Ada Lovelace Day 2011
Ada Lovelace day: As usual I had a tough time deciding; in my post last year I had three categories, entrepreneur, intellectual, and hacker. I’ll do the same this year. Winners after the break! Read More …
Category: technology
Human vs. Vacuum
While Neil Stephenson laments that we have lost our space faring capabilities and sees it as a harbinger of societal decay as a whole, I am getting waves of future shock just from SpaceX’s vaporware. So I’m more optimistic; the basic conflict human vs. vacuum may yet be won as private companies rightly take interest in the final frontier. Also if the powers that be are listening: sign me up for the first trip to Mars. Read More …
pv-astro poster, simulating the Milky Way, and supercomputer lovefest
I gave a short presentation Friday about pv-astro at the Swiss National Supercomputer Center’s User’s day. We also got to hear a few talks, including about Lucio Mayer’s recent work on a realistic simulation of a Milky Way type galaxy similar to our own. Finally we got an update about the machines at the center being upgraded in October. Some people like fast cars, motorcycles, and airplanes. Me however, I like big machines, with lots of cores and an obscene amount of RAM. Read More …
SSL and packet sniffing with Wireshark.
SSL stands for the secured socket layer and it is the way many websites handle encrypting your data as you communicate to them and helping you to verify that they are who you think they are, making it more difficult for others to view your traffic. As simple as using SSL is, many services don’t use it. What happens then? Well if an eavesdropper, let’s call her Eve, is somewhere on the same network as you are, for example if you are at a coffee house and she is sitting a few tables down from you, she can run any number of freely available tools (or one she wrote herself) to observe your network traffic. Sounds like a rather far fetched scenario, if you aren’t familiar with how easy it is to be Eve(il) if you so choose. Read More …
The Intersection of Productivity and Joy (over the past months)
Since last we spoke a couple of months ago, I had a hell of a time personally: I moved house, went from one location to another too often, had a major and very stressful financial crisis and had some rough times with friends which rocked the emotional boat. Although there are many things which didn’t Read More …
Kliq Soft Launch
Kliq soft launched this weekend. You can schedule a meetup (dinner, drinks, you name it) in just a few thumb taps with your local facebook friends or be adventurous and be introduced to a friend of a friend. This is just a taste of what’s to come. Get Kliq on the iPhone App Store at http://itunes.apple.com/lt/app/kliq/id412169676 or visit http://kliq.in. Read More …
Geovisualization and Eyetracking
I had tea and a brief lab tour recently with my friend Dr. Arzu Coltekin (who conveniently works in the building across from mine) and in her own words I am a researcher/lecturer, doing what I do in a ‘geovisualization’ unit (GIVA). I come from a Geomatics engineering education. I mostly work on a number Read More …
Wikileaks Research Project–Final Report: Background and Methods
The Motivation https://twitter.com/#!/corbett_inc/status/11049922849673216 https://twitter.com/#!/corbett_inc/status/11050551278051330 https://twitter.com/#!/ario/status/11053875767279616 Check my Wikileaks Research Project midpoint report out for more details but a bite sized background piece quoting from the blog post is as follows: A week ago I hatched a plan to educate myself in a more structured manner on what exactly Wikileaks stands for, its history, and its Read More …
Kliq app field testing in Columbus, Ohio
The Kliq beta application has recently been submitted to the iPhone app store. Kliq allows you to schedule a meetup with nearby facebook friends or a friend-of-friend at a nearby location in three thumb taps. A tech nugget and anecdote: Kliq uses SimpleGeo to go from the user’s GPS location to a set of possible Read More …
The future of the internet
It may not yet be a widely known fact but computer chips have stopped getting faster. But what if the average user doesn’t need all that performance? If desktop chipmakers are going to stay afloat there’s got to be a huge market for chips which scream. So what’s going to drive the CPU market? Read More …