No, alcohol isn’t involved this time. These are military robots. Lots of ‘em. All different kinds. According to this article on Network World, the Marines are looking for, among other things, robots that weigh 10 pounds or less and can be litterally tossed into battle for reconnaissance or other support operations. They’re looking to other types of robots (some of which already exist as prototypes) to carry gear, assist with communications, and actually fight.
Read on…
Why is it that answering machines, no matter how fancy, don’t have a feature to mark a message as unread? I mean, most households have more than one person in them, and the odds are good if a message is for one person, another person in the house might play the message. Being human, odds are good they will forget to tell the intended recipient there is a message for them. And if one of the cats answers the phone, well they don’t care about anyone but themselves anyway (except at mealtime).
Almost all answering machines are digital these days, so there’s no technological reason. There isn’t even extra information to store. All it has to do is not clear the NewMessage bit if the listener presses that button. What do you think? Will you invest in my company? Or should I just sell the idea to VTech or Panasonic then move to Bermuda with the million dollars?
P.S. Just to make it clear to those who will read this and be tempted to rob my house, my next million dollars will be my first million dollars.
This is the 40th anniversary of UNIX. ComputerWorld did a nice timeline of the history of UNIX. As with anything (or anyone) with a 40-year history, there are going to be fuzzy spots and disagreements about what actually happened, but this accounting looks mostly sound to my eyes. And I have been using UNIX/Linux for about 20 years.
The other day I posted about the reference material available on DZone. Today I found this post on LinkedIn’s Linux Expert group from someone who has combined the input from the Linux Documentation Project and other sources into one indexed. I poked around it and really like the way he’s organized it. Check it out here.
DZone is a community-driven website where software developers can post links to articles and reviews. There’s other great content there, but I want to focus on the huge collection of free reference cards they offer in PDF format. Some of their recent titles are:
- Agile Adoption: Reducing Cost
- Effective Process Modeling with BPM & BPMN
- Flex & Spring Integration
- Apache Maven 2
- Getting Started with Equinox and OSGi
The reason I like this concept so much because my specialty is having no specialty. I have a very diverse set of skills. But when you know so many languages and technologies that have a lot of common (Meet the new language, same as the old language), it’s great to have quick reference materials to refresh myself on the ins and outs of the hat I need to wear that day, or to an interview the next day. The quality of the material is high, too.
We all love Google. And I’m not just saying that because I would love to work there. Sure, there are other search websites, but for general use, Google works best for me. And I’m not saying that because it usually brings me to the right Wikipedia page as the first result, or the cool logos. They get the whole metadata thing. They get the whole “The Web As A Database” thing, as does Yahoo.
Just the other day, Google announced on their Webmaster Central blog a new technology that will allow web devleopers to specify content for their website’s Rich Snippets (I found this on Dries Buytaert’s blog post, posted on a LinkedIn group). Rich Snippets are tiny sections of a website that appear next to the link on Google’s search results page. Depending on the kind of website, it might show reviews of the company/product, contact information for that person, etc. That information is automagically derived from that page and related pages. Read on…
The Robot Hall Of Fame is a Carnegie Mellon University project.
The School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University established the Robot Hall of Fame to honor landmark achievements in robotics technology and the increasing contributions of robots to human endeavors. Two categories of robots are honored in the Robot Hall of Fame: Robots from Science and Robots from Science Fiction
They are currently accepting nominations for new inductee robots. At the head of the pack right now is my personal favorite, Bender Bending Rodriguez from Futurama (yes, I voted for him. Bite my shiny mettal a**.) However, I found this entry quite intriguing. This is an actual mechanical robot automaton from the 18th century that looks like a man, but can draw several complicated drawings and reproduce a few poems. All mechanically. Fascinating! The website at The Franklin Institute has videos of it working and its output, as well as its complex history.
Honestly, I lost where I got this link from. Maybe Slashdot. But it’s brilliant in its snarkiness and honesty at the same time. From James Iry’s blog, One Div Zero, I bring you A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages.
A few of my favorite entries on his list to tempt you:
- 1842 – Ada Lovelace writes the first program. She is hampered in her efforts by the minor inconvenience that she doesn’t have any actual computers to run her code. Enterprise architects will later relearn her techniques in order to program in UML.
- 1970 – Niklaus Wirth creates Pascal, a procedural language. Critics immediately denounce Pascal because it uses “x := x + y” syntax instead of the more familiar C-like “x = x + y”. This criticism happens in spite of the fact that C has not yet been invented.
- 1972 – Dennis Ritchie invents a powerful gun that shoots both forward and backward simultaneously. Not satisfied with the number of deaths and permanent maimings from that invention he invents C and Unix.
If you’re more interested in actual facts (that’s crazy talk!), there’s The Programming Languages Genealogy Project, and The History Of Programming Languages.
I knew about this technique in a general way but found an article through Digg that really explained it well. This article not only does a great overview, it also links to several other great articles on the subject, like this one.
CSS Sprites is a technique borrowed from video games. If you’ve got several small images you want to appear in the same spot and change based on some JavaScript event (hover, onclick, or really any other event), instead of using several separate .GIF files, put all the images into one file in a grid pattern, and using CSS’s background-position attribute to move the visible portion of the image around from one virtual image to the other.
The result is a dramatic decrease in the number of HTTP requests required to display the page. And the combined image takes up less space than the sum of the individual images, due to header and color map information.
From Slashdot: This article tells of how a search warrant was granted simply because this student was running some alternate operating system they didn’t understand. They suspected an email was sent from his computer which defamed a fellow student. But instead of handling it as a disciplinary matter, they’re getting all Brazil on his a**.
“The Boston College Campus Police have seized the electronics of a computer science student for allegedly sending an email outing another student. The probable cause? The search warrant application states that he is ‘a computer science major’ and he uses ‘two different operating systems for hiding his illegal activity. One is the regular B.C. operating system and the other is a black screen with white font which he uses prompt commands on.’ The EFF is currently representing him.”
I saw a report on this on the news, which said they took every electronic device he owns, including is ipod (an infamous hacking tool, donchaknow.), his computer, and his cell phone. He’s a Computer Sicence major, so he now has no way of completing his schoolwork. And he lost his job at the computer lab.
This is a great combination of “Fear of the unknown” and “Shoot first, ask questions later”. Book burning at its finest. If I were him, I would sue the school for the entire year’s tuition which will now go to waste, missed salary from his job at the lab, the replacement costs for all they took, and a big dollop for mental anguish from having his name dirtied with no evidence.