zondag 27 april 2008
zaterdag 26 april 2008
Veluwe woestijnen - Otterlo
Vandaag deze wandeling van Ontrack gelopen. De wandeling is gekozen tot wandeling van 2008 en het is inderdaad genieten geblazen.
In totaal hebben wij 8 verschillende herten in het wild gezien.
Beschrijving van Ontrack:
zondag 20 april 2008
Boerenbos, Bennekom (Gelderland)
Prachtige wandeling van On Track gelopen.
Als je op het plaatje klikt zie je onze foto's van de tocht.
BoerenBos 20km of 16km
BoerenBos brengt u van de parkeerplaats op het landgoed Hoekelum, naar de landbouwdelta Quadenoord. Onderweg kunt u een uitstapje maken naar theeschenkerij ‘De Panoramahoeve’ voor een aangename pauze. Wandelt u 20km, dan maakt u bij Quadenoord een ommetje door het prachtige bekenstelsel. Op zondagen is het leuk dan ook het museumpje Tute Natura, bij het natuurvrienden huis ‘De Bosbeek’ even aan te doen.U wandelt door met bossen omgeven akkers met bloemstroken, die veel vogels en vlinders aantrekken. Via de Oostereng, het Bennekomse Bosch en de Hullenberg keert u terug naar het kasteel Hoekelum, het begin- en eindpunt van deze wandeling.
woensdag 16 april 2008
16/04/08 Op kraambezoek
Vandaag op kraambezoek gegaan in Nijmegen en een paar "rolletjes" vol geschoten.
Hier het resultaat van de eerste fotoshoot van Loes Lola (4 dagen oud)
zaterdag 12 april 2008
Loes Lola Stuifbergen 12/04/08
Opnieuw trots weer opa en oma geworden
Zaterdag middag 12 april geboren: Loes Lola. 2820 gram, 49 cm en kerngezond.
Dochter van Linda Habraken en Jules Stuifbergen en zusje van Bloem Stuifbergen.
9 Dagen te vroeg geboren. Linda werd door verloskundige naar het ziekenhuis gebracht. Jules nog wat dingen gepakt en zelf er achter aan. Gelukkig net op tijd om de geboorte mee te maken. Loes was in een kwartier geboren!
Uit het verslag van Jules
Voor de lezers onder ons: de tijdplanning liep ongeveer zo:
13:00 Lunch. Linda voelt al een tijdje wat rommelen en geeft nu toe dat het wel eens zo ver zou kunnen zijn
14:00 Jules doet boodschappen, nietsvermoedend. Linda belt: kom je snel terug?
15:00 We bellen de verloskundige. Die komt om 15:15 en constateert wat poep in het vruchtwater
15:25 Jules regelt zijn ouders en Afke om op Bloem te passen. Linda rijdt alvast mee met de verloskundige naar het ziekenhuis
15:35 Jules scheurt naar het ziekenhuis
15:45 Jules is binnen, en klaar om Linda bij te staan
15:55 Loes komt ter wereld, in een poep en een kwartet persweeen.
Wandeling "Slaapwandelen" rond Amerongen
Slaapwandelen is een avontuurlijke route vol diversiteit en heeft twee varianten: de zomer- en winterslaap. Prachtige vergezichten, een laarzenpad en uiterwaarden vallen u ten deel. Het brengt u langs kastelen en heuveltoppen en laat u de Utrechtse Heuvelrug op een verrassende manier verkennen.
vrijdag 11 april 2008
IBM's Faster, Denser Memory
Data is encoded onto racetrack memory by changing the magnetic properties along the wire, creating a series of magnetic barriers--called domain walls--and gaps between. Just as electrical charge represents a bit in a Flash memory cell, the gaps between two domain walls represent bits in racetrack memory. To read and write data from the nanowire, the domain walls move along the tracks, single file, past where stationary read and write heads are positioned.
woensdag 9 april 2008
The history of computer data storage, in pictures
Wow, that my automation life!
I am involved in automation since 1968 and I really love this kind of information!!
I recognize all of the showcased storage types (no denying anymore, I am old).
Nowadays we are used to having hundreds of gigabytes of storage capacity in our computers. Even tiny MP3 players and other handheld devices usually have several gigabytes of storage. This was pure science fiction only a few decades ago. For example, the first hard disk drive to have gigabyte capacity was as big as a refrigerator, and that was in 1980. Not so long ago!
Picture: IBM Model 350, the first-ever hard disk drive. The first hard disk drive was the IBM Model 350 Disk File that came with the IBM 305 RAMAC computer in 1956. It had 50 24-inch discs with a total storage capacity of 5 million characters (just under 5 MB).
dinsdag 8 april 2008
Excerpts from Ricardo Semler's book "Maverick: The Success Behind the World's Most Unusual Workplace"
That’s what’s wrong with bosses. So many of them are better prepared to find error and to criticize than to add to the effort. To be the boss is what counts to most bosses. They confuse authority with authoritarianism. They don’t trust their subordinates.
Why bureaucracies get built:
Bureaucracies are built by and for people who busy themselves proving they are necessary, especially when they suspect they aren’t. All these bosses have to keep themselves occupied, and so they constantly complicate everything…I wanted our people to have more contact with one another. I wanted less clutter. I wanted fewer levels. I wanted more flexibility. I wanted a new shape for our organization.
maandag 7 april 2008
Crash warning for connected cars?
European researchers have demonstrated in the lab a collision warning system for cars that could alert the driver several seconds in advance of an imminent impact. The device could save thousands of lives and usher in the first steps towards the ‘connected car’.
It knows its location, can talk to other cars and can tell the future. Are we entering the era of truly automated cars? The Collision Warning System (CWS) is the brainchild of the Reposit project, and they recently fired up a fully working prototype of their system.
The prototype can find its position using GPS, and find the position, speed and trajectory of neighbouring and oncoming traffic using an emerging car communication protocol called Vehicle2Vehicle (V2V).
It can use that information to calculate the relative position of other cars, and then extrapolate where they will be in a few seconds’ time. If the data predicts a collision, it warns the driver.
“So far, we’ve got predictions about 1 to 3 seconds ahead of a collision… but anything from 2 seconds up gives drivers time to react. It works better at medium-to-high speeds, above 50km/h,” reveals Jose Ignacio Herrero Zarzosa, coordinator of the Reposit ‘relative position for collision avoidance systems’ project.
High-performance GPS systems, that can locate a car within a metre or so, perform far better than low-performance GPS systems, but even with poor GPS technology Reposit has managed to get warning times to 1.5 seconds in a simulator, not too far from the useful minimum of 2 seconds. Zarzosa believes the system can do even better, with further work using vehicles’ available sensors.
But the system does work, at least in a simulator, and that is a concrete result. The team has also perfected a simulator that other projects can use to model car collisions, another useful output. But will it be a success?
Unforgiving economics
It is possible, in time. Crucially, the system uses technologies, such as GPS and V2V, which are already becoming common or are emerging as a feature of modern cars. More and more cars come with GPS already installed, explains Zarzosa, and many owners are self-installing a GPS system, so for these cars Reposit takes advantage of the installed base.
V2V is an emerging standard for communication between vehicles, and so it will become more common as time goes by. The Rosetta stone of the system, the programme that ties all the devices together, is just software and so relatively cheap.
That is very important. Keeping cost down is essential for any new car technology. The economics of the motor industry are unforgiving. “New car devices must be cheap if they are to be commercialised,” notes Zarzosa.
The Reposit team discovered that the rules for automobile innovation are unforgiving, too. Right now, there is no standard for integrating new functions into an existing car system. Every manufacturer uses different system integration methods. This significantly pushes up the cost of third-party technologies like Reposit,” warns Zarzosa.
Although the European Commission reports that it is working hard on this.
So far, the car industry finds Reposit’s work interesting, but remains unconvinced of the commercial application. The car industry is... very price sensitive, notes Zarzosa.
Even so, the popularity of GPS, and the emergence of V2V as a standard, means that the system will become more attractive over time. Before long, drivers might take the first, tentative steps into the era of connected cars.
In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop
New York Times, April 6, 2008
They work long hours, often to exhaustion. Many are paid by the piece — not garments, but blog posts. This is the digital-era sweatshop. You may know it by a different name: home.
A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment.
Of course, the bloggers can work elsewhere, and they profess a love of the nonstop action and perhaps the chance to create a global media outlet without a major up-front investment. At the same time, some are starting to wonder if something has gone very wrong. In the last few months, two among their ranks have died suddenly.
Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.
Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.
Rest of story in NY Times article >>
zondag 6 april 2008
US man gets $2.6m for domain name
A US man has sold the domain name pizza.com for $2.6m (£1.3m) - after maintaining the site for just $20 a year since 1994.
Chris Clark, 43, accepted the offer from an anonymous bidder after a week-long online auction.
"It's crazy, it's just crazy," Mr Clark, who lives in North Potomac, Maryland, was quoted as saying by the Baltimore Sun newspaper.
"It will make a significant difference in my life, for sure," he added.
Regret
Mr Clark registered the domain name in 1994, when the world wide web was just starting.
He had hoped that pizza.com would help to get a contract with a pizza firm for his consulting company.
He sold his business in 2000, but kept paying the $20 annual fees for maintaining the domain, which he also used to sell advertisements.
In January, Mr Clark decided to sell it after hearing that another domain - Vodka.com - was sold for $3m in 2006.
"I thought, 'Why don't I just try to see what the level of interest is?'" Mr Clark said.
"If someone's willing to pay that much for Vodka.com, maybe there's more interest in pizza.com."
The online auction was launched on 27 March. The first bid was $100, jumping to $2.6m a week later.
Having accepted the latter offer, Mr Clark hopes to get his windfall in a few days' time when the transaction is completed.
He said he now regretted not buying more domain names in the 1990s.
vrijdag 4 april 2008
Geekologie
Geekologie is a geek blog dedicated to the scientific study of gadgets, gizmos, and awesome. There are a lot of shiny new things out there, and Geekologie is dedicated to finding every last one of them for you.
IST WIP - An All-Wireless Mobile Network Architecture
Read at Cordis Europe:
“We’re not looking to replace the internet with the flick of a switch,” warns Dias de Amorim. “What we’re proposing is a robust, flexible, optimised and above all user-friendly set of technologies and standards that will mean any user, anywhere, can identify and network with any nearby devices. Without any technical expertise whatsoever.”
An example helps illustrate the concept. You live in an apartment building. You find neighbour’s wifi connections and invite them to join a new ‘building network’ with a few clicks. Now you can share and communicate with everyone.
You all have internet connections via an ISP, ranging from 1, 2 and 5 megabits/second (Mbits/s). You decide to pool your money and rent a fibre-optic line that handles voice, data and TV for the whole building. Suddenly you all have 10Mbit/s connections.
...
Taken from: P. Antoniadis, B. Le Grand, A. Satsiou, L. Tassiulas, R. Aguiar, J.P. Barraca, and S. Sargento, Community building over Neighborhood Wireless Mesh Networks, To appear in IEEE Technology and Society, special issue on Potentials and Limits of Cooperation in Wireless Communications, 2008:
The fourth generation (4G) network paradigm has long been sought. A user-centric vision for such “always best connected” next-generation 4G networks is neighborhood Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs).
The vision for WMNs reflects the tradeoff between the immediate selfinterest of the user, and the user’s need for social contacts: Users would pool their resources in order to support the creation and operation of the underlying communication network (participating at all physical, access, and network layers), but also for service provision on top of it.
We argue that the design of communities suitable for this environment will encourage users to participate, enable trustworthy network creation, and provide a social layer, which can be exploited in order to design crosslayer incentive mechanisms that will further encourage users to share their resources and cooperate at lower layers.
....
Conclusions
Communities are an increasing guiding line for future networks. Their social nature reflects human communication needs, and they seem particularly adequate as a basis for future usercentric communications, based on wireless technologies. In this context, communities span from the physical layer to the higher social layers, reflecting human interests, and creating self-organizing wireless mesh networks (WMNs).
Social relations will encourage users to participate in the formation of the envisioned neighbourhood WMNs, and will generate the necessary information to ensure that the underlying network is formed among trusted and interested users. To this end, cross-layer incentive mechanisms are nevertheless required, using either reward or punishment strategies at different levels, reflecting the current user (node) behaviour towards the community.
POF - Plastic Optical Fibre
Plastic fibre slashes network costs.
Plans in the 1990s to bring ultra-high speed telecom lines into every home foundered because the optical fibre infrastructure was just too expensive. But a new European project using plastic fibre and off-the-shelf components could make optical networking so cheap and simple that anyone could install it.
What happened to the dream of optical fibre in every home? While the core of the telecoms network, the long-distance trunk routes, use optical fibre, the links from the exchange to individual homes remain almost entirely copper wire. Telecoms companies have been creative in pushing copper to its limit with ADSL broadband technology and leveraging existing TV cable infrastructure (especially France and the Benelux), but only by taking optical fibre right into the home can they meet the demands for ever-faster connections.
The truth is, it’s too expensive. Ambitious plans to rip out the copper and lay optical fibre were largely abandoned in 2001 when telecoms companies realised that they could not afford the mounting costs. Only a few countries, notably Japan, have pushed ahead on any scale.
“The cost was way too high to be sustainable,” says Alessandro Nocivelli, the founder and CEO of Luceat SpA, one of the partners in the EU-funded POF-ALL project. “There was no business model to support such an investment.”
The object of POF-ALL is to find a technical solution to this rising cost. The partners decided to focus on the cabling inside buildings, which would typically account for 30% of the cost of laying an optical fibre from the exchange into the home. This last hundred metres or so is known as the ‘edge’ network.
“We realised that we could lower the cost of this edge installation by using a simpler technology,” says Nocivelli. “If we could employ a technology which is so simple to use that anyone can install it, that would relieve telecom companies of 30% of the cost of the access network, which means up to several billion euro if you consider the European Union as a whole.”
Rest of story >>
Wind Power That Floats
Ocean bound: Since December, this prototype 80-kilowatt floating wind turbine has been absorbing wind energy off Puglia, Italy, in 108-meter-deep water, beyond the economically viable depth for turbines mounted on the seabed. Data from the machine’s interactions with wind and waves will inform the final design and control schemes for full-size floating turbines. Credit: Blue H Technologies
Offshore wind-farm developers would love to build in deep water more than 32 kilometers from shore, where stronger and steadier winds prevail and complaints about marred scenery are less likely. But building foundations to support wind turbines in water deeper than 20 meters is prohibitively expensive. Now, technology developers are stepping up work in floating turbines to make such farms feasible.
Several companies are on their way to demonstrating systems by borrowing heavily from oil and gas offshore platform technology. In December, the Dutch floating-turbine developer Blue H Technologies launched a test platform off Italy's southern coast; last month, the company announced its plans to install an additional test turbine off the coast of Massachusetts, and possibly begin constructing a full wind farm off the Italian coast, next year. Close behind is SWAY, based in Bergen, Norway, which raised $29 million last fall and plans to field a prototype of its floating wind turbine in 2010.
Rest of story >>
Beam it up: Tiny projectors to magnify cell-phone cinema
Microvision Inc., a small Redmond, Washington, company, was at the CTIA Wireless industry show this week to demonstrate a prototype of its projector. It's about the size of two full-size iPods, but by the time it goes on sale later this year, it should be about 30 percent smaller, said Russell Hannigan, the company's director of projector product management.
In a darkened room, the prototype beamed out surprisingly bright, crisp and large video from a connected iPod Nano: With the projector held 6 feet (1.83 meters) away from the wall, the image measured 6 feet (1.83 meters) diagonally and was as sharp as a DVD.
On the brightly lit showroom floor, the image was less impressive, but projected on a piece of paper held a foot away, it still made for a nice alternative to the iPod Nano's screen, which is slightly larger than a stamp.
The technology differs substantially from standard projectors: Microvision's unit shines red, green and blue lasers on a rapidly moving, 1-millimeter square mirror, which ''paints'' the picture line by line, so fast that it blends into one image.
Read more at Microvision >>
woensdag 2 april 2008
Nike+ SportBand Training Bracelet
dinsdag 1 april 2008
Nonelectric Hybrid Engines
The improved fuel consumption essentially comes from downsizing the engine, says Neville Jackson, technology director of Ricardo UK, an engineering firm in Shoreham-on-Sea that developed the new engine. "A smaller engine has less internal friction and delivers better fuel consumption," he says.
But small car engines, which are usually based on a four-stroke design, don't offer a lot of power. They can be particularly problematic when operated at low speeds with a high load, such as when accelerating uphill. Such conditions can even make a small engine stall if the driver doesn't downshift.
"Four strokes are most efficient at full throttle; with two strokes, it's the opposite," says Robert Kee, a mechanical engineer who specializes in combustion engines at Queen's University, in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
The difference between two- and four-stroke engines is that the latter carry out the four stages of air intake, compression, combustion, and exhaust in four strokes of a piston. A two-stroke engine, in contrast, does this in just two piston strokes.
Two-stroke engines are intrinsically simpler by design and have higher power-to-weight ratios at high loads and low speeds because they get twice as many power strokes per revolution. But traditional two-stroke engines require oil to be mixed in with the fuel, and therefore produce higher emissions. Because of this, they aren't typically used in cars. Instead, they're used for lightweight applications such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, and some motorbikes.
