Archive for May 2011

WTF is… 4G

The great thing about standards, as some wit once said, is that there are so many to choose from. Mobile phones have a multiplicity of standards, nested within one another like a messy set of Russian dolls filled with alphabet soup. WTF is… 4G article tells about the newest hot mobile phone standard. The ‘generations’

The Architecture of Open Source Applications

Here is one interesting book for all coders. The Architecture of Open Source Applications book has a goal to change the fact that most software developers only ever get to know a handful of large programs well. In the book, the authors of twenty-five open source applications explain how their software is structured, and why.

Listening ground loops

There is a way to “hear” the potential in different parts of your system. The method for checking audible noise is to take an amplifier and some magnetic field picking sensor. You can use a coil connected to a microphone amplifier. Or you can take an old cassette player, remove the magnetic pickup that reads

Google Hamina data center details

Google’s Latest Data Center Is Cooled Entirely With Ocean Water article tells about newest Google data center. Google has a new video showing how it’s using sea water to cool its new data center in Hamina, Finland. The water is sucked in through granite tunnels (the site used to be a paper mill and the

555 AM radio

I have earlier written about 555 timer design contest. The contest is over and winning circuits have been found. Here is one very interesting contest entry (got second place in Minimalist category): AM radio receiver built around 555 timer IC. Look at the following video that presents the circuit.

Android versions

Android Developers Platform Versions page provides data about the relative number of active devices running a given version of the Android platform. This can help you understand the landscape of device distribution and decide how to prioritize the development of your application features for the devices currently in the hands of users.

Angry Birds in web browser

You can now play Angry Birds on the web! If you did not know earlier, let’s tell you now that Angry Birds is a puzzle video game developed by Finland-based Rovio Mobile. In the game, players use a slingshot to launch birds at pigs stationed on or within various structures, with the intent of destroying

Boot Linux In Your Browser

Boot Linux In Your Browser: Fabrice Bellard, the initiator of the QEMU emulator, wrote a PC emulator in JavaScript. You can now boot Linux in your browser, provided it is recent enough (Firefox 4 and Google Chrome 11 are reported to work). This Linux image includes his own realtime C compiler as the C compiler.

News on very fast Ethernet standards

I still like to follow what is happening IEEE is doing on Ethernet standardization, although there has been around 10 years since I last time was part of the process. I was participating in Ethernet in the first mile (EFM) standardization work at years 2000-2001 (at that time I worked for Nokia). There is always

Entering The Minority Report Era?

Stephen Spielberg’s Minority Report (released nearly 10 years ago) captured the imagination of many in the technology space. Today we are seeing some things from the movie start to come true right in front of our eyes today. Entering The Minority Report Era: A Video Series article shows some examples of those technologies. The video