Recently in Gearhead Category

Surprisingly, this article isn’t from The Onion.

The biggest problem with programming for the PS3, as I understand it, is that it’s rather difficult to get the most out of the hardware due to the multi-processor nature of the processing core. I’m not sure that making a cluster out of PS3 really gets around this problem….

Related: Virginia Tech hand-built a supercomputer out of Apple Macintosh XServes called System X back in 2003/4 that, at the time, was one of the top ten fastest supercomputers on the planet. These days, it doesn’t even crack the top 500.

Also related: OpenCL, a programming language designed to solve the problem of how to write code for systems that feature multiple diverse (i.e. non-identical) cores; what this means in English is that this lets programmers use the very powerful but very specialized graphics processors that most modern computers have for general-purpose computing; in short, this kind of solves the programming for PS3 problem in a general sense.

Ned Batchelder stares down a bug that shouldn’t exist:

We were no strangers to jammed printers, but a particular file that could jam the printer? Yeah, right. It was crazy.

Just because something can’t happen doesn’t mean it won’t. Just ask any programmer. Or any Bond villain.

Easy contact beaming for iPhones. I’m surprised that this functionality isn’t built into the iPhone software proper—beaming contact info was a selling point for the old Palms.

Time to revise those Apple stock price targets to something that has four digits: chinese character functionality has been added tot he iPhone firmware.

When I was a kid, I spent hours and hours trying to beat the adventure game version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. It was a fiendishly hard game, but it was eventually beatable (admittedly with some help).

And now part of the story of the inevitable sequel which turned out to be rather evitable after all has been released (check out the comments, too).

How do you right a 55-thousand-ton ship that’s tipped over on its side?

Very, very carefully.

BTW, this is gonna make a great movie.

So these guys out in Europe are building a a super huge particle collider, right? So these other guys are trying to sue to stop it from going into operation, ok?

The reason given is a new one in law—apparently they’re concerned that the collider will accidentally make a mini-black hole, and that mini-black hole will become somewhat larger than mini as it consumes the entire Earth.

That’s not likely to happen though. We think.

Working on some back-end stuff over the next several days, so do not be alarmed if stuff breaks or looks funny.

Holy cow! You can now edit your photos straight from within Flickr!

Now, if they’d only add a way to export all your pictures….