Among my many thoughts about the future is the wish for a cabin in the woods. Sarah and I talk about building a Flatpak home on a concrete slab near a body of water.

With apologies to Philip Johnson, I saw this in the paper and had an idea.

(See also: StarTribune: 1970s Minneapolis Skyway)
(See also: StarTribune: This skyway used to span S. 5th Street but was taken down for the Hiawatha light-rail line.)
(See also: Flatpak)
(See also: Flickr: Flatpak house photostream)
(See also: Wikipedia: Philip Johnson)
(See also: Wikipedia: Philip Johnson Glass House)
(See also: Craigslist: Skyway)

The picture is from GeoEye via AFP/Getty Images

(See also: TimesOnline: Inauguration Day, from space)
(See also: Inauguration: large version)

(See also: TED: David Carson)
(See also: TED Speakers: David Carson)
(See also: DavidCarsonDesign)
(See also: Wikipedia: David Carson)
(See also: The End of Print: Graphic Design of David Carson)

For Macworld this year Google Earth iPhone engineer David Phillip Oster assembled a program that lets you surf Google Earth (api) with the Nintendo Wii Fit Balance Board.

Based on Thatcher Ulrich’s open source Javascript Monster Milktruck demo. David wrapped it as a Macintosh application program so he could add Objective-C Macintosh Bluetooth support to decode the Bluetooth packets from the Wii Balance Board.

I’m going to have to try this. If only to change the surfing Milktruck into something more appropriate. Perhaps a Silversurfer?

Earth Surfer and its source code will be available next week on the Google Mac Developer forum.

(See also: Flying Through Google Earth at Macworld)

The TOP500.org list is an ordered collection of the 500 most powerful general purpose systems in use today. Rank is determined by the number of floating point operations per second (FLOPS) sustained while solving a dense system of linear equations in the LINPACK benchmark suite. The TOP500.org list is updated every six months.

There is now a Green500.org list ranking machines on the TOP500.org list based on energy efficiency, in FLOPS per Watt. LINPACK makes use of the BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms) libraries to perform vector and matrix operations. The three benchmarks that comprise LINPACK were designed for use on vector processors in the 1970s and early 1980s.

If LINPACK is representative of the types of calculations and loads produced by your application suites, then Green500.org ranking may be a valid measure of performance efficiency. If LINPACK loads are not representative of your work, it would be interesting to explore a metric more appropriate to modern hardware and application loads. Perhaps LAPACK-based FLOPS over Watts metric?

(See also: TOP500.org)
(See also: Green500.org)

(See also: LINPACK: Fortran subroutines that analyze and solve linear equations.)
(See also: LINPACK: latest report)
(See also: LAPACK: Linear Algebra PACKage)
(See also: BLAS: Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms)

(See also: EnergyStar.gov)
(See also: GreenerComputing.com)

(See also: IEEE: Green Supercomputing Comes of Age)
(See also: IEEE: The Green500 List – Encouraging Sustainable Supercomputing)

(See also: Honey, I Shrunk the Beowulf)