Mike’s Technology Blog

First, the geniuses started printing skin. I’ve also read that they’re already printing bacon as well. Now the human geniuses have made a great machine that prints your house in just 24 hours - FOR REAL!

The whole idea is to create a house without the aid of human hands. Well, humans will of course still be involved in designing the house using Computer Aided Design (CAD) and setting up the Contour Crafting 3D House Printer which is pretty huge by the way, the actual building of the house remains human-free. Now imagine designing your house and sending it out to the printer, wait 24 hours, and TADA!!! - a brand new house!

Behrokh Khoshnevis (USC Engineering) has been perfecting his contour crafting device, which squirts semi-liquid construction materials to form walls and domed ceilings. His ultimate objective?

“The goal is to be able to completely construct a one-story, 2000-square foot home on site, in one day and without using human hands.”

Various renditions of the whole-house “printer”
envisioned by Behrokh Khoshnevis.
Credit: Behrokh Khoshnevis, USC

Dr. Khoshnevis’ techniques will receive their first real world test in Los Angeles sometime in April of this year. The first prototype will be a watertight shell of a two-story house built in 24 hours - without a single construction worker on the job site.

End result? Houses built according to design - without human error in just 24 hours. And oh, if this technology pushes through (and I believe it will), contractors will no longer have to worry about workers’ wages and insurance.

Now, where do I get one of those???

Read more about it here

Keywords: Contour Crafting, 3D House Printer, 3D House Printing

I just recently checked my blog statistics and was surprised to find out that More people are still using Internet Explorer 6 compared to Firefox. Here’s the recent stats covering January 1 to January 13, 2007

9114 : Internet Explorer 6
2835 : Mozilla Firefox 1.5
2081 : Mozilla Firefox 2
0975 : Opera 9
0404 : Internet Explorer 7
0212 : Internet Explorer 5.5
0170 : Mozilla
0135 : Internet Explorer 5
0125 : Mozilla Firefox 1
0101 : Netscape 4
0068 : Opera 6
0058 : Apple Safari 2.0.4
0038 : Netscape 3
0030 : Konqueror
0030 : Opera 8
0028 : Opera 7
0025 : Internet Explorer 4
0019 : Mozilla Firefox 0.1
0013 : Mozilla Firefox 0.7
0013 : Opera 5

I find this kind of funny since my blog is more focused on technical stuff and so I expect more Firefox users visiting it. Hmmmm.

As of today less than 1,000 people has been to space and you can just get the chance to be one of them. Microsoft and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has recently tied up to give us the chance to reach the ultimate vista of all.

The game is called Vanishing Point and it’s basically a puzzle game. Here’s an excerpt from the Vanishing Point website:

Each week, I will post twelve puzzles, along with footage of spectacular real world events around the globe. Every puzzle has a piece hidden in the live event…

The Grand prize is a trip to space on the Rocketplane® XP Vehicle. The Rocketplane® XP Vehicle is a four-seat fighter-sized vehicle fitted with a delta wing and a V-tail which provide good flight characteristics both subsonically and supersonically. The vehicle is powered by both turbojet engines and a rocket engine, enabling it to accelerate to speeds just over 3,500 feet per second (2,386 miles per hour) and reach altitudes in excess of 330,000 feet (100 kilometers) providing the sensation of weightlessness for three to four minutes!

This prize package also includes a Windows Vista based AMD powered Dell desktop pc, 24″ widescreen monitor, Zune™ digital media player, an Xbox® 360 gaming console, three Games for Windows game titiles, a Microsoft® LifeCam VX-6000, Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007, and $50,000 cash to help defray the cost of taxes.

Now, hmmm.. Ultimate vista as in Windows Vista and Rocketplane® XP as in Windows XP? Hehehehe. They do know how to imprint stuff in people’s minds ei?

More about the contest can be found in the Vanishing Point website.

Apple has finally announced the much awaited Apple iPhone - it’s an iPod, a cellphone, and an internet device in one! Here’s what Apple has to say about it:

iPhone combines three products — a revolutionary mobile phone, a widescreen iPod with touch controls, and a breakthrough Internet communications device with desktop-class email, web browsing, maps, and searching — into one small and lightweight handheld device. iPhone also introduces an entirely new user interface based on a large multi-touch display and pioneering new software, letting you control everything with just your fingers. So it ushers in an era of software power and sophistication never before seen in a mobile device, completely redefining what you can do on a mobile phone.

By the looks of it, it’s an all-screen device sporting a sleek user interface and it runs on the OSX operating system. And oh, apparently Apple won the race against Nokia’s Aeon in building an all-screen cellphone.

Technical Specifications

• Screen size: 3.5 inches
• Screen resolution: 320 by 480 at 160 ppi
• Input method: Multi-touch
• Operating system: OS X
• Storage: 4GB or 8GB
• GSM: Quad-band (MHz: 850, 900, 1800, 1900)
• Wireless data: Wi-Fi (802.11b/g) + EDGE + Bluetooth 2.0
• Camera: 2.0 megapixels
• Battery Lifespan:
  • Up to 5 hours Talk / Video / Browsing
  • Up to 16 hours Audio playback
• Dimensions: 4.5 x 2.4 x 0.46 inches / 115 x 61 x 11.6mm
• Weight: 4.8 ounces / 135 grams

The Four Faces of the Apple iPhone

Click on any of the image below for more details…

» The Cellphone

» The iPod

» The Internet Browser

» Apple iPhone - More Technology

The cost??? It’s said that the 4GB version will be sold at around $499 while the 8GB will cost $599. Pretty expensive I would say but with it’s features and stuff, I think it will sell - sell well.

More information about the Apple iPhone can be found in Apple’s website.

A recent discussion in the SEO Philippines Yahoogroups was about a meet-up between NASA and Google. The discussion started when someone in the group asked what could be the reason behind NASA and Google’s meeting?

There were hilarious suggestions as well as serious ones. Now I think, we can settle the issue with this one true fact.

Google has joined the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) Project, which intends to complete the world’s largest survey telescope by 2013. Google will work with nineteen universities and national labs that are designing and building the telescope.

A computer generated view of the Large Scale Synoptic Survey Telescope Site

The proposed telescope itself will be a ground-based 8.4 meter, 10-square-degree field instrument capable of providing digital imaging across the entire sky. In an endless series of ten-second exposures, the LSST will cover the available sky every three nights over a period of ten years. The telescope will be built atop Cerro Pachón in Chile.

Google and the LSST project share some important characteristics; both groups seek to organize massive quantities of data and then share it in the most useful possible form. Every night that the LSST operates, it will store over thirty terabytes (30,000 gigabytes) of data. Google will provide assistance in the following areas:

1. organizing the flow of large parallel data streams
2. processing and analyzing the data streams in a continuous 24/7, fault-tolerant manner
3. providing a dynamic view of the night sky for the lay public, as well as for specialists.

Google’s VP of Engineering, William Coughran, remarked that “Google’s mission is to take the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. The data from LSST will be an important part of the world’s information, and by being involved in the project we hope to make it easier for that data to become accessible and useful.”

This project is not Google’s first step into the sky. Google has already collaborated with NASA in its iEarth program.

Every day, NASA’s Earth Observing System (EOS) transmits terabytes of data back to ground stations. The Google Earth application already provides easy access to worldwide maps. iEarth is an application that superimposes this data on top of 3D maps provided by Google Earth.

Picking a spot on the Earth will prompt the application to look through EOS and convert that data into a file viewable from Google Earth.

Google’s iEarth application and its collaboration with the LSST project (iUniverse?) have a remarkable precursor in science fiction. In Neal Stephenson’s excellent 1992 novel Snow Crash, Hiro Protagonist is given an amazing service - ordinarily available only to the wealthy - for free.

Read more about Google/NASA iEarth. Don’t forget their obsession with the “inner space” of humanity’s imagination; take a look at Encyclopedia Googlactica - Google To Put All Human Knowledge Online. Learn more about the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope at LSST.org.

Last November, I posted about how spammers are coming up with new spamming ideas, one of which is using images instead of just plain text to get through spam filters. Until now, my only solution is to teach Mozilla Thunderbird’s Junk mail filter which is spam and which is not. After a few weeks of teaching Thunderbird, it appears to be learning and getting smarter though a few other image spams still come through.

Now, I think there is a better solution to stop image spam and that’s through the use of Borderware MXtreme which is basically an email firewall application. It uses some sort of algorithm to determine which emails contain image spam and which emails are good. They do claim to capture 98% of all image spam. I would say that this is cool.

Would I give it a try? I might just do so. But even if I don’t try it, I think it’s a good solution to a relatively new problem. And oh, they do offer free trial.

I found this kinda odd news from Linux.com entitled ‘Microsoft hiring “open source evangelist”?‘ Of course, it got my attention so I decided to read the entire article - a thing that I seldom do. Basically, the story is about someone whose name was not revealed who got a call from Microsoft asking this ’someone’ to fill in the position of an open source evangelist.

Though the actual name of the person was not mentioned, I do believe that a website as respected as Linux.com wouldn’t post such a story if it wasn’t true.

My thoughts on this? Well, I think Microsoft is trying to win the hearts of opensource people. One other thought as also mentioned in the Linux.com article is that they might just try to make opensource people to do things the Microsoft way. Is Microsoft trying to infiltrate the opensource world? If so, what’s their ultimate goal? Reminds me of the movie Antitrust.

Whatever Microsoft is trying to do, I don’t think they’ll be able to accomplish it easily. IMHO, opensource people know better - we can’t easily be fooled!