Long time no news on Gambari.
I’d like to have some feedback on a paper i’ve wrote few days ago about a Virtual Software concept.

http://www.z-way.org/technical/vsdb

I’m actualy looking for advice about language to use.
I need to be able to describe concepts that can be translated in code, math and graph. Also this language must be distributed from web so if those conversion could occur directly on web pages that should be awesome.

Thank’s to take time for that.

Google buzz and reader are to way to share the news but i guess to create news it would not hurt to use a good old blog post.

I’ve been in Japan for about 5 months now. I’ve been studying Japanese in a community center near by. Its quite fun, I can read and write hiragana a little, でもまだじょうずじゃありません.

I’m enjoying been in Japan quite a bit. I’m staying kind of in the country side near Tokyo/Yokohama. There are many old houses and farms.

Its not uncommon to buy vegetables directly from small producers who leave them unattended with the price next to them. The climate here is tropical so its very hot and humid and it rains a lot.

Sometimes its so hot i have to take 3-4 showers a day. Thats one of the reasons I came up with the “idea” to collect rain water and use the sun to purify it (trough distillation) so i came up with a small prototype which i call the water panel The cool thing about it is that it can keep the water evenly distributed even when it is tilted at an angle.

Japan is quite up there with  green energy appliances which they usually label ECO. I’ve uploaded couple of pictures of my prototype, a Solar water heater and a roof mounted Sollar PV pannels. I have not seen roof mounted Solar personal water purification system in Japan so far.

I would like to know the actual possibilitys of making a “smart” search engine that could give you answers of your questions.

For example, let say that i want to know the birth date of Napoleon, i’m going first on google and type Napoleon brithdate, i find few links and by habit, i click on Wikipedia. There, i look in first lines to find what i’m looking for.

Is there a way of finding directly this information by asking a simple question like this? I mean noone care about looking stuff in search engine or encyclopedia but the answers.

Even better, what if i speak directly in mic asking my questions and get replyed by voice. Avoiding typing and mousing gesture for earn time.  Imagine a children playing with such application for years! Or this could in reverse made the learning process almost unusefull for most people.

Until where could we go about question complexity?

John told me few years ago about ontologie and this really blow my mind but what now? Is there something like Wikipedia but ontologie oriented more open than a “simple” dictionary?

2 years ago, i decided to rally my ideas from my own experiment around a concept. This concept is large and can’t really be describe in few lines. But there is the main ideas.

But let’s talk first about the software industry. I hate this old school business model of making desktop software, selling it, and justify annual upgrades for making money, even if we don’t know what new functionality to put, we let few new bugs, increase the binary size and make it run slower to obligate clients to buy a new computer.

In 2001, i was using a compositing software called Shake. This software was really perfect. Very fast, binary of 8Mb, impossible to crash it, very new and open philosophy, etc. It was used by the major VFX studios for make movies like Starwars or Lord of the Rings. What’s append, in 2002, Apple acquired Shake’s company and stop the smart development, stop the Windows and Irix version and make a MacOS bugy and slow one, and now this software is no longer sold and updated by Apple. But a huge part of the industry continue to work with, even with the 2001 version on Windows. For me, this example is very good, users don’t need economic upgrades but just smart tools. Another example is about the Adobe softwares, Photoshop is the leading pictures manipulation software on the market now, but what if i’m looking a little around it. Nothing new since 5 years, only attractive words around little improvement, still bugy, binary is about 1Gb now, and you need a fucking Nasa computer to work correctly. So most of the Photoshop’s operators that i know are still using older Photoshop versions. The tools was good 5 years ago, with everything to work properly, we know where are bugs and computers are fast enough now to made it run correctly.

What’s new now? Since few years are coming online apps. Google doc is a very good example of what to do. Simple app, light, easy and handy for free user and more advanced with support for clients. I love this business model.

My idea is very simple, made a complete picture manipulating online apps based on a media repository and a single rendering engine.

1 – Media Repository:

No new ideas here! I was thinking about such thing few years ago. Now such tools are very usual. Except that movie industry users need the medias to be in local network, remote web access for uncompressed pictures or video are not really possible yet. Also, a real user interface, no complexes setup, think artist way, not programmer’s way. Mesh is a very good example. With a versioning system, it could be perfect.

2- Media Manipulating Tools:

What are pictures tools? There is a bunch of software’s kind that use different GUI system for do the same things. Editing, color grading and compositing are very similar softwares. Only GUI allow you to do different things and work on different parts of the media more or less comfortably.  The main idea is to setup all those differents GUI all around the same rendering engine.

Advantages are users can define them own way of working, all clients are always up to date so no compatibility problems exchanging projects, an online plugins and scripts repository will allow users to send rendering remotly all over the world without installing new plugins, new version, etc.

A simple version could be free to let new users work and train with the app, and a professional versions could be rent with extra GUI an functionality depend of clients. More precise tools and dedicated hardware control.

The renting tools idea is really great for industry. Rather than buying very expensive tools, they could only rent software even for a day in some cases. It’s also better for manage production pipeline and operator’s licenses. It can be more precise in prices range over a project.

The Open fX project is also very interesting for making plugins inter compatible. It already exist every possible functionality. The use of GPU in 2D software still rare and not often used in smart way. GPU for make sound processing just even don’t exist yet.

Off course, the greatest probleme making such application is to find a way to make the browser’s GUI and the local media communicate together. It’s not really possible to work remotly on a web server for profesional that use a lot of uncompressed contents.

My google presentaion

3 – Media Project Tools:

No finished online tools exist for managing film, tv, print or any media projects. This could be a very good starting point making money. Free simple and graphical tools to let people get addict, and more complete and professional tools  in rent.

Conclusion:

I think that the software industry is really deeply changing. All artists that i know are really tired of existing old school softwares and they are always looking for something lighter and smarter. Of course i can talk about this for weeks. But all what i just described don’t exist yet. It should.

Does anyone have clear idea what exactly we would like to do?
Let’s answer this first.

OR

Let’s just let everyone talk here and may be something will come out of it. The Universe is a perfect place, it’s built of random (although the existence of the randomness is a controversial philosophical question) stuff and events. Let’s see what the chance will bring to us.

Here is a little concept of of magnetic articulation driven by 3 or 4 little electric engines.  The main goal is to let natural magnets hold the biggest part of the weight and use a very little energy to drive it.  It could be use as a stepper engine except that the angle could be setup very precisely. The strength of the joint could be modify without adding extra electric energy. Also the velocity factor could be very interesting. There is no mechanical contact between the 2 heaviest parts so no sound, no heat and no usury. Only the driven part: the electric motors, the driving screws and the spherical bearing will!

As i saw in many industrial manufacturer since few years, the electromagnetic bearing are now very in use. (ex: SKF)

Here is a very simple concept of natural magnet bearing:

This is an aluminium shaft with box magnet all around at 45 degrees. On each sides, i put a ring magnet in the repulsive side.  Of course, it’s a schema, so i let the rings floating in space to keep the pictures readable. So more the ring are closer from each other, more there is pressure over the whole shaft.

After that, my question was how to made this turn.  As i was studying chopper’s swashplate few years ago, i fund a way to adapt this mechanical method to my concept. Simply by creating a disharmony between the rotor’s box magnets strength like this:

So by tilting a little the rings in symmetry over it, this will give a direction to the shaft. Now the question is how to make the rings turn in symmetry without using a lot of energy? For this i setup a set of 3 driving screws to hold the rings magnet with spherical bearing. The 2 shaft’s strokes are set in an opposite stepping, that way, when i turn the shaft there are getting closer each other, or farest in opposite rotation.

Magnetic Clevis from Lempereur Bertrand on Vimeo.

Here a little schema of the Final concept:

This is with 3 shaft but it could work also with 4.

If you want to experiment some stuff with magnets:

http://www.supermagnete.fr/eng/

http://www.hkcm.de/

For industrial stuff:

http://shop.hpceurope.com/an/home_catalogue.asp

Constant Velocity Joint

New Scientist Article

Google Research blog entry

I was in Las Vegas for a while and decided to upload some pictures of my home renovation solar experiments. This is a 500 feet black hose that is connected to an old water heater. The hot water should circulate using D5 Solar circulation pump. My goal eventually is to concentrate solar energy with computer controlled mirrors or by pointing an old C-Band satellite towards the sun.

It would be cool if one can find funding for organizing green development camps. For example a group of enthusiasts can get together once a year and dedicate 7 days to get their ideas into a working prototype. A demo session at the end should show the final  result. The funding is necessary for materials, travel and accommodation. Videos and pictures can be published so that the joy is shared

While on the subject here are some other interesting flash-based apps & libs:

• Use nodes to build http://sourcebinder.org/
• Diagrams, UML http://www.gliffy.com/
• 3D libs  papervision, away, sandy, alternativa (paid,russian), jiglibflash (physics)

http://www.eyewriter.org/

Absolutely stunning

http://singularityhub.com/2009/11/23/universal-translators-are-all-around-us-video

Aesthetically speaking, I’m tired of seeing “energy efficient” structures designed around large, ugly solar panels. So this technology definitely solves that problem.

Plus, if we’re to believe numerous sci-fi movies (Matrix, Terminator, etc.) the human race will end up living underground in the future, so these cells will come in handy

I wonder if any company will be doing a partnership with the French government to use the algae as fuel. My understanding is that one can press algae and produce oil pretty much the way olive oil is produced. I can picture an old water powered mill pressing algae instead of grinding wheat and producing algae oil and fertilizer. Ahh, i guess it might not be as easy as one may think.

On Influenza A (H1N1)

Here are some references:
http://wordnet.princeton.edu/
http://protege.stanford.edu/
http://jena.sourceforge.net/
http://www.openrdf.org/
http://code.google.com/apis/wave/guide.html

Easy Low Cost No Radiation Fusion

Somewhere else, I’ve also read the US Navy approved $10B research spending for next 5 years on this project (don’t ask me why exactly US Navy)

Big Blue’s new LotusLive iNotes service starts at $36 annually per worker, compared to the $50 annually per worker that Google charges for its more comprehensive package.

It costs $3/mo and there is a trial: https://www.lotuslive.com/en/pricing/inotes.

For that slightly higher price, Google is offering 25 times more storage: 25 gigabytes per account compared to IBM’s 1 gigabyte per mailbox. Google also throws in word processing, spreadsheet and presentation applications, as well as a video channel. None of those features are included in IBM’s package.

The IBM’s solution though will probably support BlackBerry push integration for email, calendar and everything else that LotusNotes offers which is a big advantage for corporate customers.

I will definitely run the trial, will post feedback here.

PS: Translation feature would be nice to have. My be Interlecta could offer that to IBM.

As you already know from my post on Facebook our BlackBerry product was promoted on RIM’s App World as a featured application last Friday. We are now getting thousands of downloads and activations, about 400 per hour. That is good.

We get quite good exposure not only trough App World but also from other mobile portals. Although, we need to develop our business and move the company to the next stage.

It’s been couple of months already since we started looking for new funding sources. Our company Interlecta has been privately held for almost 3 years, self funded as well, but it seems it is time for a change.

Right now we are talking to several potential investors (Corp, AI’s & VC’s) that are current or potential customers of our products, but not all opportunities look that promising or suitable for us.

So, if you think that you know someone or have friend of a friend who may know someone … any ideas are welcome.

And of course, the standard finders fee will be applied to everyone that refers an investor that turns to a deal.

According to quite few specialists that I’m talking to recently next several months will be the best time to invest in start-up’s simply because there are not that many left and those that survived are expected to have a good value.

• Remote-control 24/7 Server PC/Mac/Linux box that serves as torrenting client as well as transcoding server. Every downloaded movie or TV show is compared using RegEx with Scraper information using similar methods to XBMC to gather full movie or TV show information and episode list. This builds Web Server which the Video Player can access. The user, via special Video Player with Web interface access integrated in it, can list all the movies and TV Shows on his home computer in a rich User Experience full of Fan Art, DVD Box covers, screen thumbnails and more, and can check which one is watched or not. While Web Based, the whole HTML/image pack of the remote server is cached in the background to allow the user to access a snapshot of the server’s offerings even if offline. The server also should support merging subtitles into videofiles via FFMPEG, and also must receive additional options for video/audio/subtitle track choice for MKV packagers (i.e. you can request transcoding for an anime series, by choosing default or specifying exact audio (Eng/Jap) and subtitles (Yes/No/which ones).

• Android OS Video Player. No need for fancy codec support as we will be streaming or downloading media with transcoding on demand. The user chooses what Movies or TV Shows he wants to watch. The Video Player demands these shows from the remote server, informing him about the specifics of the device – in our case, it’s an Archos PMP, so the server knows that he has to serve 800×480 MPEG-4 to the device using specific kbps setting (Archos has 500GB hard drive so it can take 1.5Mbps, but if it was a HTC Tattoo it would be 384 kbps video). The remote server starts transcoding all requested videos. It sends an estimated transcoding time to the Video Player. Using Interface bar or Home Screen Widget, the user may see how much time is required before the videos are completely transcoded. Once the videos are transcoded, or if they were transcoded previously and transcoded copy for that device exists already, it it sent to the device via background downloaded service that supports resuming if the user drops connection from time to time due to mobility. Once the video is uploaded to the device, the user may start watching it. Or, if streaming is possible, he can start watching it once certain buffering is made possible and downstream can support buffering – the user is informed in real time whether streaming will go perfectly or there may be hiccups.

• The Video Player may also support additional automation such as: (1) deleting transcoded cached and/or original copy files on local mobile device and/or remote server once the video is being completely watched; (2) merging video player UI with data from various torrent client web clients, such as mTorrent, Vuze, Transmission – see while watching what is the remote up/down ratio for the video so you know whether it is safe to delete both as data and as torrent from used torrent client.

One way to post to social network is through predefined messages. We could design an UI that detects series of swipes and taps in gestures, each gesture triggering a predefined message for sending. We could even chain several gestures to connect several short sentences or portions of a sentence. If the sentence has ad-lib locations, Voice-To-Text could fill in the blanks. Predefined Twitter messages can have variants based on Locations. (i.e. “I am still at work” may be “I am at home” if at home location) Location is based on GPS, CellID, WiFi ID Presence.

Example:

• John is running TwitterTap app. TwitterTap has a black screen interface or a Home Screen replacement which mnimics turned off phone so his boss doesn’t know he’s actually running a Twitter app. The phone screen acts as a touch sensitive Twitter/Facebook interface for entering predefined Twitter messages.

• John is at work, he was told a great joke. This made him happy.

• John taps three times on the screen. This means “I am still at work” from the predefined list of phrases. John swipes twice down up on the phone screen. Two up swipes means Positive Rank 2, which means “I am happy, because $1!”.

• The screen shows a minimalistic icon of Microphone or keyboard. Johh can add $1 = “I heard a joke” either via microphone icon voice-to-text or keyboard. Adding all ad-lib blanks shows a small, minimalistic message and approval button, or directly sends the message to all added services.

• Sometimes we don’t want to send immediately, but to remind ourselves about something that happened today when later we have time to message it. John’s taps and sweeps are enough to set a draft format that he can later at home resume (in sequence if multiple drafts) with missing information. For example, John has no time to sweet the joke today, so all he does is press a draft button, tap few letters if he wants on a virtual keyboard – “jk” for a joke – and save it as a draft. At home or while walking back to home, he pulls his phone and starts sending all the Twits. Each message comes in timeline sequence, offering him to add blanks, rewrite or remove. Each pre-defined message may have current and past mode. If John sends the message later, “I am still at work” becomes “While I was at work”, “I am happy, because $1!” becomes “I LOLed a lot, because $1!”. He decides to use voice-to-text to speak “I heard a killer joke, i’ll tweet it later” and the message is now complete. Message is auto-shortened by removing vowels, switching words for sms shortspeak etc. if longer than 140 characters, then it’s sent.

http://www.barrelfish.org/

It can be downloaded from here:

first release snapshot

If you had this technology today provided via Google Maps API, how would you use it?

raynerape@gmail.com

…and I still haven’t got one.

Why I believe Microsoft Courier can succeed?

• Self-protective design. Similar to Nintendo DS/DSi, both screens protect each other in a closed state. Apple Tablet does not promise any protective design, making caring for 7-10 inch screen an issue to consider.

• LCD Tablet for the masses. Wacom Cintiq plays Adobe’s game and holds a high price tag of $999 barring amateurs and enthusiasts from access to LCD drawing. Even without pressure sense of Wacom tablets, Courier could prove to be the best way to learn people to draw using reference material, positioning art into panels for comics or storyboards.

• Usability-minded product focus with real-life applications. Apple Tablet’s expected marketing will be too much focused on multimedia and gaming. Rumored support for iPhone apps will provide initial productivity boost but iPhone apps are known to provide constrained or pseudo-usability. It will take time, or might prove impossible, to provide the level of integration that Courier could provide out of the box.

Why I believe Microsoft Courier can fail?

• Exorbitant price. Given that demonstrations has shown Courier being targetted at designers, engineers, and such. first generation hardware can make this device unreachable for the general population at prices over $800. EeeReader from ASUS may be the alternative, stealing the basic design and cheap-ifying it.

• Closed Platform. Without SDK and third-party support, tossing information in a spiffy OneNote or drawing with MS Paint inspired Corel Painter wannabe can get old pretty fast. The worst thing that could happen to Courier is to end up a closed platform, or Apple-like cripped hardware held back by business policy not to make it too open to developers. Once again, Microsoft will have one chance to play fair ot lose the game to the taiwanese companies. ASUS would love if M$ plays El Jobso with Microosft Courier, as it’s a chance for EeeReader.

What are you going to use a Microsoft Courier in your life?

On the brighter side, Android Open Alliance is a group of Droid coders who believe Google Experience apps are not made of heavenly light and shouldn’t put tears in Cyanogen’s eyes, as they can be exchanged with fully open-source set of apps that provide the same usability. So far they are looking for complete solutions to prepackage and build up some cheap short-term hype, but I am hoping they listen to my issue-writing wisdom and develop everything from scratch in order to implement more advanced, more capable and plugin-friendly solutions that support even more services and features out of the core.

Alas, the device requires Push-to-Talk feature that needs manual reach to the device. This makes it hard to use anywhere, such as lying on the bed, standing across the room, or being anywhere you don’t have the device with you. If I were to design such a product, I would have done it a screenless computer worn around the neck, around the wrist. The device would then communicate with just about any screen-based device such as computers, mobile phones, LCD picture frames for text confirmation, or would allow direct no-confirmation posting, or screenless confirmation by text-to-voice repeating and voice command agreement to post as text, agreement to post as audio attachment (via hosting audio file) or canceling.

The BrainWatcher is a wrist-watch MP3 player with accelerometer, pulse meter, integrated flash memory and bluetooth 2.0 A2DP connectivity. The BrainWatches also includes simple DSP capable of mixing songs with alpha, beta, theta and delta(s) brainwaves in real time. BrainWatches has miniUSB for charging and connectivity. Right side of the watch has button controls, while left side is a tiny magnet strip for placement over WildCharge charging pad.

The BrainWatcher contains XML-based profile for setting up sound alarms based on combination of time, heart rate, position (standing, lying down). Alarms include playback via connected Bluetooth device (see below) of internal playlist mixed with desired alpha, beta, theta and delta(s) brain waves for set time period with set volume rate that can be modified at user set steps through playback. XML Profiles are set up via desktop application when connected via miniUSB or through Bluetooth file transfer.

BrainWatcher is accompanied with either nightstand Bluetooth speaker or can be connected to Bluetooth headset. BrainWatcher compatible devices are constantly seeking for registered BrainWatch in vicinity. When a BrainWatch is present, it will try to connect to it and play BrainWaves to the present human watch-bearer, with or without mixing with music. BrainWaves and music/no music is prioritized so if someone is sleeping with Delta Waves and no music, his playback is not overriden by Alpha waves listening wake person.

The main purpose of BrainWatcher is to provide soft emitting of brainwaves according to activity and heart rate. For example, a profile can be set that during 22:00 and 7:00, if the accelerometer finds the body laying down and the heart rate meter falls into condition of sleep, emitting Delta waves for dreaming or dreamless sleep. A profile can be set that during 9:00 and 18:00, if the accelerometer finds constant movement and the heart rate is not above undesired position, any connected Bluetooth device would emit Alpha brain waves to keep us alert and in working condition.

HILP consists of the following elements:

• Home Light Device, attached to the ceiling of a room, with 2-4 LED lights capable of emitting different color lights and attached to motors allowing automated 360 degree rotation and positioning. The Home Light Device is wired or connected wirelessly to Sound Sensors (see below), and contains grid-powered WiFi adapter for WiFi connection to home router, Bluetooth radio chip, mobile/miniature screenless computer device using web interface accessible through any screen-based web-device throughout the house, or specialized remotes.

• Sound Sensors. Spatial stereo microphones located in the corners of the room. The purpose of the sound sensors is to constantly record the sound in the room, react to sound commands and triangulate the positio of the sound source depending on the strength of the sound and the speed of sound reaches the sensors. Sound sensors are connected either wired or wirelessly to the Home Light Device. Home Light Device supports connection with as many Sound Sensors as possible – the more sensors, the more complex and precise is the sound source positioning.

Purposes of HILP:

• John wakes up in the middle of the night. “Lights on me!”, he commands. Sound Sensors catch his voice, triangulates his position and one of the LED lights rotates and casts light straight on him.

• John wants dim light to cast on the beautiful picture on the wall through the night. He walks to the picture and speaks, “Light Remember Position: Picture”. His position is remembered as “Picture” and LED light casts on him. “Set Picture to Dim”, says John. HILP remembers a property of “Picture” is Dim light. John goes to bed. “Lights on Picture”, he commands. HILP turns towards the Picture and casts dim light on it.

• John has lost his phone somewhere in his home. “Lights Find My Phone”. HILP sends a free SMS to his phone via its WiFi connection. John’s phone emits the sound for SMS. HILP is programmed to trinagulate and cast red LED light on device that emits SMS alarm. HILP casts red light on a bunch of dirty socks; John’s phone is right under them.

• HILP can record and log sound recordings in a room. It’s a perfect Big Brother device for a family in privacy denial or lifecasting. John lives alone and he’d rather speak his startup ideas out loud while in bed, without reaching his voice recorder. Because HILP has 1Gb of memory for sound buffering, John has the last 48 hours into 30-minute voice recordings cached into internal memory or immediately FTP’d or Network saved to his private server. “Lights, Save 60 minutes of recording.”, John says after speaking aloud to himself. HILP digs into buffered sound, builds a 60-minute audio file, names it according to command timedate and saves it to a /Saved folder on John’s FTP or NAS drive.

• John is exhausted and he falls asleep, and lets say he doesn’t snore. HILP is programmed to compare lack of sound with time of 22:00 as sleep time. HILP will slowly dim the lights until sleep mode of full darkness or directed light in exact position(s) is reached.

• John wakes up with a scream in the middle of the night. Immediate sound in the night could mean light is immedately cast in that direction. What if John did not wake HILP but a robber who made a loud step into the room?

• Power Pebble is a modular mobile power source. It uses a LEGO brick design where each Pebble starter kit contains one middle rectangular block, called Power Block, with charging magnets on both it’s long sides, interconnecting plugs on it’s internal long sides, and tiny LED indicators on its shorter sides. Each Power Block contains multi-cell battery unit. The user can connect unlimited number of Power Blocks together as LEGO bricks using the interconnecting plugs. Two “caps” close the Power Block from both sides providing sleek rounded design. Each “cap” is a module with specific internal functionality, powered by the Power Block they are connected to. There can be numerous caps, with a limit of 2 caps used at a time.

• Power Pebble is meant as a universal kit for building both mobile and desktop charging stands. One or two Power Blocks with Caps can be put in a laptop or messenger bag next to a device with WildCharge-compatible device and charge them while being carried in a bag. Multiple Power Blocks can align together to create travel-minded charging mega-device as a charging stand.

• Feature-wise, the powered caps that complete the Power Pebble design feature modern mobile technologies that allow the user to assign up to two features (or packs of features) to the device from a list of multiple available features that are gradually expanded with introduction of new caps or upgrades of existing caps. Each cap itself is a mini-device with a programmable firmware. Each Alarm Cap offers a MiniUSB plug for cable charging off the grid, so the device can be charged from either side. The following cap feature packs I’ve come up so far:

• Alarm cap. The default cap contains a clock with LED screen and alarm functionality and a buzzer. It can buzz user-defined alarms, create charge alarms based on Power Blocks remaining capacity, turn on or off charging alarms depending whether the Power Blocks are below or above certain capacity (do not ring in 21:00 for charging if Charging > 60%). Snap-out Wall Charge allows Pebble to be charged from a wall charger. The pebble will hang vertically while the charger is stuck in the grid horizontally.

• Connectivity Cap. Based on an ARM8 processor, this cap is a Android-OS-based screenless mobile device with Bluetooth, WiFi b/g and 3G functionality. GPS is available. Android Cap runs a WiFi server, optional 3G-to-WiFi MiFi and a Web server allowing other screen-based devices to connect to it and configure it. The following software-based tasks are pre-packaged.

** Twitter, Facebook Publish or Facebook Mail (when API available) self. GoogleTalk/XMPP Push. RSS hosted locally or proxied via online service (FeedBurner with PubSubhubbub support). Email. Create alarms in Google Calendar for charging via iCal Calendar.
** Messaging can tell devices that PowerPebble has capacity to serve them thus devices should specifically ask the user to use the Pebble. Devices with GPS can compare their own GPS data with PowerPebble GPS data and if close, could tell the user that the closest PowerPebble is in close distance. Devices can subscribe to multiple PowerPebble feeds/accounts/etc. and triangulate closest Pebble.
** Google Latitude, Fire Eagle GPS support. GPS Log support for cross-tagging media from cameras, online travel tagging services. GPS-defined Locales that trigger on or off Alarm Cap functions. For example, be alarmed of low capacity only when you return home.
** Voice Alarms via Bluetooth-connected headset. Support for headsets capable of connecting with multiple devices.

• PowerBag is a line of laptop and messenger bags that contain integrated wireless charger in its design. One of its compartments is meant for placing 4-cell or 6-cell PowerPebble. The whole interior of a PowerBag is lined up with multiple magnets (both compartment sides and compartment bittom) allowing any device placed inside to snap attached and charged if needed by just being carried in a PowerBag. PowerBag has handy MiniUSB connector that allows to “plug” the PowerBag to the grid and thus charge both the residing PowerPebble but also any device inside the bag. Power Bag also has wireless charger magnets on it’s exterior bottom, for placing over PowerPebble stands instead of wired charging via miniUSB

• Solar Carrying Bag. Carrying Bag for PowerPebble of up to 8 Power Blocks, using velcro connections to stay together as a bag, but can be expanded to a canvas 32 Copper Indium Gallium diSelenide solar panels, with a miniUSB charger for connecting to PowerPebble via any of its Caps. PowerBog can have models with solar panels attached to it.

They have created a virtual pack of neurons that acts just like the real thing, and hope to get an e-brain up and running.

All hope is not lost. Genes don’t really code the body like blueprints do for a building, mapping out every single detail; instead, they give a more general instruction and hit the “repeat” button a few million times (e.g. when they give fractal instructions). This means that amid the great complexity of the whole brain, there are structural units that repeat themselves. One such structure is called a neocortical column (NCC): a group of about 10,000 neurons in the cerebral cortex that are organized in a relatively consistent way across the mammalian brain. Millions of these columns compose the whole of the brain.

Check out this video that flies you through their virtual brain:

Flying through the column

and here is project home page

http://bluebrain.epfl.ch/

The Blue Brain runs on IBM’s Blue Gene/L (btw: there is one is Sofia since last year, but currently I have no idea how I can get hands on it, and actually not sure what to do with it) supercomputer, one of the top five supercomputers on the planet.

Nice to see the good old gang together again. This takes me back to the times I love to remember.

I’ll do my best to write my posts in proper English. However, probably my English will not always be as “proper” as I wish it to be. In such cases, I hope that you guys will be not so polite and will kick my ass as strong as you can. I believe that criticism is one of evolution’s driving forces. And I mean this not only for the language case but in general.

Since I’m using this post just to introduce myself here at gambari.org (great name John! ), I’ll finish it with an ancient video, which had huge impact on me. I’m pretty sure you are familiar with it, but I hope you’ll be glad to see it one more time.

I am personally most interested in micro-robots which are considered those that are in size less that 1 cubic inch. The Ants from MIT (http://groups.csail.mit.edu/lbr/ants/) is very good example.

The Swiss EPFL institute had done great deal of research and work in that area. Not all the pages are currently active, but they have archives of most of their projects. Here are some links:

• http://diwww.epfl.ch/lami/ – The LAMI (Microprocessor Systems Lab) – the founder is now running this business: http://www.didel.com/.
• http://asl.epfl.ch/epfl/ – ASL/LSA Autonomous Systems Lab.

Here: http://nanolab.me.cmu.edu/projects/waterrunner/ – a project from Carnegie Mellon University – Water Runner Robot.

Of course Linux has its share in the business too: http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News/Open-source-robotic-simulation-packages/ – “Open source robot simulation software simplifies the creation of physical …”. IBM are in the business too – http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-robotools/.

For  “iFanatics” there is that silly walking  iPhone robot (http://robots.net/article/2670.html) create by Japanese eningeer Kazu Terasaki.

If you want to start practice here you can find some gear:

• http://www.acroname.com/
• http://www.robot-electronics.co.uk/
• http://www.active-robots.com/
• http://www.allelectronics.com/
• http://www.newmicros.com/

… and some tutorials:

• http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/step/index.html

Other links that you may fond interesting:

• http://robots.net/
• http://www.solarbotics.com/