Carpet Bomberz Inc.

Category: technology

General technology, not anything in particular

  • Yahoo Pipes via Dan Dube dot Com

    Yahoo Pipes plus Twitter = Good
    Yahoo Pipes plus Twitter = Good

    There is nothing cooler than discovering you can take a feed from one bit of RSS and plug it into another service and slowly create your own custom feeds based on simple keyword filters. But that service is here today using the mechanism of ‘pipes’ ala Unix style input/output of character streams from one application into another. Take for instance in Unix the ability list the contents of a folder in a long detailed format:

    ls -al

    Now what good is that if there’s a thousand files that get spit back in your face? Now add the power of Unix pipes, and the search command known as ‘grep’

    ls -al | grep interestingThings*.txt

    So now I can take the output of the first command and rather than send that output directly to my computer screen, I ‘pipe’ i t over to the grep command and let it do a search in real time on all that text output. I get a list of things as a result:

    interestingThings1.txt
    interestingThingsFoo.txt
    etc.

    So Yahoo Pipes extends this metaphor into the real of http and rss/xml feeds of data from Twitter, Blogs, Web based RSS news readers and allows you to find stuff as soon as it is sent out for mass consumption on the Interwebs. And like all things, it also allows you to add your own personal spin by blogging about that which you have discovered through the Yahoo Pipes. Flame On!

    For example, suppose I wanted to search for news on Google, specifically about Chrome. There could be useful things popping up at any minute, and I could easily miss them (like leaked screenshots!) This is what you could consider doing:

    * Create a twitter search for #google

    * Subscribe to the RSS feed of that search

    * Send the RSS feed to the pipes, where it is filtered for the word “chrome”

    * Subscribe to the RSS feed that comes out of the pipes

    Now you can monitor any breaking developments about chrome as they happen (more or less)!

    This is the real power of the web 2.0 stuff, the ability to make your own stuff. No longer will we have to rely on any one place to get info. I am using twitter, google, and yahoo to get my information here!

    via Yahoo Pipes.

  • Waterproof Lithium-Air Batteries

    You may remember High School chemistry class when the topic of reactive metals came up. My teacher had a big slab of pure sodium he kept in a jar under kerosene. The reason for that was to prevent any water, even humidity in the air from reacting with that pure metallic sodium. He would slice pieces off of the sodium to make the surfaces completely free of tarnish. Then pull out the pieces with forceps. And in a display of pyrotechnics and sound and fury, he would place the metal in a flask of water. And it would fizz violently racing around on the surface of the water. It was reacting with the water creating Lye (NaOH-Sodium Hydroxide) and Hydrogen Gas(H2). He would then light the gas to show it was really combustible Hydorgen gas.

    Well, Lithium is also a very reactive metal too. Which means it has lots of energy stored up in it that can be tapped to do useful things, like being a battery electrode. Lithium Ion batteries exploit this physical trait to give us the highest energy density batteries on the market save for some exotic specialty chemistries, like Zinc Air. Lithium Ion uses all kinds of tricks to keep the water and moisture out of the mix inside the battery. However these tricks take away from the total energy density of the battery. So now the race is on to use pure metallic lithium in a battery without having to use any tricks to protect it from water.

    A company based in Berkeley, CA, is developing lightweight, high-energy batteries that can use the surrounding air as a cathode. PolyPlus is partnering with a manufacturing firm to develop single-use lithium metal-air batteries for the government, and it expects these batteries to be on the market within a few years. The company also has rechargeable lithium metal-air batteries in the early stages of development that could eventually power electric vehicles that can go for longer in between charges.

    via Technology Review: Waterproof Lithium-Air Batteries.

  • Intel to double SSD capacity • The Register

    Things are really beginning to heat up now that Toshiba and Samsung are making moves to market new SSD products. Intel is also revising it’s product line by trying to move it’s SSDs to the high end process technology at the 32nm design rule. Moving from 50nm to 32nm is going to increase densities, but most likely costs will stay high as usual for all Intel based product offerings. Nobody wants SSDs to suddenly become a commodity product. Not yet.

    Intel is expected to bring forward the projected doubling of its SSD capacities to as early as next month.

    The current X18-M and X25-M solid state drives (SSDs) use a 50nm process and have 80GB and 160GB capacities with 2-bit multi-level cell (MLC) technology. A single level cell (SLC) X25-E has faster I/O rates and comes in 32GB and 64GB capacities.

    via Intel to double SSD capacity • The Register.

  • PowerVR maker – Imagination Inc.

    Imagination is the name of the of company making the wicked cool low power graphics chip called PowerVR SGX. In the handheld manufacturing market Imagination scored two huge design wins. First was the Apple iPhone and iTouch. Second is the Palm Pre. It is very encouraging that the designers at Palm chose the PowerVR in order to create the iPhone killer. No doubt Palm benefited directly from inside knowledge of the iPhone when they hired former Apple VP Jon Rubinstein to head this new iPhone killer project at Palm.

    Now Apple realizes it needs to protect it’s competitive advantage. They are sinking some several million dollars in Imagination stock to prevent any hostile takeover of their strategic partner. Even more interesting than this move on Apple’s part is Intel has already staked a huge claim on Imagination without having a single design win to announce. There’s some word out that future netbooks will use an integrated PowerVR chip. But the next revision of the Atom CPU and chipset will definitely have PowerVR integrated in, scoring some bigger more strategic design wins on the low power front. Intel hopes to best Apple at the low end, low power, long battery duration category.

    The investment is considered important for Apple, which uses only PowerVR graphics in its iPhone and iPod touch devices. Its most recent launch, the iPhone 3GS, uses a PowerVR SGX video core now believed to be the SGX535.

    via Electronista | Apple more than doubles stake in PowerVR maker.

  • Ghana: Digital Dumping Ground

    I watched this program this past Tuesday and I noticed Slashdot and some other vetted link-sharing websites are picking up on it too. My own feeling about this is it’s bad form for any government contractor to allow their computers to fall into the hands of anyone outside their own IT organization. If the folks that manage and audit the computers cannot encrypt, wipe or destroy hard drives on their computers, they need to be fired. It’s that simple. I’m sure some manager felt that the computers they were managing didn’t need top secret level procedures performed on them when they were de-aquisitioned and ‘recycled’. But who knows what little details are swimming around in those Word documents (stuff like the revision controls for instance). Too often everyone who manages computers lives by the dictum, “Do the absolute minimum necessary.” But no one even imagines what ‘could’ happen later on, like having your computer wind up in Ghana. It proves anything can happen and you should treat every Hard Drive like it needed to have the Top Secret procedures performed on it before it’s taken off your property list.

    PBS: Frontline World

    Thats particularly a problem in a place like Ghana, which is listed by the U.S. State Department as one of the top sources of cyber crime in the world. And its not just individuals who are exposed. One of the drives the team has purchased contains a $22 million government contract.It turns out the drive came from Northrop Grumman, one of Americas largest military contractors. And it contains details about sensitive, multi-million dollar U.S. government contracts. They also find contracts with the defense intelligence agency, NASA, even Homeland Security.When the drives’ data are shown to James Durie, who works on data security for the FBI, hes particularly concerned about the potential breach at the Transportation Security Administration TSA.

    via: FRONTLINE/World Ghana: Digital Dumping Ground | PBS

  • Intel ready to launch new 34nm SSDs?

    Check back in two weeks from today

    via Electronista | Intel ready to launch new 34nm SSDs in two weeks?.

  • Samsung develops mini-card SSDs may drop 1.8″ HDD

    Industry insiders in Taiwan today have claimed Samsun is dumping it’s 1.8″ Hard Drives in favor of providing devices like the Mini Card based Solid State Disk drives.

    The Mini PCI Express or Mini Card form factor is available as an expansion slot on many PCs. Samsung is manufacturing Flash Drives in the Mini Card format using it’s latest Flash chips. Compared to traditional 2.5″ Flash Drives from Intel and others, Mini Card devices are going to consume a little less battery power. I wonder if any netbook sized laptops have the MiniCard expansion slots built in. It might prove to be a good marketing direction if enough manufacturers decide to add open slots to their motherboard designs. I also know that Samsung manufactuers 1.8″ Hard Drives and at one point that was the preferred form factor for netbook devices. It was also heavily used by Apple iPods. Getting rid of a SATA or PATA disk controller is a good thing. Hopefully connecting to the Bridge chips through PCIe might provide better throughput than going through a disk controller then through the same Bridge chips.

    Mini PCI Express Card aka Mini Card
    Mini PCI Express Card aka Mini Card

    The denser memory also permits a level of storage that isnt normally found in this class with 16GB, 32GB and 64GB capacities coming on launch. All of them use just 0.3W of power and so contribute little to the total power drain.

    via: Electronista

  • Moore’s Law to take a breather • The Register

    Back in the days of Byte magazine still being published, there was a lot of talk and speculation about new technology to create smaller microchips. Some manufacturers were touting Extreme UV, some thought X-rays would be necessary. In the years since then a small modification of existing manufacturing methods was added.

    “Immersion” lithography, or exposing lithography masks using water as the means of transmission rather than air was widely adopted to shrink things down. Dipping everything into optically clear water helps keep the UV light from scattering, the way it would if it were travelling through air or a simple vacuum. So immersion has become widespread, adding years to the old technology. Now even the old style UV processes are hitting the end of their useful life times.And Intel is at last touting Extreme UV as the next big thing.

    Note this article from April 22, 2008. Intel was not at all confident in how cost effective Extreme UV would be for making chips on it’s production lines. The belief is EUV will allow chips to shrink from 32 nanometers down to the next lower process design rules. According to the article that would be the 22nm level, and would require all kinds fo tricks to achieve. Stuff like double-patterning, phase-shifting, and pixellated exposure masks in addition to immersion litho. They might be able to tweak the lens material for the exposure source, they might be able to tweak the refractive index of the immersion liquid. However the cost of production lines and masks to make the chips is going to sky-rocket. Brand new chip fab plants are still on the order of $1Billion+ to construct. The number of years the cost of those fabrication lines can be spread out (amortization) is not going to be long enough. So it looks like the commoditization of microchips will finally settle in. We will buy chips for less and less per 1,000, until they are like lightbulbs. It is very near the end of an era as Moore’s law finally hits the wall of physics.

    Diminishing Returns of process shrinks

    iSuppli is not talking about these problems, at least not today. But what the analysts at the chip watcher are pondering is the cost of each successive chip-making technology and the desire of chip makers not to go broke just to prove Moore’s Law right.

    via iSuppli: Moore’s Law to take a breather • The Register.

  • Sugar Labs-Making computers useful

    Image representing One Laptop Per Child as dep...
    Image via CrunchBase

    I’m enjoying reading about Walter Bender‘s project to make software that makes the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) or XO-1 Laptop more useful to a wider range of people. What’s even more uplifting is the same software will run on older PC and Mac hardware. So don’t recycle that PC, just install Sugar Labs–Sugar on a Stick and continue using that PC until the hard drive finally fails or the display gives out. No need to endlessly upgrade your hardware, just keep on truckin’ with Sugar Labs. For schools with budget cuts and families with older computers Sugar on a Stick is going to be a godsend.

    The Sugar on a Stick environment is self-contained and sized just small enough to fit on a 1GB USB Flash drive. You can boot into the Sugar environment, run all the applications, save our data on to the Flash drive. Then when you are done just reboot and remove the flash drive. The PC goes back to its original Operating System, no fuss no muss. Considering the amount of computer waste shipped overseas to be salvaged, keeping the computer running with Sugar might be a greener alternative.

    Sugar on a Stick provides a coherent and consistent computing experience. It reduces costs by providing flexibility in hardware choices, allowing schools to keep their existing investment in hardware. Learners can benefit from the increased household ownership of computers; by bringing Sugar on a Stick home, every student has a consistent, comparable computing environment that parents can share in as well. It also provides off-line access to applications and content as not every learner has Internet access at home.

    Sugar Labs—learning software for children.

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  • vReveal uses GPU to accelerate video fixes

    Before and After

    There’s a new video trend in personal home video. Companies are lining up to provide aftermarket tools to process and provide corrections to camera phone video. Pure Digital’s Flip! camera line has some tools available to do some minor cutting to video clips and publish it to sharing websites. All of which presents an entrepreurial opporunity to provide pay for tools to help improve poorly shot video.

    Some tools are provided within video editing suites like Apples iMovie (it corrects camera shake). Now on the PC there are two new products, one of which is designed to take advantage of the nVidia GPU acceleration of parallel programming. The product is called vReveal

    While vReveal works with Windows XP or Vista (and not with Macs), it will make its enhancements much faster if the machine contains a recent graphics processing card from Nvidia, Dr. Varah said. Nvidia is an investor and a marketing partner with vReveal; a specific list of cards is at vReveal’s Web site.

    via Novelties – Making a Fuzzy Video Come Into Focus – NYTimes.com.