Archive for May, 2006
May 23, 2006 at 9:52 am · Filed under General
Just recently, I was researching some CG stuff and I had an impulse to look up an old system I had to work with. The system was called Graphics Kernel System, or GKS. It was an ISO standard and it was designed to make graphics easier… for systems in the 1970’s :-). It could work on anything from an old Texktronix storage tube terminal to a ‘modern computer with a raster display’. ‘Raster’? Who came up with that word?
Anyways, if you aren’t getting the inference, the system was not designed for ‘interaction’, but I had to try and wrangle that out of it anyways. The user (a Dr. of Neurology), needed to zoom or focus on layers, etc. Why was I even using such a system in 1990/1991? Lets just call it ‘external reasons’. In reality, a Macintosh or the new ‘Microsoft Windows’ product would have done a better job.
Short story, whenever I did try to turn on the input device sample mode (or whatever that was), I would bring consume 100% CPU from my machine, SOMA. Soma was a 3mips Microvax. Anyways, this ’sample mode’ stunt would then cause the cluster to go down… which would then start affecting all the file shares and terminals in the lab 
I did this 3 times, and then declared GKS ‘a little too ancient’. (Side note: Dave’s machine was AXON. I can’t really remember if my machine was SOMA or GLIA… so long ago!)
Then I started looking for information on the machine that I was working on. It was some device that would push solutions through various micropore filters and analyze the conductivity or flourescence as time went on (UPDATE: I emailed the Principal investigator of the lab and he told me it was an HPLC - High Performance Liquid Chromatographer). I still can’t remember the name, but… I remembered the Dr. I worked with.
Dr. Mordecai Globus was the researcher. He was an Israeli, I believe, who was quite known in his field. As I did a google search, I found out several things about him.
First. This is the lab that I worked at and here is the great stuff that they did on hypothermia as a treatment for stroke.. I now the faces behind each of those names. I worked with those people every day for a few years and hey were all the real deal… good people.
My searches also revealed that Dr. Globus died in 1996. I wasn’t very close to him, but I did have a work relationship with him. The guy had a great laugh, and he laughed often. I never remember him saying anything negative about anyone (truth!). We all called him ‘Morty’.
Then I find out that he has an award named in his honor! The American Heart Association has the Globus Award. This is such a good thing.
If you haven’t read the links above, I encourage you to do so.
May 22, 2006 at 10:35 am · Filed under General
I was just thinking about open source. They really changed the world with the idea of getting programmers to work for free.
Can we take it further?? I think we can!
How about this - Super Open Source
How is it different? Well, it goes like this. The programmer makes the software and then pays you to use it! C’mon, you know it… this is the future!
(yes, this is sarcasm. Unfortunately, I wasn’t the first to think of this. A lot of people who create open source are paying, but their currency is time.)
May 22, 2006 at 8:53 am · Filed under General
Something to check out in the future, FreeNAS.
May 15, 2006 at 10:15 am · Filed under General
I never want to lose this picture
May 12, 2006 at 12:47 pm · Filed under General
I was cleaning out my old email, and I ran across this old message to myself from from December 3, 2003. I was telling myself to remember some of the great things about OS 9. If I remember correctly, I even ran an old Dragon emulator to run a copy of the OS image that someone put up.
Thanks to Wikipedia, there is now a good page about OS 9. I highly recommend reading it because I still consider this OS to be a good design.
From what I remember, the OS was much more elegant than any other system. All of the modules were very small, yet still powerful. Re-use was a hall mark of the system. It didn’t have a true MMU, but it was one of the first to support an MMU in the early 1980’s on a simple microprocessor.
Think about it: it supported true multitasking, a unix I/O model. Its ABI was very cool… it used the carry register for boolean returns. You could read the asembly description of a module and understand what was happening very quickly.
(Note to me: look at IDup in ioman.asm)
Where was it weak?
It didn’t support threading, tcp, ethernet, large memory sizes, and improved linker technology. For some reason, they had a lot of innovation and then it sort of stopped. I wonder if the original engineers left early in the process.
May 12, 2006 at 12:21 pm · Filed under General
This is the new Dell XPS station ID released at E3 this year. Very cool looking PC!
May 12, 2006 at 9:46 am · Filed under General
So, Carl Icahn, a famous investor lost $66 million recently. Meanwhile, in his Hall of Justice headquarters, Warren Buffet pulls in a $771 profit on the deal. Carl Icahn essentially gave Mr. B a check for $66 million. Nice.
What did we learn?
My take away… Warren’s got better people running numbers for him. He was able to accurately predict the exhuberance of the real estate market. Having a hurricane or two sure didn’t hurt either.
May 11, 2006 at 11:44 am · Filed under General
There is an article over at sitepoint on a rounded corner technique for DIV’s called Spanky Corners. The big upside is that it only requires a single div and the CSS takes care of the rest. Kinda neat and an interesting CSS puzzle if you are into stuff like that. I also liked their technique for generating the the rounded corner gifs. Very clever.
As a side note. This is also another example of why programmers are bad at HTML design. They leave it to the designers for figure out how all the CSS rules and exceptions (quirks) work.
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