Category Archives: Programming

Alan Turing and Robert Moog Google Doodles

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To celebrate Robert Moog’s 78th Birthday, Google published on May 23, 2012 an interactive doodle of the electronic analog Moog Synthesizer.

Google Moog Doodle

Google Doodle : Moog Synthesizer

The doodle was synthesized from a number of smaller components to form a unique instrument. When experienced with browsers supporting the Web Audio API, the sound is generated natively. For other browsers the Flash plugin is used. The doodle takes advantage of JavaScript, Closure libraries, CSS3 and tools like Google Web Fonts, the Google+ API, the Google URL Shortener and App Engine.

The Moog doodle was created by Google engineers Reinaldo Aguiar and Rui Lopes and the doodle team lead Ryan Germick.

For Alan Turing’s Centennial, Google published one month later (June 23, 2012) an interactive doodle showing a Turing Machine. The doodle was designed by Jered Wierzbicki and Corrie Scalisi, Software Engineers, and by Doodler Sophia Foster-Dimino. The code for this doodle was open sourced and is available at Google Code.

Turing Machine

Google Doodle : Turing Machine

A video about the Art & Technology behind Google Doodles is available at Youtube.

Processing software and projects

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Last update : January 21, 2014

Processing Software Logo

Processing Software Logo

Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to create images, animations, and interactions. Since 2001, Processing has promoted software literacy within the visual arts and visual literacy within technology. Initially created to serve as a software sketchbook and to teach computer programming fundamentals within a visual context, Processing evolved into a development tool for professionals.

Processing is an open project initiated by Ben Fry and Casey Reas. It evolved from ideas explored in the Aesthetics and Computation Group at the MIT Media Lab. The current version is 2.1, released on October 27, 2013.

The following websites help to learn processing :

Mono

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Mono is a software platform designed to allow developers to easily create cross platform applications. Sponsored by Xamarin, Mono is an open source implementation of Microsoft’s .NET Framework based on the ECMA standards for C# and the Common Language Runtime. A growing family of solutions and an active and enthusiastic contributing community is helping position Mono to become the leading choice for development of Linux applications.

The latest stable version of Mono is 2.10.x.

Screenshots

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Last update: August 9, 2016

Screenshots, screen dumps or screen captures are images taken by the computer user to record the visible items displayed on the monitor or another visual output device.

Windows
Print Screen for screenshotsThe windows key PrtScnSysRq captures the entire screen and copies it to the clipboard. You find this key at the upper right of your keyboard. Holding down the Alt key when pressing the PrtScnSysRq key, Windows captures only the currently active window and copies it to the clipboard. In Windows 10, use the Windows Log key together with the PrtScnSysRq key to capture the whole screen which is saved into a Screenshots Folder inside the Pictures directory.

If you want to capture regions or windows with scrolling or other features, you need a special software. My favorite tool is Hypersnap. I use the licensed version 6.81.03. The current available version, with more features, is 8.04.02.

There exist also screen-capture tools as extensions or plugins for web browsers, for example Awesome Screenshot.

To test how a web page looks on different real browsers and different operating systems, you can use Browsershots run by a community cooperation. Public beta for Browsershots started in February 2005. The screenshots are made on distributed computers that are run by volunteers. The results are uploaded to a central server. Everybody can add URLs to the job queue on this server, the usage is free, but you can buy priority processing.

Properties of command prompt window

Properties of command prompt

Command Prompt Window
The marked content or the full content of the command prompt window is copied to the clipboard with the menu popped up by right clicking the window. The properties of the command prompt window can be changed in the pop-up menu Properties by right-clicking in its title bar.

Apple iOS
To take screenshots on an Apple iOS device, you press first the Sleep/Wake (Lock) button and than at once the Home button. The screen flashes white. The device captures the entire screen and saves it as a photo in .jpg format. You find the results in the photo app inside the Camera Roll folder on an iPhone / iPod Touch or inside Saved Photos folder on an iPad.

A web scroll capture app to take screenshots of scrolling web pages, developed by Jaye Jung, is available for free at the Apple AppStore.

Android
As of Android 4.0, screenshots can be taken by pressing and holding the Volume Down button and the Sleep/Wake button. They are stored in.png format in the Gallery app inside the Screenshots folder.

Most Android screenshot apps on the market offering more features require root access. One app, Screenshot Ultimate, has been designed to replace every other screenshot app out there by using over 10 different capture methods. Unfortunately, this app is incredibly buggy, unstable and complicated.

Blackberry
To take screenshots of a Blackberry screen, have a look at an earlier post.

Apple Mac
To capture the entire screen, press Command (⌘)-Shift-3. The screenshot is added to your desktop. To capture an area of the screen, press Command (⌘)-Shift-4, and then drag the crosshair pointer to select the area. To capture a specific window, press Command (⌘)-Shift-4, press the Space bar, move the camera pointer over the window to highlight it, and then click. Learn more at the Apple support website.

Linux Debian
An open-source feature-rich screenshot program for Linux is Shutter. Pressing the print-key takes a copy of the whole screen. Screenshots are saved into the Pictures folder.

Shutter Screenshot Linux Program

Shutter Screenshot Linux Program

Android’s Jelly Bean 4.1.1. user guide

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The main Android’s buttons are :

  • Home-16 : Home
  • Back-16 : Back
  • Recent-Apps-16 : Recent
  • Menu-16 : Menu

A running app is minimized by tapping the Home icon. A recently used app is revealed by tapping the Recent icon. To see more recent apps, slide down. To switch to an app, tap a screenshot from the Recent apps list. To clear a recent app from the list, swipe it sideways. You don’t need to close a running app for every instance on the Android system. If you want however to stop an app, run the Settings app, tap Applications under DEVICE, select the app you want to close, tap the Force stop button and tap OK to confirm. At  the same settings you can uninstall the app. To rearrange icons on the screen, touch and hold any icon for a second and drag the icon to a different spot on the screen. You can also drag an icon to the left or right edge of the screen until it starts sliding to drop the icon to another screen.  To remove an icon, touch and hold it until the Remove icon appears on the top, the drag and drop the icon over the Remove icon.

To group similar apps together, you can create a folder by holding an icon for a second to reveal a create folder button at the top of the screen. Give it a name and drag the wanted icons into this folder. You can rename a folder at any time by tapping its name to rename. To turn off Auto-Correction, open the app Settings and select Language & input under PERSONAL and enter the keyboard tab to change the options.

The following list provides links to additional informations about this topic :

Save Contents of Command Prompt to Text File

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Command Prompt is a feature of Windows that provides an entry point for typing MS‑DOS (Microsoft Disk Operating System) commands and other computer commands.

To get a command prompt, click the Start button, click All Programs, click Accessories, and then click Command Prompt. To view a list of common commands, type help, and then press ENTER. To view more information about each of these commands, type help‌ command name and then press ENTER.

To save the content of the Command Prompt Window to a text file, add > name.txt after the command and then press ENTER.

Foo and Hello World

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The term foo is sometimes used as a placeholder name in computer programming or computer-related documentation. Other placeholders, also referred to as metasyntactic variables, are bar, baz, qux and foobar. The word foo originated as a nonsense word from the 1930s.

The term foo is very often used in programming examples, much like the Hello World program is commonly used as an introduction.

Synology package files

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Non-experienced users of a Synology DiskStation (NAS) have the possibility to use the package management option to update their system with other programs and possibilities. A special kind of package baring the extension .spk is used to do this update.

An .spk file is nothing more then a tar file, containing a standard structure and files. Every package will contain an INFO file, a compressed (gzip) tar file package.tgz and a directory scripts containing multiple shell scripts.

The file can be easily installed in the Synology DashBoard with the Package Center.

More informations about .spk packages are available at the following links :

Supercomputers

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Last update : August 6, 2013

Supercomputers were introduced in the 1960s and were designed primarily by Seymour Cray at Control Data Corporation (CDC), and later at Cray Research. While the supercomputers of the 1970s used only a few processors, in the 1990s, machines with thousands of processors began to appear and by the end of the 20th century, massively parallel supercomputers with tens of thousands of “off-the-shelf” processors were the norm.

ChipTest, Deep Thought and Deep Blue supercomputers

ChipTest, Deep Thought and Deep Blue were chess computers. The chess project was started at Carnegie Mellon University by Feng-hsiung Hsu in 1985. He and his collaborators were hired by IBM Research in 1989 to continue their work to build a chess machine that could defeat the world champion. On May 11, 1997, Deep Blue, with human intervention between games, won the second six-game match against world champion Garry Kasparov by two wins to one with three draws.

Blue Gene supercomputers

Blue Gene is an IBM project aimed at designing supercomputers that can reach operating speeds in the petaFLOPS range, with low power consumption. The initial design for Blue Gene was based on an early version of the Cyclops64 architecture, designed by Monty Denneau. The project created three generations of supercomputers, Blue Gene/L, Blue Gene/P, and Blue Gene/Q. In 2004, the first IBM Blue Gene computer became the fastest supercomputer in the world.

Watson supercomputers

Watson is an artificial intelligence computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language, developed in IBM’s DeepQA project by a research team led by principal investigator David Ferrucci. Watson was named after IBM’s first president, Thomas J. Watson. In 2011, as a test of its abilities, Watson competed on the quiz show Jeopardy!. Watson had access to 200 million pages of structured and unstructured content consuming four terabytes of disk storage including the full text of Wikipedia, but was not connected to the Internet during the game.

IBM describes Watson as “an application of advanced Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval, Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, and Machine Learning technologies to the field of open domain question answering“.  IBM’s DeepQA technology is used for hypothesis generation, massive evidence gathering, analysis, and scoring.

Watson is related to Artificial Intelligence and to the research of commonsense knowledge, the collection of facts and information that an ordinary person is expected to know.