Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Tuesday, April 27, 2004

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Nanoscale spider-feet point the way to extreme stickiness: "A Swiss/German research team have published an article in Smart Materials and Structures analyzing the feet of jumping spiders. These feet covered in nanoscale fibers depending from thicker hairs, and the overall bundle is small enough that the van de Waals force [...] creates a very high degree of waterproof, grease-proof, dirt-proof stickiness. " [Boing Boing]

Using Python for scientific computing on Mac OS X -- Comment()
Python and Scientific Computing: "Scientists and engineers often have needs for high-performance computation tools which are also easy to use and modify. Many also wish to be able to use a general-purpose language instead of a specialized tool, allowing them to integrate networking, GUI's etc. in their high-performance work. Several tools have been developed to address these needs around the Python language. The Numeric Python extensions is the foremost among these tools."

On Mac OS X, you should install python-mode.el for Emacs editing. I recommend installing MacPython, after which you can use the PackageManager to install, e.g., readline (command-line editing), Numeric (scientific computing) and Tkinter (GUI programming). Before installing Tkinter you have to install Tck/Tk Aqua.

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iTunes Music Store at one: "With the iTunes Music Store celebrating its first birthday on Wednesday [...] Walmart.com's 88-cent music store has come the closet to duplicating Apple's success, with the store garnering about half as many customers as iTunes had in March; and Apple's competitors continue to believe that Apple's closed approach to the iPod/iTunes will be what unseats both from their dominant positions, while the music industry itself would like to see more interoperability between all services and devices." [The Macintosh News Network]

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Top Strategic Technologies for 2005 points to the following technologies (among others) as important in 2005, according to Gartner: instant messaging, WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access), VoIP (Voice-over-Internet-Protocol), RFID tags, modular web services, utility computing, and grid computing. Recently I have written to IT magazines about instant messaging and grid computing, so perhaps I should also think about these other key technologies.

Learning Python programming on Mac OS X -- Comment()
Today and tomorrow I'm on a two-day course on Python programming. I hope to find out how to use Python for common programming tasks, such as manipulating text files, interacting with web services, and programming graphical interfaces. Of course, two days is too little to really know how to use Python, but at least this shows some of the possibilities of the language.

I'm planning to use the 2.3 version of Python which is included with Mac OS X 10.3. Perhaps I'll need to download some additional packages from the net as well.

Python is becoming popular among university researchers here in Finland. Of course, Python is not well suited for heavy number crunching, but for Matlab-type tasks it works quite well.

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Insecurity Threat: "Responses to claims that Linux and open source are threats to national security." [Linux Journal]