EVOL.reverse

http://dougmccune.com/blog/ - A blog from a programmer living in the other part of the world.

I particulary like the post (link) where Doug talks about making the move from an independent subcontractor to a full-time employee and tackles on the subjects of building a team, product and intellectual challenges and the lifestyle and commitment issues involved in such decision.

Quotes from it include: “building a badass team to dominate the Flex world” and  “One of the best parts of my job is getting to work with some of the smartest guys I know. Guys who teach me new stuff every day on a project.”

Another post (link) I quite enjoyed was the one where he admits that his original goal when he started blogging has to get a job in Adobe. He goes on to present a letter he had once wrote with a proposal for a job at Adobe (but which he never sent) which besides trying to convince Adobe to get him a job also tries to convince them that they should create a new job role that he would take and why that role would be an advantage for the company.

In one line, I would say that what attracts me in this blog is the personal side of Doug’s life, that he so openly talks about, mixed with technical bits here and there. Congratulations Doug and keep on!

Recently I’ve meet the maintainer of the GNU PDF Project, a colleague of Ana’s, and once he told me about the project and its goals I thought it was quite interesting. My first thoughts were why another PDF project? Haven’t people solved that problem already? There’s a motivation page and there has been questions and answers about this on the project’s mailing list so I can’t explain it better than they do but one thing that seems important to me is the PDF 1.7 specification that the project wants to implement. That means having features in the free software world that are only available now in proprietary software, like interactive forms in a PDF.

It’s a very recent project, still with a small codebase and considered by the Free Software Foundation as a high priority project. Be sure to check it out, maybe it is that free software project you have been wanting to contribute in a while.

A fellow developer brought up Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) during lunch. AOP is a programming paradigm that increases modularity by allowing the separation of “cross-cutting concerns”. These are aspects of a program which affect (crosscut) other concerns. These concerns often cannot be cleanly decomposed from the rest of the system in both the design and implementation, and result in either scattering or tangling of the program, or both. Examples are a logging infrastructure or user-based authentication. If we want to implement these things we have to scatter around the application instructions for it (either in the beginning/end of the function/method calls).

AOP implementations have some crosscutting expressions that encapsulate each concern in one place. The critics however advocate several things against it: “AOP has an inherent ability to create unpredictable and widespread errors in a system” and “Given the power of AOP, if a programmer makes a logical mistake in expressing crosscutting, it can lead to widespread program failure.”

http://www.eclipse.org/aspectj/doc/released/progguide/index.html

This message got to my mailbox via a friend a few days ago but only now I’ve got around to check it properly. CUDA is a programming language for applications that are to be executed on the graphics processing unit (GPUs). GPUs have a parallel “many-core” architecture, each core capable of running thousands of threads.

> Nvidia has announced the production release of CUDA 2.0, the latest
> version of its C language programming environment for GPUs that
> enables software developers to tap into the massively parallel
> architecture of the GPU for the acceleration of complex computational
> problems.
>
> This latest production release of the CUDA software suite includes
> support for 32 and 64-bit Windows Vista and Mac OS X as well as 3D
> textures and hardware interpolation to increase the efficiency of
> applications such as medical volume reconstruction and oil and gas
> seismic computing.
>
> Also included in CUDA 2.0 is an Adobe Photoshop plug-in example for
> both PC and Mac versions of the software. The example allows
> developers to design plug-ins that move the most compute-intensive
> functions of Adobe Photoshop to the GPU, such as filtering and image
> manipulation, delivering dramatic performance improvements.  The
> plug-in is available as source code so developers can easily develop
> advanced filters and imaging techniques that are available directly
> within Adobe Photoshop.
>
> CUDA 2.0 also features additional source code examples and new
> compiler optimizations and is available today for free download from

www.nvidia.com/cuda

Hi,

After a lot of work, the Mars Express Flight Control Team here at ESA/ESOC have got the Visual Monitoring Camera (VMC) back in operation.

As you know, the VMC is mounted on Mars Express. In 2003, it provided simple, low-tech images of Beagle lander separation, and this completed its original operational role.

While it’s not a scientific instrument, it does provide fantastic views of Mars - including crescent views of the planet not obtainable from Earth. VMC’s wide field of view also provides global images of Mars - something that is not currently provided by any other spacecraft.

In 2007, the Mars Express Flight Control Team began a test campaign to see whether the camera could be used to image Mars. ((It wasn’t even known if the camera would function at all after over three years of inactivity in deep space.)) But the VMC did, indeed, come back to life and the results to date have been very encouraging.

We plan to publish the new “VMC minisite” on Friday, 22 August, around 15:00 CEST. This mail is being sent to a select group of about a dozen bloggers, space writers and media as advance notice, and I hope you will plan to surf by to take a look at the results. Furthermore, we need your help!

Help us with the VMC

• VMC activities are unique in that the camera is operated by the Flight Control Team on a time-available basis (and not by a team of scientists).
  
• Starting Friday, images from the VMC (we call it the ‘Mars Webcam’) will be made available via the ESA website as rapidly as possible and whenever we have something worth showing - on the understanding that the VMC project is strictly a lowest-priority, “as available” activity.
  
• Open invitation for image feedback:: You can assist the Mars Express team with additional processing of the raw image data files as well as interpretation: What do you see? What part of the Mars surface is being shown? Can you identify any geographical features? What regions of the atmosphere or atmospheric components do you see?
  
• It would be fabulous if you would help spread word of the new site and encourage your readers to visit, enjoy the image galleries and take part, if they can!

((We would be delighted to receive copies of any good results that you get - either processed images or interpretations (more details on the site) - and we hope you’ll allow us to publish the best submissions.))

http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/VMC/index.html

So, after signing up for the service back in Portugal it was time to install the antenna so we could watch portuguese TV here in Darmstadt. I haven’t stuck the thing into the wall yet but I wanted to test it before the weekend so after a lot of pointing at the air (I didn’t use a compass) I got it to work. The thing you see serving as a support is a rotative chair without it’s top part