Aasemoon'z Cluster

Breadboarding a new circuit is a key skill and an important step in many projects—especially early on, when you need to move wires around and substitute components. But that very flexibility also makes it easy to knock wires out. Eventually, if your project is a keeper, you’re going to want something with a bit more permanence. Printed circuit boards (PCBs) solve all those shortcomings. But most people don’t even consider translating a one-off project into a PCB design. For one thing, PCB fabrication has traditionally been expensive, viable only in commercial quantities. (One alternative is to do it yourself with etches and silk screens, a messy and time-consuming process.) Also, there are technical constraints involved with PCB designs that are daunting to the casual hobbyist. But it turns out that nowadays you can produce a professional PCB very inexpensively.

While on campus for the MVP Summit in February, I had a chance to visit Henry Sowizral over in building 41. Henry Sowizral is a Principal Architect in Microsoft Expression, and he and his team did something really cool: they converted an existing C/C++/MFC application to have a WPF front-end, while still leveraging all that existing code. If you have legacy code and are considering porting the UI to .NET, pick up some pointers from Henry. Once you've finished, check out Henry's presentation deck on how the team converted the Expression Design UI to WPF. See more WPF at Pete's site and blog http://10rem.net Follow Pete on twitter at @pete_brown

Orchard will create shared components for building ASP.NET applications and extensions, and specific applications that leverage these components to meet the needs of end-users, scripters, and developers. Additionally, we seek to create partnerships with existing application authors to help them achieve their goals. Orchard is delivered as part of the ASP.NET Open Source Gallery under the CodePlex Foundation. It is licensed under a New BSD license, which is approved by the OSI. The intended output of the Orchard project is three-fold: Individual .NET-based applications that appeal to end-users , scripters, and developers A set of re-usable components that makes it easy to build such applications A vibrant community to help define these applications and extensions In the near term, the Orchard project is focused on delivering a .NET-based CMS application that will allow users to rapidly create content-driven Websites, and an extensibility framework that will allow developers and customizers to provide additional functionality through extensions and themes. Erik Porter and Nathan Heskew are two of the developers of Orchard. Do they look familiar? Sure they do. They used to be devs on the C9 team.

Andrew Phillips holds the title of Scientist with Microsoft Research Cambridge, and he's working on a method of programming that compiles into DNA. Part of this involves a visual programming language called Stochastic Pi Machine, or SPiM. This system models biological processes to help give researchers feedback on how organisms will react to modifications. The hope is that this can be used to help scientists program for large biological systems using modular components compiled to DNA. Yes, I’m in way over my head here, but I do my best to ask Andrew about the role this will play in medical treatment going forward, what it means to DNA computing, and the ability of back-engineering the genetic code we don’t use now.

A bejeweled mummy dressed in Roman robes has emerged from the sands of Egypt's Bahariya Oasis, the Supreme Council of Antiquities said Monday. Entombed in a decorated gypsum sarcophagus, the 38-inch tall mummy  belonged to a woman or girl who died in the Greco-Roman period about 2,300 years ago. Unearthed in a rock-hewn tomb at a modern construction site near the town of Bawiti, in Bahariya Oasis, some 185 miles southwest of Cairo, the mummy points to the existence of a large Greco-Roman necropolis nearby, Mahmoud Affifi, director of Cairo and Giza antiquities, said in a statement.

A new chink has been found in the cryptographic armor that protects bank transactions, credit-card payments, and other secure Internet traffic. And although programmers have devised a patch for it, clever hackers might still be able to break through. The hack, presented in March at a computer security conference in Dresden, Germany, involves lowering the input voltage on a computer’s cryptography chip set and collecting the errors that leak out when the power-starved chips try and (sometimes) fail to encode messages. Crooks would then use those errors to reconstruct the secret key on which the encryption is based. More important, say the hack’s creators, the same attack could also be performed from afar on stressed systems, such as computer motherboards that run too hot or Web servers that run too fast.

Predicting trends is difficult even by the most connected industry experts, but one trend that's easy to spot is the widespread acceptance of multicore SoC. This is happening for a number of reasons. First, it's been years since the workstation first adopted the multicore processor architecture to solve such issues as increasing performance and power concerns. While the adoption rate in workstations is now saturated and is fully supported by General Purpose OSs (GPOS), the embedded world is just now looking at ways to adopt multicore architecture. Second, several SoC vendors have been providing multicore solutions including Cavium, Freescale, MIPS, and ARM; but up until now, these solutions have been limited to networking and used for performance enhancements rather than for low power. The rest of the embedded industry has had limited hardware options available as low-power design is a driving factor. While the ARM 11 MPCore was ahead of its time, the Cortex-A9 MPCore design is ready for primetime and is gaining acceptance in the embedded marketplace. As a result, SoC vendors have adopted the Cortex-A9 MPCore hardware as a basis for their next generation designs. Over a year ago, Texas Instruments pre-announced their next-generation OMAP designs in the OMAP 4 with a dual-core Cortex-A9 MPCore, scheduled for production in the second-half of 2010. ST Microsystems has pre-announced their next generation consumer devices which will be based on the Cortex A9 MPCore.

Various Artists — Wintertunes

Better late than never. Wintertunes

Better late than never. Wintertunes.

How's this for a wedge issue on a slow news week? When Xilinx announced earlier this year that it was changing one of its foundry suppliers from UMC to TSMC for the 28-nm node, it seemed like a blow to differentiation—at least from a process technology standpoint—between Xilinx and Altera, which has been using TSMC for years. But while Xilinx chose to go with TSMC's high-performance/low power process, Altera said this week it is going with TSMC's high-performance process. Altera maintains that customers in the high end communications equipment market are much more concerned about performance than power. Luanne Schirrmeister, senior director of product marketing at Altera, put it this way: "In communications infrastructure, nothing is battery powered. Everything is plugged into a wall."

Part 1 of an excerpt from the book "Acoustics and Psychoacoustics", 4th edition, examines the ways to make rooms better for the purpose of critically listening to music.

Part 2 of an excerpt from the book "Acoustics and Psychoacoustics", 4th edition, looks at acoustic and psychoacoustic principles applied to the clinical measurement of hearing ability, as well as procedures used in psychoacoustic testing.

رمان‌هایمان را فرهاد جعفری می‌نویسد.رییس ِ فرهنگسرای هنر ِ ما علی معلم دامغانی است.خواننده ی ما بنیامین است.فیلم‌هایمان را مسعود ده‌نمکی می‌سازد.نقش‌های کمدی را با بازی بهنوش بختیاری می‌بینیم.یکی از فیلم های پر فروش ِ ما دو خواهر است.سریال ِ تلویزیونی ِ ما زن بابا نام دارد.فرهنگی ترین کانال ِ تلویزیونی کشور ِ ما اسمش شبکه چهار است.در کشور ما بخشهای خبری ِ هیجان انگیزی چون بیست و سی وجود دارد.محبوب ترین سریال در نزد ِ مردم ِ ما ویکتوریاست.ورزشکار ِ محبوب ِ ما نیکبخت واحدی است.تیم محبوب ِ پایتخت ِ ما طرفدارانی دارد که کله ی کفتر میکنند.سیاست های نیروی انتظامی ِ ما را رادان تعیین میکند.فرهنگ‌مان را غلامعلی هداد عادل طرح ریزی می‌کند.اخلاقیات را قرائتی به ما یاد میدهد.نماینده ی شورای شهر ما علی رضا دبیر است.شهرمان را محمد باقر غالیباف اداره می‌کند.نماینده ی ما در مجلس روح الله هسینیان است.نماینده ی ما در خبرگان مصباح یظدی است.مصلحت ِ کشور ما را حاشمی رفسصنجانی تعیین می‌کند.نگهبانی ِ شورا با جنطی است.بر جمهوری ِ ما اهمدی نژاد ریاست می‌کند.

This white paper looks at a number of key techniques to optimize the systems engineering process and ensure project success. It examines the business benefits the techniques can provide and looks at IBM Rational solutions that are available to support the techniques.

Bruno Oliveira and I are working on a functional pearl called The Monad Zipper (*). You know how dealing with monad transformers can be quite awkward -- especially when developing highly modular programs where every component comes with its own effects?Well, we bring relief in this situation by applying Huet's zipper to a type-level data structure: the monad stack.We're submitting to ICFP on April 2, and would greatly appreciate your feedback on the current draft. Please let us know what you think of the presented approach, the clarity and style of writing, examples of situations where you could have used the monad zipper, ...(*) not to be confused with the zipper monad

The computer models used to determine whether it was safe for airlines to fly through the ash resulting from the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in southern Iceland were flawed, European Union officials now admit, says a story in the Financial Times of London.

The vision of a smarter grid is of course a lovely thing to behold: an electric power system that’s much more interactive, interoperable, reliable, and robust—“self-healing,” even. That’s why so much excitement attended the news this time last year that the U.S. stimulus bill would contain billions of dollars in new funding to support smart grid construction, and the news six months later than the National Institute for Standards and Technology was issuing draft standards and a roadmap for completing standardization of the smart grid (the Framework and Roadmap for Smart Grid Interoperability Standards, issued in final form in January). And it's the reason too why such high expectations ride on the avalanche of smart meter installation projects launched in the last year.

Since I wrote a bittorrent client in both Erlang and Haskell, etorrent and combinatorrent respectively, I decided to put up some bait. This might erupt in a language war and “My language is better than yours”, but I feel I am obligated to write something subjective. Here is to woes of programming in Haskell and Erlang.Neither Haskell, nor Erlang was a first language for me. I have programmed serious programs in C, Standard ML, Ocaml, Python, Java and Perl; tasted the cake of Go, Javascript, Scheme and Ruby; and has written substantial stuff in Coq and Twelf. I love static type systems, a bias that will rear its ugly head and breathe fire.I have written Haskell code seriously since 2005 and Erlang code seriously since 2007. I have programmed functionally since 1997 or so. My toilet reading currently is “Categories for the working mathematician” by Mac Lane. Ten years ago it was “ML for the working programmer” by Paulson.Enough about me.