Look at this video of a Turing Machine built with the LEGO Mindstorm platform:

This is a part of a project at computer science of Aarhus University in Denmark. At this page you can find the official blog of the project where you can follow the step-by-step development of the robotic Turing Machine.

Turing Machines were described by Alan Mathinson Turing in 1936: they are a simple way to describe the logic of any computer algorithm. Despite their simplicity they are useful to describe and understand the limits of mechanical computation.

A Turing Machine consists in:

• a tape arbitrarily expandable to the left and to the right, divided into adiacent cell containg a symbol;
• a head wich can move in any direction over the tape and can read and/or write symbols on it;
• a set of transition functions that describe how the machine operates;
• a state wich describes the current status of the machine.

For more information about the Turing Machine you can visit this page on Wikipedia.

A few minutes ago I made a search on google.com and you’ll never guess what I’ve discovered!
Every result shown by the most popular search engine is tagged as a malware! Look at this picture:

When you try to open a link this page is displayed:
 

We hope that Google will fix this bug quickly!

Edit: after about half an hour everything seems to be ok.

Edit: this bug was due to an human error when updating blacklists in collaboration with StopBadware.org – as Google states in this page of its official blog.

Today at the uni (my beloved MIT – Milan institute of technology) a friend of mine that have recently bought an Asus eeePC 701 (Xandros version) told me he can no more stand linux since now that is used to OS X’s easiness all linux’s problems are too annoying! Hearing this really surprised me since my friend, before moving to Mac, was one of the greatest GNU/Linux’s supporter I’ve ever met!

You know… when you get used to the fact that everything works fast without problems it’s quite hard to “come back”. Just an example… yesterday I saw a poor linux user working for about half an our on his ubuntu trying to get connected to uni’s wifi… with no success! For me it is just a matter of opening the MacBook and it automatically get connected to uni’s wifi!

Mac’s easiness has no price! 

We are sorry for not writing for a such long period but exams at uni kept us quite busy! Anyway now, since we finished all the exams, we are again free. To restart witing on this blog we want to show you this beautiful photo of our macs…

I’m sorry for not writing as much as I would but unfortunately the study (for uni’s exams) is keeping me away from the keyboard (I’m still using my computer… but after studying I’ve not much energy left for blogging).

Anyway I found on the web this extremely funny strip that tells a really sad truth about geeks and women…

Since my mental illness is still not cured, and I’m very much into this “game of life” thing, I also developed a version of Conway’s game of life for Mac OS X using Objective-C and the framework Cocoa.

Esthetically speaking the Cocoa version is much more cool then the Java one… but the algorithm is actually the same. I named it “CocoLife” fusing “Cocoa”, the name of the framework I used, and “Life”. The application’s icon represent a particular configuration of the game of life called “glider”.

Since I cured much more the develop of this version I filled up the application with many “cool” features! In CocoLife is possible to:

• Configure the colors of background and automata
• Choose between 4 different world sizes (50×50, 100×100, 250×250 and 500×500)
• Choose the world type (bordered-world or loop-world)
• Change the execution speed of the simulation modifying the interval of pause between transitions
• Create personal world configurations using the bult-in world-editor

The application, released under the license GNU GPL v2, requires Mac OS X 1.5 Leopard to work.  

Download CocoLife from here:

• XCode Project source code: CocoLife-src.zip
• Mac OS X Universal Binary: CocoLife.zip

Do you know the Conway’s Game of Life? Well for them who don’t…

The Game of Life is a cellular automaton devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970. It is the best-known example of a cellular automaton.

The “game” is actually a zero-player game, meaning that its evolution is determined by its initial state, needing no input from human players. One interacts with the Game of Life by creating an initial configuration and observing how it evolves. A variant exists where two players compete.

Yesterday I read an article about it ad I felt an insane necessity of developing a little java version of this useless game (of course it is not the first implementation of the life game… but it was just for my fun)!

Here you can download it:

• Source code: jLife-src.zip
• Mac OS X Universal Binary: jLife.zip
• JAR Multi-platform executable: jLife.jar

Here you can find bit different version… the world-loop one. In the previous version the world was a 100×100 bordered matrix, in this version instead it is a 100×100 infinite-loop matrix (each border is connected to the opposite one creating an infinite loop).

•  Source code: jLife-loop-src.zip
• Mac OS X Universal Binary: jLife-Loop_Version.zip
• JAR Multi-platform executable: jLife-loop.jar

Two weeks ago I did it! I bought the new Apple’s super thin computer… the MacBook Air! Obviously the model with the 1.6 GHz CPU and 80 GB PATA Hard Drive since I’m not rich enough to buy the Solid State Disk model (I’m also not a fan of solid state technology… so having the money I would have opted for a 1.8 GHz CPU and PATA HD).

You know… I don’t care if it hasn’t any dvd drive or neither a ethernet port! On my old MacBook the ethernet port was still virgin after 2 years of use… and the dvd drive is useless since I have my iMac to burn and read DVD (I usually rip my dvd-movies and put them on a portable HD) so I got only advantages from the Air: less weight to carry around at uni, less space occupied in my bag and a battery with a much longer duration (tested… it truly worked for 5 hours)!

Another thing I love of the Air is that it has all the “coolnesses” of the pro series (like the ambient light sensor for automatic adjustment of keyboard illumination and screen brightness). So I can say I’m pretty happy with my new toy!

I did a video of the unboxing… I hope you’ll appreciate it:

A few days ago, in front of our university (MIT – Politecnico di Milano), appeared a big black box with the Sun logo on its sides.

Sun’s guys were here to present the “Sun Modular Datacenter S20″ also known as Project Blackbox: it is a virtualized datacenter, built into a shipping container, first announced in October 2006, but officially presented in January 2008. The project is a computing powerhouse, placed among the top 200 fastet supercomputers globally, which maximizes energy efficiencies and reduces electronic waste.

The container is 6.06m (20 feet) long, 2.44m (8 feet) wide and 2.59m (8 feet 6 inches) tall; empty its weight is 8,000 kg (18,000 lb.), but reaches 15,000 kg (34,000 lb.) when fully loaded. It house 8 40U racks (7 for server, storage, etc. and 1 for network and system management equipment) and, with its 4 water hook-ups (2 per side), can cool up to 25kW per rack.

The cooling system keep the inner temperature under 35°C (95°F) with maximum noncondensing relative humidity under 80%. The system can operate between 10°C (50°F) and 35°C (inner temperature) and can be placed in an enviroment between -29°C (-20°F) and 54°C (130°F) and at a maximum altitude of 3,000m (10,000 ft).
The cooling system works using both air and cold water. Each rack has 10 fans, 5 in the front and 5 in the back: the frontal ones bring fresh air inside and the others let hot air outside the rack. Between each rack tubes with cold water cool hot air to bring new fresh air to the next rack.

The container has one power panel on both sides providing 415 VAC (300 A) per panel at 380 V (3 phase).

Concerning network connectivity, SMD supports two network panels offering different option starting from standard RJ-45 and/or LC fibre -single or multi mode- connectors to bulk cable pass-through panel.

The container offers 320 RU divided in 280 RU for IT equipment, 25 RU for network equipment and 15 RU reserved for SMD monitoring and management system. Customers can choose between different Sun equipments such as Sun Fire servers, StorageTek systems, Blade system, etc. but also third part material.

The box is also provided by an efficient fire preventing system in charge of keeping safe the internal environment.

SMD can work even in very difficult condition: for example it can resist a magnitude 6.7 earthquake without stopping his service as you can see in this video: SMD Earthquake Test.

More information can be found at Sun’s website.

Here are some photos of SMD:

I have never had a good relation with kubuntu (and ubuntu too…) for reason that I’m not going to discuss here, but yesterday, having to fix an old laptop for my cousin (that has never used Linux), I decided to give it a chance!

It impressed me! It fixed a malfunctioning HD and it installed perfectly on a pretty old (2.8 GHz P4) laptop of a “never heard brand”! I used the default installation (formatting the HD with ext3)… in 30 minutes everything was finished! All hardware recognized and correctly installed (and the machine, that previously mounted Windows, seems to be reborn faster and lighter).

Adept, the packet manager, is also quite impressive… very easy to use. I just plugged in the ethernet cable to connect to the web… updated all packages pressing few buttons and installed extra software with the same easiness!

So… I’m still preferring my beloved Slackware but I must admit that kubuntu is a pretty nice choice for quick jobs and for people who are new to GNU\Linux!