FreeBSD is back to its incredible performance and now can take advantage of multi-core/CPUs systems very well... so well that some benchmarks on both Intel and AMD systems showed release 7.0 being faster than Linux 2.6 when running PostreSQL or MySQL.

andlinux

andLinux is a complete Ubuntu Linux system running seamlessly in Windows 2000 based systems (2000, XP, 2003, Vista [32-bit only]). This project was started for Dynamism for the GP2X community, but its userbase far exceeds its original design. andLinux is free and will remain so, but donations are greatly needed.

Tunnelling MySQL Over SSH

To set up a tunneled connection to a MySQL server at remotehost.com, you can issue the following two commands on any client:

ssh -fNg -L 3307:127.0.0.1:3306 myuser@remotehost.com
mysql -h 127.0.0.1 -P 3307 -u dbuser -p db

The first command tells ssh to log in to remotehost.com as myuser, go into the background (-f) and not execute any remote command (-N), and set up port-forwarding (-L localport:localhost:remoteport ). In this case, we forward port 3307 on localhost to port 3306 on remotehost.com.

float InvSqrt (float x){
float xhalf = 0.5f*x;
int i = *(int*)&x;
i = 0x5f3759df - (i>>1);
x = *(float*)&i;
x = x*(1.5f - xhalf*x*x);
return x;
}

Finding the inverse square root of a number has many applications in 3D graphics, not least of all the normalisation of 3D vectors. Without something like the nrm instruction in a modern fragment processor where you can get normalisation of an fp16 3-channel vector for free on certain NVIDIA hardware if you're (or the compiler is!) careful, or if you need to do it outside of a shader program for whatever reason, inverse square root is your friend.

Jawr is a tunable packaging solution for Javascript and CSS which allows for rapid development of resources in separate module files. Writing a simple descriptor properties file, and using a servlet and a tag library are all the requirements to use it.
[...]
Jawr offers the best of both worlds, by combining a powerful bundling-minifying-compressing scheme for optimal service in production, with a rapid development mode for quick change-save-test cycles.

Users specify a map function that processes a key/value pair to generate a set of intermediate key/value pairs, and a reduce function that merges all intermediate values associated with the same intermediate key.

skynet

Skynet is an open source Ruby implementation of Google’s Map/Reduce framework, created at Geni.com. With Skynet, one can easily convert a time-consuming serial task, such as a computationally expensive Rails migration, into a distributed program running on many computers.

Howto: Encode H.264 Video for the iPod using ffmpeg Homer's picture Mon, 05/02/2007 - 6:57am — Homer

Save this script somewhere, e.g. /usr/local/bin/podit, then chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/podit

#!/bin/sh
# Name: podit
# Summary: iPod H264 640x480 video transcoder script.
# Version: 1.1.1
# Date: 2007.07.11
# License: GPL Version 3 or Later
# URL: http://slated.org/howto_transcode_h264_for_ipod_with_ffmpeg

The Google Chart API returns a PNG-format image in response to a URL. Several types of image can be generated: line, bar, and pie charts for example. For each image type you can specify attributes such as size, colors, and labels.

You can include a Chart API image in a webpage by embedding a URL within an tag. When the webpage is displayed in a browser the Chart API renders the image within the page.

I found out this is on sale:

Canon EF 50mm f1.4 USM

The 4GB compact flash card is a good fit in digital cameras:

Kingston CF/4GB-S 4 GB ElitePro CompactFlash Card

I'm still on the fence about a flash... I've been relying on quality lens, and willing to loose a shot. But this flash is onsale as well:

Canon Speedlite 580EX II Flash

Anyone else have a 20D???

TinyGraphs

TinyGraphs is an open source Excel add-in that creates sparklines, mini column graphs, and area graphs from a row of data. It generates beautiful tiny graphics that are as small as a cell and is useful for visualizing large quantities of data, such as stock prices and exchange rates.

Mini PC cottage industry, is dead at 6

The Intel D201GLY is a PC motherboard that’s referred to as a MicroATX when it fact it’s the same size as Via’s popular Mini-ITX motherboard. The product comes with a “Celeron” Model 215 1.33 GHz CPU with 27 watt TDP (Thermal Design Power) based on a single core version of the “Yonah” processor which is slightly better than a Pentium 4 2 GHz processor.

Selecting a Wireless Sensor Development Platform

This article will present the problems a designer will face when implementing a wireless sensor network and the factors that are important in deciding which development platform to select. [...]
One of the more interesting parts of the software layers in a wireless sensor network is the Zigbee software stack. Texas instrument offers a free version of the stack called Z-Stack. Z-Stack is compliant with the Zigbee 2006 specification and several platforms. A link to TI's offering is given here: http://focus.ti.com/docs/toolsw/folders/print/z-stack.html
[...]
In order to build support for TCP/IP, USB mass storage devices or provide parallel execution of software tasks one needs to resort to a RTOS. A good free one for sensor devices is Tiny OS. For more information the reader is encouraged to visit the following web sites: www.tinyos.net, and www.sensinode.com.