They missed my favorite player, the Jens (sounds like yens 'cause it's Sweedish.)
It was the editor's choice for one of those sites (ziff davis or pcweek or something) a few months ago when I bought it. It's the size of a stick of chewing gum, has 512MB Ram, USB connector at one end, and it's also an FM Radio and a voice recorder. Even better, it comes with a really cool neckstrap with built-in earphones. The icing on the cake is that it is delivered in a really sexy black aluminum tube.
Oh well... (warning: very loud flash-enabled homepage!)
My web pages don't have any zip code or latitude / longitude information on them... and sure enough they don't show up in any local.google.com search.
What exactly does it look for on a page to know where the business is?
Should I put my entire address on every page? on just the home page? Or is a zip code in a meta tag good enough for google to know where I'm talking about.
I really like it! Searching for pizza in my zip code shows just what I would hope.
Once something like Boa Constructor really works beautifully, Python will be unstoppable.
And to all those people who give the knee-jerk boring reply that they don't like the lack of braces (or don't want white space to be part of the syntax, or whatever) Just try putting comment lines at the end of indented regions.
fun printFive():
for i in range(5):
print i
# #
There... now even my brace-smart smart indenting programmer's editor will do the right thing when I paste code. (It will put it at the appropriate indent level regrardless of where it was copied from.)
It's gotta be coming soon. I want a pda that can play streaming mp3 over 802.11. Ideally it would also have some internal storage (1.5GB is just about right) and the fm transmition that this has. But if the wifi is only for syncing, and only with their software, then I think the wifi is wasted. It could be used for streaming mp3s, which is my favorite thing to listen to these days. Groove salad, and KCRW play more music than I colud find in years of downloading and paying for my own mix of music. I've been waiting for the next generation Zaurus to be released in the US because it has built in 802.11, still, I'm tempted to give the Aireo a try.
Check out this alzheimers in a human brain microscopic slide. Click on the purple crosshair buttons on the left to be directed to some plaques and tangles: Click here
When I tell co-workers that Linus is so young (a few months younger than me) I get a lot of suprised responses. It's as if everyone who has heard of Linux just from IBM commercials assumes that it was done by an older hacker. What can young inexperienced kids accomplish that's worth anything?
Natural Selection is done by a seriously cool group of people. Flayra (the head developer / producer) has some great philosophies on how the good of the group is the good of the individual, and some roles on the alien side are to protect the other players. It's all very wholesome in an incredibly fast paced violent way.
To elaborate: We have this one image that is an entire Dolphin Brain imaged using a 10x objective on a microscope. That's about 0.74 microns per pixel.
Once you click on the Dolphin Brain Link, Use the + magnification glass in the upper left to zoom in. Next, click on various places in the overview to jump around the image.
Our customers are using this to research the brain and teach pathology, histology, and dermatopathology to their students.
(Taken from the file size statistics)
This file is 135,000 pixels wide by 200,000 pixels high which would take 77,247 Megabytes to store uncompressed. The compressed size on this machine is 3912 Megabytes.
If you wanted to see the whole slide on your monitor (60 dots per inch) you would need a monitor 187 feet wide and 277 feet high.
This is a bit of a plug, but it's on topic. I put together an image serving website that could handle images up to about 70 "Gigipixels" We were using images from a microscope. http://www.neuroinformatica.com/
Does anyone recognize any of the mechanics of the App? I'm wondering how it was written. It doesn't look like a typical MFC or wxWindows Application. I don't think they did all their own controls...
The fancy printing seems a little complicated, and If you were to take the 'unreadable' copy and identify the individual 'pixels' printed on the paper, then holding up a patterned transparency which blocked the obfuscating elements of the image would reveal the real vote.
What if instead, the voter was given a printout of the MD5 of a combination of (digesting all of) everyone they voted for and their (the voter's) social security number? It would be nonsense to anyone looking at it, but if they needed to verify their vote, they could specify all of their choices and their ssn again, and get the same MD5.
The key is that it is an expensive operation to find an individual's SSN, then combine that with every permutation of who could be voted for, and match that with a printed MD5. You have reasonable privacy, and the ability to verify the vote. What more do we need?
The problem of being able to verify information and keep it private has long been solved by cryptographic one way hashes.
Agreed Again! The TDI doesn't have any batteries, accelerates from 60mph to 80mph in just a few moments (the high torque is really noticable at high speeds) And best of all it can run on biodiesel. I average about 46 mpg, and absolutely love it.
Anyone know about the collaboration
on
SARS Contained
·
· Score: 1
What I want to know is: What software / hardware did they use to provide the collaboration? Does anyone know?
In a few articles, I've heard that the WHO and CDC established secure web sites to aid in the communication and collaboration. One was in the (paper) Technology Review from MIT. Another is Forbes here
I've done about an hour of googling, and the only lead I've found is this:
The federal government is prepared to spend $377 million on
medical communications and surveillance improvements in fiscal
2003, according to President Bush's proposed budget. The CDC is
linking its bio-terror preparedness funding grants to
NEDSS-compliance.
So far, all 50 states and large cities such as New York have
received funding for the surveillance system, but the national
rollout, is expected to take "several years," says Loontz.
Under a pilot, Tennessee is using federal funds to replace its
DOS-based system, with a NEDSS-based system with Microsoft SQL
2000 and BEA Systems WebLogic software running in the background.
My guess is that the real webmasters behind the collaboration were using something like simple FTP sites, or Zope-like CMS for the collaboration.
I recently visited the Human Brain Project yearly conference at the NIH in Bethesda Maryland. It answers all your questions. There was one computer person giving a talk for every three researchers' talks.
The big buzzword this year was Bayseian Filtering. People were using it to model probabilities that genetic sequences would correspond to: Behavior, electcrical signals in specific cells, pathology.
Lots of people were using Java. a few more people using PHP, Python and Perl... no mention of C# or other microsoft stuff. Two projects were using Qt extensively, although they were a little disapponted with something to do with Jpeg image stuff on OS X. I got the impression that they didn't see Qt as being perfect.
They're mostly Mac people And there are a _lot_ of linux enthusiasts. I had dinner with a handfull of people who seemed like 50+ year old administrators. When the subject of Linux came up things got animated. One gentleman runs every SuSE on every desktop in his department. (using Crossover plugin for MS office)
Lots of people are putting together very large databases, and trying to model lots of complex interactions. Others were trying to standardize cross-database communication.
Henry Markram from Switzerland stole the show with a Neocortical microcircuit database. He has measured electrical signals from thousands of living brain cells, traced the cells using Neurolucida, and found corresponding factors between genetic sequences and patterns of electrical activity.
It's clear there's still a lot of excitement (and a little money) in bioinformatics. The important thing is to make sure it's being driven by science.
Almost all of the work that's being done (in this field) is being done in Academia by cheap graduate students... so the complaint is that the programmers rarely stay with the project for more than a year or two.
I have been pondering this problem for months now... I am creating an online microscope / informatics database that has it's own access control systems.
The problem that I have is how do you make a system secure, and also ensure that there is a mechanism to create the first administrative account in a way that won't be considered a back door by the customer.
The approach I have created is to have them enter an 'emergency password' when the software is installed. They can later use this emergency password to create an administrative account for themselves... or import data into the database from a previous export on another system (an xml file.)
I store the MD5 hash emergency password in an.ini file, in a way that even if someone edited the file, they would have to restart the service in order to use the new password.
Does anyone have a favorite technique for this sort of secure system bootstrapping? Are there any books that have approaches that are considered acceptable to people who need _realy_ secure systems?
After taking a look at these internet enabled radios, I decided to go for a simpler solution, I just received my SliMP3 from slim devices yesterday, and I am thrilled with it.
The beauty of the device is that it puts all the complexity in perl scripts on a server computer. I was afraid that I was going to have to upgrade the Debian Pentium I / 100MHz server in my basement, but it works just fine on it, rarely taking over %35 of CPU time.
So now, instead of running a long audio line from the stereo to my laptop, and starting winamp, I can hit play on the SliMP3 universal remote control. The audio quality is wonderful, and it is really easy to navigate my music collection. To listen to Groove Salad at SomaFM, I hit the menu button, then down to 'browse playlists' then right once to select it, then down two times 'till I see the 'Groove Salad Soma FM' entry, then hit the play button. By keying in letters using the numeric keypad on the control I can search too. I hit menu, down to 'search by song title', right, typed in 'mac' hit right, and chose 'Macerena' (a long forgotton MP3 in my collection) and hit play... it's too smooth.
Since the source is all open (GPL) Perl, people can modify it, and have. One available patch will show the BBC news ticker on the SliMP3s display. I want to have a php page on my web server send messages to it, so that people visiting my web site can send messages into my living room.
If the SliMP3 is a very simple audio decoder, I can't wait until there's a similar video decoder. I would throw my Tivo out the window, and record shows onto my Debian box's hard drive, and then inexpensively stream it to anywhere in the house.
The downside is that the SliMP3 isn't too much less expensive then a Tivo (after rebates) but it is the elegant way to go.
From this story, I followed a couple of links about pie menus to Radial Context
Where they have a pie menu plug-in for Mozilla. I am a huge pie-menu fan. They are so much faster than a right click menu where you have to look down through all the options, and find the one that you want, and position the mouse just right, and then click. What a waste of motor control.
With pie menus, you can internalize the movement, and do it without even looking at the screen. I'm loving Radical's back and forward are just click, drag left (for back) or click drag right (for forward) When I want to full screen, I drag diagonally up and to the left, then curve around to the right. They've done a great job.
Another beautiful pie menu implementation is in Natural Selection the mod.
And another thing! Try doing a search on the google news page!
You get news stories sorted by relevance or date (more recent is usually more relavent anyay).
Searching for my home town (tiny Hinesburg Vermont) shows me what local businesses have been news-worthy recently.
Searching for manrijuana shows how many protests, busts, and crop damage has happened in the last few days.
Searching for 'Python' (I use the scripting language) shows me that around the world, there have been several dogs, two deer, a cheeta, and goat eaten by pythons. The ones that ate the deer died. So did the deer.
I don't know anywhere else I can search for current events on the web. I'm adicted.
google news really makes me feel like I have an even better feel for what is happening in the world than I would have if I visited my usual dozen news sites. (cnn, nytimes, washington post, bbc, new scientist, burligton, vt free press, champlain channel, etc.)
At the moment, the sci-tech section shows: National Geographic subliminal tree in a zen garden and Slashdot apple open-sourcing Rendezvous. Tony blair has the headline, and the world section has a story on the ivory coast that I really appreciate that is just the kind of story that I wouldn't see on american news, but would show up on the news overseas.
I love how often it's updated. I can visit it a few times an hour, and it has a great ballance of important stories staying, and fluffy, but interesting stories passing through.
My only wish is that it had a nytimes - style NASDAQ graph or some other indicator of the financial news.
I think that the current method of publishing findings is going to be kept alive indefinitely by the people who thrive in the environment. Prestige is important, and those who filter through the peer review 'moderation' of the important journals certainly deserve it, and will get the funding to publish again during their next study. The only people who are left behind are the people who have brilliant insight, but don't have the patience or skills to jump through academic hoops and climb the academic ladder.
The magic of the web is that people are going to be able to transcend the limits of paper publishing.
Online laboratories where traditional researchers can share not only their results, but the material at issue itself in digital form. Check out the University of Iowa's virtual microscope, which is currently used for educational purposes. http://www.medicine.uiowa.edu/pathology /uarep_hist opathology/content_index_db.html
There's another demonstration site, where people can point out phenomena in huge images created from a microscope... http://neuroinformatica.com The implications of online images of this size and quality are huge.
One paper which is tied up by Elsivier IP is a PDF file which shows regions of the Macaque brain dyed with six different stains that each show different phenomena. In the PDF file are links to the full-size full-color images, which very much increases the value of the publication.
Not only is the whole peer review process going to be accelerated, but an online simulation of the phenomena being studied will be able to grow and get more accurate with each researcher's contribution.
Purdue has several simulations of yeast growth online, with the source available. http://www.hort.purdue.edu/cfpesp/models/models. ht m
My dream is of an online simulation where people can add little hypothesis in the form of python scripts. The scripts which pass peer review as properly reflecting the physical phenomena are kept, and can accumulate into an accurate simulation of complex systems (maybe even parts of the human brain eventually)
Even once the web pages let collaborators/peers accelerate the scientific process, the results will still be published by the traditional methods for years to come. (in my humble opinion) To many researchers, scientific work has not been done until it shows up in the prestigious journals.
I just tried my first four gallons of Biodiesel that I picked up from a display at Solarfest, an alternative energy music festival here in Vermont. Those four gallons lasted 193 miles, just under 50 miles per gallon.
I was thrilled with the biodiesel, the car still accelerated when I hit the gas. I would buy it at the pump if I could. My car smelled more like normal vegetable oil than french fries. It was nice not to have the city-bus diesel smell in the air when I started my Jetta in the morning. For the week I got to brag that I was not dependant on fossil fuels / forein oil.
I bought the biodiesel from a company called "Dog River Alternative Fuels Co, LLC" in Berling, Vermont. Run by Paul Butler. He is also looking into using the glycerine by-product of the biodiesel creation as a fertilizer.
I am convinced that even if it isn't financially feasable at the moment, that if (when) fossil fuels become more expensive and less available, we have a very reasonable replacement ready to fill the nation's need for fuel.
I love my TDI Volkswagen Jetta. You can also get the engine in a Beetle, Golf, etc. It doesn't have the greatest emmisions ratings, but it does get 45 - 50 MPG (american), and it is fun to drive. It has a lot of torque, so you feel like you are on the end of a really big thick rubber band when you accelerate.
Whatever hybrid you buy today, not many service shops are going to be able to maintain it for you, and it is going to be obsolete in the very near future. This equals a huge extra cost.
The Turbo Direct Inject (TDI) Diesel is familliar to mechanics, and the best part is that you can burn BioDiesel if you can find it. BioDiesel is fuel that is made from vegetable oil. When Rudolph Diesel designed the Diesel engine, he was a visionary who wanted it to run off vegetable oil, and 'save the world.' The oil companies turned it into a good engine for their low-grade petrolium waste.
The drawbacks to BioDiesel is that it is a little less powerful, you'll notice abut %20 less horsepower. It gets waxy quickly in cold weather, and it can 'harden' the plastic / rubber fuel lines in the car, so that you have to replace some of the fuel lines every few years. (reference: cars.com in the 'fringe' part of the Car Talk website)
Hello, I've been following this closely. I've donated money to Rusty at Soma FM and written a letter to my congressman. My question is:
How do we know when we've won?
I understand that some California congressmen are calling for a review of CARP, but where will that lead? I keep checking www.saveinternetradio.com but I never see any news about progress being made.
I for one intend to set up my own internet radio station in formal civil disobediance if the CARP bill passes. If I can talk enough other people into the same thing, we can at the very least show them that their efforts will backfire into an explosion of internet radio stations.
I wrote Bernie Sanders (my Representative in Vermont) with the following:
Subject Please help keep Web-Radio broadcasting artist compensation fair
April 28, 2002
Hello Bernie,
I'm a musician and a fan of internet raido broadcasting. The RIAA is lobying for a recommendation by "Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel" (CARP) which would put small scale internet radio broadcasters out of business.
The problem is that internet radio already compensates artists for use of their work through ASCAP and BMI fees. The CARP fees don't compensate the artists as much as they compensate the record companies. The CARP fees are also so high, that the small internet radio broadcasters will not be able to continue, and the BMI and ASCAP will not receive the fees that they currently pass on to artists.
I have a hobby of recording live performances using about $5000 worth of recording equipment, going into a laptop computer. What I've learned doing this is that I can produce a level of quality that approaches what the record companies produce. Technology has put the power of the recording, mastering, producing and broadcasting into a budget range for hobbyists everywhere. As long as these hobbyists honor the existing methods for artist compensation, the arts can flourish.
Record companies are threatened, and are fighting to avoid a dinasour's demise _at the expense of the artists_.
Some of your fellow congressmen are already askinng for a review of CARP
Slashdot Mirror
They missed my favorite player, the Jens (sounds like yens 'cause it's Sweedish.)
It was the editor's choice for one of those sites (ziff davis or pcweek or something) a few months ago when I bought it. It's the size of a stick of chewing gum, has 512MB Ram, USB connector at one end, and it's also an FM Radio and a voice recorder. Even better, it comes with a really cool neckstrap with built-in earphones. The icing on the cake is that it is delivered in a really sexy black aluminum tube.
Oh well... (warning: very loud flash-enabled homepage!)
http://www.jensofsweden.com/
-Jim
My web pages don't have any zip code or latitude / longitude information on them... and sure enough they don't show up in any local.google.com search.
What exactly does it look for on a page to know where the business is?
Should I put my entire address on every page? on just the home page? Or is a zip code in a meta tag good enough for google to know where I'm talking about.
I really like it! Searching for pizza in my zip code shows just what I would hope.
Once something like Boa Constructor really works beautifully, Python will be unstoppable.
And to all those people who give the knee-jerk boring reply that they don't like the lack of braces (or don't want white space to be part of the syntax, or whatever) Just try putting comment lines at the end of indented regions.
fun printFive():
for i in range(5):
print i
#
#
There... now even my brace-smart smart indenting programmer's editor will do the right thing when I paste code. (It will put it at the appropriate indent level regrardless of where it was copied from.)
It's gotta be coming soon. I want a pda that can play streaming mp3 over 802.11. Ideally it would also have some internal storage (1.5GB is just about right) and the fm transmition that this has. But if the wifi is only for syncing, and only with their software, then I think the wifi is wasted. It could be used for streaming mp3s, which is my favorite thing to listen to these days. Groove salad, and KCRW play more music than I colud find in years of downloading and paying for my own mix of music. I've been waiting for the next generation Zaurus to be released in the US because it has built in 802.11, still, I'm tempted to give the Aireo a try.
-Jim
Check out this alzheimers in a human brain microscopic slide. Click on the purple crosshair buttons on the left to be directed to some plaques and tangles: Click here
When I tell co-workers that Linus is so young (a few months younger than me) I get a lot of suprised responses. It's as if everyone who has heard of Linux just from IBM commercials assumes that it was done by an older hacker. What can young inexperienced kids accomplish that's worth anything?
Peace....
Natural Selection is done by a seriously cool group of people. Flayra (the head developer / producer) has some great philosophies on how the good of the group is the good of the individual, and some roles on the alien side are to protect the other players. It's all very wholesome in an incredibly fast paced violent way.
Link: Natural Selection
Once you click on the Dolphin Brain Link, Use the + magnification glass in the upper left to zoom in. Next, click on various places in the overview to jump around the image.
Our customers are using this to research the brain and teach pathology, histology, and dermatopathology to their students.
(Taken from the file size statistics) This file is 135,000 pixels wide by 200,000 pixels high which would take 77,247 Megabytes to store uncompressed. The compressed size on this machine is 3912 Megabytes.
If you wanted to see the whole slide on your monitor (60 dots per inch) you would need a monitor 187 feet wide and 277 feet high.
This is a bit of a plug, but it's on topic. I put together an image serving website that could handle images up to about 70 "Gigipixels" We were using images from a microscope. http://www.neuroinformatica.com/
-Jim
Does anyone recognize any of the mechanics of the App? I'm wondering how it was written. It doesn't look like a typical MFC or wxWindows Application. I don't think they did all their own controls...
????
-Jim
The fancy printing seems a little complicated, and If you were to take the 'unreadable' copy and identify the individual 'pixels' printed on the paper, then holding up a patterned transparency which blocked the obfuscating elements of the image would reveal the real vote.
What if instead, the voter was given a printout of the MD5 of a combination of (digesting all of) everyone they voted for and their (the voter's) social security number? It would be nonsense to anyone looking at it, but if they needed to verify their vote, they could specify all of their choices and their ssn again, and get the same MD5.
The key is that it is an expensive operation to find an individual's SSN, then combine that with every permutation of who could be voted for, and match that with a printed MD5. You have reasonable privacy, and the ability to verify the vote. What more do we need?
The problem of being able to verify information and keep it private has long been solved by cryptographic one way hashes.
What do you think?
Agreed Again! The TDI doesn't have any batteries, accelerates from 60mph to 80mph in just a few moments (the high torque is really noticable at high speeds) And best of all it can run on biodiesel. I average about 46 mpg, and absolutely love it.
In a few articles, I've heard that the WHO and CDC established secure web sites to aid in the communication and collaboration. One was in the (paper) Technology Review from MIT. Another is Forbes here
I've done about an hour of googling, and the only lead I've found is this:
from: http://www.baselinemag.com/article2/0,3959,1161972 ,00.asp
The federal government is prepared to spend $377 million on medical communications and surveillance improvements in fiscal 2003, according to President Bush's proposed budget. The CDC is linking its bio-terror preparedness funding grants to NEDSS-compliance.
So far, all 50 states and large cities such as New York have received funding for the surveillance system, but the national rollout, is expected to take "several years," says Loontz.
Under a pilot, Tennessee is using federal funds to replace its DOS-based system, with a NEDSS-based system with Microsoft SQL 2000 and BEA Systems WebLogic software running in the background.
My guess is that the real webmasters behind the collaboration were using something like simple FTP sites, or Zope-like CMS for the collaboration.
I recently visited the Human Brain Project yearly conference at the NIH in Bethesda Maryland. It answers all your questions. There was one computer person giving a talk for every three researchers' talks.
The big buzzword this year was Bayseian Filtering. People were using it to model probabilities that genetic sequences would correspond to: Behavior, electcrical signals in specific cells, pathology.
Lots of people were using Java. a few more people using PHP, Python and Perl... no mention of C# or other microsoft stuff. Two projects were using Qt extensively, although they were a little disapponted with something to do with Jpeg image stuff on OS X. I got the impression that they didn't see Qt as being perfect.
They're mostly Mac people And there are a _lot_ of linux enthusiasts. I had dinner with a handfull of people who seemed like 50+ year old administrators. When the subject of Linux came up things got animated. One gentleman runs every SuSE on every desktop in his department. (using Crossover plugin for MS office)
Lots of people are putting together very large databases, and trying to model lots of complex interactions. Others were trying to standardize cross-database communication.
Henry Markram from Switzerland stole the show with a Neocortical microcircuit database. He has measured electrical signals from thousands of living brain cells, traced the cells using Neurolucida, and found corresponding factors between genetic sequences and patterns of electrical activity.
It's clear there's still a lot of excitement (and a little money) in bioinformatics. The important thing is to make sure it's being driven by science.
Almost all of the work that's being done (in this field) is being done in Academia by cheap graduate students... so the complaint is that the programmers rarely stay with the project for more than a year or two.
-Jim
I have been pondering this problem for months now... I am creating an online microscope / informatics database that has it's own access control systems.
.ini file, in a way that even if someone edited the file, they would have to restart the service in order to use the new password.
The problem that I have is how do you make a system secure, and also ensure that there is a mechanism to create the first administrative account in a way that won't be considered a back door by the customer.
The approach I have created is to have them enter an 'emergency password' when the software is installed. They can later use this emergency password to create an administrative account for themselves... or import data into the database from a previous export on another system (an xml file.)
I store the MD5 hash emergency password in an
Does anyone have a favorite technique for this sort of secure system bootstrapping? Are there any books that have approaches that are considered acceptable to people who need _realy_ secure systems?
Thanks,
-Jim
The ultimate way of watching trends on a month-to-month basis has to be Zeitgeist from Google.
After taking a look at these internet enabled radios, I decided to go for a simpler solution, I just received my SliMP3 from slim devices yesterday, and I am thrilled with it.
The beauty of the device is that it puts all the complexity in perl scripts on a server computer. I was afraid that I was going to have to upgrade the Debian Pentium I / 100MHz server in my basement, but it works just fine on it, rarely taking over %35 of CPU time.
So now, instead of running a long audio line from the stereo to my laptop, and starting winamp, I can hit play on the SliMP3 universal remote control. The audio quality is wonderful, and it is really easy to navigate my music collection. To listen to Groove Salad at SomaFM, I hit the menu button, then down to 'browse playlists' then right once to select it, then down two times 'till I see the 'Groove Salad Soma FM' entry, then hit the play button. By keying in letters using the numeric keypad on the control I can search too. I hit menu, down to 'search by song title', right, typed in 'mac' hit right, and chose 'Macerena' (a long forgotton MP3 in my collection) and hit play... it's too smooth.
Since the source is all open (GPL) Perl, people can modify it, and have. One available patch will show the BBC news ticker on the SliMP3s display. I want to have a php page on my web server send messages to it, so that people visiting my web site can send messages into my living room.
If the SliMP3 is a very simple audio decoder, I can't wait until there's a similar video decoder. I would throw my Tivo out the window, and record shows onto my Debian box's hard drive, and then inexpensively stream it to anywhere in the house.
The downside is that the SliMP3 isn't too much less expensive then a Tivo (after rebates) but it is the elegant way to go.
Where they have a pie menu plug-in for Mozilla. I am a huge pie-menu fan. They are so much faster than a right click menu where you have to look down through all the options, and find the one that you want, and position the mouse just right, and then click. What a waste of motor control.
With pie menus, you can internalize the movement, and do it without even looking at the screen. I'm loving Radical's back and forward are just click, drag left (for back) or click drag right (for forward) When I want to full screen, I drag diagonally up and to the left, then curve around to the right. They've done a great job.
Another beautiful pie menu implementation is in Natural Selection the mod.
Now I just want to zip around web pages all day.
-Jim
And another thing! Try doing a search on the google news page!
You get news stories sorted by relevance or date (more recent is usually more relavent anyay).
Searching for my home town (tiny Hinesburg Vermont) shows me what local businesses have been news-worthy recently.
Searching for manrijuana shows how many protests, busts, and crop damage has happened in the last few days.
Searching for 'Python' (I use the scripting language) shows me that around the world, there have been several dogs, two deer, a cheeta, and goat eaten by pythons. The ones that ate the deer died. So did the deer.
I don't know anywhere else I can search for current events on the web. I'm adicted.
-Jim
google news really makes me feel like I have an even better feel for what is happening in the world than I would have if I visited my usual dozen news sites. (cnn, nytimes, washington post, bbc, new scientist, burligton, vt free press, champlain channel, etc.)
At the moment, the sci-tech section shows: National Geographic subliminal tree in a zen garden and Slashdot apple open-sourcing Rendezvous. Tony blair has the headline, and the world section has a story on the ivory coast that I really appreciate that is just the kind of story that I wouldn't see on american news, but would show up on the news overseas.
I love how often it's updated. I can visit it a few times an hour, and it has a great ballance of important stories staying, and fluffy, but interesting stories passing through.
My only wish is that it had a nytimes - style NASDAQ graph or some other indicator of the financial news.
-Jim
I think that the current method of publishing findings is going
y /uarep_hist opathology/content_index_db.html
. ht m
to be kept alive indefinitely by the people who thrive in the
environment. Prestige is important, and those who filter through
the peer review 'moderation' of the important journals certainly
deserve it, and will get the funding to publish again during
their next study. The only people who are left behind are the
people who have brilliant insight, but don't have the patience or
skills to jump through academic hoops and climb the academic ladder.
The magic of the web is that people are going to be able to
transcend the limits of paper publishing.
Online laboratories where traditional researchers can share not
only their results, but the material at issue itself in digital
form. Check out the University of Iowa's virtual microscope,
which is currently used for educational purposes.
http://www.medicine.uiowa.edu/patholog
There's another demonstration site, where people can point out
phenomena in huge images created from a microscope...
http://neuroinformatica.com The implications of online images
of this size and quality are huge.
One paper which is tied up by Elsivier IP is a PDF file which
shows regions of the Macaque brain dyed with six different stains
that each show different phenomena. In the PDF file are links to
the full-size full-color images, which very much increases the
value of the publication.
Not only is the whole peer review process going to be
accelerated, but an online simulation of the phenomena being
studied will be able to grow and get more accurate with each
researcher's contribution.
Purdue has several simulations of yeast growth online, with the
source available.
http://www.hort.purdue.edu/cfpesp/models/models
My dream is of an online simulation where people can add little
hypothesis in the form of python scripts. The scripts which pass
peer review as properly reflecting the physical phenomena are
kept, and can accumulate into an accurate simulation of complex
systems (maybe even parts of the human brain eventually)
Even once the web pages let collaborators/peers accelerate the
scientific process, the results will still be published by the
traditional methods for years to come. (in my humble opinion)
To many researchers, scientific work has not been done until it
shows up in the prestigious journals.
Yeay! I love my Jetta TDI too.
I just tried my first four gallons of Biodiesel that I picked up from a display at Solarfest, an alternative energy music festival here in Vermont. Those four gallons lasted 193 miles, just under 50 miles per gallon.
I was thrilled with the biodiesel, the car still accelerated when I hit the gas. I would buy it at the pump if I could. My car smelled more like normal vegetable oil than french fries. It was nice not to have the city-bus diesel smell in the air when I started my Jetta in the morning. For the week I got to brag that I was not dependant on fossil fuels / forein oil.
I bought the biodiesel from a company called "Dog River Alternative Fuels Co, LLC" in Berling, Vermont. Run by Paul Butler. He is also looking into using the glycerine by-product of the biodiesel creation as a fertilizer.
I am convinced that even if it isn't financially feasable at the moment, that if (when) fossil fuels become more expensive and less available, we have a very reasonable replacement ready to fill the nation's need for fuel.
-Jim
I love my TDI Volkswagen Jetta. You can also get the engine in a Beetle, Golf, etc. It doesn't have the greatest emmisions ratings, but it does get 45 - 50 MPG (american), and it is fun to drive. It has a lot of torque, so you feel like you are on the end of a really big thick rubber band when you accelerate.
Whatever hybrid you buy today, not many service shops are going to be able to maintain it for you, and it is going to be obsolete in the very near future. This equals a huge extra cost.
The Turbo Direct Inject (TDI) Diesel is familliar to mechanics, and the best part is that you can burn BioDiesel if you can find it. BioDiesel is fuel that is made from vegetable oil. When Rudolph Diesel designed the Diesel engine, he was a visionary who wanted it to run off vegetable oil, and 'save the world.' The oil companies turned it into a good engine for their low-grade petrolium waste.
The drawbacks to BioDiesel is that it is a little less powerful, you'll notice abut %20 less horsepower. It gets waxy quickly in cold weather, and it can 'harden' the plastic / rubber fuel lines in the car, so that you have to replace some of the fuel lines every few years. (reference: cars.com in the 'fringe' part of the Car Talk website)
-Jim
Hello, I've been following this closely. I've donated money to Rusty at Soma FM and written a letter to my congressman. My question is:
How do we know when we've won?
I understand that some California congressmen are calling for a review of CARP, but where will that lead? I keep checking www.saveinternetradio.com but I never see any news about progress being made.
I for one intend to set up my own internet radio station in formal civil disobediance if the CARP bill passes. If I can talk enough other people into the same thing, we can at the very least show them that their efforts will backfire into an explosion of internet radio stations.
-Jim
I wrote Bernie Sanders (my Representative in Vermont) with the following:
d =7 0&e=6&cid=70&u=/cn/200204
b _r adio/?x
Subject Please help keep Web-Radio broadcasting artist compensation fair
April 28, 2002
Hello Bernie,
I'm a musician and a fan of internet raido broadcasting. The
RIAA is lobying for a recommendation by "Copyright Arbitration
Royalty Panel" (CARP) which would put small scale internet radio
broadcasters out of business.
The problem is that internet radio already compensates artists
for use of their work through ASCAP and BMI fees. The CARP fees don't
compensate the artists as much as they compensate the record companies.
The CARP fees are also so high, that the small internet radio broadcasters
will not be able to continue, and the BMI and ASCAP will not receive the
fees that they currently pass on to artists.
I have a hobby of recording live performances using about $5000 worth
of recording equipment, going into a laptop computer. What I've learned
doing this is that I can produce a level of quality that approaches
what the record companies produce. Technology has put the power of the
recording, mastering, producing and broadcasting into a budget range
for hobbyists everywhere. As long as these hobbyists honor the existing
methods for artist compensation, the arts can flourish.
Record companies are threatened, and are fighting to avoid a
dinasour's demise _at the expense of the artists_.
Some of your fellow congressmen are already askinng for a review of CARP
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&nci
24/tc_cn/net_radio_fears_heard_in_congress
The following is a good article on the issue:
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/03/26/we
My favorite webcaster is
http://www.somafm.com
Thank you,
Jim Carroll