Rocking Technologies

Flash your power

2010-07-04T10:01:00.000-07:00

Post 1

If you are a Web app developer it is impossible that you have not heard of Flash and the same holds true for a home-user who frequently visits Youtube, Miniclip etc.etc.

Flash, indeed and undoubtedly is one of the most powerful platforms of web application development. And to realise this, you need to be a Flash Developer, you will definitely fall in love with it. For people who would like to start learning Flash, this article will be very useful to them.

What is Flash?

Roughly speaking, Flash is just another platform of application development like JAVA, .NET(Visual Basic, C# ECT.) but with a slight difference. This difference is that software written in flash is designed or rather configured well to run as a Web Application, i.e. in your browser. The client must have an “interpreter” of the flash file located on the server (so the whole process is on the client side). The interpreter is today, commonly known as the “Flash Player”.

What can I do with flash?

You can write any complex or simple program on Flash just like you write in Java,C,C++,VB,C# etc.You can re-write the programs written on these languages into Flash too. Flash is as flexible as any of these languages. The Flash programming system comes in 2 parts. Flash Professional 8 or Flash Builder serve as the IDE and make the programmers work easier by allowing them to visually design their program. The programming language of Flash is called the ActionScript (AS) . This is the beauty of Flash. The power of Flash lies in the ActionScript, and any program of extreme complexity can be formulated using the ActionScript.

How do I learn the ActionScript fast?

Well, remember that every problem in this world can be regarded as a problem of Computer Science on condition that we build its mathematical model accurately. You need to realise that a computer language is nothing but a formal compostition of various modular parts.Thus, currently existing computer languages fall in the category of Formal Languages. I mean to say, the “Computer Language” is NOT important, the approach to the problem is important. Similarly, flash is like any other language, very easy to learn. As for the syntax, the Flash IDEs consists of excellent documentation of every single possible statement or function etc. You must refer to that.

So if you are an addicted Web App developer, its time to be a Flash Junkie now!

To be continued in Post 2

Wear ur World::Sixth Sense

2009-12-13T07:44:00.000-08:00

Augmented reality will soon be easily availiable as Pranav Mistry and other guys at the MIT Media Lab are gearing up to give the world a wearable computer. They have named it "Sixth Sense". Anytime and anywhere, switch it on and the little projector will project the data on walls, screens newspapers where ever you like.With that pranav has also developed a finger tracking software (which he has made it open source) which can interpret gestures made by your fingers to operate the "Sixth Sense" computer. So now you will be able to interact with the computer through your finger movements.This sort of technology where information world and the real world merge i.e. interact is called "augmented reality" You must have heard of Virtual Reality (No? please see the Matrix, or existenz, or the Thirteenth Floor etc. etc. etc.). Augmentation is a very superficial form of virtual reality involving stitching the real world and the computer through a more "physical" way,like using fingers to interact (if u need a better visualization,see the movie "Minority Report", and notice that cool screen which can be controlled through finger movements)

another open source finger tracking software is here -
http://nuigroup.com/touchlib/

P.S.-With this you can attain much more than you can imagine. I once saw in YouTube how to create a multitouch pad using this software....and u need nothing more than a web cam and transparent paper. Search for "Multi-touch Keypad Homemade DIY" in YouTube and you will get the video.

Aritifical Intelligence

2009-11-22T01:23:00.000-08:00

Post 1

Even before the the modern electronic era began A.M. Turing (you must of heard of the a.m. turing award from the association of computer machinery, its named after him) a great mathematician and the father of modern computing science,"the science of computing" coined the term "Artificial Intelligence".Unfortunately, the "science of computing" cannot give us the science of thinking....thinking is something and computing is something else.Even a vernier caliper is a computer and so is the abacus,but none of these machines is intelligent.Well what is intelligence,does intelligence imply consciousness? Is it possible for machines in the future to have the property of intelligence? Well then how can one differentiate between an intelligent system or a non intelligent system. The argument is useless until and unless one has a proper definition of "intelligence". It must be made clear and ambiguously stated that the machine "intelligence" we are talking about may be different from human intelligence". Spoils the fun eh? No! the fun begins here. Intelligence as an entity independent from biologically living systems is what has to be formulated in terms of equations and numbers. The challenge in itself is extremely complex and understanding it is difficult. In fact, it may lead us to absolutely wrong conclusions.To be very precise, intelligence in terms of AI is absolutely a mathematical concept which might try to roughly attain the output of an input say X as the same as the output of a biologically intelligent specie, like humans for the same input X. Are the results accurate? well, not exactly but still, in some cases, the output is practically useful. All the theories of AI do not follow the above procedure, they may differ drastically too. Neural Nets are excellent examples of what I have just said. They try to attain results through the process of "learning" in a "training", but be very careful, "learning" and "training" terms can be absolutely different from how we humans "learn" and get "trained". The learning and training in neural net is nothing but a term used to describe the process of applying certain mathematical functions to the input or intermediate values. Sure will tell you more in the next post, just keep seeing.

To be continued in Post 2

Larry Page::Founder Google

2009-11-01T07:32:00.000-08:00

A link to Larry Page's commencement speech at Michigan University. The full transcript is also written on the page page. A must watch for everyone.

http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/annc/20090502-page-commencement.html

3D Analyze - A good demonstration of the power of software

2009-10-20T01:47:00.000-07:00

While browsing the web for some good software graphic renderer,i bumped into a free software "3D Analyze" . At first the concept of it being a good replacement of a "real" hardware graphic card didn't impress me very much because it never worked out for me..but the main thing which impressed me is the power of such softwares to emulate certain hardware functions through software. Say i dont have a GPU, but actually GPU is nothing but a specially engineered cpu to specifically carry out graphics operations. But ultimately if you like at it, it is just another processor, right? So suppose, we have a powerful processor, it can work as a "GPU" too if you got the right emulator software for it...the cpu can specially work as a gpu.. we must remember that hardware to software and software to hardware mapping is obviously possible and an interesting thing too, the hardware to software mapping infact demonstrates the power of software. OS Virtualization is another excellent example of what we can call "hardware to software" interaction. The host OS hosts the virtualzing software and the guest OS resides on the software mapping of a computer hardware. Well obviously the guest uses the physical memory and processing power of the host system yet, the softwares provide the hardware emulation base. Hardware emulation has become an exciting technology, and its applications are growing day by day...who knows may be we are itself locked in a virualization?

As for 3D Analyze, if you dont have a powerful graphics card..you may want to try it out for the games that dont work on your system...Dont blame me if it doesnt work with the 3d Analyze too because software graphics rendering is not a powerful substitute for the hardware graphics card unless you have very powerful processor(in that case it is probable that you might be having a good grapics system too!), because all graphic rendering including pixel shading will be done by the CPU itself and it might not be able to process the load well.... http://www.tommti-systems.de/go.html?http://www.tommti-systems.com/main-Dateien/files.html If you require it for educational and learning purpose this software indeed is very very good! you might want to try some other pixel shaders too. One of them is SwiftShader, this software is not free,but you can download a demo for testing purposes and it didnt quite work for me but atleast it worked more than 3D Analyze. check it out http://www.transgaming.com/business/swiftshader/