Recently in Technology Category

http://www.eskimo.com/~billb/miscon/elect.html

How does 'electricity' work? If you've learned about electricity from grade-school textbooks, then first we have to do some "debunking" and find out how electricity DOESN'T work. Sorry if the following is a bit contentious at times. I wrote it in an attempt to get some things off my chest. If you keep watching this site, I'll probably clean it up and make it sound a bit more professional. Also, this file is still under construction and is being written, edited, corrected, etc. It does currently contain some mistakes of its own. I placed it online as a sort of 'trial by fire' in order to hear readers' responses and target weak or unclear sections for improvement.

From Lifehacker:

Windows only: Free, portable application Uploadr takes screenshots or shares files on file sharing site Localhostr with a simple drag-and-drop interface--and it even has Jump List support for Windows 7 users.

Once you've installed the application or launched the portable version, you can simply drag files onto the interface to immediately upload them to previously mentioned file sharing site Localhostr. You can upload single files, or even entire folders of files, as long as they fit inside the 50MB total limit.

You can also use Uploadr to take screenshots of windows directly, and immediately upload them. Once you've done so, you can copy the URL to the clipboard for sharing, or if you head into the options you can enable automatic copy of the URL. Uploadr is a free download for Windows only.

Localhostr Uploadr

From reprog:

I've been posting much longer articles than I meant to, so today's will be short. [Later: but, as it turns out, not as short as I intended.]

When I was fourteen, I wrote space-invader games in BASIC on a VIC-20. If you were interested in computers back in 1982, I bet you did the same. When I was 18, I wrote multi-user dungeons in C on serial terminals attached to a Sun 3. When I was 22, I worked deep down in the guts of a text database system -- still C, now on a Sun 3/80 of my very own, with one of those HUGE bitmapped screens with a million black-or-white pixels. I was in touch with my friends from university: we were going to write compilers and operating systems and cool stuff like that -- and to some degree, we did. We sent each other our in-progress code, complained about each other's programming-language designs, and laughed at how inefficient each others' completely unnecessary reimplementations of malloc() were. [I remember a friend's implementation achieving something like 18% occupancy.]

That was then.

Today, I mostly paste libraries together. So do you, most likely, if you work in software.

From gizmodo:



I can tell you about the SR-71 Blackbird's titanium frame, its Pratt&Whitney J58-P4 engines, or its genesis. But that's not important. What really matters is the thrill of flying it in an extremely dangerous mission, as remembered by this pilot.-JD

In April 1986, following an attack on American soldiers in a Berlin disco, President Reagan ordered the bombing of Muammar Qaddafi's terrorist camps in Libya. My duty was to fly over Libya and take photos recording the damage our F-111's had inflicted. Qaddafi had established a 'line of death,' a territorial marking across the Gulf of Sidra , swearing to shoot down any intruder that crossed the boundary. On the morning of April 15, I rocketed past the line at 2,125 mph.

From Jaunted:



Since we last left the 787, the new plane has been through even more and more tests. It still sounds like the plane will make its first commercial flight later this year, but we're more interested in when we can see the bird in Continental Airlines livery.

The most recent milestone for the Boeing 787 Dreamliner was the wing stress test. During this test, engineers pretty much attempted to break the wings of the airplane by bending them upward with a tremendous amount of force. The wings went about 25-feet higher from their normal position, and the plane appeared to handle everything without a problem. This was not the case when the Boeing 777 first received a similar test.

Despite all the good news, Boeing has not yet released a firm date for when its new bird will begin the FAA in-flight certification process. Sure the airplane is flying around, but until the government says it's safe and satisfactory the plane is a no-go for launch.

From reprog:

It's 32 years old, and it remains the single greatest book ever written about a programming language. Its crown is secure; even if you'd not already read the title of this article, you'd know what book I'm talking about. It's the only language-specific book in Top Five programming books of the Programming Reddit's FAQ. Co-written by Reinvigorated Programmer regular Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie, it's not just the definitive book about the language in question, it's the book the rewrote the book on what it means to be definitive. Step forward, please, The C Programming Language!

From izuzak:

This post is about understanding REST, the software architectural style behind the World Wide Web. My Ph.D. research, which I'll write about some other time, pushed me on the road of REST and over the last year I've been reading lots of research papers, lots of blogs, lots of mailing lists, lots of tweets, lots of videos, wikis, books and IRC transcripts on REST and I've also recently started the This Week in REST wiki and blog. In other words, I've read almost everything I could find on REST.

From academicearth.org:

Course Description

This subject is aimed at students with little or no programming experience. It aims to provide students with an understanding of the role computation can play in solving problems. It also aims to help students, regardless of their major, to feel justifiably confident of their ability to write small programs that allow them to accomplish useful goals. The class will use the Python™ programming language.

From Wired UK:



This eerie wreck image is not computer generated. It's the sonar image of Russian nuclear submarine B-159 (called K-159 before decommissioning), which has been lying 248m down in the Barents Sea, between Norway and Russia, since 2003. The Russian Federation hired Adus, a Scottish company that specialises in high-resolution sonar surveying, to evaluate if it would be possible to recover the wreck.

"The operation was complicated as the submarine was very deep, so we had to use the sonar equipment mounted on a remotely operated vehicle, (below)" says Martin Dean, the managing director of Adus and a forensic-wreck archaeologist. "We also had a problem with the surveying due to the density of north Atlantic cod attracted to the sound of the sonar and the light of the cameras. So at the beginning we had to turn off the equipment for 40 minutes and wait for the fish to go."