the number of developers who must be unexpectedly crushed under the wheels of a truck in order for the development team to lose some piece of information that is critical to the project.
Month: February 2009
Waterproof Sand
Simply laying down a 10 cm blanket of hydrophobic sand beneath typical desert topsoils stops water below the roots level of the plants and maintains a water table, giving greenery a constant water supply.
$500 UAV
Our first commercial autopilot, the Arduino-compatible ArduPilot, has been released and our goal of taking an order or 2 of magnitude out of the cost of an autopilot has been achieved: it’s $24.95! Combined with a RC plane, this makes it easy to build a complete UAV for less than $500, which is really kind of amazing.
Multiple Inboxes
yay vivi!
Starting today, you can try Multiple Inboxes, a Labs experiment which makes it possible to have more than one ‘inbox’ in your default Gmail view.
Cheney Dunk Tank
The 44th White House Carnival was a rousing success, raising a record $800000066845 for the federal government—$800b of which came from a dunk tank featuring former vice president Dick Cheney. After being goaded by the former vice president for several minutes, Hunter reportedly struck the tank’s target on his 3rd turn, plunging Cheney into the pool below and eliciting wild cheers from the 150m people on hand.
Recreating the button
Until some future version of HTML gives us new native controls to use in a browser, at Google, we’ve been playing and experimenting with controls we call “custom buttons” in our apps (among other custom controls). These buttons just launched in Gmail yesterday, and they’ve been in Google Reader for 2 months now. The buttons are designed to look very similar to basic HTML input buttons. But they can handle multiple interactions with one basic design. The buttons we’re using are imageless, and they’re created entirely using HTML and CSS, plus some JavaScript to manage the behavior. They’re also easily skinnable with a few lines of CSS, which was a key factor now that Gmail has themes.
how the new gmail buttons were made
Princeton Companion to Mathematics
I know that the PCM is the book I’d want beamed into space to justify the continued existence of our species.
bought.
India growth
- Population dividend
- Entrepreneurs are role models
- English
- Technology is seen as empowering
- Comfortable with Globalization
- Democracy now firmly embedded
MS Cedes World Sim
sucks for Avi Bar-Zeev.
So the industrial applications market can only grow, but what about the competitive landscape? While some would argue Microsoft World-Sim and Google Earth are very different tools for different purposes, let’s face it – both are realistic simulations you can fly through, which aggregate real world data for physics purposes. And while Flight Sim was going to deliver underwater as a mode, Google just pulled the trigger. In a story today Google Earth Fills Its Watery Gaps The NY Times reported that Google is now mapping the blue parts of the planet. Microsoft and Google were in adjacent market, on a collision course. Not any more. Somebody blinked.
Google Earth 5.0
oceans, mars, time machine. best release in quite some time.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 