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by dion.
Original Post: Links for 2008-11-01 [del.icio.us]
Feed Title: techno.blog(Dion)
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Feed Description: blogging about life the universe and everything tech
Intelligence Squared
The Oxford style debating show has come to NPR. Good stuff. Real debates, not the shoddy stuff that we see on TV.
FFI for Ruby Now Available
"FFI stands for Foreign Function Interface. FFI has been implemented in various libraries; one of them, libffi, actually serves as the core of JNA, allowing Java code to load and call arbitrary C libraries. libffi allows code to load a library by name, retrieve a pointer to a function within that library, and invoke it, all without static bindings, header files, or any compile phase.
In order to address a need early in Rubinius's dev cycle, Evan Phoenix came up with an FFI library for Rubinius, wrapping the functionality of libffi in a friendly Ruby DSL-like API."
"Gestris" - Gaming with Gestures
Intel’s Pittsburgh Research Lab opened its doors this week for a tour of the fascinating exploratory research they’re doing on future technologies including a natural gesture interface for games built as a novel application of SLIPstream parallelization techniques. The Pittsburgh lab demonstrated this interface with a head-to-head Tetris-style game, where the players use whole body gestures to control the motion of their pieces. Unlike typical approaches to gesture detection that employ props, special clothing/markers or a controlled environment such as a blue screen), the Intel approach is designed to work in everyday environments and does not require users to be segmented from the background. Although the technique is computationally expensive, the researchers have achieved interactive speeds by parallelizing the vision algorithm across a cluster of machines in a manner that minimizes latency."
Java Performance in 64bit land
"The 32bit vs. 64bit distinction is a bit more subtle. The x86-64 architecture adds not only bigger registers to the x86 architecture, but more registers. Generally this translates to better performance in benchmarks (as having more registers allows the compilers to create better machine code). Unfortunately until recently, moving from a 32bit java to a 64bit java mean taking a performance hit."
Journey To The Center Of Prop 8
Alex Russell has a great, nicely thought out piece on Prop 8. I listened to the same NPR Forum episode that had both sides discussing their issues. I still conclude that you very much have to vote No on Prop 8. Voting yes is unthinkable to me. I tweet'd this recently: 'Prop 8 from the 60s: "You will allow your kids to learn that black people are equal at school? REALLY?" Yes then (if alive), yes today.'
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