I’m thankful for… workflows. I don’t know why exactly, but I get a real feeling of satisfaction from putting together workflows that allow others to produce stuff by stringing through a chain of tools. It’s also nice to work to shorten those chains by melting links together.

Dang. Those search terms I listed in my last article turn out to have exactly one hit (soon to be more…) in Google. I thought I’d unintentionally run across my first Googlewhack, but alas, the rule is two keywords.
“lazy impatient” – 210k hits, of course
“lazy pre-grilled” – 29 hits, not bad
“impatient pre-grilled” – 5 hits, not unclose

C’mon EETimes, aren’t you supposed to be a respectable publication? Why are you posting garbage that claims that a triple-core 3.2GHz 128-bit vector unit can deliver 1Tflop? I mean, I could be wrong in my off-the-cuff calculations, but I’d have to be wrong by a factor of 78 or so if 1Tflop is true.

Or are you actually including the ATI chip in the total, and using the vastly inflated claims of the video chip market to beef up the numbers?

Anyway, I suppose I don’t really care since I don’t really have the proclivity to believe that the computing world has suddenly been inverted and now every teen with $200 will show up on TOP500, but still, one place I don’t figure I’d see crazy numbers like that is EET.

EETimes.com – Custom PowerPC drives new Xbox 360 to Tflop performance

Insects are pretty cool sometimes. Also the little bits of electronics that can be attached to them, and the crazy scientists who are patient and precise enough to do experiments with the above.

Biology News Net: Biology – Waggle dance controversy resolved by radar records of bee flight paths

Speaking of 3D and physics, check out the games at walaber.com. Fun stuff!

It’s interesting how often 3D computer graphics comes up in my work-life. I guess it’s mainly a function of being vaguely good at it. In any case, it’s quite a bit of fun sometimes. A project I’m working on for a client now integrates 3D graphics and physics to do a vehicle simulation. It’s really getting me in the mood to make some sorta video game. I can think of this simulation as my first little 3D game, I guess, and see where that leads.

By the way, hurray for open source again. Irrlicht and ODE are both doing a very nice job, though I have to admit that there are some steep learning curves on some bits for both, since there are holes in the documentation (and the code). Still, glad I didn’t have to start this project writing code to pump tris and solve 20-some dimensional linear equations efficiently. I’ll get back to writing my own engines some other day :-).

I don’t have all my thoughts well-formed on this yet, but I should post something lest I have a genuine lull here…

I’m just going to put this is basic scenario-outline form. Please leave comments to fill in some details so that we can all think about this more. (Hehe, he thinks he has readers).

Say I want to build a weather website.

As a technologist, I ask: what kind of database will I use? Where will I host the site? What features will I assume in the users’ browsers? How can I reuse existing infrastructure and code?

As an HCI practicioner, I ask: what sort of tasks will the user be performing? What’s the best way to scope the information presented to the user? How should the site be customizable? How can I make this more useful to more users?

As a business developer, I ask: what is the value of this site? How can I get people to use it? Where will I get the data and labor necessary to maintain it? How can I integrate this service with others?

One can think about business as the art and science of incorporating human values as explicit variables into system design. A proper understanding of this, then, can lead to more robust, useful and long-lived systems, building on the previous layers of HCI and raw technology.

This is quite impressive, at least to me. Who’da thought that they’d keep coming up with uses for that there quantum mechanics knowledge? 🙂
EETimes.com – Micron-sized refrigeration device has no moving parts
I think the thing that was most impressive is the idea of using it for cryogenic cooling in sensor applications. Some day your blender and your cell phone will have a little 100mK chamber in it, and you won’t even realize how fantastically cool that is.