Category: Code

The [Apple World Wide Developer Conference 2008 Keynote Address] is now available via streaming Quicktime. You should install Quicktime 7.6, but the video still pauses a lot. With all the delays, it makes the video hard to watch.

[King5] reports Bellevue-based [AFS Trinity Corporation] has developed a Hybrid-SUV that gets 150 miles per gallon. The trick is, they need to find a manufacture interested in mass producing the electric hybrid. An electric car was similarly developed in the 80s, but without a dedicated manufacture, the line died out.

[Gamasutra] has an article on [IncrediBuild] which is a product that advertises the ability to reduce C++ compile time by 20X. This is especially useful if you have 150k of source plus external dependencies and you already find your compile times for a full rebuild are at 30 minutes.

We took a trip out to [Index, WA], a small mountain town North of Highway 2. We drove across an interesting bridge to get into town. The town has a post office/grocery store, a school, a church, a small park, and [Wood’s art gallery].

Later we stopped at a park in Sultan on the way back home.

Today I received a replacement motherboard for my P5N-E that fried last month. I have 30 days to send the defective board back otherwise I’ll be charged $110.

Unfortunately, I get the same result with the new motherboard. So it’s time to send the whole thing back for repairs…

A new stable release of [Gimp] is now available. Gimp is an open source and free Photoshop clone.

I sent my XBOX 360 back for [repairs ] today. It was pretty easy. The packaging came in the mail with a pre-paid label inside. I dropped the package off at the UPS store and got my tracking info.

[Spore] the next game from Wil Wright (creator of the Sims) is due out in September. The [Spore Creature Creator] is coming out early (June 17th) which will allow you to pre-create characters for the game.

The summit provided a look at a variety of new medical devices. [Pathway Medical Technologies, Inc] presented a little plastic device that holds an amount of premeasured medicine to treat natal Tetanus for anyone with a couple hours of training. [Kurve Technologies] is manufacturing micro devices to deliver treatments to the brain via the nasal cavity. [Spiration, Inc] creates pulmonary devices to treat Emphysema. [Philips Heathcare] is a large company who develops both big and small boxes and that acquired ATL who develops ultrasound devices. A new device on the conference showcase is a plastic bubble that intends on replacing a standard hood as a mobile sterile environment. Nancy Campbell of [Therapeutic Resources] is working on developing an integrated device to help prevent battlefield insomnia. [Respironics] manufactures a sleep machine that prevents snoring.

Governor Gregoire recently designated Bothell as an [Innovation Partnership Zone]. This new zone will principally support medical device/ultra-sound manufacturing.

One hot topic discussed by the summit panel and the Chancellor of University of Washington Bothell is that the UW can’t seem to facilitate communication between biotech companies and the students. Not only do grads lacks the skills to work for these biotech companies, there doesn’t exist a way to let students know of opportunities with the biotech companies. The UWB recently formed the [Biotechnology and Biomedical Technology Institute] to potentially integrate students and biotech companies. UWB has plans of adding a [Technology Transfer] faculty member. The main UW campus has a variety of [computer science research] areas.

Organizations that attended: [Washington Biotechnology and Biomedical Association], [Washington Technology Industry Association], [Prosperity Partnership], [Snohomish County Economic Development], [City of Bothell]

Biotechnology areas:
[research and development],
[manufacturing],
[imaging],
[medical implants],
[electromedical equipment],
[drug delivery],
[analytical devices],
[electromedical devices],
[surgical devices],
[ophthalmic devices],
[dental devices]

Windows Server 2008 includes IIS with native [Php] support.

If you are a pre-IIS 6.0 user (less than or equal to Windows XP), [IndigoPerl] comes with a free – bundled Apache Php server.

It’s been about a year since I last actively developed with [MySQL]. MySQL 5.0 is now a stable release. On the download page there is now options for [community server] or [enterprise server]. The [MySQL GUI Tools] are now all bundled together. The install wizard is now invoked automatically creating a “root” admin user.

It turns out the warranty expired on my XBOX 360, which needs repairs. I’ll have to telephone customer service, since [requesting repairs via the web] doesn’t seem to work.

Everett Community College is offering a course in making bio-fuel for $59.

Then again, [salt water] could also be a fuel source.

[Yahoo] – has extensive API documentation and tools for creating Yahoo Widgets

[Widget Converter] – allows fast conversion between flat widget files and a directory structure to bundle and analyze widgets

[Konfabulator] – provides online manual documentation on Widgets

[Widget Creation Tutorial] – is the first thing you should read before making your first Widget

[UniView] – is a handy tool to help encode text properly

[Forums] – to chat with fellow widget creators

[Apple] – provides widget design guidelines

[Microsoft] – provides design guidelines when creating Widgets

[Yahoo] – has an article about using Flash in Widgets

NLP – Natural Language Processing
NLU – Natural Language Understanding

[Wikipedia] – has tons of resources about NLP

[Microsoft] – has a special group dedicated to NLP

[SourceForge] – has source code to several open source NLP projects

[Ai-depot] – has an interesting article on using Morphology, Syntax, Semantics, and Pragmatics to perform NLP

[Dogpile] – has more natural language processing results

[SourceForge] – has more open source projects related to NLU

[Dogpile] – has more natural language understanding results

[Gate] – General Architecture for Text Engineering is a widely used and extensive Java library for NLP

Unfortunately, while playing Halo 3 tonight, the game froze. When I reset the 360, I got [three red lights]. I emailed support and should be receiving my [XBOX 360 coffin] any day now.

I plugged in the Power-On-Self-Test card into my ASUS P5N-E SLI motherboard with yielded error code 7F. I’ll have to find the correct set of post codes for the [Award Bios]. This says that errors are displayed and its waiting for a key press. That seems correct, because as soon as I press a key the post codes continue to cycle. The pattern of post codes are: FF A0 1d C1 FF A0 C1 FF A0 11 C0 C1 FF A0 C0 A0 C0 C1 FF A0 C1 FF A0 1d C1 FF A0 C1 C3 2d 50 52 080 75 86 80 FF 80… stop.

I was refreshing my mind on C++ template classes and defines today when I thought of a nice optimization if it could be possible.

I want to use a #define to add a set of dynamic properties and methods to a class. For example: the macro would add a World property, a GetWorld method, and a SetWorld method. The tricky part is the “World” part of the names would be dynamic.

And it works beautifully. Check out the details in the post.

Forum: [post]

My desktop machine up and died Friday. For some reason it keeps rebooting before it
even gets to the BIOS screen. I have a P5N-E SLI motherboard and I’ve emailed tech support to see if they have any diagnostic tools. Like maybe a trigger or some kind of
[diagnostic mode] where the motherboard could blink at me and say what the
problem is.

I’m still within my 1 year under Warranty. Before I mail this thing back for
repairs, I was just wanting to know if I could figure out the problem first.

I tried taking out the CMOS battery without success. The machine keeps rebooting before the BIOS screen opens up over and over. I’ll try resetting the Bios to factory mode (on the hardware if possible). But if that doesn’t work it must be a hardware problem.

Apparently there is something called a [power on self-test card] or [PCI POST diagnostics card] which is a PCI card that outputs computer problems to an easy to read LED display.

Info: [system specs]
[support forum]
[post]

If you are already a C/C++ coder and want to learn about Action Script 3.0 syntax check out the [Kiwi Project]. If you are a C/C++ developer and want to learn Action Script 3.0 programming check out the [Kiwi Project].

[Microsoft Expression Blend 2.5] allows you to create [Microsoft® Silverlight™ 2] applications.

I spent part of Saturday playing around with [Reason 4] and watched the training videos. Now I can use Dr. Rex in combination with basic instruments and organize the note tracks better. Here’s [30 seconds] of what I came up with.

A couple other interesting sound apps worth checking out are [Celemony] and [FruityLoops].

The WN121T causes many blue screens of death on Vista. A new driver was released that may fix some of the issues.
[WN121T Support Page]

Also WG111T 2.1 drivers released on the [WG111T support page].

The problem with this latest driver is that if you remote desktop to the machine using Vista then the network connection abruptly disconnects if Netgear manages your wireless connections. Everything works correctly if you let Vista manage the wireless connections.

Forum: [post]

I’ve been thinking of creating a [Modo 302] python script using the [Bullet Physics SDK] and the [Bullet forums] to submit to [VertexMonkey]. The Bullet SDK also contains BulletX targeted at C# .Net and XNA in the Bullet/Extras/BulletX folder of the Bullet SDK. VertexMonkey has a [script introduction] to how Modo 302 scripts work. After watching the Modo 302 animation training videos, I think a physics helper could make the process much easier.

[Modo 302] uses [Python] as a scripting language for add-on scripts. The [Python docs] and [Python API] make good references. Python training videos are available at [ShowMeDo], including a [VPython] [physics tutorial]. I’d prefer using an existing physics library, so [extending Python] has become necessary. [IronPython] makes all .NET libraries easily available to Python programmers, while maintaining full compatibility with the Python language.

Modo 302 also uses [Perl] for scripting. I was always a big fan of developing using [ActivePerl] in what seems like a lifetime ago. The best part of Perl is [The Comprehensive Perl Archive Network] which maintains an extensive library of Perl plugins to do anything you could think of. I find it amazing you can even find [Ogre3d] as a Perl module created by [Slanning].

Forum: [post]
[post2]
[post3]

“[WBBA] is collaborating with several organizations to host the 2008 Washington State Biomedical Device Summit. Focused solely on the region’s medical device sector, the May 15 Summit will attract 200 executives from the medical device industry, researchers, economic development professionals and media. The event will feature a report on key findings of a study about the sector, a panel discussion with executives from the region’s industry, the launch of the Biomedical Device Innovation Partnership Zone, a showcase medical device products developed or being developed in Washington state and a reception. WBBA’s partners on this effort are enterpriseSeattle, the Economic Development Council of Snohomish County, City of Bothell, University of Washington Bothell, the Prosperity Partnership and the Washington Technology Industry Association (WTIA). The event is Thursday, May 15 from 4 to 7 pm, at the UW Washington Bothell.”