Monthly Archives: March 2007

Archive, Software

First Steps Cocoa Programming

Well, if you wonder why my blog has
some gaps recently, it’s because of me doing my first steps towards
Cocoa
programming on MacOS with XCode.
I didn’t do programming for a longer time, and a friend of mine
gave me that great book, that helps me a lot now to get into the
Objective-C slang, used for Cocoa.
In short terms, its really amazing how simple and structured Cocoa
programming with XCode actually is. And the best thing is,
objective-C has already implemented reference counting as this was
one of the best features of the Crystalspace 3D
Framework, for which I contributed to for 3 years.
These are some screenshots of applications of my first steps
programming with the previous mentioned book.
A lottery application:
lottery
More or less, the same application in a GUI frontend:
randomapp
A letter counting GUI application:
lettercount
And my latest finished training chapter, a speaking text
application, with choose-able voices.
sayit
Really, really, big fun… stay tuned for more within the next
days.
Further I’m really looking forward to see all the great new
features of MacOS
Leopard’s XCode 3.0, which is said to have graphical instant
performance tuning of running code…. wow… I really wanna see
this…
So far,
Kobaan.

Archive, HPC

Cure@PS3 – Folding at Home on your PS3 finally available

Finally, finally, finally…
…just in time for the european release of Sony’s Playstation 3
on friday, march 23rd, Sony presents the final “now public” client
software for contributing 100 GFlop/s of CELL
computing power to stanford university’s Folding@Home
project.PS3-shot-00006
shot-00007
Let’s all help to fight deceases and boost scientific calculations
for the good of all mankind.
(A note for the green enthusiast: YES, it will consume 180 watts,
but it’s 20 times faster than the average PC, now think
again.)
Kobaan.

Archive

Hot Icecubes ?

I don’t know if it’s big news for you,
but it was for me.Ice doesn’t have to be cold as one might think.

We’re talking about water-ice, right. According to Sandia Labs I just learned
that, water can have a lot more than only one iced aggregate
state. In our everyday live we only know 3 states for most
substances: liquid, hard, gas respectively in case of H2O=water:
water, ice, steam.
In fact there are 11 states of different ice states known for
water, yet.
firecubes
Using the Z machine at Sandia Labs, scientists managed to
compress water to ice within the record time of only 100
nanoseconds by using a pressure of 50.000 to 120.000 atmospheres.
In this state, water becomes hard as ice, but it is also extremely
hot.
z-machine
The Z machine itself is intended to create extremely high
temperatures, like in the interior of stars, by heating a plasma
with 20 million amperes of electric power.

What do we need this for ? Winking

…melting diamonds…
…creating the ultimate cocktail on the rocks…
…you know there was this discussion about global warming and
stuff…
…yeah maybe we just all need to open the door of our fridges, or
a z machine….
…I’m gonna order one.

Archive, Japan

Natto Storage Devices ?

For the ones of you not knowing what
“Natto” is: Natto are fermented (fouling) soy beans, and
are quite favourite as food all over asia. In my opinion, it smells
horibble, so stay away.
The bacteria used to get the beans so sticky fouling is called
Bacillus subtilis and only rarely causes food poisoning.
Winking
250px-Natto_mixed
Now back to storage devices…
…well that’s the news, – it – is the new storage devices, not the
Natto itself, but the DNA of the bacteria.Scientists (Natto lovers ?) from Keio University in Japan, of the
Institute for Advanced Biosciences, managed to “store” a short
message “E=mc^2 1905!” inside the genome of this bacillus subtilis.
Since DNA copying over generations and other environmental
influences, always leads to mutations (that’s evolution baby…),
the scientists decided NOT to use a cryptic and complex algorithm,
but instead used 4 different positions inside of the genome chain
to place the message information data multiple times. Thus
providing redundancy against damage and a possible error correction
when the message is read back from the DNA sequence.
bp060261yf00001
Although this method already works quite well, there still is the
problem of the slow process (about 24 hours) of DNA construction
and sequence analysis, to actually write and read data.
But once these problems are solved, It might be that your harddisk
or DVD is not any longer your biggest data storage, instead you
could explore the billions of secret contents of your “Natto”
storage device.

Uhh.., smelly computer… Natto drive ?
Kobaan.