Drooling on the Arm

Arm based boards are becoming more and more powerful and complete with nifty peripherals like gpu, gps and accelerometers. Making them perfect for building autonmous platform brains on a budget.


-- Post From My iPhone

Playing god - messing with Terrain in WorldWind Java

I wish i could say I did this but, it is clearly in Italian. Very nice to see what can be done with the nice clean framwork WorldWind provides. This video demonstrates modifications to the mesh using a game sandbox like set of tools, now that feature should so make into the examples provides with the core library.

Wrangling with Curly Monkeys

I had some files delivered via FTP to me. Sounds simple enough - not really : the FTP server is apparently FTPS://. Oh great they are careful about security. Fire up FileZilla and try to download using FTPS. The nice feature in filezilla is that you can see the server interaction. FTPS RFC's defined implicit and explicit FTPS, the implicit version comes first in FileZilla options. The server threw me out with an EABORTCONNECT on port 990 (FTPS Implicit port). More self-education and I realized that the FTPS implicit is deprecated. Explicit FTPS is on port 21 using TLS. So that worked out fine till the server timed out the connection, it was not really fast to start with (6.8kb/s). So I resorted to using curl , for future reference the command below can handle FTPS/TLS.

curl --ftp-ssl -# -1 --insecure ftp://user:pass@server/file -o outputfile

So there was the curly bit, now let's move onto the monkey bit. I have an ATI Radeon HD 3670 card on the laptop, so I would rather use AMD/ATI graphics tools, namely RenderMonkey. I did some simple brightness contrast shaders in it looking to implement them in JOGL. That didn't quite work out - so more wrangling with monkeys is needed.

Giving answers - messing around at Stack Overflow

I got onto SO a couple of days ago. Since then I have learnt an incredible amount of Java and Python via the quickfire question-answer system. There are interesting community bits too. It is almost like an MMO in design, the only monsters to hunt are niggling technical problems. Here is the joke of the board in my opinion and a solution to an important user satisfaction issue - load times.
Load times and data streaming is what has made the whole load pages by bit movement in the new internet design so popular. Good design makes portions of the content to the user and the input from the user atomic, allowing partial refreshes. People expect instant responses (within 1/16 second) - a lot of other factors come into play while delivering this:

1. Server processing capacity
2. Network bandwidth
3. Client machine rendering capacity
4. Concurrent users
5. Any other bottleneck you can think about

Optimizing the user experience is what good products are built upon.

Economics of Chip Making - cut throat market

There was a very old story I was told once about 3 chips that could be - Zilog Z80, Motorola 68000 and the pre-maturely born Intel 8086. The early release, familiar instruction set and price gave 8086 such a boost that we still have it around.
Given all the publicity about AMD - Intel rivalry it is interesting to follow what works in this arena. AMD had to split up design and manufacture, Intel might be following suit. Motorola spun off Freescale long long time ago.
Problem then as in now is the familiarity and usability of the instruction sets and the chips, the efficiency and transparecy with which silicon is exposed to the neurons. I researched some more on the new instruction set on the block, the GPGPU. I wish I could tag cloud the projects using Nvidia Cuda vs those using ATI Stream, but here is the googlebattle result , Cuda is nearly twice as much used as ATI stream.
There are some heavy-weights putting in behind Cuda, the very hot Lapack creators making MAGMA, with blessings from Mathworks and Microsoft. Microsoft itself making a GPU computing extension in Windows 7/ DX11. Not to mention GPULib from Tech-X, which has led to some very interesting experiments in remote sensing image processing. The core of all this comes down to my laptop having only an ATI Radeon and no decent GPGPU capability to play with, best of luck to AMD getting its house in order.

Riding around in the rain

Hobart has some pretty good bike tracks if you can handle them in the wet in an unfamiliar ride. Went up a hill mostly on foot because I could not get the gears figured out - me and the gears haven't been friends this week, same problem in the rented lancer with it's semi automatic gears which automatically switch down but not up.

Downhill bits were fun where I had the guts to ride it and not slalom through trees. Had to scrape some concrete on the way back, brakes would not pull out enough speed - hence grazed elbow and knee nothing serious.

Need to whip around the hills a bit more when I get back.


-- Post From My iPhone

Maintaining the fantasy - while the real people sleep

I was just reading on the Warhammer Online server architecture and hosting system in the Intel Zine. Fascinating description of what is essentially an AI simulation system with global deployment. Interesting are also the parallelization and maintenance systems. WAR uses application level parallelization and inter-process communication with TCP, forking of processes to deal with keep sieges and trying to minimize the instancing. The update system uses the hardware level access provided by blades, I am sure I would be scared if I was instructing the bios to eject and load a new CD and install a full os off it.

Luckily WAR is not so heavily populated and you can have some great large battles. The quality of the players is decent and the transition between RVE and RVR is smooth.

I wish similar efforts were put into dealing with real world problems and modelling it while we slept.