Saturday, June 26, 2010

I'm always making a comeback...

The internet is a wonderful place that brings together like-minded folks for cooking, scrapbooking, comic book collecting, and home-based nuclear fusion.

Here's another example of meshes in the real world: art student Alice Gruhle designed and produced the polymorph lamp.

Need to brush up on your solid mechanics?  Allan Bower's Applied Mechanics of Solids is available online for free.  If you're more into programming, Stack Overflow offers this list of free programming books.  The official web site of author Lee Child.

At last year's Business of Software conference, Don Norman's talk was my favorite.  Now you can watch in online.  He talks about how good design is not just features, but the complete user experience; and not just for the bit you do, but the user's entire workflow from A to Z.

"95% of the time the problem is with the mesh".  Ouch.  Once again the whip comes down.   Of course, there's never anything wrong with the CFD solver (OK, 5% of the time apparently.)  Let me see if I can make a good analogy.  The CFD solver is like driving a Formula 1 car during a race.  It takes a great deal of skill and coordination and strategy.  But the driver is given a fully functional and operational car, a track on which to drive, and a single objective: finish first.  On the other hand, mesh generation is like being given all the disassembled parts of the car, some missing, some that are incompatible, some from an airplane, with no blueprints, and no specific performance goals other than make a car (with the implied "you know what we want.")

Got an iPhone?  Download this MAYA app and have a little CFD in the palm of your hand.  Got spray?  Get it analyzed using CFD.

BYU professor Tom Sederberg, shown here given his acceptance speech, was honored for his contributions to computer graphics.  How to choose the right icon for the job.

Peppermint is a cloud-based Linux operating system.  Google plans to integrate PDF viewing directly into a future version of the Chrome browser. (In other words, no plug-in.)

Vintage bacon pancakes.  The Dallas restaurant Local occupies the former Boyd Hotel, the oldest remaining free-standing hotel in the city.  Now you can't complain that you can't find a farmer's market in the DFW area with this list from the Star-Telegram.

 What did you do today for freedom? and other World War II posters.

If you've ever wondered how to turn a conference into a social media event, here's how PTC did it for their recent user meeting.

Here's how to deconstruct a CSS table design.  Be one of over a million readers of SEOmoz's free Beginner's Guide to SEO.  Sitepoint provides this list of 10 common mistakes made by novice web designers.  (Sigh.  How man of these do I still make daily?)

Now's the to start thinking about how to exploit GPU computing next year.  (And, yes, the author cites meshing as something that can benefit from this.)  New from Dassault Systemes: DraftSight, software for reading, writing and sharing DWG files.  (And it's free.)   Phil Spreier, CAD industry veteran most recently at Spatial, has joined Tech Soft 3D to lead the CAD translation business they recently acquired from Adobe.

This nearly indecipherable article seems to be describing a collaborative CFD tool used to coordinate analysis activities across multiple ARA and Airbus locations.  (I think.)  The June issue of Symscape's newsletter is out.

In case you missed it, most of the presentations from this past week's OpenFOAM Workshop in Sweden are now online.  With all due respect, when someone suggested OpenFOAM in response to a Slashdot query on CFD for high school students, I cringed.   Check out NASA's Green Aviation College Student Challenge.  And see Virginia Tech's winning twin-fuselage tilt rotor from NASA's Amphibious Tilt Rotor Competition.

Git yer drink on with the Booze Dancing blog.

Yee haw! Texas has half the big cities with the greatest population growth and other demographics nuggets based on census estimates for 2009.  Best quote: "Texas is the star of the Sun Belt," said demographer Bill Frey of the Brookings Institution. "It avoided the housing bubble, it attracts immigrants, it has high tech and low tech, and it's affordable. Texas has survived the downturn while the rest of the Sun Belt has slowed down."
 
Barbie loves Woodie
  
...but nobody ever tells me where I've been.  --Billie Holiday

No comments: