I decided to wait a bit before blogging about the release of WorldWide Telescope (WWT) to see how everything went and what the initial reaction would be. After Curtis and Jonathan showed me an earlier version over 18 months ago - I knew they were onto something...I fell in love with the sky once again. The images I could access were nothing short of beautiful and the experience of zooming in and out of spaces was second nature. Who needs a user manual? Of course then when you here the excitement in Benjamin's voice as he talks about the crab nebula you also have to remember what it felt like to be a child...
Anyhow, I so loved it when I ran across this post - this is exactly what WWT is all about - letting individuals find interesting items and letting others know about them...
Skull at mars / Esqueleto en Marte Yesterday I was using the new Microsoft's WWT (World Wide Telescope) and in it's panorama view, I decided to zoom some rocks, and "surprise" I found a little one, very near to the rover wheels, that looks diferent. Here are some pictures, judge them yourself.
Yesterday I was using the new Microsoft's WWT (World Wide Telescope) and in it's panorama view, I decided to zoom some rocks, and "surprise" I found a little one, very near to the rover wheels, that looks diferent. Here are some pictures, judge them yourself.
JP-IP: Skull at mars / Esqueleto en Marte
Passing this note about PHP support in Expression Web 2....
PHP Support in Expression Web 2 For those who might wonder about how open Microsoft is to third-party development tools and/or languages, here's one answer: In response to feedback from Expression Web 1 users, we’ve added a rich set of features for PHP development in Expression Web version 2. There are the expected productivity features such as code-coloring, snippets and IntelliSense™, but it doesn’t stop there. The product now ships with a PHP development server that lets you test your PHP pages without any other external web server dependencies (e.g. IIS or Apache). Essentially, PHP is now a first-class citizen in Expression Web 2, and will continue to be in upcoming versions of the product. [Thanks .net DEvHammer]
For those who might wonder about how open Microsoft is to third-party development tools and/or languages, here's one answer:
In response to feedback from Expression Web 1 users, we’ve added a rich set of features for PHP development in Expression Web version 2. There are the expected productivity features such as code-coloring, snippets and IntelliSense™, but it doesn’t stop there. The product now ships with a PHP development server that lets you test your PHP pages without any other external web server dependencies (e.g. IIS or Apache). Essentially, PHP is now a first-class citizen in Expression Web 2, and will continue to be in upcoming versions of the product. [Thanks .net DEvHammer]
Windows HPC Server 2008 Beta 2 is available on Microsoft Connect and Ryan Waite goes into detail on much of the new stuff. I'm really excited to start seeing scientists utilize and evaluate the new version - I think many of the new pieces especially Network Direct, PowerShell integration, and the HPC Basic Profile will surprise users. The other piece I'm looking forward to is the release of the next Top500 list in June...
We completed a few great Top500 runs in the last few weeks. We can’t talk about the numbers until the International Supercomputing Conference in June but it looks like Beta 2’s new MPI stack and new Network Direct RDMA interface are starting to hum. Windows HPC Server 2008 Beta 2 is Here
HPC Server 2008 Beta Technical Overview
Just saw this post that the NY Times Reader for the Mac is available - I'm interested in seeing how the Silverlight version works. I've been using the WPF version for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and really like the ease of reading articles. I'd like to see some research journals and magazines adopt this model as well.
NY Times Reader Beta for the Mac OS Now Available If anyone out there has not had an opportunity to use the NY Times Reader to read the NY Times, you're missing out on a great experience! The Times Reader is a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) application that let's you read the paper on or offline in a rich format. It's been available for over a year now, but you do have to pay a subscription fee to use it. <...> The NY Times has now released a beta edition of the Times Reader for the Mac. What's interesting about this version is that it is built using Silverlight in combination with Cocoa (the native Mac programming language), and the Safari WebKit. The application runs as a stand alone desktop application on the Mac and is very similar to the WPF PC version. Tim Heuer posted about it on his blog. The NY Times folks have shared some technical details over on their blog. [Thanks JrzyShr Dev Guy]
If anyone out there has not had an opportunity to use the NY Times Reader to read the NY Times, you're missing out on a great experience! The Times Reader is a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) application that let's you read the paper on or offline in a rich format. It's been available for over a year now, but you do have to pay a subscription fee to use it. <...>
The NY Times has now released a beta edition of the Times Reader for the Mac. What's interesting about this version is that it is built using Silverlight in combination with Cocoa (the native Mac programming language), and the Safari WebKit. The application runs as a stand alone desktop application on the Mac and is very similar to the WPF PC version. Tim Heuer posted about it on his blog. The NY Times folks have shared some technical details over on their blog.
[Thanks JrzyShr Dev Guy]
If you'd like to experience a total Eclipse of the Sun - set WWT to 8/1/2008 at 2:23 and put the Lat/Lon at 65/72.
Just played the "Kill the Peas" game on the new Popfly Game Creator and it was pretty fun...what type of science game could be created...
Popfly Introduces Game Creator Alpha Today we’re adding something special to Popfly: an early version of our Popfly Game Creator. That’s right: Popfly is about more than mashups and web pages. It’s about making it fun to build things and share them with your friends. And one of the things we’ve heard loud and clear is that games are the kinds of things that people would like to try to build. What kinds of games can you create? Just about any kind of two-dimensional game, a category that includes things like the original Super Mario™, Frogger™, Asteroids™, and a host of other old arcade games. To make it easy, Popfly is still focused on getting as much done as possible without having to write any code. The game creator has over 15 pre-built game templates for you to try, hundreds of images, animations, backgrounds, and sounds for you to use in the games you create, and, of course, a way for you to write code if you reach the limits of what the user interface can do for you. Since this is Popfly, you can still save, share, and embed your creations everywhere from your blog to your Facebook page to your Windows Vista Sidebar.
Today we’re adding something special to Popfly: an early version of our Popfly Game Creator. That’s right: Popfly is about more than mashups and web pages. It’s about making it fun to build things and share them with your friends. And one of the things we’ve heard loud and clear is that games are the kinds of things that people would like to try to build.
What kinds of games can you create? Just about any kind of two-dimensional game, a category that includes things like the original Super Mario™, Frogger™, Asteroids™, and a host of other old arcade games. To make it easy, Popfly is still focused on getting as much done as possible without having to write any code. The game creator has over 15 pre-built game templates for you to try, hundreds of images, animations, backgrounds, and sounds for you to use in the games you create, and, of course, a way for you to write code if you reach the limits of what the user interface can do for you. Since this is Popfly, you can still save, share, and embed your creations everywhere from your blog to your Facebook page to your Windows Vista Sidebar.
Popfly Team Site: Popfly Introduces Game Creator Alpha
The World Wide Telescope: A new view of the night sky article by Ian Harvey (CBC news) on WWT - not only captures the excitement around using WWT - highlighting the tour created by 6-year old Benjamin (which gets to me every time I hear it). The article also gives a really great overview of the project as a whole and the amazing work that Curtis, Jonathan and the rest of the team have done. I only wish Jim Gray was around to see it...you can read Jim and Alex Szalay's 2002 paper The World-Wide Telescope, an Archetype for Online Science for the background and vision...
The World-Wide Telescope (WWT) will emerge from the world’s online astronomy data. It will have observations in all the observed spectral bands, from the best instruments back to the beginning of history. The “seeing” will always good – the Sun, the Moon, and the clouds will not create dead-time when you cannot observe. Furthermore, all this data can be cross-indexed with the online literature. <...> The World-Wide Telescope will also be an extraordinary tool for teaching Astronomy. It gives students at every grade level access to the world’s best telescope.
The World-Wide Telescope (WWT) will emerge from the world’s online astronomy data. It will have observations in all the observed spectral bands, from the best instruments back to the beginning of history. The “seeing” will always good – the Sun, the Moon, and the clouds will not create dead-time when you cannot observe. Furthermore, all this data can be cross-indexed with the online literature.
<...>
The World-Wide Telescope will also be an extraordinary tool for teaching Astronomy. It gives students at every grade level access to the world’s best telescope.
I see the WWT model as the prototype for accessing and visualizing data in many scientific domains...
The World Wide Telescope: A new view of the night sky Microsoft imaging project will change how people see the heavens when the website launches in coming weeks By Ian Harvey CBC News Benjamin is only six years old, but he's already checked out a Nebula in deep space. "I read that the Ring Nebula is 2,300 light years away," the Toronto-area child says matter-of-factly in his tiny voice as he leads the online world on his personal tour of deep space. "I don't know how far that is, but it's a very, very long bike ride." Benjamin is indeed a lucky lad. He has had a glimpse at the stars as most have never seen them - but will soon be able to - thanks to a new web-based project that will launch in the next few weeks from Microsoft Research Labs. The World Wide Telescope is about to change the way Ben and all the rest of us see the heavens when it launches this spring.
Benjamin is only six years old, but he's already checked out a Nebula in deep space.
"I read that the Ring Nebula is 2,300 light years away," the Toronto-area child says matter-of-factly in his tiny voice as he leads the online world on his personal tour of deep space. "I don't know how far that is, but it's a very, very long bike ride."
Benjamin is indeed a lucky lad. He has had a glimpse at the stars as most have never seen them - but will soon be able to - thanks to a new web-based project that will launch in the next few weeks from Microsoft Research Labs.
The World Wide Telescope is about to change the way Ben and all the rest of us see the heavens when it launches this spring.
The World Wide Telescope: A new view of the night sky
The good folks at NCMIR - National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research have released a port of the Scalable Adaptive Graphical Environment (SAGE) for Windows for download. This allows you to create large tiled displays - we even had one running at our SC07 booth.
Scalable Adaptive Graphical Environment (SAGE) for Windows 32-bit SAGE is a graphics streaming architecture, originally developed by the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago (http://www.evl.uic.edu/cavern/sage/), for supporting high-resolution, scalable and collaborative scientific visualization environments. It is primarily designed to be run as a thin middleware on a high bandwidth-enabled, cluster-driven tile displays. It allows users to treat the high-resolution distributed displays as one contiguous desktop where users can move/resize application windows. SAGE is network centric and the applications running on these displays need not run locally. The applications can be run on remote machines or clusters, and they can stream their pixel frame buffers to SAGE-enabled tile displays.
SAGE is a graphics streaming architecture, originally developed by the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago (http://www.evl.uic.edu/cavern/sage/), for supporting high-resolution, scalable and collaborative scientific visualization environments. It is primarily designed to be run as a thin middleware on a high bandwidth-enabled, cluster-driven tile displays. It allows users to treat the high-resolution distributed displays as one contiguous desktop where users can move/resize application windows. SAGE is network centric and the applications running on these displays need not run locally. The applications can be run on remote machines or clusters, and they can stream their pixel frame buffers to SAGE-enabled tile displays.
NCMIR - SAGE