January 13, 2008

Tata Unveils 1 lakh Car

The $2500 Tata Nano, Unveiled in India [jalopnik.com]: I just back from India today and there was mixed emotion about this. Some people are excited about being able to buy a cheap vehicle that gets great gas mileage. Others, mostly the middle class who already have cars, are kind of pissed because the roads are already crowded with people, rickshaws and cows/goats. This is probably only going to exacerbate the existing situation.

Also, 1 lakh (Rs. 100,000, also known as Indian Rupees, INR) is not necessarily 2500 USD. The exchange rate I was quoted was 1 USD = 38.50 INR, which comes out to more like 2600 USD. Sure it's only 100 USD, but I'm a stickler for details.

Posted by Guy at 09:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 15, 2006

ER Homicide

ER Heart Attack Ruled Homicide [findlaw.com]: This was quite a surprise. When I first read the digg blurb I thought, no way they actually ruled this a homicide, someone's sensationalizing. So I followed the article trail until I saw the actual verdict form and sure as sh!t it was a homicide. I wonder what kind of repercussions this will have within ERs? Probably worse care for people who don't complain of heart attack symptoms.

Posted by Guy at 07:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 02, 2006

Stupid Little Threats

Adobe Threatens Microsoft with Suite [slashdot.org]: Stuff like this is ridiculous. Apparently Adobe wants Microsoft to (1) remove PDF writing capabilities from Office 2007 and (2) charge extra for them. So Microsoft complied with (1) and actually crippled their product ot make Adobe happy. But they won't comply with (2) and you know what? I don't blame them. Adobe's request is like Netgear asking Dell to not include wireless networking in their laptops because it competes with their business. Utterly ridiculous!

Posted by Guy at 09:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 27, 2006

JSR 223

Build your own scripting language for Java [javaworld.com]: It's about time. I've played around with BSF and Rhino in the past, but a formal specification would alleviate a lot of the confusion in development of additional scripting languages. For example, I really like Lua [lua.org], but I can't seem to find a good way to integrate existing scripts with my Java code. Lua can be used on a JVM via LuaJava [keplerproject.org] or (maybe, I don't know) JLua [hetland.org], but I don't think these can be used to automate Java applications in a meaningful way.

Posted by Guy at 10:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 25, 2006

New Microsoft Madness

Microsoft shows off JPEG rival [news.com.com]:

This has got the be the crappiest thing I've seen in a while. Not because it's MS, but because it's MS. Let me explain, I don't have anything against MS, in fact I would probably apply for a job with them if I was moving to the Pacific Northwest. However, they have been known to put some realy crappy DRM controls into their media file formats. Am I anti-DRM? Yes. Am I anti-big business? No. It's quite the conumdrum, I confuse a lot of people.

I just think that DRM creates more problems then it solves. Is there DRM in most of the CDs sold throughout the world? No. Have album sales truly suffered? I really don't think so. How about DVDs? Are DVD sales "down" because of rampant piracy or maybe because services like Netflix make renting so easy it's not worth buying a movie when it comes out?

I'm a fan of better technology, but not when those technologies are hindered by other technologies.

Posted by Guy at 09:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 08, 2006

The True Pop Culture

Maid Cafes [reuters.com]: Now that's what I call true pop culture. I don't think we'll ever see stuff like this in the States, well at least never on the East Coast.

Posted by Guy at 08:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 05, 2006

Too Quiet? Really?

Should hybrids pump up the volume? [autoblog.com]: Is this just another excuse for non-disabled people to sue people over? I'm trying to get my car's rattling to settle down and people are complaining that some cars are too quiet. Don't they realize that the lack of noise is partly due to the more efficient transmission? Hopefully, in the future our transportation will be so efficient that we won't here anything above a wisper. Then people will really start suing!

Posted by Guy at 05:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 31, 2006

Free Energy : 2

So I was thinking about the article I blogged about earlier and something is just sticking in my head.

By cementing a copper disc on top of a cylinder magnet, and rotating the magnet and disc together, Faraday created an electrical potential. After pondering this phenomenon for many years, he concluded that when a magnet is rotated, its magnetic field remains stationary. Thus, he reasoned, the metal of the magnet moves through its own field, and the relative motion is translated into electrical potential.

So I think it's generally accepted that the Earth is polarized, does this imply that the Earth is a magnet? If so then as the Earth rotates it's magnetic field is stationary and free energy is constantly being drawn from space at a planetary level. If that is the case then how is it we can't tap the energy that is freely available from the Earth's rotation? Hmm, I think something just broke.

Posted by Guy at 08:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 30, 2006

Free Energy

I just read an article [mufor.org] on the N machine referenced from digg and all I can really say is wow, wouldn't this be cool if it were real. It seems that the US S&Es (Scientists and Engineers) are discouraged to the point of apathy. I mean why wouldn't free energy be on the top of everyone's list of things to understand? Oh the finger pointing games we play.

Posted by Guy at 08:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 16, 2006

Genetic Engineering to Synthetic Biology

Funny, but I've always consideredgenetic engineering the process of assembling genes (or engineering them) to form something else. You know, the whole scientist vs. engineer thing. Apparently I'm wrong because in this article [msn.com] what I thought genetic engineering was is now called synthetic biology. Those crazy biologists!

It seems crazy that the whole synthetic biology thing is mostly trial-and-error, I thought we were a little bit beyond that in certain fields, genetics being one of them. I look at the whole DNA/gene/chromosome knot as a heirarchical composition of increasing complexity. What does that mean? It means that once you understand the relationships between the different levels in the hierarchy synthetic biology just becomes an abstract form of assembling and programming. For example, genes are an assemblage of DNA pairs in the same way that a function is an assembly of simpler instructions. Given this notation you can consider DNA nothing more than simple instructions for the processor of life.

They need more computer scientists, computer engineers and reverse engineers working on these projects.

Posted by Guy at 07:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 12, 2006

RSSOwl

I just checked out RSSOwl [rssowl.org] and all I have to say is Holy Freaking Cow!

I love the Eclipse Rich Client Platform [eclipse.org].

Posted by Guy at 03:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 11, 2006

WebCleaner Proxy

As some of you know I've been searching for a good "personal" proxy that would filter the web for me (removing advertisements, etc.). So far I've analyzed

• Squid
• and AnalogX

The latest proxy that I tested was WebCleaner [sourceforge.net]. At first I had some trouble just installing it, turns out that it depends on Python 2.4 (had it installed) and the Python win32 extensions (didn't know I needed it). After all the dependencies were installed everything was peachy-keen.

The web interface was phenomenal and allowed a plethora of configuration options. It was truly impressive! I then fired up SwitchProxy for FireFox and entered in the info. And after some testing I'm sad to say that it just didn't quite work that well for me.

Specifically, it failed when I was opening lot's of pages at the same time. What I'll do is open an entire FireFox bookmark folder in tabs at one time. This creates a lot of simultaneous connections all hitting the proxy at the same time. I think WebCleaner just couldn't handle that many connections becuase I got proxy connection errors from FireFox, something to the effect of "Proxy refused connection".

The search continues.

Posted by Guy at 06:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 10, 2006

Digg

I've seen links for Digg [digg.com] all over the place lately so I finally checked it out. Holy crap! I like it, I like it alot. Now if only there was a way to automatically submit stuff to digg instead of redirecting people to a submission page [digg.com].

Posted by Guy at 07:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 09, 2006

Quality over Quantity

The Philadelphia Inquirer had an interesting piece [philly.com] on the comparison of China's, India's and the US' graduating engineers. The first quote that jumped out at me was:

The Duke engineering-student study, led by executive-in-residence Vivek Wadhwa and sociology professor Gary Gereffi, performed a detailed analysis of the kinds of "engineers" counted in the numbers from India, and they found that in addition to four-year baccalaureate degrees, these numbers contain a significant number of three-year, sub-baccalaureate degrees.

So my painful five-year degree is commensurate with a three-year degree in technology? Hmm, makes me wonder... The next quote is even more funny:

The researchers were not able to verify the same detailed breakdown for students graduating from Chinese universities. According to the Chinese Ministry of Education, however, any bachelor's degree or "short-cycle" degree with "engineering" in its title is counted, regardless of the degree's field, or academic rigor associated with it.

Okay, so now my five-year degree in computer engineering counts the same as a three-year degree in basket engineering. I love how other countries graduation numbers can be misrepresented to make the US look bad and feed the FUD [wikipedia.org].

Posted by Guy at 07:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 31, 2005

Electro-Gravity

Since I first heard of them in 2002 I've been fascinated with Lifters. For the uninitiated a Lifter is a piece of tinfoil on a blasa wood frame with 30,000+ volts running through it. Why's it called a Lifter? Because it levitates.

Some physicists have attributed this to phenomenom as ionic wind, but the Lifter community thinks their full of shit. I cam across this paper [free.fr] written by a guy a Rutgers that tries to draw some kind of parallels between gravity and electrostatic forces. Interesting. Personally I've always felt that some provable theory relating magnetics/electrics to gravity in the hopes of some kind of engineering application for (should I say it :o) anti-gravity. Uh-oh, I've said it. I hope no one thinks any less of me... ;-)

Posted by Guy at 11:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 09, 2005

Snow Driving Tips

I just read these tips [weather.com] on how to drive in the snow on weather.com. It's funny, but I guess most people don't realize most of these common sense tips and scenarios. My favorite has to be

• Don't use cruise control or overdrive on icy roads.

It's just sort of a Duh! thing to say.

Posted by Guy at 06:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 17, 2005

How many times indeed?

This blog entry [typepad.com] really got me thinking, how many times do we pay for the same thing indeed? I've bought things in the past that then showed up in something I bought afterwards and I thought to myself, shouldn't I be getting a discount? Sometimes, especially in regards to the Farscape series of DVDs, a second set of DVDs is released which has the same exact content, but with extended scenes. Well, that's what I wanted to buy in the first place, but they weren't released. I wish there was a way for me to trade in my old DVDs for the new ones with some minuscule payment (~$3) to cover any expenses.

Shelly's got some good points and media companies really piss me off!

Posted by Guy at 09:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 20, 2005

VW Electronics Research Lab

I didn't know it even existed until today, but Volkswagen has a research branch called the VW Electronics Research Laboratory [vwerl.com]. Just for kicks I checked out their job postings and noticed a request for an Embedded Systems Engineer. Now this in itself isn't interesting, what is interesting is the "Unique Skills" that are part of the Required Qualifications. In this laundry list of what you would expect, "Embedded system and vehicle electronics knowledge" and "Programming experience", you'll also find "Operating systems (e.g. QNX, Windows)". Hmmm, does this mean that some VWs sport QNX [qnx.com] or Windows Embedded under the hoods (or in the dash as it may be)?

A quick Google of VW and QNX reveals that VW is using QNX in some models. Most notably the Audi A8L Multimedia Interface. They also have a working relationship with 3SOFT, an embedded systems company that specializes in QNX solutions.

So, no idea if the car's main OS is QNX or not, but it's definitely used for multimedia stuff in high-end models. Maybe some of this could trickle down into the actual VW brand?

Posted by Guy at 07:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)