Monthly Archives: December 2012
100 Diagrams That Changed the World
Great article and review of a book written by Scott Christianson on Brain Pickings. Very inspirational! The book tells (and shows) the story of 100 diagrams that changed the world. The saga spans 32,000 years, ranging from the daubed Stone Age paintings discovered on cave walls in Chauvet, France to the futuristic design for the sleek […]
Google and other companies fight for fairness of patents
Google, Facebook, Red Hat and several other companies submitted a brief to the US Court of Appeals stating that combination of an abstract idea and a computer do not constitute a patent. Bare-bones patents are because they claim abstract ideas when used on a computer or over the Internet. Because such patents merely divide an […]
Everything existing in the universe is the fruit of chance and necessity. – Democritus
Microsoft research made available video presentation of a book by Peter Hoffman ‘Life’s Ratchet: How Molecular Machines Extract Order from Chaos‘ about latest achievements of what we (scientists) presently know about inner workings of life at a nanoscale level. Peter mentions such philosophical concepts as life force, creationism, and some other before discarding them as unnecessary. […]
Black Marble – Views of Earth at Night
Could not resist temptation to share the link to the latest views of earth released by NASA. Can’t help but think about our place in the universe.
UI Design Guidance
HTML Design Guidelines Web design approach should have the following layers that will be added using a progressive enhancement strategy: 1. Create valid and semantic markup containing only the content—no CSS, no frames or iframes, no JavaScript, and no Ajax. All the content and services on the website (with the exception of some nonstandard features, like […]
JSON Web Token (JWT)
JWT is the standard for securing REST web services. “JSON Web Token (JWT) is a compact token format intended for space constrained environments such as HTTP Authorization headers and URI query parameters. JWTs encode claims to be transmitted as a JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) object […]”. References below describe it as well as provide links to […]
HDR Tone Mapping C++ DirectCompute Sample
The sample shows how to calculate average luminance of an image using parallel reduction, and then apply it to tone mapping. Additionally, blur and bloom effects can be calculated both on compute and pixel shaders (for comparison) and then rendered. It also demonstrates how to setup and run image post-processing on a compute shader, it modifies […]
Alan Tatourian 