Gagan explores thoughts and ideas on technology and business.
Homeless in NY
CNN.com reports this story about a college student who says he spent eight months sleeping in a library basement because he couldn’t afford campus housing. New York University officials eventually discovered an online journal the student kept about his experiences and relocated him to a free dorm room eventually.
Stanzak, who dubbed himself “Bobst Boy” on the Web site, says he washed in the library’s bathroom and took occasional showers at friends’ apartments and dorm rooms.
3 - Dimensional Searching - The Next Stage in the Internet Search Domain
Wired.com discusses the new paradigms dealing with the next stage of evolution in the internet search domain. The mind-boggling speed and reach of Internet search engines mask a severe limitation: They are powered by words alone. But the world is full of objects and patterns. Now computing researchers have developed search engines that can mine catalogs of three-dimensional objects, like airplane parts or architectural features.
All the users have to do is sketch what they’re thinking of, and the search engines can produce comparable objects.
“The idea of information and knowledge, and retrieval of knowledge, has been something I’ve been intrigued with for a long time. This gives it a more solidified meaning,” said Karthik Ramani, a Purdue University professor who created a system that can find computer-designed industrial parts. Ramani expects his search engine will serve huge industrial companies whose engineers often waste time and energy designing a specialized part when someone else has already created, used or rejected something similar.
With the Purdue search engine, designers could sketch the part they need and instantly see dozens in inventory that might fit the bill. If an item seems close, but not quite right, designers can see a “skeleton” of the part and manipulate it on their computer screens — make it longer or shorter or curved, for example — and then query the database again.
So how can computer programs look for objects? The breakthrough is the voxel. Digital camera owners are familiar with pixels — the basic element of a digital image. Each pixel is a tiny grain of color. Similarly, a voxel is the basic element of a three-dimensional object that is represented in a computer. Each voxel represents the volume of the object at any given point.
In Ramani’s program, for example, stored CAD designs and entries sketched by users are converted into voxels. Then voxel patterns are compared for similarities. Because the voxels represent volume rather than just shape, the program can sniff out, say, a coffee cup, which is mostly hollow but might have a solid handle.
Microsoft Reaches out to Developers
Microsoft Corp. has recently come up with a new site called Channel 9 that combines a host of social networking technologies in a move to improve communications with outside software developers. The site uses weblogs, mobile blogs, wikis and forums as well as other technologies to reach out to developers. The site was created by a group of five engineers and technology evangelists at Microsoft; it was named after the United Airlines in-flight audio channel that allows passengers to listen in on cockpit communications.
The welcome message on the site reads,”We think developers need their own Channel 9, a way to listen in to the cockpit at Microsoft, an opportunity to learn how we fly, a chance to get to know our pilots. Five of us in Redmond are crazy enough to think we just might learn something from getting to know each other.”
Channel 9 seems to be all about creating a new level of communication between Microsoft and developers — beyond the news groups, blogs and the press releases. Microsoft has been pursuing this initiative quietly, and has already been selecting and naming a select group of developers and users as MVPs — or Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals. Over 2,500 people have been awarded MVP status till now.
BTW, for the uninitiated, Weblogs, or blogs, are personal-journal-type entries on a Web page, mobile blogs are Web pages with pictures taken using a camera phone, and wikis are user-editable Web pages.
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