D-Wave is a perfect example of a niche business: company that sells the world’s only commercial quantum computer. They just scored their second client – a collaboration between Google, NASA and the non-profit Universities Space Research Association.
These guys will explore machine learning and other stuff, probably with the usual ultimate goal to create a super-intelligent computer and make it rule the world.
Source: nature.com.
Since our MooTools class worked well on many projects we went ahead and rewritten it for jQuery (after all it’s a jQuery world out there).
The idea as well as functionality remains pretty much the same: we need to use as many (probably background) images as we want no matter how heavy they are, while minimizing their influence on load times.
Here are the basic requirements:
So here is the jQuery version:
No need to pass the full screen option any more, for jQuery version of this plugin it is handled entirely by the CSS – again if you want the full screen feature to work, download the whole package and take a look at our bare bones style.css. The CSS part is based on Perfect Full Page Background Image / CSS-Only Technique #2 from css-tricks.
Images used in this demo are copyrighted and only intended for this demo.
Further information, usage and options: Continue reading
Welcome to the future of mobile development – Google rolls out the Mirror API for future Glass developers.
Glass is a unique platform that is mobile but fundamentally different than existing mobile platforms in both design and use. To develop great experiences and effectively test them, you need to have Glass and use it in your everyday life. This is why the Google Mirror API is in a Developer Preview and actual access to the API service will be rolled out slowly, starting with the Glass Explorers as they get their Glass.
In the meantime, start reading about the Google Mirror API and start dreaming about the next, great, mobile experience. We hope you are as excited as we are, and we can’t wait to see the great things you’ll build!
Sounds like fun, let’s hope they wouldn’t close it in a year like other not-so-lucky projects…
Here is a weird and beautiful repository: πfs file system. The idea is pretty simple as far as math goes – π contains all possible sequences of numbers which means all possible data. So why not just get it from the “π” as we need it using index/length combo as meta data?
One of the properties that π is conjectured to have is that it is normal, which is to say that its digits are all distributed evenly, with the implication that it is a disjunctive sequence, meaning that all possible finite sequences of digits will be present somewhere in it. If we consider π in base 16 (hexadecimal) , it is trivial to see that if this conjecture is true, then all possible finite files must exist within π. The first record of this observation dates back to 2001.
Here is the task: make images on a page printable. Not really challenging unless the images are fetched via ajax from an external server and loaded in a lightbox (Mootools MediaboxAdvanced), that makes this task a little more challenging and worthy to write about. Continue reading
Merry Xmas and happy New Year everybody!
Wouldn’t it be a geeky celebration without playing with some kind of tricky API and finding out how stuff works? Totally not, so today we looked under Tumblr’s hood cause they wouldn’t show you who doesn’t follow you back, which would be a really welcome feature.
Additionally there seem to be no working app out there, that can do the trick, so here is one we made: Tumblr Fcheckr. Just give it the access (needed for the follower/following lists) and it’ll show you the all your followers dirty secrets.
UPD 12.2013: At the moment after another Tumblr API change it is not possible to authenticate into the application. We’ll look into it as soon as we get a minute or an hour 🙂
UPD 07.2013: Since it came up more then once – there is an issue with the “Don’t follow back” list for users who have a lot of followers.
Initially everything worked just fine, but after few updates the system started to close connection before giving up all the followers, so only the first thousand or so would be shown. Since these followers are then used to generate the Don’t Follow Back list, it gets some honest followers too. So if you have a lot of followers – double check “Don’t follow back” list, sorry for that.