Read more (only a bit) about it
here.
-
This guy is funny. He will
show you some DIY tricks with your 'datamachine'. I just love his
'data' tools.
18 February 2002
-
It has been quite lately, so to relieve your boredom you can read Dave
Barry's
column.
He rips off British art :)
-
Information concerning my master's thesis degree is now available. Have a
look.
14 February 2002
-
Happy Valentines day to you all!
12 February 2002
-
The final version of my master's thesis is completed and was handed in
yesterday. A copy of the manuscript is available here (gzipped
postscript file). I will move my academic pages over here soon and
then I will describe the thesis subject in a bit more detail.
8 February 2002
-
Niels Bohr's family released a number of
documents concerning the meeting between
Bohr and Werner Heisenberg during WWII.
7 February 2002
-
nVidia released the Geforce4 range of
GPUs. Both
Tom's
Hardware and
Tech
Report has nice reviews.
-
The MONO saga continues, Miguel has
responded
to RMS request to 'explain himself'. This article explain his intend a
lot clearer than any of the other the articles I've read so far on
this subject. For normal consumer type applications (Gnumeric, etc.)
this looks like the way to go.
-
I found another nice
article about .NET. It is masterfully crafted by
Bertrand Meyer,
the man who brought us Eiffel.
6 February 2002
-
I've completed my thesis oral yesterday and received a mark of 75%, sweet.
Now there is only a few editorial things to sort out and hand in the final
copy of the beast. I will post an online version of my thesis a bit later on
when all the admin stuff is sorted out.
-
Here is an interesting
article called: "Is human evolution finally over?". There is a group of
scientists who claim that the Western lifestyle inhibits evolution in humans.
-
Someone here in the South African government is doing something useful for
Open Source. Here
is a document ("Open Software and Open Standards in South Africa") recently
released by the National Advisory Council
on Innovation.
4 February 2002
-
Another weekend is gone, rocketing us into February.
This year is flying!
My masters thesis oral is finally scheduled for Tuesday 5 February
(12:00). The exact location is not known yet. Those in the
Stellenbosch area are welcome to drop in and listen to all the boring
research stuff. You might just learn something.
I will keep you in touch. The final report will be published here when
it is ready.
-
The register has an
interview
with Gnome creator Miguel de Icaza about his adoption of
Microsoft's .NET framework. I'm a bit skeptical about the whole
thing. I read an article he wrote a while ago (can't find the url
now), where he explains why he is doing this. He basically wants to
put a development environment in place that will accelerate
application development for Gnome. While I agree with him on that
point, I don't agree with the choice he made.
There was also an
article,
written by Miguel and Brian Jepson, about MONO in the
Dr. Dobbs journal.
28 January 2002
-
The first issue of the
Free Software Magazine is out. I'm sure it will be a nice read for those
who roam in the free software world.
The first issue covers a lot of the terminology and concepts behind the free
software movement. So, you can even let your boss read this.
-
Most of you probably heard by now that Loki is dead. This will
certainly mean that we will (for the time being) not see Linux ports
of most of the commercial games. This is sad, but I'm sure the people
involved with Loki over the years have gained valuable knowledge and
experience. We can only hope that this experience will filter through
to the rest of the community.
Loki's CVS tree can be found at icculus.org.
-
Cringely's latest
article
is out. The topic is about ultra wide band (UWB) communication.
23 January 2002
-
I've read an interesting
article (Love is
the killer app) today at
Fast Company about 'love' in the
business world. The author, Tim Sanders (chief solutions officer at Yahoo),
propose a different way to interact with your business partners, based on
trust, openness and sharing of network relations. What strikes me is that
his philosophy is very similar to how our
company operates.
-
Bob Cringely's latest
article
attempts to get behind the Microsoft's latest announcement to make
their products more secure. As always, he provides valuable insight
into the situations, even it its only his opinion.
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