Tech at the speed of Warp

A collaboration between Microsoft and University of Washington produced a interesting concept of how a photo collection could be explored in 3D. This is one amazing piece of programing achievement.
Now, lets just hope it will make it to the mainstream sooner rather than latter.

Labels: Design, Programing, Visualisation

If you ever searched for royalty free stock photos, clipart, fonts or vector based images that you wanted to use in your own projects this is the place to visit. Blue Vertigo offers up to 1,000 links sorted by quality and quantity, not by alphabetical order so choosing the first 10 links from any category gets you instant satisfaction. I was extreamly surprised by the quality of yotophoto.com, a license free photo search.

Labels: Design, Visualisation

This is simply amazing. Top Gear, a British show about cars/other more or less important things, built a small space shuttle like vehicle and stuck a car on it.

And not just any car, the Reliant Robin, Del Boy's car. They actually launched Del Boy's car! Trotters are going to outer space.
A three wheel car, famous for staring in BBC "Only fools and horses" comedy show.

EDIT: As I was informed, the actual car used by Del Boy was actually Reliant Regal VAN. Three wheel car reminded me of them so I put reference to them, and lets face it, its still is a Trotters car what ever its name is.


The sheer complexity of the task and the probability of a failure make this one of TV's history making moment. For me this is up there with such footage as first launch of SpaceShipOne, the Moon landing and very few others.
It all started as a joke but after seeing the first finished booster rocket it looked more real and interesting. By the end of the show they have assembled it on a military testing site and I was expecting it to go BOOM on liftoff.

BUT THE SUc** LIFTED OFF.

Some of the specs are:

- 1/5th scale Space Shuttle...well sort of.
- Weighing in at 1.4 Metric Tonnes (3080 lbs)
- Installed impulse over 200kNs (R impulse)
- Main power plants consisting a cluster of 6 Hybrid Contrail O motors.
- Two of which were designed to be airstarted.
- Supplemented by 20 other Cesaroni composites.
- Size: 27 cubic metres. (>1000 cubic feet)
- Man capable - seating for 4.
- 4.5 months from design to ignition.

And just to emphasise the point, because it’s so damn cool, this really was the largest non-commercial rocket launch in European history.

Top Gear Shuttle Launch Aka. The New Car Bomb. - The best free videos are right here

the ending is definitely added but thats TV.


For all of you that have not seen the other TV's historic moments here are additional two that rand the highest in my book:

Labels: Space

After a huge disappointment with Star Trek franchise and its inability to produce a game worth while a moment of nostalgic made me turn once again to Descent Freespace 2 for the rescue. So I installed the Freespace 2 and went in search of mods, I remember that there was a modding community up and running making good, not bad, but just good mods for Freespace 2.
Then it happened or better yet, when did it happen? Freespace 2 is open source, with community of developers that are slowly and painstakingly taking this game to the next level.





Let’s face it, Freespace 2 was and is the best Space FPS available. The story is excellent, the interface was astoundingly manageable but provided with so much features that sometimes you had to use the entire keyboard which felt like you are trying to play a flight sim, the AI and computer controlled players were smart as was the interface to control them. It allowed the players to produce their own maps and mods with ease as a very good editor (FRED) was shipped with the game.The only thing that is not good is old graphics. This also changed, supported resolutions are maxed to 1024x768 but you can turn on the unsupported ones... OO... the joy. And then you put new textures, the game just lifts up. It can really be argued that now, this is a completely new game and we have there The Freespace 2 Source Code Project to thanks for that.
Not only did Freespace 2 get a new life but its graphic engine is being used for some upcoming games. Some of them are:

Babylon 5



but the most compleate conversation is for the upcomming Battlestar Galactica. This will be a beauty.

Labels: Games, Open Source, Space

In the age of Wikis, Google Earth/Mars and after WikiMapia it was just a mater of time before someone creates a Wikimapia styled web service for the heavens. It is surprising that we had to wait so log to get such web application.
WikiSky has a database of more than half a billion (500,000,000) stellar objects. Thats one impressive database. One additional feature next to the shear size of the database is the SDSS mode. WikiSky uses Sloan Digital Sky Survey images to display real photographs of the sky you are looking at through WikiSky.
A couple of comments; search could be better, lists of available high-res images for selected object should show in tooltip on main map and not on separate page that is hard to navigate.

They are looking for people who are willing to code and improve their service, also they are publishing their API so all you MashUp junkies, start coding.

Labels: GUI, Programing, Space, Visualisation

There have already been some reviews of similar attempts to bring the desktop grade drawing applications online. One such application is Fauxto. It is a Flex based web application with aim to become web based Photoshop, and its coming out really nice.
It is visible that it is still Alpha as many features are still missing. Nevertheless this is by far the most usable drawing application next to Litha on the web.

Labels: Design, GUI

The biggest buzzword and none knows what it is. Its been used over and over again in the media, on blogs, everywhere since 2004 when it was crafted. Everyone you ask gives a different explanation. O'Reilly, the creator of the term describes the Web 2.0 at Wikipedia as a

business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them. (This is what I've elsewhere called 'harnessing collective intelligence.')

In another words, not even a clue to the larger portion of the population that lack Internet education of what he is talking about.

Now, enters another, more Web 2.0 way of describing the meening of the term. It was created by Michael Wesch, an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University. Which if you look at it makes a perfect sence. It takes a non technical person to explain technical details as tech people always get stuck using technical terms.

Labels: Web 2.0