Day: June 21, 2013

This week’s GSotW is an Open Source Computer Aided Design (CAD) program that can be used like AutoCAD.

BRL-CAD – Cross-Platform Open Source CAD

BRL-CAD is a powerful cross-platform Open Source combinatorial Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG) solid modeling system that includes interactive 3D solid geometry editing, high-performance ray-tracing support for rendering and geometric analysis, network-distributed framebuffer support, image and signal-processing tools, path-tracing and photon mapping support for realistic image synthesis, a system performance analysis benchmark suite, an embedded scripting interface, and libraries for robust high-performance geometric representation and analysis.

For more than 20 years, BRL-CAD has been the primary tri-service solid modeling CAD system used by the U.S. military to model weapons systems for vulnerability and lethality analyses. The solid modeling system is frequently used in a wide range of military, academic, and industrial applications including in the design and analysis of vehicles, mechanical parts, and architecture. The package has also been used in radiation dose planning, medical visualization, computer graphics education, CSG concepts and modeling education, and system performance benchmark testing among other purposes.

BRL-CAD supports a great variety of geometric representations including an extensive set of traditional CSG primitive implicit solids such as boxes, ellipsoids, cones, and tori, as well as explicit solids made from closed collections of Uniform B-Spline Surfaces, Non-Uniform Rational B-Spline (NURBS) surfaces, n-Manifold Geometry (NMG), and purely faceted mesh geometry. All geometric objects may be combined using boolean set-theoretic CSG operations including union, intersection, and difference.

BRL-CAD has been under active development with a portability heritage that includes systems such as a DEC VAX-11/780 running 4.3 BSD; DECStations running ULTRIX; Silicon Graphics 3030, 4D ‘IRIS,’ O2, Onyx, and Origin systems running various versions of IRIX; Sun Microsystems Sun-3 and Sun-4 Sparcs running SunOS; the Cray 1, Cray X-MP, Cray Y-MP, and Cray 2 running UNICOS; DEC Alpha AXP running OSF/1; Apple Macintosh II running A/UX; iPSC/860 Hypercube running NX/2; the Alliant FX/8, FX/80, and FX/2800; Gould/Encore SEL PowerNode6000/9000 and NP1; NeXT workstations; IBM RS/6000; HPPA 9000/700 running HPUX; Ardent/Stardent; Encore Multi-Max; and much more.

BRL-CAD is a collection of more than 400 tools, utilities, and applications comprising more than a million lines of source code. The package is intentionally designed to be extensively cross-platform and is actively developed on and maintained for many common operating system environments including for BSD, Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, and Windows among others. BRL-CAD is distributed in binary and source code form as free open source software (FOSS), provided under Open Source Initiative (OSI) approved license terms.

“Animal creation puzzler Incredipede is holding an ‘Open Source Appreciation week,’ in which Linux users are being rewarded with a free copy of the game. As users of the open-source OS crawl, roll and sproing away with their newly gifted present, there’s no need for other platform users to feel abandoned. You’re being given a not insignificant 50% off, instead.

‘I’m making it free because Linux users are such strong supporters of indie games and because I like Linux, and the philosophy behind it so much,” writes the game’s creator Colin Northway. In addition, a portion of the week’s Humble Store sales are being donated to the open source projects FlashDevelop and Box2D – both of which were instrumental in the creation of the game.

To claim your free copy, head to this page of the Incredipede site. There you’ll also find instructions for the game’s optimum set-up – a side-effect of the lack of Linux support from the decidedly closed-source Adobe Air.”

Elon Musk, the owner of Tesla Motors is facing a court battle in New York because there’s a lot of New York based local car dealerships that want to stop him from selling his electric cars through direct sales. Now, I think this is completely crazy and anti-competitive! It does not make a lot of sense to me! If a car company chooses to sell directly to their own customers, then let them! The local dealerships feel like they’re being cut out of the equation, which is a loss to them and their sales…. however, these car dealerships are NOT Tesla dealerships, and they would not have been selling Telsa Motors cars anyway! They are other car dealerships that don’t have anything to do with Tesla! Therefore, it makes no sense that they’re trying to stop a car company that has never sold cars in New York before from selling it’s cars directly to customers! I hope that Tesla Motors will win this particular lawsuit, and we will see if this anti-competitive activity will continue! If Elon Musk, and Tesla Motors want to bring their own dealerships, and showrooms, and other means of sales into any particular state, then they should have the ability to do so, in my opinion!

It was also announced today that Tesla Motors has come out with “quickchange battery stations” for their Tesla cars, that basically would allow you to swap out batteries in your electric car as quickly as it takes to fill the gas tank in your current vehicle. You do have to reuse those batteries… if you leave them then you would lose the value of the battery, and if you have to buy a whole new battery, from the place that does the swapping of batteries then it would cost a lot more than just the energy, obviously! So, they’re working out those particular kinks, but they have an automated robotic “quickchange method” to do it that looks interesting… it’s very similar to a company based out of Israel that had a similar vision; but that company declared bankruptcy and went under because electric cars didn’t catch on, however, Tesla Motors is doing quite well in selling cars, and a much higher rate than the industry thought they would! They’re turning out to be very popular!

Learn to Build a Portable Raspberry Pi (Part 1)

Learn to Build a Portable Raspberry Pi (Part 2)

I want to share with you one of my favorite podcasts! It’s absolutely awesome for the geek in all of us, and that would be “The Ben Heck Show!” Ben Heckendorn’s “Ben Heck Show” is awesome! And, I can definitely appreciate the fact that he abbreviates his last name to “Heck”… it does make for an interesting show name! But, at any rate, this show is awesome! This particular set of shows: Part One and Part Two… I wanted to share with you because it shows how he is has taken the Raspberry Pi and he’s turned it into a small, handheld portable… which is right down my alley since also do the netcast called the “Hand Held Hack!” So check it out! I’m also cross posting it over on the “Hand Held Hack” website, and I think it’s going to be an awesome show for you to see so that you will see what’s possible with some of the tools that Ben has!

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So, the new trailer is out for the Steve Jobs biographical movie that’s just called “Jobs,” and I have a link to the YouTube video right above this article. I have mixed feelings about the movie; I think it’s possibly going to be good. And, what little I’ve seen, based on the trailer, seems to indicate that Ashton Kutcher may actually get to act, which is unusual in and of itself! But, I will withhold judgment on it until after it comes out. I don’t know if I’ll see at the theater; I may wait and watch it on Bluray, or on Netflix, that will depend on my state of mind when it comes out, but it does look interesting!

Yep. Today. Welcome to summer, welcome to the longest Friday at work for the whole year. You’re welcome.