Category Archives: Technology

Mechanical Hit Counter

I’ve always subscribed to the Rube Goldberg School of Engineering Design, the philosophy of which is “simple, elegant solutions are for the unimaginative”. These are words I can live by. Overengineered designs are where Art and Science meet, eye each other up a bit, sink a few pints, and head off to Science’s apartment to see his etchings. I tip my hat to Mr. Goldberg, using a machine that tips hats in 22 steps, starting with cracking an egg.

Here, then, is my humble contribution to the rich tradition of overengineering – the Mechanical Hit Counter. To operate it, open the webcam window
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So, when you ping salem, you’re actually hitting my firewall, which redirects ICMP type 8 (Echo Request) so the board, whose internal address is 192.168.0.2.The BX decodes the ping request and asserts a TTL output high for 50ms. This turns on the transistor, which fires the relay, which cycles the power, which increments the counter. Then, the webcam takes a picture of it every 5 seconds and stores the image in the www directory. Voila!

Great.

Google Summer of Code 2007

Google Summer of Code will pay about 800 students $4,500 to work on open source software development projects this summer at over 50 open source organizations including: Gaim, Drupal, EFF, Haskell.org, OpenOffice.org, Subversion and WordPress. Applications opened March 14th and are due by March 24th.

While the majority of past student participants were enrolled in university Computer Science and Computer Engineering programs, GSoCers come from a wide variety of educational backgrounds, from computational biology to mining engineering. Many of our past participants had never participated in an open-source project before GSoC; others used the GSoC stipend as an opportunity to concentrate fully on their existing open source coding activities over the summer.

See the site for many more details. Find internship opportunities via externs.com (a curiouscat.com web site): engineering internships – science internships.

Magnetic Switching Data Storage

New Magnetic Switching Method Could Dramatically Speed Up Data Storage

Scientists of the Research Centre JÃ¼lich, Germany, have found a fundamentally new magnetic switching method which achieves the fastest speed ever reported by applying an external magnetic field. The results that are presented in a current article in the scientific journal Physical Review Letters could introduce new possibilities for future data storage applications with ultimate speeds.
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Besides its extremely high speed, a remarkable aspect of this finding is that it unfolds automatically: The applied field only perturbs the magnetization, which then under-goes these complicated changes as it recovers equilibrium. “These findings represent a promising leap towards smaller length scales and shorter time scales in magnetic data storage applications”, affirms Prof. Claus M. Schneider, director at the IFF

A Career in Computer Programming

Why a Career in Computer Programming Doesn’t Suck (A Response)

Programmers need to be lifelong learners. I’m not sure what else to tell you. Lots of people change their professions. It’s not too late for you. Alternatively, you could find a job using a stable technology that you enjoy. Maybe you should find somewhere that will let you use C or C++, both of which are unlikely to disappear anytime soon.

To the readers, pick a field that’s compatible with your own nature. You’ll be much happier. If you find that you’ve chosen the wrong field, change it. It’s just a job. Find something you actually enjoy, even if it means a massive career change. It’s better to be poorly-paid and happy than highly-paid and miserable.

Open Source 3-D Printing

3-D Fabrication Goes Open Source

Hod Lipson and Evan Malone of Cornell University have cooked-up a cheap DIY 3-D printer – the Fab@Home – that they believe could lead to the widespread use of fabrication machines by hobbyists and experimenters. Fabrication machines, or fabbers, operate on the same principle as inkjet printers, but instead of squirting out ink onto paper, they squirt plastic or other materials into three-dimensional shapes. Commercial systems average around $100,000, but you can build Cornell’s Fab@Home for about US$2,300 worth of off-the-shelf parts.

Your Online Identity

Social Networking Sites: Enter At Your Own Risk by Amina Sonnie, IEE-USA Today’s Engineer:

Your Career Builders profile may be the professional face you wear online, but sites like MySpace or Facebook may be perceived as the “real” you. Many college students and entry-level employees may think that these social networking sites are not part of the adult world and forget that they are being viewed as an adult by their employer. To put a different face on the “real,” the first thing you may want to do is Google yourself. What comes up first?

Try me: John Hunter – usually my homepage or something about the another, John Hunter, the “father of modern surgery”, no relation. I found the above via: Facebook is public not private where John Dupuis added:

As an aside, when I’m on a search committee I always Google at least the short listed candidates and often many of the other applicants as well. I’ve never found anything shocking. On the other hand, I’m always surprised when I can’t find anything about a candidate. How can you be an active professional (or even an aspiring one) in this day and age and leave no impression on the web?

I agree.

As a society, we have a large bias toward punishing acts of commission – versus acts of omission. So the failure to have established a credible online presence is not normally as big a problem as creating one people object to. However, people should not become so fearful of doing something wrong that they fail to take advantage of the opportunity to enhance their career with a positive online presence: Ackoff on errors of omission.

Atom-thick Carbon Transistor

Atom-thick carbon transistor could succeed silicon by Tom Simonite:

Transistors more than four times smaller than the tiniest silicon ones – and potentially more efficient – can be made using sheets of carbon just one-tenth of a nanometre thick, research shows. Unlike other experimental nanoscopic transistors, the new components require neither complex manufacturing nor cryogenic cooling.

The transistors are made of graphene, a sheet of carbon atoms in a flat honeycomb arrangement. Graphene makes graphite when stacked in layers, and carbon nanotubes when rolled into a tube. Graphene also conducts electricity faster than most materials since electrons can travel through in straight lines between atoms without being scattered. This could ultimately mean faster, more efficient electronic components that also require less power.

Missing laptop found in ET hunt

Missing laptop found in ET hunt:

Kimberly was more enamored with Melin’s detective work.

“I always knew that a geek would make a great husband,” she said. “He always backed up all my data, but this topped it all. It became like `Mission: Impossible’ for him, looking for hard evidence for the cops to use. … He’s a genius – my hero.”
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One of the computers on which Melin installed SETI(at)home is his wife’s laptop, which was stolen from the couple’s Minneapolis home Jan. 1.

Annoyed – and alarmed that someone could delete the screenplays and novels that his wife, Melinda Kimberly, was writing – Melin monitored the SETI(at)home database to see if the stolen laptop would “talk” to the Berkeley servers. Indeed, the laptop checked in three times within a week, and Melin sent the IP addresses to the Minneapolis Police Department.

Pixar Is Inventing New Math

Pixar Is Inventing New Math:

According to DeRose, Pixar is the first Hollywood studio equipped with it’s very own in-house scientific research facility. Mathematicians and computer scientists there are figuring out new mathematical ways to solve problems in animation.
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What they’re finding is that the interplay between academics and industry has been hugely successful. According to DeRose they now have more courage to explore scientific musings that would normally only have been possible in a university environment.

VirtuSphere

The VirtuSphere platform consists of a large hollow sphere that sits on top of a base and allows the sphere to rotate 360 degrees. Wearing a wireless, head-mounted display, users can step inside the sphere to fully interact in immersive virtual environments. The VirtuSphere enables 6 degrees of freedom – one can move in any direction; walk, jump, roll, crawl, run over virtually unlimited distances without encountering real-world physical obstacles.

VirtuSphere systems are made to client specifications and typically include an easy-to- assemble sphere, a base platform that enables it to rotate, a head-mounted display, 3D sensors, sphere rotation trackers, a computer, device drivers and 3D software applications.

See videos of the sphere in action