Planets

Planets are now becoming well-formed.  They have a placeholder atmosphere object, but will get a dedicated scattering shader.
Their atmosphere detects entry and the Planet Flight App Module is instigated.  This sets up the rendering pipeline slightly differently.  Flags are set on the spaceship physics model, for atmospheric flight.
In future this app module will also begin the streaming of planet cities, detail objects, etc.

An Update

I have to get back into blogging this thing, so this update is just a refresher to remind me how to log in to blogger etc.  Here's a screenshot of the cityscapes these days :
What we've got here is
A tile-based city that is read streamed from a bitmap.  The tall building you see in the centre is an example of specific placement of buildings - it's not just a procedurally generated cityscape.  This is so that players will be able to grow cities on planets, but also do specific terraforming and building and truly customise their planets. A nice example of...

Bandwidth Meter

Network Bandwidth meter at the hackspace:

Starting up, new challenges and (maybe) a farewell

I titled this post like one of those book chapters that try to summarize the diverse happenings in a concrete timeframe. It's been some months since the last post, always having things to say and never finding how to do it.
Today it has been much easier.
It is the end of a long period (10 years) devoted to academic R&D and the start of a new professional life in my own (shared) start-up: Symplio.
I have been for some years now trying to figure out new ways of using the Internet through physical objects, sometimes called the "Internet of Things" (although for...

The arXiv According to arXiv vs. snarXiv

After more than 3/4 of a million guesses, in over 50,000 games played in 67 countries, the results are clear: Science sounds like gobbledygook.

arXiv vs. snarXiv has been live for 6 months now, and it’s time to take a look at the results. Here’s how the game works. The user sees two titles: one is the title of an actual theoretical high energy physics paper on the arXiv, and the other is a completely fake title randomly generated by the snarXiv. The user guesses which one is real, finds out if they’re right or wrong, and...

Lie Group Computations With Python

lie is a python module for computations with Lie groups, Lie algebras, representations, root systems, and more.

I based it on the computer algebra package LiE, written by M. A. A. van Leeuwen, A. M. Cohen and B. Lisser in the early 90’s. They chose to implement a proprietary scripting language as a wrapper for all the fancy mathematical algorithms. While this language is useful for interactive computations and short scripts, python is more expressive and powerful — definitely what you want when exploring your favorite exceptional group.

Here’s an example of using lie to do a...

Architectures for the Internet of Things: Presentation at Web of Things 2010 (PerCom 2010)

I have just had my presentation at Web of Things 2010 (Percom 2010) where I explored the different architectures for the Internet of Things and analyzed them under certain key factors. In this way, an Internet of Things designer can have a small guidance about which architecture fits better for his/her project depending on:
where to place the intelligence (at the object or at the cloud) the infrastructure required the busines model flexibility ... In fact, the exploration of business models for the Internet of Things is a new topic of interest for me, a to-be-discovered world that resembles the Web in the mid-90s. My...

Rafi Haladjian at Deusto

Some weeks ago I invited Rafi Haladjian, founder of Violet, and now at sen.se to give a speech at the Spanish national RFID Conference we were hosting at Deusto. Talking with him was very "epiphanic" in the sense that he explained the process behind the conceptualization and marketing of Nabaztag, as well as the final situation where Violet was acquired by Mindscape.
Funny enough, I think that the current position of Rafi about the Internet of Things can be summarized in two sentences:
The problem with the Internet of Things are the things.
I don't know what the Internet of Things is... but...

The snarXiv

The snarXiv is a random high-energy theory paper generator incorporating all the latest trends, entropic reasoning, and exciting moduli spaces. The arXiv is similar, but occasionally less random.[1]

Actually, the snarXiv only generates tantalizing titles and abstracts at the moment, while the arXiv delivers matching papers as well. Details of the implementation are below.[2] I’m the author, and I don’t remember exactly why I decided to do this. I did already have the framework lying around from a previous project, and I swear I spent more time doing research last weekend than implementing snarXiv.org.

David Rose on "Enchanted Objects"

I have just found a pill of knowledge by David Rose, founder of Ambient Devices and now CEO of Vitality, the company that created the GlowCaps. It was a talk at Lift 09 on "Enchanted Objects - How fiction foreshadows innovation".
He describes his past work in Ambient Devices, from the early prototypes to the final designs, presenting the audience with some of the challenges and decisions they were facing. Liked it a lot!