Three months ago we hired Jeffery D’Urso for a 3 month contract to get some line of sight and direction in technology. He was great. It doesn’t seem like it has been 3 months, but as of friday it was. He is now heading off into the sunset riding his 18.5 inch laptop…
But huge things have changed, I will detail those in other posts. Now I just want to review the big ones.
Work developments
Website almost fully redeveloped in PHP on the Code Igniter framework. Some highlights -
Completely redesigned data framework, much cleaner
New design, and complete content reorg
HUGE drop in processing needs
Much more streamlined code - at least a 75% drop in code volume
2x the features (including, integration with video chat, workflow tool, new CRM integration points)
re developed customer section for better usability
Brand New curriculum and tests!
Many Many More. When the site launches live I will give you a better update and maybe a walk through.
Musical Developments
Picked up the Bass guitar
Expanded horizons
These are my last 3months of listening changes Compare to overall
Extra Curricular
My bowling team wow the league championship.
I am doing crossfit. My crossfit number is 925
I started eating outmeal and PB&Js again.
Those seems like the biggies to get out there. I will post a work update on the site once we go live (hopefully for 2010)
Did you all see that Microsoft decided to relaunch Live Search as Bing. What a weak attempt.
TO Microsoft: You can keep rebranding it, but Bing will never be a verb and your search just isn’t going to catch up. But I like the vigor at which you rebrand and relaunch your search! Keep trying you will at least keep competition alive!
D-Wave Systems of British Columbia announced a prototype quantum computer in January, 2007. It can play Sudoku.
Charles Babbage's Difference Engine tabulates polynomial functions. It was the immediate predecessor to his Analytical Engine, a mechanical computer left incomplete at his death in 1871.
Designed to compete with the Commodore 64, Amstrad's CPC series was popular in Europe in the late 1980s. Like the thing itself, the graphics were colorful and blocky.
Jeffrey Stephenson's Ingraham's design is based on a 1946 Stromberg Carlson model 1110H: "American black walnut shell clad to the aluminum body of a Silverstone LC06 mini-ITX case. The back panel is a piece of burl from the same stock"
Jon Ive's award-winning Power Macintosh G4 Cube, a predessor to the popular Mac Mini, suffered from functional flaws and a high price. An example was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, but they're now cheap enough on eBay.
Sinclair Research's ZX80 brought home computing to the British public in 1980 at a low price: just £100. It had 1 kilobyte of RAM.
A ruined mechanism, found strewn over the sea bed near Antikythera, took a century to puzzle out. A complex analog computer dating to about 100BC, it is on display at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.
Designed in the 1960s, the control units for DEC's PDP series of minicomputers came in bright colors like fuscia and cornflower blue.
A vector supercomputer designed by the legendary Seymour Cray, its distinctive cooling fountain gave it the nickname "Bubbles,"
Flashes of prismatic color on Clive Sinclair's tiny ZX Spectrum mark the original from its vast army of clones.
Oh man, Google is kickass. They don’t just find a solutions to a problem (this time the problem is the curve of a book when open) they find kickass solutions to problems. I kinda guessed that google just cut all the pages out of books, but turns out they don’t. They actually have a set of infared cameras make a 3D rep of the pages so they can adjust for the curving. “Dude! Why don’t we just 3Demensionally render every page so we can make the perfect scan” Sounds like stoner logic. And a really cool piece of software.
Turns out, Google created some seriously nifty infrared camera technology that detects the three-dimensional shape and angle of book pages when the book is placed in the scanner. This information is transmitted to the OCR software, which adjusts for the distortions and allows the OCR software to read text more accurately. No more broken bindings, no more inefficient glass plates. Google has finally figured out a way to digitize books en masse. For all those who’ve pondered “How’d They Do That?” you finally have an answer.
I have finally settled on a news page online. I have bounced around. I hated news.google, it just jumpe around to much, and was too boring looking. I liked the drudge report, but i have finally decided to go with Newser. It is pretty, well maintained, quickly updated and gives great overviews to what is happening in the world at all times. Really interesting filtering methodologies…
But if you haven’t found your favorited news source, Give Newser a try.
In just a day a really cool program on a really fast computer figured out the laws of motions that took human physisits hundreds of years to figure out.
“One of the biggest problems in science today is moving forward and finding the underlying principles in areas where there is lots and lots of data, but there’s a theoretical gap. We don’t know how things work,” Hod Lipson said “I think this is going to be an important tool.”
The program was written and run by Cornell university. The new age of computers figuring things out for themselves is only a couple of steps away from computers deciding people are evil and revolting in the coming Robot Revolution.
This is a no good graph!!! Check out the drop! 2007 was good, 2008 was worse, but 2009 isn’t looking good at all for Hybrid vehicles, but i guess it is just economics. Gas isn’t 4 dollars a barrell, and people don’t have as much money. All vehicles sales were down like 36%, but so far Hybrids are down 44% or so. But Prius is coming out with a new version in 2010, so people are probably kinda waiting for that too.
