Author Archive for c1pher

Happy Birthday, 10th GOOGLE (7/Sept/1998 - 7/Sept/2008)

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c1pher
on September 28, 2008
in Info & News
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In September 7, 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin accept a $100,000 check from Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim and incorporate Google Inc. Google opened its door in Menlo Park, California. The door came with a remote control, as it was attached to the garage of a friend who sublet space to the new corporation’s staff of three. The office offered several big advantages, including a washer and dryer and a hot tub. It also provided a parking space for the first employee hired by the new company: Craig Silverstein, now Google’s director of technology.

Source: Google History
Facts: Google 10 commandments

Social Tagging

Published
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c1pher
on September 21, 2008
in A word or two
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I used to be addicted to blogging. Blogging made me spend a lot of time browsing around the blogs on the internet, made new friends, found out how to create a good and interesting kind of blog, how to put traffic to the blog and be happy to see when people come across to my blog and visit for a look or comment. These blogging activities had led me to a popular website called digg.com or say “Digg”. Digg is a website for people to share links content resources (e.g., pictures, movies, documents, stories, web pages) on the Internet and put it into a particular keyword or “tag”. Not only that, Digg also allows registered users to use two unique things, digging or burying facility while commenting. Dig simply means users put one point up to the posting and burry means not to vote, the more dig points or dugg Continue reading ‘Social Tagging’

Algorithm?

Published
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c1pher
on May 15, 2008
in A word or two
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THe Father of AlgorithmThe word “algorithm”? is quite interesting; at first glance it may look as though someone intended to write “logarithm” but jumble up the first four letters. The word did not appear in Webster’s New World Dictionary as late as 1975; we found only the older form “algorism” with this ancient meaning, the process of doing arithmetic using Arabic numerals. During the Middle Ages, abacists computed on the abacus and algorists computed by algorism. By the time of the Renaissance, the origin of this word was in doubt, and early linguists attempted to guess at its derivation by making combinations like algiros [painful]+arithmos [number]; others said no, the word comes from “King Algor of Castile.” Finally, historians of mathematics found the true origin of the word algorism: It comes from the name of a famous Persian textbook author, Abu Abd Allah Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khawarizmi — literally, “Father of Abdullah, Mohammed, son of Moses, native of Khawarizm.” The Aral sea in Central Asia was once known as Lake Khawarizm, and the Khawarizm region is located in the Amu River basin just south of that sea. Al-Khawarizmi wrote the celebrated Arabic text Kitab al-jabr wa’l-muqabala (“Rules of restoring and equating”); another word, “algebra,” stems from the title of that book, which was a systematic study of the solution of linear and quadratic equations. [For notes on al-Khwarizmi's life and work, see H. Zemanek, Lecture in  Computer Science 122 (1981, 1-81.]

Gradually the form and meaning of algorism became corrupted; as explained by the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “passed through many pseudo-etymological perversions, including a recent algorithm,  in which it is learnedly confused” with Greek root of  the word arithmetic. This change from “algorism” to “algorithm” is not hard to  understand in view of the fact that people had forgotten the original derivation of the word. An early German mathematical dictionary, Vollstandiges mathematisches Lexicon: “(Leipzig: 1774), gave the following definition for the word Algorithmus: “Under this designation are combined the notions of the four types of arithmetic calculations, namely addition, multiplication, substraction, and division.” The Latin phrase algorithmus infinitesimalis was at that time used to denote “ways of calculation with infinitely small quantities, as invented by Leibniz.

By 1950, the word algorithm was most frequently associated with Euclid’s algorithm, a process for finding the greatest common divisor of two numbers that appears in Euclid’s Elements (Book 7, Propositions 1 and 2).

[Donald Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming, volume 1, 2007]

Interview with Donald Knuth

Published
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c1pher
on April 28, 2008
in Info & News
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Andrew Binstock and Donald Knuth converse on the success of open source, the problem with multicore architecture, the disappointing lack of interest in literate programming, the menace of reusable code, and that urban legend about winning a programming contest with a single compilation.

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Microsoft Releases Robotics Developer Studio 2008 CTP

Published
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c1pher
on April 11, 2008
in Info & News and Programming
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by Michael Desmond
09 April 2008

MSDN Logo Microsoft today released the first community technology preview (CTP) of Robotics Developer Studio 2008 at the RoboBusiness conference in Pittsburgh. The product is the third version of the robotics programming platform, which previously had been called the Microsoft Robotics Studio.

Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 2008 (RDS 08) significantly improves runtime performance, from 150 percent to 300 percent, according to Microsoft General Manager of the Robotics Group Tandy Trower. “It’s not the monolithic, single-threaded model that people have normally used for robots. Instead this is a more asynchronous, distributed approach to programming,” Trower said.

Trower said RDS 08 will enable developers to write code and routines that rely on asynchronous message passing, providing for a more distributed runtime environment and expanding the potential for future robots to process and act on large volumes of information. According to a Microsoft release, RDS 08 adds support for distributed language integrated queries (LINQ), intended to enable “advanced filtering and inline processing of sensor data at the source.”

According to Trower, the distributed application architecture will make it easier for robotic applications to access processing from remote sources, enabling a simple machine to act on complex processing done on a corporate server or in the cloud.

“You can have cooperative robotic interaction, because the robots can easily share information among each other,” Trower said.

The RDS 08 CTP also provides improved sensor interaction, enabling sensors to send granular state change information to the processor, rather than requiring code that constantly checks sensor status.

Microsoft Robotics Studio was launched in 2006 to give developers a way to write high-level robotics applications without having to dive down into the minutiae of hundreds of different sensor and motor interfaces.

Ultimately, Trower said, the tools and techniques developers in the Robotics group could very well end up in mainstream development products at Microsoft.

“You will see that this year the core pieces — the CCR, which is our concurrency coordination runtime and our DSS services, which is its companion that provides the concurrency model across the distributed network — these pieces we actually will separate out and offer independently as well as in the toolkit, so that people who are interested in using this for [other] applications will be able to do that,” Trower said.

“You will also see them positioned as part of the development tools family outside of the robotics area by our marketing team in our developer tools marketing group.”
Michael Desmond, former editor at large of Redmond magazine, is the editor in chief of Redmond Developer News magazine. He has served as senior editor of news at PC World and executive editor at Multimedia World magazine, and has written for dozens of publications and Web sites. Desmond has also written four computing books, including Microsoft Office 2003 in 10 Simple Steps or Less.

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