Archive for the 'Links' Category

Singularity Summit 2007

For all who are interested in the progress and current state artificial intelligence, interesting talks of this year’s summit of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence can be found here. Only a few have transcripts available, the others are only available as podcasts and sometimes hard follow. But there are lot of interesting ideas and thoughts to hear.

High Scalability

Found recently a interesting site concerning highly scalable web architectures, High Scalability. If you go through the realized architectures you see nearly never ASP or JEE (but at least some Java). Most C/C++, MySQL and Memcached besides various script languages seemed to be in favor.

Transactional Memory Garbage Collection

I#ve found a interesting paper published at OOPSLA 2007 by Dan Grossman where he points to the similar patterns in the concept of Transactional Memory and Garbage Collection. The paper is not only well written by itself it is also a good source for finding more resources for both concepts. I also think that his claims are right: Transactional Memory will never need hardware support (as was similar claimed in the beginning for GC), that TM will need more time as expected to become mainstream and that it will not make concurrency programming much easier (but it will certainly help to prevent us from visiting the most silly traps again and again …)

OSCON 2007

Great presentations form the O’Reilly OSCON 2007 conference.

Never get lost on Web 2.0

A fascinating map of trends in 2007!

Some amazing applications with pictures

Google has started a new feature in Google Maps, Street View. Now you can walk through selected places in the US and watch panoramic photos along the streets. This is not so new, but what is amazing is the free navigation along the streets so you can go sight seeing!
The second fascinating thing is Photosynth, presented by the TED2007 conference. Scott Hanselmann posted this information on his blog but it is really a create technology that is worth reposting. What it does is basically to align collections of images of a specific object taken from different viewpoints one to another via automatic feature extraction. What you get is a reconstructed 3D structure of the object which can be viewed as far as pictures are available. Supported is this with the seamless zooming technology of Seadragon which allows to operate with extreme large image collections in real time.

News that is “overlooked” by commercial media

Not only Europe, also the USA has a de facto censorship of the press which is currently by far stronger than every time in the history because of the stupid and commercial interestingWar on terrorism“. A lot of stories pill be actively or indirect prohibited for publications. These two sides at least publish interesting ones on the internet.

The value of podcasts

I personally ignored podcasts a long time, maybe mainly I am not one of the kids with iPod. But since I got my current mobile, which has wireless LAN and a very good speaker, I learned that there are a lot of good podcasts out there. The nice thing is now, that my device loads automatically all new podcasts eposides in the night and whenever I’ve time I can listen to them. This makes it fool proved for lazy people like me … now what are my favorites:

  • Hanselminutes
    Scott Hanselman has not only a good website concerning hacking in the Microsoft ecosystem, his weekly podcast is also one of the best.
  • Software Engineering Radio
    The podcast presents very good interviews with bright and celebrated people in software engineering.
  • Agile Toolkit Podcast
    Very good interviews from the bright side of the force.
  • Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders
    This is definitely my all time favorite: Stanford brings it’s lectures on entrepreneurship as podcasts and you can listen to people you maybe will never meet but which have thoughts and experience that you will never hear from most people here in Europe. So event if you are not so interested in talks about entrepreneurship, listen to it, it will be interesting!

There are a lot of other good podcasts out there, but at least this four have a constant high quality for their episodes. If only Google Tech Talks can be subscribed as podcasts …