updated whenever i feel like it

I was window-shopping for laptops today and discovered the amazing Asus UL30 series.  It’s truly an amazing piece of engineering: it’s thin, it’s light, it’s fast, has an insane battery life, and pretty cheap.  Let me break down the specs for you non-geeks:

Core 2 Duo SU7300 Processor:
It has a 1.3Ghz (up to 1.7Ghz with TurboBoost technology), ultra-low-voltage processor manufactured on 45nm technology.  Which really just means the processor can do a LOT of work while barely sipping on your precious battery.  Honestly, it’s unbelievable how fast this processor is while using less than 10W of power.  [Compare with a 13 MacBook Pro: slightly slower, but uses 1/3rd the power)

Nvidia G210M 512MB and Intel 4500 Graphics:
This .93 inch thin laptop has TWO graphics cards.  The Nvidia G210 is probably the fastest graphics card available on a 13 inch laptop.  It's build on 40nm technology, and uses a max of 14W of power, which is still impressive for a graphics card of this caliber.  The Intel is slower, but uses even less power.  You can toggle between the 2 to trade off performance for battery life. [Compare with a 13" MacBook Pro: twice the speed of the Nvidia 9400M, while uses the same amount of power]

4GB DDR3 RAM:
Also, the laptop can support a max of 8GB of memory, you know… in case you need that much. [Same as Macbooks.]

13inch LED-lit Screen:
LED also means it’s uses less power than regular backlights. [same as Macbooks]

12 hour battery life:
…or so Asus claims, you can probably expect 10 hours of real world usage, and maybe 4-5 hours of gaming/heavy 3D work. [much longer than the MacBook Pros]

Design:
Not quite on par with Apple’s drool inducing one-piece aluminum finish, but it’s one of the nicer laptops I’ve seen (once you get rid of all the stickers).  The design is obviously Macbook inspired.  And it’s really light and thin.

Price:
$800 USD.  I know you can get an even faster 15″ laptop for $900, but the battery life and portability also suffers as you up the screen size.  13″ with this amount of computing power is perfect.  It also comes with all the standard bells and whistles: webcam, bluetooth, 802.11n, and a half terabyte harddrive.

The bottom line:
if you are looking for a portable powerhouse, take a closer look at this laptop.  If you want raw power and don’t care about battery life, skip this.

* I do not own this laptop, nor did I got paid to write this, I was just excited that I finally found a laptop that seems to be everything I am looking for.

I had been lucky enough to be a part of a very cool project taking place at the Fisheries Centre at the University of British Columbia.  In a nut shell, we are trying to create a 3D underwater visualization using the Blender Game Engine to display scientific data in a more pleasing way.  Basically translating a stream of mind-numbing data:

into something prettier:

The visualization data is coming from EwE6, a well-respected ecosystem modeling software.  Blender uses inputs such as biomass, water turbidity and light level to create a realtime visualization that allows the user to ’swim’ around in the ocean, watch the schools of fish interact, and see their population change over time.

To accomplish all this, the project consists of 3 layers:

The server core does all the heavy computation while the visualization layer does all the graphics, AI, as well as user interaction.  To facilitate the communication across these two separate processes, a third layer (called the GameClient) is created, providing the bridge.

Being a Blender artist, my main focus is on the visualization layer: the Blender Game Engine.  In the following few posts, I will outline the process in creating this application, and describe some of the issues we faced.  Please leave a comment if you are interested, it will motivate me to write more :)