Freely available.

Excel .NetMap - Social Network Add-in for Excel 2007

Robert Darnton, in The New York Review of Books:

Information is exploding so furiously around us and information technology is changing at such bewildering speed that we face a fundamental problem: How to orient ourselves in the new landscape? What, for example, will become of research libraries in the face of technological marvels such as Google?

How to make sense of it all? I have no answer to that problem, but I can suggest an approach to it: look at the history of the ways information has been communicated. Simplifying things radically, you could say that there have been four fundamental changes in information technology since humans learned to speak.

Somewhere, around 4000 BC, humans learned to write. Egyptian hieroglyphs go back to about 3200 BC, alphabetical writing to 1000 BC. According to scholars like Jack Goody, the invention of writing was the most important technological breakthrough in the history of humanity. It transformed mankind's relation to the past and opened a way for the emergence of the book as a force in history.

The history of books led to a second technological shift when the codex replaced the scroll sometime soon after the beginning of the Christian era. By the third century AD, the codex—that is, books with pages that you turn as opposed to scrolls that you roll—became crucial to the spread of Christianity. It transformed the experience of reading: the page emerged as a unit of perception, and readers were able to leaf through a clearly articulated text, one that eventually included differentiated words (that is, words separated by spaces), paragraphs, and chapters, along with tables of contents, indexes, and other reader's aids.

The Library in the New Age

ImageMagick gets seam carving.

Just as Sampling an image resizes by directly removing or duplicating whole columns and rows from an image, the special IM operator "-liquid-rescale" also removes or duplicates columns and rows of pixels from an image to reduce/enlarge an image. The difference is that it tries to do so in a more intelegent manner.

First the instead of removing a simple line of pixels, it removes a 'seam' of pixels. That is the column (or row) that could zig-zag through the image, at angles up to 45 degrees.

Secondly it trys to remove seams that have the 'least importance' in terms of the images contents. How it selects this is in terms of the images energy, or more simply, the amount of color changes a particular 'seam' involves. The 'seam' with the least amount of changes will be removed first, followed by higher 'energy' seams, until the image is the size desired.

Resize or Scaling -- IM v6 Examples

Imagine a high-speed rail line that could get you from San Francisco to LA in 2 hours and 40 minutes.

California Building 220 MPH High-Speed Train from San Francisco to LA

Computer science research results in new technology that can outperform standard microprocessors up to 1,000 times.

Research Leads to Self-Improving Chips with Speed ‘Warping’

Let’s check our common-sense understanding of the word social. It’s mostly about people talking to one another. Sometimes it’s about dancing, bowling or doing other stuff with people.

This gets lost in the meaning-destroying repetition of the word by a bunch of Internet companies.

Steering Between Unsocial Networks and Social Spam

GPUs continue to evolve rapidly, but toward what?

Future Graphics Architectures

Today's businesses have a growing need to reliably store and analyze increasing volumes of data. On April 30th LogiXML and Vertica jointly explored this trend and discussed how our companies are responding to it. We concluded with a brief demo which illustrated a more tangible example of the benefits of Vertica's innovative columnar database and LogiXML's Web-based BI solutions.

"A New Era in Business Intelligence"

Shiira is a web browser based on Web Kit and written in Cocoa. The goal of the Shiira Project is to create a browser that is better and more useful than Safari. All source code used in this software is publicly available.

Shiira Project

RapidXml is an attempt to create the fastest XML parser possible, while retaining useability, portability and reasonable W3C compatibility. It is an in-situ parser written in modern C++, with parsing speed approaching that of strlen function executed on the same data.

RapidXML