Malcolm Yoke Hean Low

Multi-agent, Parallel Processing, Robotic, Warehousing

Sat, 01 Nov 2008 19:50:53 +0800

This article from the July issue of IEEE Spectrum describes a state-of-the-art agent-based robotic warehousing system. Unlike traditional warehouse where operators go around the warehouse picking orders, in this system, swarms of robots controlled by an agent-based scheduling, dispatching and traffic control system, worked in parallel to bring shelves to the operators for picking. The system has already been deployed by Staples, Walgreens and Zappos.

10 Great Tech Books

Sun, 19 Oct 2008 18:59:11 +0800

From the July issue of IEEE Spectrum, below are 10 great general-interest books about technology.

The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance by Henry Petroski
Mirror Worlds; or, The Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox...How it Will Happen and What it Will Mean by David Gelernter
A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter
The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder
The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman
The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing by David Kahn
Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age by Paul Graham
Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by Dava Sobel
The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes

The links to these books on Amazon are listed in this page.

Professor Who Wrote 200,000+ Books

Sat, 18 Oct 2008 12:17:17 +0800

This interesting article describes how a management science professor make use of publicly available data on internet and computer AI to automatically "generate" 200,000 books and publishes and sells them for profit.

Programming Languages - 6 Scripting Languages Your Developers Wish You'd Let Them Use

Fri, 17 Oct 2008 10:24:42 +0800

Links to Programming Languages

6 Scripting Languages Your Developers Wish You'd Let Them Use

Lifelike Animation

Sat, 06 Sep 2008 12:53:10 +0800

From the story: "The woman above is not real. I mean, she was real once, when real actress Emily O'Brien provided Image Metrics (you know their work from GTAIV) with 35 facial poses in front of a pair of digital cameras. From there, O'Brien was dismissed so the animators could go to work. Apparently "ninety per cent of the work is convincing people that the eyes are real." And the results, while not always perfect, are pretty extraordinary."

Sun's Fortress Language: Parallelism by Default

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 13:47:03 +0800

If anyone knows how to introduce a new programming language, it's Sun Microsystems. The company's highly successful Java language, which was introduced in 1991, has become ubiquitous in network-centric and embedded computing. Today, there's a whole research team at Sun Labs devoted to programming languages, and the big project there in recent years has been the development of the Fortress programming language. The end game is to "do for Fortran what Java did for C."

Graphics chips help supercomputers become commonplace

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 13:36:33 +0800

The sight of supercomputers in every home and office may soon become a reality thanks to video games such as Grand Theft Auto. High-end 3D games need the fastest graphics chips to run well. This has driven graphics cards makers to build ever-faster cards, and performance from the graphics processor on these cards is hundreds of times faster than the processor in a standard PC.

A massively parallel future

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 13:30:08 +0800

AMD has fired the first shots around a massively parallel computing architecture in the form of the ATi Radeon HD 4800 series GPGPU featuring a mind-blowing 800 cores (or shader units). A GPGPU, or General Purpose Graphics Processing Unit, blurs the distinction between CPU and GPU and promises to usher in an entirely new paradigm for programmers to learn. The future has arrived in a chip that delivers more than one teraflop of computing power, and, best of all, it has arrived in the form of a $200 (6,700 baht) mid-range graphics card.

Serial computing is dead; the future is parallelism

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 00:44:51 +0800

Serial computing is dead, and the parallel computing revolution has begun: Are you part of the solution, or part of the problem? That was the question posed by Dave Patterson, head of the Parallel Computing Laboratory at UC Berkeley, during his keynote address at the Usenix conference in Boston on June 26.

Google urged to make a more loving cloud

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 19:12:30 +0800

Yes, Google has opened its cloud to every developer down on earth. But for some, it's not quite as open as it should be.

Intel says 'no' to Windows Vista

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 19:01:38 +0800

Windows Vista is not for Intel, it has been claimed. The chip giant will not be installing the new operating systems on its many thousands of desktop PCs. It has "no compelling case" to do so.

An Evolutionary Path for High Performance Heterogeneous Multicore Programming

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 18:01:13 +0800

The multicore era has opened the Pandora box of parallel programming environments. Closing it won't be easy. To address both portability and performance on heterogeneous multicore platforms, a directives-based approach may be the way to go.

Heterogeneous machines with x86 and GPU processors make more sense than many-cored chips

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 10:08:58 +0800

Chuck Moore from AMD argued that these heterogeneous machines with x86 and GPU processors will make more sense moving forward than the so-called many-cored chips that the likes of Sun and Intel are pursuing where software is spread across tens or even hundreds of similar cores.

How a pair of American spies created the Soviet Silicon Valley - Part II

Sun, 11 May 2008 15:50:24 +0800

Episode 16 of Semi-Coherent Computing comtinues with the second part of the tale of two Americans who became spies for the Soviets and then helped created the Soviet version of Silicon Valley.

The podcast for the two parts are available here: Part I, Part II.

May 1, 1964: First Basic Program Runs

Fri, 02 May 2008 01:27:14 +0800

From the article: 1964: In the predawn hours of May Day, two professors at Dartmouth College run the first program in their new language, Basic.

How a pair of American spies created the Soviet Silicon Valley

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 17:31:32 +0800

Few stories in computing history come close to matching the tale of Zelenograd - the Soviet Union's attempt at creating something along the lines of Silicon Valley. Episode 15 of Semi-Coherent Computing recounts the tale of Zelenograd's founding along with the stories of the two US-born Russian spies behind the city.

Creative threatens developer over home-brewed Vista drivers

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 14:37:00 +0800

Creative Labs has enraged customers by threatening a developer with legal action after he wrote drivers that allowed its products to run smoothly on Vista.

Apple Pushes Safari on Unsuspecting Windows Users

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 14:36:17 +0800

Apple is distributing Safari as anautomatic "update" for iTunes.

Cluster computing gets thumbs up from NSF head.

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 14:35:35 +0800

From the article: "A large-scale computing collaboration between Google, IBM and the National Science Foundation holds the key to some of science's most pressing puzzles, NSF director Arden Bement said in a conversation Friday with Wired editors."

Windows Vista VPN Error 609

Sun, 09 Mar 2008 14:34:50 +0800

If you have problem with Windows Vista VPN with error code 609, you can try the following fix from this post.

uninstall miniports:

>netcfg -u ms_l2tp

>netcfg -u ms_pptp

install them again (order may not be important):

>netcfg -l %windir%\inf\netrast.inf -c p -i ms_pptp

>netcfg -l %windir%\inf\netrast.inf -c p -i ms_l2tp