Saturday, August 29, 2009

Truth is like a football...


Teh interwebs was made for stuff like this: a collection of dice. Proof that it doesn't matter how you say it: the preamble to the Constitution done with license plates. Head cheese and other delicacies. Get your Orange on (no, not burnt orange). Cool pictures of airplanes in flight.

Stone Brewing: visit the site, read the blog, drink the beer.

Here's a blast of related product marketing blogs and sites: ProductMarketing.com, Launch Clinic, Buyer Persona, Tuned In (retired), and Web Ink Now. Get on the squirrel bandwagon with the Squirrelizer. Entrepreneur.com offers tips to make you Web Smart. Sign of the apocalypse #38: there's a Twitter conference.

This video shows how to use CFDesign for design (hence the name). SmartFish is an airplane (go figure). CADspan is software from creating 3D printable files from CAD data. You may have to read this a couple times to believe it. The folks at Winkers customize jeans so they wink while you walk. The folks at Gum Alert review Bacon Gumballs.

KFC has introduced the Double Down, a sandwich without bread. (I thought this whole sandwich thing was a solved problem.) It's very fitting that the Humanure Handbook is in the downloads folder. Volcanoes are awesome when seen from space, but be careful while you're looking so one of these lightning jets doesn't shoot up and hit you in the eye.

Usually there's nothing better than monkey actors, but the mouth animations just ain't right. Lancelot Link didn't need no CGI. Why are the number of immaculate innings (3 strike outs on 9 pitches) ballooning this decade? (Not to be confused with 3 pitch innings.) Go the state fair and try some chicken fried bacon and other fried fare.

Super Mario Bros. for the Wii. Hirsute t-shirts. Visualization Library is a C++ middleware for high-performance 2D and 3D graphics applications based on the industry standard OpenGL 2.1, designed to develop portable applications for the Windows, Linux and Mac OS X operating systems. They want to demolish the Langley Full Scale Wind Tunnel.

See some of the world's largest foods. (Bigger is better, right?) My favorite is the 288 meter long stuffed cabbage, although I'm certain it's not a good as my grandmother's. Ever wonder how a sewing machine works? Sorry I missed Go Topless Day on 23 August. Odd stuff abounds on the Bits & Pieces blog. The Math Book, 250 milestones in the history of mathematics.

...you can kick it around all day, but in the end it's still round and full. -- Mark Twain

Saturday, August 22, 2009

There is nothing more unequal...


This IBM article on why engineers should be worried about color reminds me of Tufte's work, and indeed he is referenced. The University of Iowa develops IA-FEMesh, a free software toolkit for generating hex meshes for anatomic models. Here are some downloads for FEAST's preprocessors, Grid3D and DiViSoR. KUBRIX, the CAE mesh generator, is available as a Rhino plug-in. The release notes for modeFrontier v4.1.2.

Avert your eyes or prepare to be offended by This is Photobomb. Mashups from Aggro1. Surchur claims to be able to show you what's popular right now. Or if you're just interested in finding out about yourself, try Personas from the MIT Media Lab. Here's me (I have no idea what it means).


Plan to be in Chicago next summer for the High Lift Prediction Workshop (HiLift). Should I or shouldn't I? Beer glasses from Sam Adams. Concept Flow specialises in the simulation of fluid flow, particle dynamics, droplet dynamics and heat and mass transfer for healthcare and pharmaceutical applications. ANSYS was ranked #33 on the Fortune 100 fastest growing companies list. Senergy Thermal offers ActiveCFD, a way to keep your data center cool by continually running CFD to see how cool your data center is.

Bacon. Fried. Ramen.

...than the equal treatment of unequal people. -- Thomas Jefferson

Saturday, August 15, 2009

Being married is not about compatibility...


First they saved the earth from Gargoyle and now Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot are on Facebook. Find experimental data for validating your CFD at the Iowa Institute of Hydraulic Research, IIHR. (Here's a report from folks who have already used some of it.) NVIDIA released CUDA Toolkit and SDK 2.3 for those of you who like to compute using your GPU. More benchmark problems for CFD from FreeCASE. Seth Godin explains why marketing is too important to be left to the Marketing Department. 47 Hats is a blog for startups and microISVs.

One of the most complex animated GIFs I have ever seen: Evolution. Give it an image and ColorSuckr creates a color scheme. Mr. Breakfast brings you all there is to know about Lucky Charms and more at the Cereal Project. Got a cloud of points? Pointools may have the software you need. A battery to power your home? I'd just like one that will power my mouse for longer than 3 weeks. Why drop the price of your CAD software from $999 to $99? Volume! The Center for CFD at George Mason University. GMU's Rainald Lohner presents computational sciences as the third pillar of empirical sciences.

Got a design that will change the world? Enter Desktop Engineering magazine's contest. Three companies with software products for computer-aided geometry design and modeling: IntegrityWare, HarmonyWare, and Solid Modeling Solutions. TrueGrid is a mesh generator and pre-processor for CFD and FEA analysis. Integrated Engineering Software writes CAE software for electromagnetics.

A simple tutorial for Pro/E. Engineering management pearls from Mackie Assoc. The official web site of ELP founding member, one-time King Crimson lead singer, and solo artist Greg Lake.

Time to update your calendar.
...as much as it's about dealing with incompatibility. -- Leo Tolstoy

Saturday, August 8, 2009

Underwear is like humility...


Why bother working out when all it takes to get ripped is to Get Ript? First there were underpants for your hands (Handerpants), now there are panties for your feet (Footundeez). Where might this profusion of undergarments end? Something this blog needs: George Washington's rules of civility. ("#7. Do not off your cloths in presence of others." Is it OK to blog while wearing only Handerpants and Footundeez?)

Mentor Graphics' David Tatchell blogs about 40 years in the CFD business. Be sure to visit the Museum Place development in Fort Worth's Cultural District for dining, shopping, and entertainment. See how folks are building user interfaces on this page about Qt in Aerospace. CastNet is a is a modeling and meshing environment for OpenFOAM and other software. Discretizer is a free mesh program for CFD.

My next Linux will be Hannah Montana. Not only are there plans for a Alien prequel, Ridley Scott is set to direct. How to make your scientific poster stand out from the socializing, free food, and free drink. Mind numbing in its machine gun banality, PingWire is a live feed of every photo posted to Twitter. Dassault Systemes announced that 3DVIA.com is now going to post models in 3DXML and COLLADA formats.

For your event calendar:
Know where your ships are at all times with live ship maps from MarineTraffic.com. More for the map-obsessed: find all the surviving SR-71 Blackbirds. Tips on web usability. Here's a PDF cheat sheet for HTML 5. Country codes got you confused when dialing internationally? No worries, help is here. 100,000 icons all in one place for your graphics pleasure.

How well do you think a new taco joint with a logo combining elements of Texas Tech and UT is going to do in College Station (actually, Bryan)? Good luck Rockin' Taco. Touchable holography and other cool interface technologies from SIGGRAPH. The folks at Cactus Code present their CFD toolkit.

...essential, but indecent if shown.

Saturday, August 1, 2009

The only reason for time...


Roman Lygin blogs about programming and geometry modeling at Open CASCADE notes. Ever forget why you bookmarked a site? That's how it is with me and AIM@SHAPE. The folks who write MiniCAD have started creating their own versions of Gridgen's tutorials. That's a good thing. Here's a site all about the high performance finite element software FEATFLOW. All the benchmark cases for CFL3D. OpenFOAM v1.6 was released. It is now possible to calculate with reasonable precision the exact location of flow separation in certain conditions and to visualize the geometry of its introduction into free flow as a 3D isosurface.

...is so everything doesn't happen all at once. -- Albert Einstein

But sometimes it still does.