GE develops 500GB holographic disk

GE is working on new type of optical storage media – holographic disk. Few days ago GE has announced a breakthrough in research and have demonstrated a disk (standard DVD size) that holds 500 GB of data.
This is very good news for businesses, in particular when it comes to backing up huge volumes of data. In any case this is great news since it is very different method of storing data compared to standard CD/DV/BlueRay disks.
In this video you can hear how does it work.

The process works by imprinting chemical changes in the form of patterns –- holograms –- within the disc. Those holograms are then read by lasers, similar to the ones in Blu-ray players. In fact, at 500GB, these holographic discs could offer 20 times the capacity of a single-layer Blu-ray disc.

There are some comments on the web that this is not that important because you can deliver the HD movies on flash memory devices. That is true, flash memory is cheap and capacity is constantly increasing. But they are missing the data side of optical media.
Considering the development of optical storage from CD to BlueRay it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect new types of disks quite soon with capacities of serveral TB on a single disk. Only time will tell if we were right.

Google Analytics API available for your site

Few days ago Google has announced availability of its Analytics API for your own web sites.
This is great news for web administrators and anyone wanting to find out more about the details of web traffic on your web site.

With Google Analytics, you can gather, view, and analyze data about your website traffic. By embedding our basic JavaScript snippet into your pages, you see which content gets the most visits, average page views and time on site for visits, which ads are driving the most visitors to your site, and more. You can also use the simple administrative interface to set up goals and filters to control what data goes into your reports based on your business needs. The best part: this sophisticated, full-featured web analytics package is free.

Additional benefit of Analytics API is ability to use Data Export API and then integrate it with your own data.
Indication of power of Analytics API is in fact that FeedBurner has stopped providing the same service in favour of Google Analytics.
With Analytics API one can view various reports detailing visitors (unique visitors, total visits, Pageviews, time on site, bounce rate…) traffic sources separated by direct traffic, referring sites, search engines etc. Not to mention that one can compare two metrics for a parameter or compare to a web site.


If you don’t like the default dashboard or reports you can check out and download have a look at Polaris for Google Analytics.
It provides new view of the dashboard but it is built using Analytics API.


Polaris comes as free version for one web site profile or only $15/year for multiple profiles. It is very low demand on system configuration. Old Pentium III with 512MB should be just fine… as long you have Adobe Air 1.5 installed.
This is definitely easier way to track web site traffic than to collect the log files, import into database and generate reports on your own.

Are gaming cards good enough for workstations?

Being member of support group at work every now and then I get a question like “Can I use gaming card for GIS? This one is really powerful, my ArcGlobe should fly on this thing!”
In more general sense this is a question of gaming vs workstation graphics cards. To answer this question Tom’s Hardware did a benchmark between nvidia GTX 260 and Quadro FX 4800.
Quadro FX 4800


XFX GTX 260


Tom’s  Hardware benchmark is quite comprehensive and in first part they are comparing Quadro 4800 card against other Quadro and ATI FireGL set of cards.
Results are bit of the mix, but FX 4800 is very close to the top in almost every benchmark.
Finally on page 10 of the benchmark results of test for GTX 260 are listed against FX4800. The number are quite impressive, some of test were a whole magnitude larger for FX 4800.

Test from Viewperf 10	GTX 260	FX 4800
3dS Max 04	11.53	46.23
catia-02	15.22	57.95
ensigth-02	18.34	54.47
maya-02	35.71	221.71
proe-04	14.72	60.59
sw-01	12.94	128.71
tcvis-01	4.77	39.36
ugnx-01	5.89	33.72

In their conclusion they sum it up quite nicely:

A Quadro FX 4800 moves up to 10 times faster when running workstation applications than the GeForce GTX 280. This leads swiftly to a clear and inescapable conclusion: there's no good reason to use a GeForce graphics card for workstation applications. It just doesn't pay.

The problem is that this test does not includes GIS applications, namely ArcGIS.  I would love to see a application testing graphics performance in ArcGIS and ArcGlobe. One of major problems might be the fact that most GIS processing (speaking of graphics only) is 2D not 3D. In that regard I believe the gaming cards are doing a fine job. Again, we need a test tool to prove this.
For 3D performance in GIS i tried using Fraps. Fraps can show current frame rate on the screen or 3D window. In ArcGLobe it was constant 25 fps (if memory serves me well).
If any ArcObjects developers are reading this I would love to test your ArcGlobe benchmark tool… If you are working on one please e-mail me on ZergOne@gmail.com.

BumpTop desktop released

While ago, in 2007 I wrote a short post about BumTop desktop with the video show how intuitive and entertaining it can be. Now BumTop has released it as a product. BumpTop comes as Free and Pro version. Pro version costs USD$29 and offers four extra features compared to Free version.
The best way to get familiar with the features is to watch the video.

Features
Main feature is definitely a 3D representation of desktop and fully physics engine. All elements on the desktop can be manipulated, moved, piled up and tossed around.
Another great feature is support for multitouch screens. If you are not sure what this means have a read over here.
Gestures are used to manipulate icons/files in certain ways. To assist you with gestures there is a Pie Menu available.
Piles – stack your documents and files into piles. They can be grouped by type so all MP3 files in one corner and PDFs in another.
Sticky note – just like sticky note that you can pin onto desktop or on the wall.
Search as you type – ability to search for any item on your desktop
Toss files –  files can be tossed to a printer, USB drive, recycle bin or e-mail.
Icon size – files used more frequently are bigger in size and heavier.
Facebook and Twitter – share your pictures with friends by simply tossing images to Facebook or Twitter widgets.

BumpTop comes with 3 themes installed Blue (Vista like), Next and Classic. If that is not to your liking then go to Customize.org and download one or more themes. At the moment there are 65 available for download.


Free and Pro version differences are listed here but here they are in compact form.

Feature	Free	Pro
Sticky Note	Max 2	Unlimited
Toss files to USB		Yes
Autogrow of files		Yes
Flip through piles		Yes
Thumbnails	Watermark	Yes
Customer support	Limited	Premium

In terms of hardware requirements they are on the lower side of scale.

• A 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows XP, Windows Vista or Windows 7, with latest service packs
• A Pentium 4/Celeron 1.8GHz or Athlon XP/Sempron 2200+ or desktop/mobile equivalent
• Minimum 1GB system memory
• 15 MB available hard disk space
• Intel 915 integrated graphics or Nvidia GeForce 6200 or ATI X300 or better with updated drivers
• OpenGL 2.0 driver support required (may require additional drivers available at bumptop.com/drivers)
• Internet connection required for activation

So go and download it from download page (only 12.1 MB) and give it a spin, or toss or pile them up.
Just a thought for the end. If you are anything like me (for PC desktop that is) then it may be arguable if you need BumTop. Why? Because I have only 5 (five) icons on my desktop: shortcut to the user files, network, my computer, one remote desktop connection, recycle bin and Fallout 3. That’s it.
Here it is how it looks as BumTop.

On the other hand, if BumpTop supports some sort of tags or can use a file description of some sort I may reconsider putting files on desktop grouped by current work. I’ll let you know after testing.

ArcObjects VB6 to .Net migration

If you are using VB6 as chosen platform for ArcObjects application development you may want to start skilling up to .Net. According to this post  VB6 will not be supported at 9.4.
To help with the code migration ESRI has posted three videos titled:

• ArcGIS Application Migration: Using the Visual Studio 2008 Upgrade Wizard
• How To Migrate a VB6 project to .NET - Complex Project
• How To Migrate a VB6 project to .NET - Simple Project
• ArcGIS Application Migration: Converting Commands from VB6 to VB.NET

Videos are from 7 to 44 minutes in length and should help you with most common questions.