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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Wouldn’t you know it… Pretty much as soon as I was ready to get back into SL and start updating stuff, my laptop dies. This weekend the fan on my main laptop starting making the most horrible racket you ever want to hear from a computer, and within hours the fan stopped rotating altogether. I’ve been able to limp by without it by doing only the bare minimum of light work on this machine such as sending emails and light web browsing, but I’m pretty sure the machine would be reduced to a pile of smoking rubble if I even *attempted* to load Second Life.
Apparently I’m not the only one with this problem; as you can see if you click the image above, it seems to be fairly common with this model. This is the third time now that I’ve had to replace the fan, and being essentially poor financially embarrassed, I cannot afford to have the machine repaired by a qualified laptop repair technician, so I’ll be doing the work myself. I finally received my new fan this morning, so I’ll be starting the swearing and crying sensitive operation after I get a few cups of coffee in me.
If you’ve ever had to replace the fan on an HP laptop, you’ll probably share my urge to kill intense hatred for the designers who must have thought that it was perfectly logical to put the only moving part on the entire machine in such a place that you have to literally remove every other component to get to it. That’s right, as steelclash’s photo above shows, you actually do have to pull your laptop completely apart to replace the fan. And it’s a harrowing experience for me, one that I am really not looking forward to.
Once I get that done, though, I’ve got a bunch of code changes to update for the Taketori, and I will try to get an update released as soon as possible. I doubt that I will be able to accomplish that today, because certainly once I finally log in I will be unable to get much work done because I’ll be catching up, paying rents, etc, etc. But I will try to get it done and delivered by this weekend.
Among the important issues that this update will address are the stamina bug and the backward compatibility issue. I’ll provide more information in another post as soon as I am able, but I can feel the spot just left of the laptop’s touchpad getting warmer than I’d like so I’m going to wrap up this post and shut ‘er down in preparation for the butchery repair procedure.
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