Author: coutinho

By (author unknown), Dilbert Daily Strip – February 15, 2013 at 01:00AM

By John Biggs, TechCrunch – February 13, 2013 at 02:08PM

As a fan of monsters and 3D printing, in that order, I was intrigued by Autodesk’s new iOS app, 123D Creature. Aimed at beginning 3D modelers, the app allows you to build cute (or scary) monsters right on your screen by pinching, grabbing, and rotating a lump of virtual clay hanging on a skeleton.

The free app is the latest in Autodesk’s line of free 3D apps. The company sells much more expensive and complex 3D solutions like Maya and 3ds max but these 123D apps are designed to allow users with little experience to build objects, paint them virtually, and output mesh files that can be used on 3D printers. You can even order 3D prints of your creations right from the app.

Given the perceived difficulty of 3D modeling, these are an interesting way for Autodesk to sneak their tools into the hands of younger designers who could go on to use the company’s more lucrative tools.

How does it work? Fairly well, to be honest.

I tried the app briefly today and was able to design a pointy-headed little man and print him on my home Makerbot. Sadly his arms didn’t quite make it through the print process but his tiny legs and pin head look just fine. I’m no 3D artist, to be sure, so it was fun to be able to make a cute little being and then pump him out of my extruder in a few minutes. Not only does this give 3D novices the chance to experiment with 3D design, it makes folks with 3D printers happy because of the seamless system for making and outputting mesh files for quick prints.

By Matt Reid, Planet MySQL – February 13, 2013 at 08:09AM

I’m pleased to announce that my first book, the InnoDB Quick Reference Guide, is now available from Packt Publishing and you can download it by clicking here. It covers the most common topics of InnoDB usage in the enterprise, including: general overview of its use and benefits, detailed explanation of seventeen static variables and seven dynamic variables, load testing methodology, maintenance and monitoring, as well as troubleshooting and useful analytics for the engine. The current version of MySQL ships with InnoDB as the default table engine, so whether you program your MySQL enabled applications with PHP, Python, Perl or otherwise, you’ll likely benefit from this concise but comprehensive reference guide for InnoDB databases.

Here are the chapter overviews for reference:

1. Getting Started with InnoDB: a quick overview of core terminology and initial setup of the testing environment.
2. Basic Configuration Parameters: learn about the most common settings and prerequisites for performance tuning.
3. Advanced Configuration Parameters: covers advanced settings that can make or break a high-perfomance installation of InnoDB.
4. Load Testing InnoDB for Performance: learn all about general purpose InnoDB load testing as well as common methods for simulating production workloads.
5. Maintenance and Monitoring: covers the important sections of InnoDB to monitor, tools to use, and processes that adhere to industry best practices.
6. Troubleshooting InnoDB: learn all about identifying and solving common production issues that may arise.
7. References and Links: informative data for further reading.

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By Jamie Condliffe, Gizmodo – February 13, 2013 at 04:32AM

You’ve almost certainly seen the dancing gorilla video which demonstrates the theory of change blindness—a phenomenon which means we don’t see changes we’re not expecting. Now, an updated experiment shows that the same may be true of radiologists analyzing CT images. More »

By dendory, Inventor Spot – Inventions, Innovations, and Interesting Ideas for the Inventor in All of Us – February 12, 2013 at 12:45PM

The Star Wars opening text is visible through an Internet traceroute. Geeks and techies rejoice as the opening crawl appears on your consoles.

By Michael McLaughlin, Planet MySQL – February 12, 2013 at 03:16AM

I had an interesting conversation about table functions in Oracle’s PL/SQL; and the fact that they’re not available in MySQL. When I explained they’re available in Microsoft T-SQL User-Defined Functions (UDFs), my students wanted a small example. One of them said they’d tried to do it but couldn’t get it to work because they found the Microsoft web pages difficult to read and use. Specifically, they didn’t like the sparseness of this one on how to create a function.

Here’s a quick definition of a UDF table function that runs in the studentdb schema (created in this post for migrating SQL Server into a MySQL database). The following getConquistador function takes a single string, which acts to filter the result set from a query positioned as the return value of the function.

CREATE FUNCTION studentdb.getConquistador
(@nationality AS VARCHAR(30))
RETURNS TABLE
RETURN SELECT * FROM studentdb.conquistador WHERE nationality = @nationality;

Unlike Oracle SQL, where you need to use the TABLE function to read the content of a table result from a function, you don’t need anything other than the function call in the FROM clause of a T-SQL query. Here’s an example of calling the table function:

SELECT * FROM studentdb.getConquistador('German');

The complete result from the query would produce these results when run from the sqlcmd command-line interface:

conquistador_id conquistador          actual_name          nationality
--------------- --------------------- -------------------- ------------
             11 Nicolas de Federman   Nikolaus Federmann   German
             13 Jorge de la Espira    George von Speyer    German
 
(2 rows affected)

However, you also have the ability to query only rows of interest without any specialized syntax, like this:

1> USE studentdb;
2> SELECT conquistador AS "Conquistador"
3> ,      actual_name AS "Name"
4> FROM   studentdb.getConquistador('German');
5> GO

This produces the following two-column result set:

Conquistador          Name
--------------------- --------------------
Nicolas de Federman   Nikolaus Federmann
Jorge de la Espira    George von Speyer
 
(2 rows affected)

Hope this helps those interested in T-SQL UDFs.

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By Lambert V., The Awesomer – February 11, 2013 at 07:15PM

Our bet to win the 2013 Oscar for Best Animated Short, Minkyu Lee’s Adam and Dog is about the meeting of the first man and the first man’s best friend. Immerse yourself in its wonderful visuals.

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