 | Eisneim on Online VFX |
 | jyonkov on Google Code Jam |
| jyonkov on Apple vs Adobe |
 | Daniel Radev on Apple vs Adobe |
| jyonkov on Apple vs Adobe |
Good day,
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.
Its been a while since I’ve posted anything here…
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.
Since 2 years, i’m playing around with natural permanent magnet. I’m really surprise that nobody is using this natural force as it should. There is a lot of new way to explore.
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/
For industrial stuff:
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
It would be cool if Hristo can share his prototypes on the blog… Unfortunately we are blocked by the language barrier and until we get this blog to be multilingual. Its quite challenging to get oneself to write in its own language already… About the solar prototypes, i think CSP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrating_solar_power looks very promising.
I like the idea about the camps!
It will be really cool. Somewhere in the mountins or even in Hroisto’s backyard, about noon everyone is already drunk and generates hundreds of new ideas. 
PS: Don’t bring any females though, they will spoil it all.
PPS: So, may be in the cold mountins is better idea, women don’t like to go there anyways, so no need to convince them. 
I’m glad you like the camps… I think Bertrand is also exited about it. We may even be able to raise funds for it, assuming there are projects themes, goals and people willing to share their thoughts ahead of time in order to do some preparations. Lets go for it.
For a while now I’ve been thinking about using knowledge representation – Ontologies as a base for creating a modular Natural Language Processing system focused on extracting structured data from unstructured. For example we can create/use Ontologies (models) that describe “simple” concepts like: Address, Time, Task, Expense, Transaction etc… and use them to “match” information from a text stream. The reason i’m writing this is because i think that there is a common ground for collaboration… I know Stefan is interested in RDF/OWL, the company that Neven is involved is in a very near domain and finally i was playing with Google Wave which i think is a good platform for creating intelligent bots that will be very easy to distribute if they turn out to be useful :)
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
Although I’m currently not even in near domain (kernel level C driver development is not even close by any means) it is very interesting to me and would gladly participate…
Awesome, I’ll try to start with some examples “soon”
I want to add a few NLP projects that I personally find interesting: openNLP, which is in Java, and NLTK, which is in Python.
Thanks Nikolay, I browsed around the links you provided and stumbled on Apache UIMA, a graduated IBM Research project which has recently been approved as an OASIS Standard. I think that it could be used as a framework in which we can plug our NLP modules when they mature.
It seems pretty good, but why it’s still in the incubator… since 2006?
Here’s one project that uses Apache UIMA – SEASR. It has interesting stuff such as sentiment analysis.
This is very interesting topic indeed.
Knowledge representation is just one part of the process. It is relatively simple task to represent knowledge in a digital form no mater how complex structures or algorithms you should use or how much processor power and memory you will need. But the task does not end with the representation of this knowledge, you need to do something with it.
One of the obstacles that existed before was the enormous quantities of information that need to gathered first and then process them, but now with Google and all other web-spiders and similar, collecting the information is feasible.
By the way, Google machine translation is mostly based on what they find on the web and they think one is translation of the other. It’s a version of the statistical machine translation. Others use other sources for parallel corpora such as books, legal documents, etc.
I will do a parallel here, like the hypothetical best compression algorithm is very similar to a random generator – in its behavior and the result that it produces, in a similar way the perfect machine translation engine is very similar to the best knowledge representation and processing system. It should be in fact a representation of the entire human knowledge with the ability to derive new representations of it in form of one human language or another.
I like the idea of presenting a program by what it does. The computer language and the computer behavior pair are not very different from humans’ language and respectively their behavior. One day we will be creating programs just by example given to the some kind of knowledge processor that will convert it to a machine code based on what we expect that program to do, just by giving verbal examples.
I forgot to mention that there was a worldwide recognized NLP conference in Bulgaria, in September, that I was invited to attend but couldn’t for reasons beyond my control, organized by the Bulgarian Academy of Science. The lecturers were mostly from EU and few from US.
Also, don’t take seriously what I’m saying here about NLP, I’m not proficient enough in that area. 
Hello ! I’m not sure what an ontology is.I’m not a Linguist. Let’s say “ontology” is the grammar way of building a sentence(in English). As I have a simple Language processor( Phrase generator ) , we are able to connect a pattern /logical or even derived relational database with different “ontologies”/patterns to Phrase generator. And we are not talking about Natural language processing, and for Virtual Natural Language Processor
“ontology” may become every grammatic rule.
As you can connect one Application to different databases, you are able to create a pure Logical database based on Artifficial Intelligence with predicats connected to the Application with recurent conections(not database) based on Neural networks Theory. And so, this Application becomes a BOT to communicate with
the beginning( reference ) :
http://www.languagetool.org/ ( be a patient and smart )
http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/node/2297
Here is an interesting open source project built from scratch in a collaboration between ETH Zurich in Switzerland and Microsoft Research Cambridge in the UK – a scalable new OS architecture for multi-core systems
It can be downloaded from here:
I can’t believe that you’re promoting a project in which Microsoft is participating.
It is quite impressive proof-of-concept OS, I can imagine Linux implementing something like that long before Microsoft moves to Windows 8.
Actually there is an open source project Grand Central, which aims to make multi-core applications support easier. The thing is it’s an API, not a whole OS. Both approaches have their advantages and disadvantages…
Another problem for some of us (not me obviously) is that it originates from Apple…:)
But it’s not fully open-sourced yet, is it? I also read that there are several fully open-sourced solutions available already.
It is fully open-source already a month or two.
Less than a month ago for sure, but I remember that only parts of the whole thing got open-sourced and under an incompatible with Linux license. Anyway, I don’t plan to move back to C/C++ and neither to start using Objective-C so it’s of no use to me. For parallel programming, Java has everything I need, but I also see myself using Scala or Erlang in the near future.
Everything Apple opensouced is compatible with Linux Licenses (WebKit, Darwin) as far as I know.
Otherwise I hear a lot of buzz about Scala and Erland these days, but for know I’m in the kernel level C land (and PHP for some private projects)…:)
Stop it, appel fanboi, you! I think Ars Technica knows better!
PHP sucks even though it’s my day job now. One of the best Web frameworks today is Lift, which is based on Scala. Erlang is a different beast, which even Amazon AWS is using. So, it’s not just buzz around those two. There are many projects using Erlang nowadays. Twitter is using Scala for all their backend stuff.
BTW, here’s a fresh off the oven Erlang-based Web Framework ridiculously named Chicago Boss.
One last pro-Erlang comment… Yaws is one of the fastest web servers known to date which outperforms Apache. You can find many other benchmarks on the web, but they all use static content, which is not a real World benchmark (unless you’re running a porn site).
Having in mind that porn is 80% of internet traffic, static content tests are more then enough…:)
Disagree. It’s not porn but marketing landing sites, that drive static web forward. Porn has already moved to Web 2.0 services to the most part.
Truly my last comment – pinkie promise! Look at one newer Erlang Web server, which has a Comet-based chatroom implemented in 57 lines of code!
The OS in question is a prototype OS used as a testbed for development of a new kernel and libraries for better support of multi-core processotrs. It’s nothing a consumer should be excited about, but it makes sense for Microsoft to test technology on a clear slate rather than try to cram it in Windows 7 and spend twice the time working around limitations. Besides, Windows 8 is still supported to be a complete rewrite, breaking compatibility except for VM-ing old apps…
Lately I have been thinking of methods of intelligently power up mobile devices through additional mobile power sources by using all currently available technologies and design solutions on the market. With wireless charging finally becoming a mass market reality through WildCharge, I am both excited and in the same time disappointed how little of the potential is actually covered by WildCharge. I decided to write down a quick list of features of a prototype product I’ve come up as the PowerPebble
** 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.
I am still trying to expand the PowerPebble concept from a feature-rich wireless mobile charger to any sort of disruptive technology.
Point for expansion: Several PowerPebbles can communicate with each other via their Communication Cap, via Bluetooth or 3G/WiFi PowerPebbleRSS subscribe, or eMail, XMPP, etc. What information can a Pebble send to another Pebble unit. A Pebble could alarm the user to remove devices when its capacity is low, and then tell other Pebbles to alarm via sound the user to move devices there. Pebble1: “I’m dead. Sorry, user!”, Pebble2: “I’m up for the task. Gimme devices!”, Pebble3, demonstrating smart behavior based on data: “Your Pebble1 is dead and Pebble2 is in use, hey I’m almost dead too so please charge me and Pebble1 when you get home OK? Here, I set your Google Calendar for 18:30 and your HTC Hero will scream bloody murder even if I’m dead.”; You can also prepare for a travel and tell your Pebbles how many recharges you need. User: “Pebbles, I have added my HTC Hero profile to your databases. My HTC Hero operates for 5 hours on a heavy use. I need to travel 25 hours, so I need 5 recharges of my 1350 mAh HTC Hero. ” Pebble1: (is dead, doesn’t respond), Pebble2: “Count me in, I provide 3 charges”, Pebble3, smart behavior again, demonstrating receiving 2nd-pass data from web interface: “One charge from me, I see you only got 3 charges so far, charge me so I provide the remaining one!”, User via Web Interface: “Okay, thanks Pebbles, I’ll charge Pebble1 and leave Pebble3 as it is”.
Public or Paid PowerPebbles: Operating PowerPebbles in a similar fashion to what FON does for WiFi. Implement option to turn on or off PowerBlock’s magnet wireless charging via Communication Cap. Hotels, cafes and such can set up a Kiosk (or allow any other Web device) to web-connect to PowerPebble. Use Nokia Money, PayPal or Credit Card API to pay for number of hours operation of the PowerPebble, get temporary WiFi account to use Pebble as WiFi or MiFi point. Successful payment allows PowerPebble to charge for the next X hours.
Not as disruptive but a must for the iPod generation.
I think it’s a good idea and all electronics should be designed similarly to the Swarm Robotics post below.
It’s kinda off topic, but Yonel had some crazy ideas in the past (which turned not to be so crazy) – wirelessly powering devices on big distances using lasers.
I’d be very interested to see that idea in a written form. I am quite interested about safety implications. While a bird or two can be sacrificed in the name of wireless charging, a plane off course cannot.
The idea came to me while studying about lasers in high school. Its simple to describe but probably very difficult to implement realistically and impractical for electricity transmission. (more likely something else …). Basically some lasers ionize air and ionized air is the shortest path for a high voltage electrical discharge. The key words for this type of phenomenon should be (Laser Induced Tunnel Ionization, laser-guided electric discharge in air … etc.)
I am not sure how safe such method of electricity transmission is, although it could probably be used with impulses rather than constant laser flow?
Here is a wireless powering from Sony!
Here’s another wireless electricity idea.
I like something about the idea of power bricks communicating with each other. There can be multiple algorithms for charging and providing power on demand from a group of interconnected power bricks replacing todays complicated central charge and drain controllers.
BTW, is Duracell myGrid a re-branded WildCharge?
Apparently yes, I think it’s a rebranding so Duracell can offer its own complete solution. The design is the same. It’s a shame though, as the current design size is really not comfortable for charging dozens of devices, especially larger ones such as netbook and notebook charging (Dell already announced a laptop with WildCharge charging).
If you’re planing to produce electricity off-the-grid you may need to think about a way to store electricity until the time you actually need it. The first thing that comes to mind is batteries. Unfortunately deep cycle batteries are expensive and like many other batteries their power reduces with time. I think that flywheels have a great potential of becoming the short-time (6h-24h) energy storage devices of future. I’m quite exited about building a prototype based on the Top toy and “Bedini motor”.
Here are several companies that manufacture UPS using flywheels:
http://www.pentadyne.com
http://www.activepower.com
Using flywheels is a really interesting approach!
Bertrand
Stefan Stefanov
ihayes2000
Jean
jyonkov and 
Apostol Apostolov, 
I think that it will be more efficient if the sun reaches the water directly, through a glass or transparent pipes. Rubber is not very good temperature conductor, it is actually very good isolator. Hristo (from Kozarevec), who has some experience, is using combination of sun heated water with gas burner or just regular wood-fire heater.