So I did it, I graduated. It’s beenseveral months now, and life is great. I’ve spent nearly all of those months with my “head down” on a new project called CitizenGroove. CG is a network for musicians and a highly interactive media player for music listeners (infinite playlists anyone?). We allow musicians to create highly networked artist groups with instrumentation information linked at the track level. Also you can upload tons of music (if you own the rights). We’re a real company, with trademarks and laywers and everything, so it’s very exciting.
It’s in early testing phases, and there’s still lots more to come. Lots of you out there have heard me talking about this, if you’re interested in being a tester, please contact me.
Just in case you’ve been living under a rock for the last few weeks, Google has finally released a browser of their own, and it’s called Chrome. As is explained in the launch-accompanying 30 page comic, Chrome is a little bit new and different. While on the surface, the primary changes are tabbed browsing as a part of the core user experience, under the hood (cars have chrome right?) it’s quite a bit cooler than that.
The Good: You see, the tabs ARE the core! Each tab runs in its own process instead of in it’s own thread off of amain process. In addition to this, they keep track of all the little bits (literally) of a webpage in memory, so when you leave that page, they can clear it COMPLETELY. My personal favorite thing about chrome is that it doesn’t run JavaScript as a part of the rendering thread, so if it hangs, no biggie. Ok, ok, ok, so what does this mean for you? It means that webpages, secifically webapps (things like google docs, meebo, and facebook that offer some interactivity) will run at a bareable if not downright snappy pace. I have noticed a distinct speedup on facebook in particular which is great for me because I build facebook apps so I’m in there all day.
The Bad: So few things, I’ll put them in bullets points:
It only runs on Windows. Grrrrr… Why is it that every time I get ready to jump off the diving board of Windows into the deep-end of Linux something always drags me back? Google wants to hit the most people the fastest, so they developed for Windows first. It makes sense people.
It has no add-ons. This is probably a combination of Google wanting to maintain very tight security, and it being still quite an early product. As a web developer though, I miss certain things like colorpicker, view source chart, and ruler.
It doesn’t support live bookmarks. I don’t get this at all. Considering all that Chrome ripped off (in a good way) from Mozilla, Opera, and Internet Explorer, why not this simple and incredibly useful bit of functionality? I am an avid Del.Icio.Us user, and I keep all my browsers in sync by live bookmarking my rss stream of bookmarks, with Chrome I have to actually hit the web page. Lame, but not terrible.
The Ugly: If you are an average computer user, (a non-developing windows user who loves webapps) jump in and get your feet wet! If not, you might wanna wait for the second release.
Check out this cool new Microsoft research product called ‘InkSeine’. From the video and the InkSeine Blog, I have surmised that the software is essentially an updated version of MS OneNote that is totally powered by stylus gestures. Take a peak at this video to see what I mean.
Pretty neat huh? According to ArsTechnica, InkSeine will be released on Friday, so I’m pretty excited. I’ve coded up some lightweight gesture-based stuff in c# for playing with on my tablet, but nothing this slick. I hope it’s as cool helpful as it looks.
Check out this cool new cooking gadget. You’ve heard of kicking it up a notch? How about BLASTING it up a notch with a spice gun?
Load that sucker up with your favorite 50 caliber salt and pepper shakers, cock the hammer, and squeeze the trigger to pepper (couldn’t resist that pun) your target with you’re own personal blend of herbs and spices. I like this thing because it takes one of my favorite cooking gadgets, the multi spice, to whole new levels.
What I wanna know is, when can i get my hands on one of these babies?
This morning Intel revealed that they have successfully created a prototype built an 80-core teraflop/second chip. This chip is capable of 1 Trillion floating point operations per second. That’s not a typo. And that is preposterously fast.
Let me try to put this into perspective. Everything the computer does is made up of tiny little math problems called operations. A single core is capable of doing only one operation at a time. This is very different from the way people think; humans are capable of generating thoughts that occur at the same time in a sort of constant stream. Computers fool us into thinking they are doing more than one thing at a time (like we do) by switching back and forth between tasks very very quickly. Today’s high end CPU’s are measured in Giggahertz. GHz are a measure of how many billion operations a chip can do in a second. The fastest single core commercially available CPU’s can do about 3.5 - 4 GHz. Intel has a chip on the market called the “Core 2 Duo” that has 2 cores which is actually capable of doing 2 things at once, and another (created by linking 2 quad cores) called the “Core 2 Quad” that can do 4 things at once. If each core is capable of about 3 GHz thats 12 billion operations per second: not too shabby. In fact, “Core 2 Quad”s are pretty much the fastest thing on the market today.
Now let’s address this new chip. It has 80 cores all linked together on the same silicon wafer. This means that it can actually do 80 things at once which is a remarkable feat for any computing system let alone a single computer working by itself.
Q: What does it all mean?
A1: One hell of a gaming machine. This thing makes the playstation 3 look like an NES.
A2: This new chip’s ability to “think” about so many things at once makes it an ideal candidate for complex tasks such as artificial intelligence.
The best part about the whole deal is that this is only the begining. Berkeley computer scientist David A. Patterson has actually issued a challenge to chip manufacturers like Intel and AMD to produce chips that have THOUSANDS of cores on them. I get excited just thinking about that. So what’s the catch? The 80 core chip is only a prototype and we won’t see anything like it for about five years.
I freakin love cartoons. There’s just somthing about the blatant disregaurd for the rules of reality that just can’t be beat. It would seem that many other people my age feel much the same way, as is evident by the recent explosion of non-child oriented cartoons. [AdultSwim = the new “old”MTV] ANYWAY. Now you can be just like your childhood hero Wile E. Coyote! That’s right kids, you too can strap on your PacificWind ThrustPac, hop on your bike, and propel yourself foreward at 35 miles an hour! This may possibly be the best idea ever thought of.
Amazingly, the gas powered device gets 150 miles per gallon. Expect to see people powerfanbiking in buisness suits any day now.
New iPod this week. Some of you out there know just how excited I am. But have any of you actually looked at it?
“A thinner design. Five stylish colors. A brighter display. Up to 24 hours of battery life. Just about the only thing that hasn’t changed is the name. In 2GB, 4GB, and 8GB models starting at $149, iPod nano puts up to 2,000 songs in your pocket.”
Pretty eimpressive eh? New colors, (much needed) battery life, and a size bump. Frankly, I’d expect more than garden variety upgrades from a company who claims to “Think different.” Especially if they’re gonna hype it like its a Deity.
Isn’t it about time for somthing really different? Instead of just alternating between shiny metal and shiny plastic, how about somthing new.
Now a device I’m personally very excited to see, the Zune, seems to have some real different ideas. The Zune is a pocket sized video music and picture jukebox with the ability to share tunes wirlessly directly to another zune as shown in the vid above. Although I think these birds will explain it better. The player has a built in wifi connection, which it can use to share music and serve as a voip phone. Shared (beamed) tunes will remain usable for three days or three plays, whichever comes first and can be marked for downloading from the a service called the “Zune marketplace”.
Did I mention that that screen is a half inch larger than the iPods? It also detects the orientation of the player and adjusts from vertical to horizontal automatically.
The sharealicious player also has a built in radio, can beam photos for permanent use and comes in:
yin black, yang white
and 70’s style wooden brown.
Now here’s the shocker. The sweet player you see above is made by Microsoft. Yup that’s right, remember that boring guy from the commercials? The guy who doesn’t have any fun, because apparently mac users haven’t heard of video games or movies or digital cameras working on pc’s, that guy made this thing. The zune is designed to sync directly with the Xbox and Xbox 360.
