It’s been some months years since the once Microsoft Research Project got public and Microsoft started offering it’s great Photosynth service to the public.
I’ve been using the Microsoft panoramic and Photosynth tools for years now and I tend to say that they are the best tools one can get to create fast, easy and high-quality panoramic images.
There is photosynth.net to store all those panoramic pictures like this one from 2008:
The photosynth technology itself contains several other interesting technologies like SeaDragon which allows high quality image zooming on current internet connection speeds.
This awesome technology is as of now available on the iPhone (3GS and upwards) and it’s better than all the other panoramic tools I’ve used on a phone.
the process of taking the images
after the pictures are taken additional stitching is needed
after the stitching completed a fairly impressive panoramic images is the result
Source 1: Photosynth articles from the past
Source 2: Photosynth in Wikipedia
Source 3: Photosynth on iPhone App Store
Since we’re at it – we not only took the new Mono garbage collector through it’s paces regarding linear scaling but we also made some interesting measurements when it comes to query performance on the two .NET platform alternatives.
The same data was used as in the last article about the Mono GC. It’s basically a set of 200.000 nodes which hold between 15 to 25 edges to instances of another type of nodes. One INSERT operation means that the starting node and all edges + connected nodes are inserted at once.
We did not use any bulk loading optimizations – we just fed the sones GraphDB with the INSERT queries. We tested on two platforms – on Windows x64 we used the Microsoft .NET Framework and on Linux x64 we used a current Mono 2.7 build which soon will be replaced by the 2.8 release.
After the import was done we started the benchmarking runs. Every run was given a specified time to complete it’s job. The number of queries that were executed within this time window was logged. Each run utilized 10 simultaneously querying clients. Each client executed randomly generated queries with pre-specified complexity.
The Import
Not surprisingly both platforms are almost head-to-head in average import times. While Mono starts way faster than .NET the .NET platform is faster at the end with a larger dataset. We also measured the ram consumption on each platform and it turns out that while Mono takes 17 kbyte per complex insert operation on average the Microsoft .NET Framework only seems to take 11 kbyte per complex insert operation.
The Benchmark
Let the charts speak for themselves first:
click to enlarge
click on the picture to enlarge
click on the picture to enlarge
As you can see on both platforms the sones GraphDB is able to work through more than 2.000 queries per second on average. For the longest running benchmark (1800 seconds) with all the data imported .NET allows us to answer 2.339 queries per second while Mono allows us to answer 1.980 queries per second.
The Conclusion
With the new generational garbage collector Mono surely made a great leap forward. It’s impressive to see the progress the Mono team was able to make in the last months regarding performance and memory consumption. We’re already considering Mono an important part of our platform strategy – this new garbage collector and benchmark results are showing us that it’s the right thing to do!
UPDATE: There was a mishap in the “import objects per second” row of the above table.
That’s great news for everyone interested in science and history. As it turns out Google and PopSci just made their entire 137-year archive available online… good times!
“We’ve partnered with Google to offer our entire 137-year archive for free browsing. Each issue appears just as it did at its original time of publication, complete with period advertisements. It’s an amazing resource that beautifully encapsulates our ongoing fascination with the future, and science and technology’s incredible potential to improve our lives. We hope you enjoy it as much as we do.”
Source: http://www.popsci.com/archives
We want to show you something today: Not everybody has an idea what to think and do with a graph data structure. Not even talking about a whole graph database management system. In fact what everybody needs is something to get “in touch” with those kinds of data representations.
To make the graphs you are creating with the sones GraphDB that much more touchable we give you a sneak peak at our newest addition of the sone GraphDB toolset: the VisualGraph tool.
This tool connects to a running database and allows you to run queries on that database. The result of those queries is then presented to you in a much more natural and intuitive way, compared to the usual JSON and XML outputs. Even more: you can play with your queries and your data and see and feel what it’s like to work with a graph.
Expect this tool to be released in the next 1-2 months as open source. Everyone can use it, Everyone can benefit from it.
Oh. Almost forgot the video:
(Watch it in full screen if you can)
Since we all need documentation I thought it would be a great idea to create a one-pager which helps every user to remember important things like query language syntax.
You can download the cheatsheet here:
Download here.
I am proud to anounce that there’s a video publicly available which shows parts and projects Microsoft Research is working on currently. It’s great to see theses projects, concepts and ideas become publicly available one by one:
“Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer of Microsoft, presents “Rethinking Computing,” a look a how software and information technology can help solve the most pressing global challenges we face today. Part of UW’s Computer Science and Engineering’s Distinguished Lecture Series, Mundie demonstrates a number of current and future-looking technologies that show how computer science is changing scientific exploration and discovery in exciting ways. He discusses the role of new science in solving the global energy crisis, and answer questions from the audience.”
Source: http://www.uwtv.org/programs/displayevent.aspx?rID=30363&fID=6021
Almost three years ago I wrote about this nice little Regular Expression Tool which provides not only a RegEx-Builder but also a clean and nice interface to test and play.
It was a CodeProject sample project in that time and as it turns out it became a full blown version 3!
Obviously the user interface was revamped completely:
So you now not only get the Testing and playing but also a Regular Expression Library, a cool How-To, a more useable design mode and you can even output your final regular expressions to C#, VB.NET or managed C++!
Great stuff! Even better is the fact that it does not come at any costs. Despite the fact that there’s a registration you can just get your free license on their website.
Source 1: http://www.ultrapico.com/Expresso.htm
Source 2: want some espresso?
I was in desperate need for an DDate equivalent running on Windows. DDate is an unix implementaion of date accoridng to the erisian calendar described in the principia discordia.
I only found some C Implementations. And since it’s fun to do I ported the original Discordian Date C code to C#.
You can download the C# sourcecode, licensed under CC-BY-NC here.
I also created a web page which displays the current discordian date and offers you to convert any gregorian date into discordian date representation.
This page can be accesses here. You can call another page with parameters and you only will get the ddate output back:
for example: http://ddate.schrankmonster.de/DiscordianDate.aspx?year=2009&month=6&day=9
Source 1: http://ddate.schrankmonster.de/
Source 2: http://dropbox.schrankmonster.de/dropped/SharpDDateLib.zip
After not less than 3 and a half hour Songbird finished with importing the iTunes library I am using for about 6 years.
The first impression is: Cool, it’s got plugins!
The second impression is: Booh, it wants to restart (while stopping the music) to install!
It’s not faster than iTunes. And this is a sad thing, because the only thing I hoped it would be was faster. It’s not – the UI it’s as fast and responsive as iTunes’ UI – at best. With just a few clicks the whole songbird window went into sleep mode and the well known beachball came into the play.
Even worse: for some strange reason Songbird consumes considerably more CPU time while just sitting there and playing an MP3 than iTunes does:
18,7% CPU load used by songbird just by playing an mp3 (no filtering, no visualisation, no nothing)
2,3% CPU load for iTunes while doing exactly the same. Even the same mp3 was played.
iTunes even takes less memory… oh dear: A long way to go for the Songbird team.
Oh dear. Another hyped protocol/platform from Google… oh wait. It’s not from Google. It’ all started in Xerox PARC…
There are several papers that describe what Google now claims to have developed…
left: Xerox PARC Paper; right: Google Wave
Conclusion: Go and read old Papers. As it turns out almost all newly hyped things have been described in papers from years ago.
Source 1: http://www.waveprotocol.org/whitepapers/operational-transform
Source 2: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/215585.215706
“”Being a geek means being so interested in something that you don’t care whether or not it’s cool.”
THE SOCIETY FOR GEEK ADVANCEMENT was founded upon the principles that we should all embrace our inner and outer geek and have fun while doing it. As individuals who love learning, innovating and believe in possibility as well as change, the second step of responsibility is to “be the geek that keeps on giving”. As a member of SGA, we work together as a global community to provide the tools and help others realize their true potential too!”
Source: http://geekadvancement.com/
Aufgrund neuester Entwicklungen im Speichermedien-Segment wird ab dem nächsten Release des sones Speichersystems auch das angesagteste Speichermedium der Stunde unterstützt: die Speichergurke.
Durch die sensationelle Speicherdichte und unerreichte Zuverlässigkeit ist die Speichergurke das perfekte Speichermedium für den Datenhunger von gestern, heute und morgen.
Source 1: http://www.sones.de
Source 2: http://www.speichergurke.de
I had the chance to interview Steve Teixeira – the Product Unit Manager for the Parallel Developer Tools team in Microsofts Developer Division.
So here is the video of this (my first) interview:
If you click here you can watch it in HD.
Once upon a time in last.fm a user named DJMorgoth added me to his friends list. And today I had the time to take a look at his work. – And boy that is great stuff!
There’s a Mash-Up Party each month in Berlin presented by DJ Morgoth. Obviously a Mash-Up is a song made out of more than one other song. The Artist blends them together to create a unique new one normally sounding great 
Here is the current schedule of these parties:
If you cannot attend you’re not lost: You can download all the samplers and tracks at the mashup-your-bootz blog.
It’s just great music – thanks to the artists!
Source 1: http://myspace.com/djmorgoth
Source 2: http://www.mashupyourbootz.com/
Source 3: http://mashupyourbootz.blogspot.com/
Source 4: best of bootie article on schrankmonster
If you ever asked yourself how many visualization methods are there und how do they look like you may want to take a look at this cool website:
Source: http://www.visual-literacy.org/periodic_table/periodic_table.html
Someone built himself a (actually not working) modell of a V8 – infact if you click on the related videos in youTube you’ll find working ones… I never knew that this would be possible with lego…
![leog-engine[1]](http://www.schrankmonster.de/content/binary/WindowsLiveWriter/WheninneedofanenginebuiltityourselfwithL_14CFD/leog-engine%5B1%5D_thumb_1.jpg)
Source: http://hackedgadgets.com/2008/09/29/lego-v8-engine/
Source 2: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8ut5ND3agI
On September 28th the Falcon 1 rocketship reached orbit:
“In an era when most technology based products follow a path of ever-increasing capability and
reliability while simultaneously reducing costs, launch vehicles today are little changed from those of
40 years ago. SpaceX aims to change this paradigm by developing a family of launch vehicles and
spacecraft which will ultimately increase the reliability and reduce the cost of space access by a factor
of ten. Coupled with the emerging market for private and commercial space transport, this new model
will re-ignite humanity’s efforts to explore and develop space.”
Source: http://www.spacex.com/webcast.php
There was the Digital Image Suite and several other tools like Hugin and Cool360 which I used over the last years to create panoramic images. Now there’s a new tool available in 32 and 64 bit (for really really huge images!) from Microsoft Research. It’s free at this point and if you’re on Windows it’s definitely worth the try.
“Microsoft Image Composite Editor is an advanced panoramic image stitcher. You shoot a set of overlapping photographs of a scene from a single location, and Image Composite Editor creates a high-resolution panorama incorporating all your images at full resolution. Then save your stitched panorama in a wide variety of formats, from common formats like JPEG and TIFF to multi-resolution tiled formats like HD View and Silverlight Deep Zoom.”
Source: http://research.microsoft.com/ivm/ice.html
Uhh… I ususally don’t do that stuff but in this case I just was curious how it would work for me. Quite well I think:
Source: http://www.xrite.com/custom_page.aspx?PageID=77
…if you do have a decent printer and if you haven’t got any graph paper – you could print it yourself.
thx to Kristian.
Source: http://www.incompetech.com/graphpaper/plain/
If you searching a tool for Windows, Linux, OSX and your windows mobile device…you may want to take a look at this:
“SpaceTime 3.0 by SpaceTime Mathematics is a revolution in mathematics software with 2D, 3D, and time graphing with MobileCAS® for algebra and calculus. With features only available in Mathematica and MATLAB, SpaceTime is the most powerful cross-platform mathematics software ever developed for computers and mobile devices.“
Source: http://www.spacetime.us/
This is a very impressive overview of new user interface ideas. It’s a fact that we need new userinterfaces for all kinds of use cases – and as it turns out there are unbelievable cool things going on in the UI research.
“Good user interfaces are crucial for good user experience. It doesn’t matter how good a technology is — if we, designers, don’t manage to make user interface as intuitive and attractive as possible, the technology will hardly reach a breakthrough. To gain the interest in a new product or technology, users need to understand its advantages or find themselves impressed or involved.
And here is where creative ideas and unusual interface approaches become important. Innovative doesn’t mean usable and usable hardly means innovative. As usual, it’s necessary to find an optimal trade-off. And some user interfaces manage to achieve just that.”
Source: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/08/17/10-futuristic-user-interfaces/
Photosynth is publicly available and it’s time to give it a try and play with the technology. Before starting you should be aware of some facts about the public photosynth technology-preview:
- all synths are uploaded and only available online (broadband needed)
- all synths are public, everyone can access them
- the synther tool runs only on Windows
- you’ll need a Live ID
When everything is checked you can go and upload up to 20 Gbytes of image data – my test synth takes up 200 Mbytes of the available space – so you have plenty of space to play with.
To start just install the photosynth application to view – and click “create” on the website. After the obligatory login you immediately can upload your pictures. Give it a name, ssome tags and a license and select your pictures.
Your pictures should show the same scene from different perspectives – photosynth is all about matching perspectives. After clicking on “Synth” the process starts.
And after a surprisingly short period of time your synth is done. Click on “View Synth” and you’re taken back to the website and you can browse your synth. That’s it – easy!
Source 1: my first photosynth
Source 2: Photosynth is open for the public
Source 3: create a synth
Believe it or not – it’s been 2 years since I first wrote about Photosynth technology. Today Microsoft made it available to the public. It’s not a tool (yet) – like I wanted – right now but it’s built into this website – so you have to upload your pictures, they are processed and then you can browse on this website… well it’s a start for a really great technology.
“We’re pleased to announce the first full release of Photosynth, available now at photosynth.com. Photosynth takes a collection of regular photographs and reconstructs the scene or object in a 3-D environment. For those of you who have seen the videos or tried our tech preview, you could experience synths that we made in the lab and get a feel for what Photosynth is and how it works. But now, for the first time ever you can create synths from your own pictures and share them with your friends. Explore great synths from others or create a few of your own.”
It’s not going to work on anything different than Windows. So stick to the movies if you’re on anything else. But as far as I know it’ll run o
Source 1: http://photosynth.net/Default.aspx
Source 2: http://www.schrankmonster.de/PermaLink,guid,fdc3d1fb-4966-418b-83ea-1e0c12aae833.aspx
OMG! I just realized that the better part of Munich is available in Google Earth in 3D mode – which means real real 3D buildings like this. I thought that the birds eye view of Virtual Earth is cool – but this is a different animal.
![leog-engine[1]](http://www.schrankmonster.de/content/binary/WindowsLiveWriter/WheninneedofanenginebuiltityourselfwithL_14CFD/leog-engine%5B1%5D_4.jpg)
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