Thoughts on systems, engineering, AI, technology and life.
The brightest ever gamma ray burst, visible by the naked eye, was observed on March 19th. “If someone just happened to be looking at the right place at the right time, they saw the most distant object ever seen by human eyes without optical aid.” The explosion took place at a distance of 7.5 billion … Read more
Google continues to release very cool, functional, and more importantly, useful APIs. They have introduced a new Visualization API, and updated their Charts API. The updates to Google Chart include three new charts (Sparklines, Radar, and Map) and a more flexible usage policy: Sparklines: Radar: Map: Google Charts have usage restrictions, right now up to … Read more
A good friend of mine and I like to talk about late 1800s philosophers, including Friedrich Nietzsche. He is much more educated than I am on the subject, and recommended that I expand my knowledge and read some related books (i.e. it is good to read things beyond computing and science); LOL. So I’m reading … Read more
Blyk is a startup company. What they are doing seems pretty cool. They have an interesting management team, ex-Nokias and other. That said, I’ve seen and experienced startups that are management heavy. But Blyk is an extremely management-heavy startup… 30 folks? That seems way to high for a startup. I wonder what’s the ratio of … Read more
Earlier this month, M:Metrics celebrated their 3rd anniversary; happy birthday M:Metrics. With it they released an interesting set of metrics that compares the last three years of device capabilities and growth: At launch, the mobile content sector was young and promising, with expectations high but device capabilities low. For example: United States Subscriber Penetration: Device … Read more
I found this article about an iPod that was spotted on the Space Shuttle… I wonder if the iPod is experiencing single-bit soft errors. In space, unless the electronic equipment such as computers (or iPods!) is “radiation hardened”, using techniques such as single bit correction Error Correcting Codes (ECC), single-bit soft errors can and will … Read more
Arthur Charles Clarke, was born on 16 December 1917. Visionary, author and inventor. Passed away today March 19, 2008 at the age of 90. What a visionary person he was. He got right so many things; this is back in the 50s and 60s and later. From geostationary communications satellites and relays, to the future … Read more
I love Rocketry too… You can do small rockets just for fun, or fly it to the edge of space if that’s your goal; the latter being very challenging and very exciting. Check out this cool video of Steve Jurvetson speaking at TED: Related to this see Tripoli Rocketry Association, and Steve’s Rocket Mavericks websites. … Read more
Morten Hjerde (Sender 11) wrote a very good piece on 2D navigation on a mobile screen: Navigating large information spaces can be disorienting even on a large screen. On a small screen it should ideally be avoided, but that is not where we are headed. Increased storage capacity and higher bandwidth mean that you can … Read more
At the last MobileMonday Austin, I met Raj Singh of Skyfire. There he showed me Skyfire, a mobile browser (I think it is Mozilla-based) with full Flash, video, QuickTime, JavaScript and AJAX support. I was very impressed with the browser, its speed and capabilities. The browser is available as a free download, and is initially … Read more