Just for You!: October 2006

Friday, October 27, 2006

Nike + Apple = Jogging Made Fun

Who would’ve thought of marrying a pair of shoes to an iPod? But it’s the kind of thing that makes you go “why didn’t I think of that?”. Slip a sensor into any Nike+ compatible shoe, and it’ll start sending data to your iPod Nano via a receiver. With data of your jogging speed, your iPod will pick suitable tracks to play. It also tells you how far you are from your destination, what speed you are running at and how long you took to complete the course. You can even play a “power” song for that last dash to the finish line.

That’s not all. Plug your iPod into its dock, and it’ll send your jogging information to the new NikePlus.com website, which keeps track of your progress.

Here’s a video of the pair in action.

Automatic Door That Opens to your Body Shape

This cool-looking door has infrared sensors on each of its slats. With them, the door detects the shape of the person or object passing through, and opens up to a neat approximate shape of it. Other than just looking plain cool, it helps minimize loss of air-conditioning and even entry of dust.

The Remember Ring Burns You to Remind You of Anniversaries

Having difficulty remembering your significant other’s birthday or even your wedding anniversary? The Remember Ring can help remind you! 24 hours before the big day, the ring will start warming up every hour for approximately 10 seconds. Warm enough that you will notice it, but not enough to burn you.

The great thing about this ring is that there is no need for any battery. It converts the heat from your finger into electricity, keeping its heat-generating stuffs running year-round and maintenance-free.

It comes in seven designs and lifetime warranty. Do take note that the Remember Ring only reminds you of one date. So if you are the type that has more than one significant other, you might need to order more than one ring.

The Self-Playing Violin

Everyday, advancement in technology is slowly replacing the need for humans themselves to perform tasks. People that used to station at carpark entrances are now replaced by machines. And heaven forbid, robots performing unassisted heart surgery.

The latest invention that is also replacing a human’s task is the Virtuoso. It is an amazing violin that is capable of playing by itself. But instead of creating a sophisticated robotic hand to control the pitch, the inventor used an electromagnetic system to achieve the same results. So what we’ll see is the bow bowing magically all by itself in mid-air.

Getting one for your home will surely amaze every guest in the house. But not without a hefty price tag of course. A set will cause a damage of $17,500 to your bank account.

Samsung SCH-B600: The 10-Megapixel Cellphone with Optical Zoom

Like the previous Samsung SCH-B500, the new Samsung SCH-B600 features a candybar form factor with an optical zoom camera. What’s new is the snazzier design and the 10-megapixel camera.

Features:

10-megapixel camera with 3x optical zoom and 5x digital zoom
Auto focus
Built-in flash
White balance setting
Manual focus
Continuous picture-taking
Interval picture-taking
Bluetooth
Satellite DMB
MMCmicro external memory support
TV-out
MP3 player
Business card reader
For guys, like the SCH-B500, be sure not to activate the B600’s lens barrel when it’s in your pants. It can be rather embarrassing. Each set is expected to set you back around US$940 when it launches in Korea.

The Self-Collapsing and Self-Assembling Robotic Chair

Alright, this seems really pointless, but it’s pretty cool nonetheless. It would have been even cooler if it could just assemble a little faster. Created by Raffaello D’Andrea and Max Dean, the Robotic Chair is meant to be an art piece that employs robotic technology. By communicating with a computer, the disassembled chair is able to find its way to the rest of its parts and joins them back together.

“Some people thought it was a hoax, or fabricated or computer animation,” D’Andrea said. “Others thought it was remote-controlled. The reality of it is, it’s not. It’s a self-contained system that does what it does.”

“It’s continually reassembling itself,” he also said. “Somewhat like what we do in our own lives. We fall apart and put ourselves back together.”

Ahhh…artsy fartsy people, I can never seem to understand them. Video of this “piece of art” below.

Posted by:
Kimberly S. Jimenez

The C Program

About C
As a programming language, C is rather like Pascal or Fortran. Values are stored in variables. Programs are structured by defining and calling functions. Program flow is controlled using loops, if statements and function calls. Input and output can be directed to the terminal or to files. Related data can be stored together in arrays or structures.

Of the three languages, C allows the most precise control of input and output. C is also rather more terse than Fortran or Pascal. This can result in short efficient programs, where the programmer has made wise use of C's range of powerful operators. It also allows the programmer to produce programs which are impossible to understand.

Programmers who are familiar with the use of pointers (or indirect addressing, to use the correct term) will welcome the ease of use compared with some other languages. Undisciplined use of pointers can lead to errors which are very hard to trace. This course only deals with the simplest applications of pointers.

It is hoped that newcomers will find C a useful and friendly language. Care must be taken in using C. Many of the extra facilities which it offers can lead to extra types of programming error. You will have to learn to deal with these to successfully make the transition to being a C programmer.

This course teaches C under the UNIX operating system. C programs will look similar under any other system (such as VMS or DOS), some other features will differ from system to system. In particular the method of compiling a program to produce a file of runnable code will be different on each system.

The UNIX system is itself written in C. In fact C was invented specifically to implement UNIX. All of the UNIX commands which you type, plus the other system facilities such as password checking, lineprinter queues or magnetic tape controllers are written in C.

In the course of the development of UNIX, hundreds of functions were written to give access to various facets of the system. These functions are available to the programmer in libraries. By writing in C and using the UNIX system libraries, very powerful system programs can be created. These libraries are less easy to access using other programming languages. C is therefore the natural language for writing UNIX system programs.

A Very Simple Program
This program which will print out the message This is a C program

#include

main()
{
printf("This is a C program\n");
}
Though the program is very simple, a few points are worthy of note.

Every C program contains a function called main. This is the start point of the program.

#include allows the program to interact with the screen, keyboard and filesystem of your computer. You will find it at the beginning of almost every C program.

main() declares the start of the function, while the two curly brackets show the start and finish of the function. Curly brackets in C are used to group statements together as in a function, or in the body of a loop. Such a grouping is known as a compound statement or a block.

printf("This is a C program\n");
prints the words on the screen. The text to be printed is enclosed in double quotes. The \n at the end of the text tells the program to print a newline as part of the output.

Most C programs are in lower case letters. You will usually find upper case letters used in preprocessor definitions (which will be discussed later) or inside quotes as parts of character strings. C is case sensitive, that is, it recognises a lower case letter and it's upper case equivalent as being different.

While useful for teaching, such a simple program has few practical uses. Let us consider something rather more practical. The following program will print a conversion table for weight in pounds (U.S.A. Measurement) to pounds and stones (Imperial Measurement) or Kilograms (International).

Posted by:
Kimberly S. Jimenez

Sorry for not updating

Semestral break is almost over and i am looking forward on this upcoming school days, we have to pass immediately our reserch project and there will be an upcoming long test in Computer Science. Ciao!

Posted by:
Kimberly S. Jimenez