Tag: technology

Intel Xeon 7400 – Made in India !

The song by Alisha Chinai – Made in India – has been my cell phone ringtone for quite some time now. And now, this tune resounds even better – when I read the EE times article, proclaiming the Intel Xeon 7400 processor to have been completely designed in India. For those not in the know, this is a BIG deal. Processor design is not trivial. Find quotes from the article below:

Intel’s India design team handled all design activities, including front-end design, pre-silicon logic validation and back-end design for the Intel Xeon 7400 series processor aimed at high-end servers and code-named Dunnington.

Along with being Intel India’s first complete microprocessor design, Praveen Vishakantaiah, president of Intel Technology India Pvt. Ltd., said the design ramp-up took just six years. “This is also the first complete 45-nanometer design outside the U.S,” Vishakantaiah added.

Boy, am I feeling proud or what !

[link to the original EETimes article]

20 new tech habits

A great list of 20 tech habits, that can make you effective computer users. A lot of helpful advise here – ranging from telecommuting to automatic backups to reminder tools to password management. All in all, I think it is a good collection. 

Read the full article here. 

Warning: Annoying irritating PC world article, which splits the article into 4 pages, and you have to click ‘Next’ after every 5 habits. Grr.

Breathing life into animation

What happens when you put a team of physicists, biologists, AI (artificial intelligence) scientists, and software engineers in a room? Pretty incredible things actually. In the following video, where Torsten Reil unveils the kinds of beautiful mix of genetic algorithms, simulations of the human neural systems, and how they work with the motor sensors of our body. This could create some awesome things. Some applications he reveals are:

  1. More realistic video games
  2. Animated stunt men for dangerous stunts in movies (being blown by dynamite etc)
  3. Helping surgeons predict outcome of operations for cerebral palsy etc.

Look at the video for some breathtaking animations.

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=ySRvKzZsDqw]

Pretty incredible eh? Brilliant, I should say. Torsten has realized that, this is has economic potential and has started his own company called Natural Motion. Go to his website here.

Update: While you are there at the naturalmotion.com website, check out both the euphoria demo and the backbreaker demo. You do not need to download the demo and see. Just click on the embedded videos.

Update2: I also see on the website, that this technology is already into some xbox and PS3 games. That is what gives these games a realistic edge.

Largest LCD display

I need one of those in my living room … um. .. except my living room is not that big. I will settle for a umm 6×8 ft, if you can make me one … for free ofcourse! Presenting the Barco video wall in the Comcast center in Philadelphia, USA. Costs only 22 million. Anyone want one?

I only wish those three large doors were not in the middle of the display. If they spent 22 million on the display, could they not have spent a few thousands, in plastering up those doors, or alteast reducing the hieght of the doors.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BO6ty5RfnrA]

Flickr founders leave Yahoo

It looks like Catrina Fake has already left, and Stewart Butterfield is on his way out on july. Stewart is apparently known for his wit, and he has submitted, in my opinion, the funniest resignation letter, I have ever seen. To give a brief background, Flickr, a photo sharing website, was founded in 2004 and was acquired by Yahoo in 2005.

Here is the letter for your reading pleasure.

(Source: valleywag)

Two ultimate utils – Gmailit and Goosh

And yes, they are shareware. One is a firefox extension and the other is best described by experiencing.

The first is a gmail it extension. I do this a gazillion times a day – things to remember, things to blog, important phone numbers etc – I just email myself. Using this extension, just select what you want to email, right click and say gmail it. How is that for ease-of-use.

The second is goosh. For CLI (command line interface) or shell lovers, this is sure to tingle your spine. This is a shell version of the great Google itself. It is not a supported google product. It runs on the browser. And see below for a screen shot. (or) just go to goosh.org to see for yourself. Wow.

I have circled the commands that I passed. To search the web, just type web <keywords> ; to search images just type images <keywords>; for help type help. Amazing and it is blazing fast – like a good shell should be. And yes, clear, ls, and command history using up-arrow is supported. Yaay for that.

Server down because XBOX is missing

Public Universities are always running on a limited budget which means they sometimes come up with “innovative” solutions. A couple of years back, an X-Box with some variant of Linux installed had been put in the server room to support a subject designed to teach computer-illiterate Philosophy students how to build their own web pages. This unorthodox platform was chosen because one of the techs was a Linux enthusiast and had convinced “the powers that be” that a cheap web server solution for this subject could be implemented using an X-Box rather than a standard PC or server. Grateful to save money where they could, the project was approved.

Several years later and most of the staff in the department had moved on to bigger and better things. There was a new manager and a brand new set of helpdesk techs. The department’s Unix administrator was one of the few people left who knew what the X-Box was used for. Each year before the second semester class began he powered up the X-Box and updated its software. Few of the other staff ventured into the server room so there was little reason to wonder why an X-Box was sitting on the rack.

Five weeks into the “Web pages for Philosophy students” class the excrement encountered the rotary cooling device. The IT department’s help desk started receiving calls from Philosophy students who were unable to access their web projects.

I quote verbatim from the website, since, I do not think, I can describe it as good as the author did. Wow. ROFL. The excrement hit the rotary cooling device – brilliant way of saying the shit hit the fan !! Well, since you saw the subject of the post, you know why the website went down !

Read the full article here.

Ninja dictionary

(image courtesy ninjawords.com)

I empathize with the author in openculture.com, who said, it used to be such a torturous wait while looking up meanings of words in the ‘famous’ dictionaries of the net. I have had my share of twiddling-my-thumbs and waiting for meanings at m-w.com, dictionary.com etc etc.

Enter the Ninja dictionary! I tried this out, and yes, it really is fast like a ninja. Try it out yourself here.