i-Safety 2010

Very important discussion were on today's i-Safety meeting . There are a lot of online threats, which originate in a real world & have hard influence on many important aspects of a real life. The Internet is absolutely real, it's not a virtual space or game, be careful here!

So a few technical recommendations for inexperienced Internet users to be more safer online:

• be anonymous , do not show your real personal data, real name, mobile number, home address, etc.;
• do not interact with dangerous content (spam, ads, etc.);
• use open-source software, for instance Linux + Firefox;
• encrypt sensitive data before sending it over network;
• think before action, cancel if you do not understand what is going on.

Another very important aspect of using the Internet is an user activities. If you just consume content & not generate your own, you are in a dangerous state, when specially designed content can program (zombie) you for negative actions!

How to start? Easily, add comments to already generated content, for instance to this blog :). Just a few clicks to start micro-blogging on twitter, or share photos, etc.

Let's build Internet together more useful & safe!

Embedded web-server FPGA project

Today I was asked some questions about FPGA development, then conversation goes to topic of possible education/training project, where students can learn technologies.

I suppose very nice one can be a embedded web-server on FPGA chip!

Funny speakin' number of web-servers on the planet significantly increases every year, (yes, like Moor's law for number of transistors).

HTTP-transport very common too, so there may be two levels of implementation:
-Basic, purely software implementation based on embedded processor (a lot of references you can find, just google);
-Advanced - when some parts or even whole web-server logic can be implemented as IP-Core.

Every web server can be tested & bench-marked, for instance by ab utility (apache benchmark):

# ab -c 1000 -n 1000000 http://192.168.0.1:8080

Most popular web-servers:

Apache - http://httpd.apache.org/
Lighttpd - http://www.lighttpd.net/
Userver - http://userver.uwaterloo.ca/index.php

In professional development very impressive results can be achieved in implementation of network applications, like load balancers, traffic filters, and so on...

technology trends 2010

So this year is ending, let's talk about current & future technology trends .

First of all it's a real-time web mobility, mix of technologies: web apps (server side) + mobile apps (client side, native or web-browser based).

Some remarkable facts: number of tweets exceeded world population :), number of mobile devices accessing the Internet to exceed one billion by 2013.

Cloud services for web apps hosting:

Google Appengine Amazon web services

Mobile apps SDKs:

iPhone SDK Nokia Ovi SDK Android SDK

Intel Atom SDK Palm WebOS

Most exciting things on top of this technology mix it's an augmented reality applications

In a hardware world there is a global trend of heterogeneous accelerated computing. Some technology examples:

AMD Fusion Intel Larrabee

So, in continuation trend: close to real-time software engines based on high performance accelerated computing platforms.

Examples: NVidia RealityServer, Mental Ray rendering software.

High performance applications SDKs:

ATI Stream SDK NVidia Developer Tools

Cgevent inspired

Still under cgevent conference impressions :)
// все еще под впечатлением конференции по компьютерной графике
Computer graphics is a driver of the whole computing industry
//Компьютерная графика "двигает" всю компьютерную индустрию
Most remarkable things from this event:
// Наиболее примечательные вещи с этого события:

- Twitter post: cgevent как вам заявка "Нанотехнологии и трехмерная компьютерная графика"? - судя по мейлу вроде не Чубайс
// How such topic for you? "Nanotechnologies & 3d computer graphics"

- Absolutely agree with this: The amount of new technical information doubled every two years!



- Yes it's reality: Ten most demanded specialties 2010 did not exists in 2004...

Moscow CG Event 2009 day 2

Moscow CG Event 2009 second day
//второй день конференции по компьютерной графике

Main message of hardware presentations - multicore
//основной посыл презентаций по железу - многоядерность

Some slides from Intel
//некоторые слайды Intel

Project Larrabee was presented, very long waited but not realised yet, with foggy future
//проект Larrabee, очень долго ожидаем но все еще не реализован, с неясным будущим
Intel Core i7 most powerful processor on the planet, hmm.. it's a matter of argument
//самый мощный процессор на планете, хм.. спорный вопрос
Intel Ct, also is not available yet
//также еще недоступно

NewScientist advertised, do not remember what cool with it
//реклама, непоню что крутого
Interfaces, project Natal
//Интерфейсы, проект Natal
3d-mouse?
//трехмерная мышь?
Qt is a cross-platform application and UI framework.
//мультиплатформенная штука

FurryBall GPU realtime renderer
//реалтайм рендерер на GPU
CG event is very positive!!!
//очень позитивный CG-event!!!

Moscow Computer Graphics Event Winter 2009

Today's 1st day of Moscow Winter Computer Graphics Event, interesting conference about many aspects of computer graphics industry, including design, art, education, and also software & hardware.

So less words more photos & links to get imagination about this event...

Design tools demos:
-2D

-3d, side 1
-3d, side 2

3D Web with "paper glasses"

X86-based multi-chip hardware designed by T-Platforms, for computer graphics may be used as rendering server, so it's a traditional way supported by many rendering engines,

but now becoming more popular GPU-based real-time rendering, especially when it's being used as web-service, an example RealityServer

Yeah, I like this event! Thanks all!

Google chromium OS custom build

Entirely web browser based OS is not new concept, as usual it's a combination of Linux/Unix + Firefox, after Chrome come, it's also Linux + Chrome :)

New Google project chromium os is open source anyone can build an os image.
There were no problems when building & configuring under chroot in my ubuntu 9.10 installed.

Yeah, some impressions & screen-shots here.
Boot screen appears really fast, no magic just nice boot loader implementation.


After entering g00gle account credentials, got chrome.



Yes, concept is clean & time proven! It's good for web users, who can work without desktop apps. Also client side can be extended by chrome extensions...

Such browser based OS also can be used as virtual appliance, very nice security solution to browse in isolated environment!