Deadly Computer Blog

It is unpossible to play with this site and keep a straight face, trust me.  And the song is awesome, awesome in the way that wont be stuck in your head for the rest of the day.

You can also make your own by uploading your own picture, I’ve yet to try that, I think the cat is doing the dance perfectly.

The Windy City.  That’s where I’ve been, and why there’s been no posts recently.  Anyway, I’m back, and as soon as I go through my 1400 unread feeds, I’ll start with some more crazyness to post about.  But for now, here are some pretty pictures from my adventure.

Buckingham Fountain.

A little kid walked in frame carrying a light up stick and made that really cool squiggle.

We saw a Cubs game, they lost.

The reason I went, to see The Blue Angels at the 52nd Annual Chicago Air & Water Show.

That’s a good series of shots.

You can see some more Chicago shots here, and the Air & Water show pictures here.

RACER DEMO 0.1 – video game mashup from sputnic on Vimeo.

This is awesome.  Some Germans made a race track, got a model car, attached a webcam to it.  Then controls for the RC car were attached to an arduino and which in turn was controlled by a steering wheel, and a TV screen showing the first person view of the car.  The size of the car, and the speed it travels at makes it seem like you’re driving at a couple hundred miles an hour, exactly like most racing video games.

This is a pretty neat first version of this idea.  I expect the next version to be able to actually race against another person driving another car on the same track.  The version after that needs jumps.  And the next version needs some missiles or banana peels or powerups of some sort.

Then it’ll be like Mario Kart, and put together Trackmanina.  The only way it could get better is if they get little toy raptors that you have to catch.

{Engadget | racer}

I dislike most artists, they are all crazy people, but the people who came up with this idea are geniuses.

Too bad there’s not much other information about it I can find.  As far as I can tell it’s in Germany somewhere, and from the owners of the most annoying site in the world award for the month of August.

Anyway, here’s another picture of the construction workers putting it up:

{Sepientia}

They’ll blow a hole in human bone and flesh the size of the grand canyon, which by the way is coming up on the left!

I want this pilot on my next flight. {source}

August 6, 1945, one of the most important days in the history of the world.  The day The United States of America used the first atomic bomb on The Empire of Japan in the closing ceremonies of World War II.  This single day defined the world for the next 50 years.  The dropping of the bomb marked the end of one war, and the beginning of the deadliest race in the history of man – the nuclear arms race.  It’s lead to the downfall of more nations, and the division of more people then almost any event in history.

This day marked the beginning of the modern era, because after that bomb went off, everything changed.  And in a few short years even the dropping of that bomb was overshadowed 1000 times over by the first successful fusion bomb, Ivy Mike.  And then a few short years after that, these weapons of global destruction were attached to massive world spanning rockets, capable of hitting any place on earth, from any other place.

I’m not gonna retell the abridged version of The Cold War, that’s what 7th grade Social Studies is for.  But I am going to tell you about something that you don’t learn in 7th Grade, or in Social Studies, or Chemistry, or Physics, or school in general.  No, what I’m about to share with you is something that the history teachers think is unimportant for the average person to know.  When, when you drill down to the very basics of it, is really the entire essence of what The Cold War was all about – beating the those damned Communists.

To start off this history lesson, I present you with a video.  So get comfortable in your desks as I turn off the lights and treat you to almost 2 minutes of me not talking:

In the 1954, a strange new thing was discovered.  The Van Allen Belt you probably have been told it protects the planet from deadly cosmic radiation.  You were told correctly.  However, did you know that it mere minutes* after it was discovered, they thought to themselves “Let’s see what happens if we blow it up with a nuke.”

The US government proceeded to spend millions of dollars over the next 4 years to do that very thing.  And they didn’t have the luxury of cheap super computers to model this out, they actually fired a missile 250 miles straight up and detonated it’s 1.4 megaton payload.

I like to envision the scientists proposing this to the military with the same old tried and true method “If we don’t do it those commie bastards will”  And in 1950/60s era America, that was all the more reason to do something.  But I can’t help but imagine that after the meeting was over and the scientists walked out of the secret room in the basement of the Pentagon, giddy as schoolboys, going “I wonder what they’ll let us blow up next week?”

In the 1960s (the height of the cold war and very much in my comfort zone of 1950s era America), the most important thing in the United States Military was to beat the Communists.  It didn’t matter how, we just had to do it.  The original idea was to see if they could use the Van Allen Belt to transfer energy from a nuclear blast to a designated point on earth, and destroy it.  Kinda like an ICBM, except, without the giant missile part.  It would be a focused beam of death from the heavens.  Every commanders dream, so of course the military said yes you must figure out how to do this before those Communists do.

The official name was called Starfish Prime, and honestly, that’s an amazing name.  Unfortunately, nothing really happened.  Or, more specifically, nothing useful for the military happened.  Tons of useful data was gained from this, and thousands of civilians got a great light show out of it.

One thing it did do was prove the effectiveness of an EMP, as hundreds of street lamps were knocked out in Hawaii, almost 900 miles away from the blast.  And, as you can see in the picture, the explosion was pretty spectacular as seen from Hawaii.

In the 1950s millions were spent to do something, and get a real result, in 2010 billions are spent to come up with an idea for how to fix a problem that’s not the governments fault.

As I’ve said before, we must go back to the ideology of the 1950s is we are to prosper as a nation again.  It was that thinking of “We can do anything” that led us to develop missiles that can reach any point on earth in an hour, easily travel 3x faster then the speed of sound (when conventional science said it was impossible to go 1x faster then sound), and finally to put a man on the moon.  This kind of thinking, this kind of doing is what made America great, and what will make her great again.

{NPR}

*some time, that same day

Concepts are weird.  Some are amazing in their ingeniousness, while others just scream wtf.

This Water Shield for fruit is somewhere inbetween those two.  It’s a completely new idea, but something thats completely cool too, (in a “I wonder if this will ever work the way the picture shows” kinda way).  The idea behind it is that bugs, and germs and animals, and ghosts can make it through the plastic, or glass covers that you would put around fruit (if you put anything).  But they can’t get through water.  So a solid flow of water from a bell fountain would cover the fruit and protect it from all forms of badness from fruit flies to ectoplasm.

Now that part is all simple and very easy to make.  The neat part is that there are sensors in the top of the tower that detect your hand, and will turn off the water flow in that one spot to allow you to reach through, grab your fruit, and run away without getting you, or your loot wet in the process.

I’ll believe it when I see it.

That’s how it works, it’s really simple in theory, but then again, so is nuclear fusion.

{Technology World | Yanki Design}

Lagoa Multiphysics 1.0 – Teaser from Thiago Costa on Vimeo.

I’m no 3-D artist, or game designer, but I can tell you that that has some serious potential.  For the most part it looks entirely realistic, but who knows how much processing power that takes.  And, it looks like this is just a plugin for already existing software.  But I can see people using this as a stepping stone to move into other places.

Alls I know is that I want to see this in the Jurassic Park game.  I’d love to see the dirt move around when the t-rex presses his foot down.

{Pop-Sci | Redmotion}

I will admit the entire name of this post is based off of the first image below.  Blame chris.

Read the rest of this entry »

Why it sucks.

You may have not known, but just recently Google launched a new format for their Image Search.

For those that can’t see it, here it is:

As of right now, it seems like it’s only available though the use of Google Chrome, because as of right now, Firefox produces the same old (better) results:

I’ve come up with a list of 5 problems, and one positive part of this change.

1. The images are too close together

There’s nothing but some small white space to distinguish between each result.  Now, that’s fine for some images, but for others it can make it impossible to tell where one image starts, and another begins, and as the images get smaller, or larger, or more ununiform, the whole layout begins to look like utter crap.

2. Stop hiding vital information

I’m speaking specifically about the dimensions and the source of the image  (the image’s name is something I can honestly live without.)  But the dimensions and source are what makes each image worth important.  I like to know that when I find images from Wikipedia, they are

1. relevant to what I’m searching for
2. most likely fair use

Now, if you click the “Show Sizes” button on the left, it adds the dimensions to each image.  That helps distinguish between each image better then when it’s not there, (and should be the default view in my opinion),  but it doesn’t replace the wealth of information given the old way, the only way you see that is if you hover over the images

3. The Hover thing needs to go

I know it’s the only way to get the extra information about each picture, but its annoying and distracting times alot.  The delay is too long.  The extra step required to view the details of each image is annoying, but most importantly is this.  I am a keyboard user, meaning, I hardly ever use the mouse if I can help it.  I don’t like to move my hands from the keyboard, so I often have the mouse remain in one place for a long time.  This is a problem because as I search for images, the mouse is over an image, and it will enlarge it obstructing my viewing of the other images surrounding it.

It also messes up the practice of middle clicking on links to have them open in a new  tab.  I have to click twice now to open up the new images, or wait for the hover to load before clicking brings me to the images’ page.  This is no good, because I tend to open 6 or 7 links at a time to find the one I want, or to find multiple ones to get all at once.

4. Lazy Loading is not for lazy people

Lazy loading is the practice of loading images (or scripts, or functions or anything really), only when they are needed.  Lazy loading of images means that if the user can’t see the images, such as when it would require the user to scroll down the page, the images aren’t loaded.

It’s a (somewhat) useful trick to that webdevelopers use to speed up the loading process of webpages. The problem is, that Google encodes the images in Base64, meaning that there is no link to a file that needs to be downloaded, the browser just takes this incredible long line of gibberish:

into the above picture of immaculate Matt Damon, that whole process negates the purpose of lazy loading images.

Now, I do understand that this lazy loading of images is required to make the “infinite scroll” work, but, there are other ways you can do that, specifically, something along the lines of the way wallbase.net has their infinite scrolling set up.  You can scroll forever, and not have to wait for the images to load, and that’s the way it should be.

Right now if you scroll too fast you are treated with a gray box with the dimensions in the lower right while you wait for the images to load.  If you scroll too fast, you can miss the images entirely, not good.

I’m all for the infinite scrolling, provided it works well, right now it’s working subpar.

5. Return the grid structure.  It works.

The grid is nice, professional, streamlined, usefull, clean, simple, elegant, perfect.  Everything was the same regardless of the size of the image, and that made it easier on the eye to scan the page.  Right now everything looks cluttered, thrown together, and very amatureish.  It’s like they just output the results and didn’t care about the looks of it.

The only thing I absolutely love about the new layout is the way the images are shown when you click on them.  With a lightbox effect of the image overlain on the page, and clicking the X removes the frame and brings you to the context of the page.
(although, after 9 years I have grown used to the frame being horizontal as opposed to vertical, but that’s a change I can live with)

Funnily enough, 3 and a half years ago Google changed the Image search interface, and there was a similar uproar of dislike, and within a month, Google changed it back to the old way.

Hopefully, this new search will last less then half as long, because it is not user friendly at all.

Confession, I love Jewel.  Absolutely love, Jewel.

So finding this gem of aceness with Jewel (total pun intended) humor was great.  The makeup team did a great job disguising her as not looking like herself.  And, if it weren’t for people like Arnel Pineda, who sounds exactly like the Steve Perry, I would have questioned her at the bar had I been there.

{Zug}