What an amazing way to illustrate the different between serial and parallel processing, which is what makes video cards such a powerful general computing platform (for certain classes of problems, at least) in addition to being great at graphics.
I think they did an excellent job on this 
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I’m such a geek
Early this morning, as I do pretty much every morning, I was sitting here with the day’s first cup of coffee and reading over my RSS feeds, and found an intriguing article on Ajaxian about a new Firefox plugin from Mozilla.
Ubiquity is a Firefox plugin that adds a very slick text-based UI for running a wide variety of powerful and useful ‘commands’ :
Enter Ubiquity
Today we’re announcing the launch of Ubiquity, a Mozilla Labs experiment into connecting the Web with language in an attempt to find new user interfaces that could make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily.
The overall goals of Ubiquity are to explore how best to:
- Empower users to control the web browser with language-based instructions. (With search, users type what they want to find. With Ubiquity, they type what they want to do.)
- Enable on-demand, user-generated mashups with existing open Web APIs. (In other words, allowing everyone–not just Web developers–to remix the Web so it fits their needs, no matter what page they are on, or what they are doing.)
- Use Trust networks and social constructs to balance security with ease of extensibility.
- Extend the browser functionality easily.
That last part, the part about extending browser functionality, is of course my favorite part. There’s a much lower barrier to entry for creating custom Ubiquity commands than there is to creating Firefox add-ins, and with the live ‘on the fly’ capability of the built-in editor I was able to create a custom Ubiquity command for searching Second Life profiles. This is something I do quite commonly, often several times a day, when I get offline messages from Second Life users with questions or feedback about one of my swords, and previously I had to use a Bookmark and open a separate page to find someone.
Now, I can just do this :
So, okay… Not Earth-shattering, but I am well pleased with the amount of functionality I got with about 45 minutes worth of work, and it will definitely smooth my customer service workflow.
Here’s the Mozilla overview video on Ubiquity, which should give you a much better general overview of what it is and what it can do:
Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.
All in all, I’m very excited about Ubiquity, and am now considering creating commands to look up C:SI scores and other data (you knew that was coming, didn’t you?).
P.S.: If you are interested in the sl-who command I developed, you can get the code here, or simply visit this blog again with Firefox after Ubiquity is installed and choose to subscribe to the command when prompted.
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Just felt like posting this, for no particular reason other than the fact that I like the way my eyes appear to be glowing in this one, which is a pretty darned cool effect
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My day job entails a great deal of web/ajax work, so I subscribe to a great many blogs on such topics. Every once in a while, I see a post that is not only interesting in the context of my "billable" work, but could possibly have interesting implications for my C:SI work as well.
Today’s example is an article on Ajaxian about a javascript library that measures a "finger print" based on your typing style. I believe that the idea essentially entails measuring the timing of your typing and allows you to correlate those results to check for similarity to past tests.
While I’ve discussed somewhat similar ideas before, this idea is conceptually simpler, and I believe that it has direct application to the problems that a few people are currently reporting with the Taketori Katana.
What I’m wondering is, if I could create a similar "fingerprinting" script in LSL, could I use that to verify that the Taketori is doing what it should be doing, and doing it consistently? If I added that script to some generic attachment and provided it to those people who are reporting issues, might I be able to gather more in-depth information without the ambiguity of relying on descriptions or having to "watch and guess"?
It’s just an idea that popped in my head. I’m gonna let it brew in there while I’m supposed to be working, and see what comes of it.
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