EasyStar Flight cam 1.mov

A friend of mine (names are changed to protect the innocent) just purchased a camera for his radio controlled airplane. He took some footage of it and posted it. Check it out. It's a pretty good camera for a little plane.

SSE with SIMD for Particle Systems in Realtime

Intel has released a new library that can be included in your game/program that is designed to use multiple cores and threads. Checkout the video to see how this library will help. I have not dove into the architecture of the library, but you can download the source code and the binaries to include in your project. Happy threading!

Scientists experiment with liquid invisibility cloak theory

This is a direct copy from TechRepublic: original atricle

A team of scientists believe that silver-plated nanoparticles suspended in water could help make a real-life invisibility cloak.

A team led by Ji-Ping Huang of Fudan University in Shanghai, China has developed a fluid that contains magnetite balls 10 nanometers in diameter, coated with a 5-nanometer-thick layer of silver with polymer chains to help discourage clumping, reports the New Scientist.

With the introduction of a magnetic field, the nanoparticles self-assemble into chains positioned along the direction of the magnetic field, with lengths and widths that correspond to the strength of the field.

Oriented vertically in a pool of water, light that strikes the surface would refract negatively - bent in a way that no natural material can manage.

That would theoretically make the team’s fluid the first pliable metamaterial, a core ingredient in an invisibility cloak.

An invisibility cloak works by directing light around an object so that it appears as if nothing is there. The technology could also be used in lenses to capture finer details than an optical microscope.

A solid metamaterial that negatively refracts the long wavelengths of red light has already been developed. For now, the Fudan team has only simulated three wavelengths to confirm negative refraction for the red portion of the visible spectrum into infrared wavelengths - meaning a liquid invisibility cloak that refracts all visible light is theoretically sound on paper, but not yet in practice.

The question is whether the researchers can extend their technique to the rest of the visible light spectrum in practice. If any light is absorbed or redirected, “dark spots” would result.

Why so difficult? The smaller the wavelengths of light, the smaller the structures needed to control them must be, which in turn are progressively more difficult to build.

Paper Batteries... Welcome To Light Weight Techno World

This changes everything!

A Trillion Is A LOT!

Maya, a design consultancy company, has created a short film called Trillions which puts some perspective on the invisible but fast approaching challenges and opportunities in the pervasive computing age. As a software engineer, this affects me directly. I think it's good to start thinking about these issues today, before we are forced to think about it in the future. enjoy!

Trillions from MAYAnMAYA on Vimeo.

Take Control of Your Soundscape

This is a quick, informative talk on the influence the sounds around us have on our feelings and behaviors; check it out. It's a good thing I work in a "Library" like atmosphere...

Web Service Not Reading the Lmhost File?

I recently spent 1/2 of my work days trying to figure out a problem reported to me by a client. I am working on a three tiered application that has a windows forms application that communicates to a web service. The web service performs all the communication with the database which is located on a different server from the web service.

I was told that they could not longer upload or download data to or from the windows forms application. They also mentioned that they installed a firewall. .Net remoting can use tcp or http as the protocol and either of those can use soap and/or binary encoding. I read that firewalls block binary transfers of data... uh... not really. So with a grain of salt I began going down that path. I determined that the web.config file for the web service is where the encoding type is set (in the remoting section). I happened to have http with soap and binary. I commented out the binary line, and ran the program. BOOM! I got an error regarding incorrect binary string. So without changing the program quite a bit I cannot have the soap protocol only.

Well, it turns out that it had nothing to do with the binary format of the stream. The client's web server was not translating the server name they entered to the correct IP address of the database... So they entered the IP address of the database server. fixed. firewall still enabled.

What did I learn? There's a lot of garbage assumptions out there in Google space... So apparently in their setup, the web server was not reading and translating the server name from the lmhosts file. I wonder if Microsoft has any detail on that?