Jet-powered VW Beetle

Leave a reply

Jet-powered VW bug takes to the street – Engadget

Ron Patrick wanted a VW Beetle with a jet engine (hey, who doesn’t?). But he also wanted to be able to drive it on the open road, rather than just on a closed airport runway surrounded by fire engines and EMT crews. His solution? A dual-engine vehicle, with a normal VW motor for day-to-day transportation, and a GE T58-8F helicopter turboshaft engine converted to run as a jet, to get through rush-hour traffic.

Photoshoot with Miss Vilan

Leave a reply

After a couple of dry months the stars finally lined up for a model shoot, I think it went well, Vilan was a really cool model, great to work with.

I took about 600 frames, first pass I flagged 47 of them as post-processing candidates, that’s around 10%, which is extremely high. Usually it’s around 2 out of 100 that I’m happy with. Here are 2 of them:

More at my portfolio.

Technorati Tags: , , , , ,

IEEE Spectrum: Unsafe At Any Airspeed?

Leave a reply

IEEE Spectrum: Unsafe At Any Airspeed?

Well, I usually enjoy reading about research done by CMU people, but I didn’t like Dan Stancil when I was there. His wireless communications class was a complete joke! Almost everyone scored 99% in the first 3 tests coz we just like plugged in numbers into the equations. I think I got a C in my mid-term report because I screwed up on one question and only got a 98%. I told him that was pretty screwed up because it didn’t test how much we actually knew but just how careful we were plugging in numbers, he didn’t give a shit. He also decided that to have a nice grades distribution he needed to make the final f’king impossible (unless your dissertation was on wireless communication or antenna design, and I was not one of them), that was a totally screwed up class, completely worthless. That was definitely the worst class I took at CMU by far.

That said, he’s probably a great researcher and he probably publishes great work, having all degrees from MIT or something like that…

Technorati Tags:

Macworld: Podcasts: Macworld Podcast #30: Intel Mac minis, iPod Hi-Fi

Leave a reply

Macworld: Podcasts: Macworld Podcast #30: Intel Mac minis, iPod Hi-Fi
Cyrus Farivar talked about the iPod HiFi in the MacWorld podcast, he seems to know what he’s talking about, he noted that the iPod HiFi does have distortion, it doesn’t separate, and it has a flat mid-range and low bass. It also has no real soundscape. Sounds like I should go for some serious amplifiers and a pair of Bosendorfer speakers. I have always LOVED their pianos, if they have the expertise to build such amazing pianos, speakers should be piece of cake…

Here’s how the Bosendorfer loudspeakers look like, aren’t they f’king sweet?

Technorati Tags: , , ,

Sirius online

Leave a reply

So you can get a 3-day trial for Sirius Online, I’m listening to it right now, as expected, the sound quality is crap. I would sign up if I can listen to the Howard Stern show from the morning, I never get up early enough to listen to it. They should make it available to subscribers as a podcast, then I would definitely subscribe…

Technorati Tags:

scaling the backend of web applications

Leave a reply

BeyondVC: The next generation web, scaling and data mining will matter

Web-based operations need an open source way and cheaper option to scale their database needs, move to a data warehousing architecture without breaking the bank, and scale with user growth leveraging commodity infrastructure.

» Shared nothing coming to open source | Open Source | ZDNet.com

This is a problem a lot of Web 2.0 start-ups like Technorati, Bloglines and Flickr are facing, and projects like Drupal will face soon. They were built with open source tools, but then find they need to “graduate” to something like a data warehouse. And there’s old Oracle, telling them there’s nothing from an open source supplier that can deliver what they need. Share with us, they say, you don’t have any choice.

Well, now there is a choice. Greenplum CTO Luke Lonergan said that O’Reilly Media, one of Greenplum’s early customers, “graduated” from mySQL to PostgreSQL with Greenplum and got a 100% 100 times improvement in database access speed across a 500 Gigabyte database. Other Web 2.0 start-ups, and projects, can do the same thing.