Talk: Me and Dalai Felinto at the 2010 Blender Conference in Amsterdam talking about Cosmic Sensation Project [Youtube] [Preceedings]

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:  The Asus is twice as fast, while using the same amount of juice]

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 or portability, skip this.

Update: I’ve had this laptop for almost a year now and am very happy about it.  It’s light enough to be carried everywhere, and with 8 hours of up time on the integrated video card (can be stretched to 10 if you are stingy on screen brighness or wifi), I don’t even need to carry the AC adapter unless I plan an overnight trip.  My only complain is that the screen has an absolutely horrific viewing angle, color shifts are common when viewed off-axis; and black is a muddy gray at best.  But once you plug this thing into an IPS display via the build in VGA or HDMI cable, the Nvidia G210M chip is beefy enough to play StarCraft II at medium settings.

Hey let’s talk about the proverbial wheel.  Or more precisely the invention of it.  Or to be even more specific: why you should NOT reinvent the wheel.  (Unless you are Audi, in which case it’s okay because they are awesome!)

I am no programmer, but the last time I looked, one didn’t have to write their own UI elements for a GUI application, you can leave that to the OS.  So GUI programming is as easy as fire up your favorite IDE, drag a few controls to a form, and hit compile!  Easy right?  Not to Nero:

Or Gigabyte

Nor Asus

Why some software companies keeps on insisting on spending money and time to create their own skinned UI is baffling to me.  This creates nothing but inconsistency for the user, who expects every window to look like a native window.  Not some shiny and metallic spaceship control panel Asus!

There are other problems associated with non-native UIs: for users that rely on accessibility features, these custom skins often make screen-readers do weird things.

If you truly want your application to have a unique look, by all means, implement a skinnable interface ON TOP of the regular native interface, but don’t make it the only interface.

The only time when I think it would be okay to use non-OS-native-UI is if the application is cross-platform, in this case having a consistent UI across all the OS might be a good thing.  So let’s be thankful for Apple iTunes, Adobe Lightroom, and Blender for using non-native UI control elements, I firmly believe these 3 represents the best in User interface design.

Part 1: The diminishing vertical space

How much time do you spend watching movies on the computer screen?  And how much time do you spend browsing the net?  If your answer is in favor of the web browsing, then help me understand why is widescreen still a popular choice for laptops and netbooks, where the focus is suppose to be work, and not play?

And if we agree that widescreen is a bad idea for working with text (reading webs and writing emails, etc), then why do applications still like to hog up vertical screen space so much?  And no, a 1280×800 screen can NOT fit two pages of point 11 text side-by-side, so don’t even try that argument.

On a 13 inch laptop, the ever popular resolution seems to be 1280×800.  If you are browsing with IE8 running on Win 7, (Firefox is not any better when it comes to this),  out of the 800 vertical pixels, 185 pixels are taken up by the UI elements,  shrinking the viewable content to a diminutive 615 pixel!  For a netbook it’s worse, browsing without fullscreen is almost like looking out a slit.  Sure you can scroll up and down to view the content.  But why make the user work for it when the application can simply condense the UI element?

Google Chrome seems to have the right idea about this: out of the box uses a reasonable 64 pixel of vertical space, leaving the rest for CONTENT.   A few pixels might not seems like a big deal, but when you are working on a small screen, every pixel needs to do something useful!

Man I am bitter today…

Introducing… a flat, boring porins protein, this is how most scientific vistualization would show it.

What’s wrong with the image?  Well technically nothing, it’s scientifically accurate, each atom is color coded to represent an element, and it even rotates so that you can see the overall structure of protein.  But can we do better?  You bet!

Click here to see the exact same porins protein, but with a much advanced shading model, I think it’s clear why this one is superior.  With ambient occlusion, in which the model is shaded based on how likely an area is occluded because of surrounding objects, the spatial structure of the protein is much easier to understand.  And with today’s super fast GPUs, doing a screen-space ambient occlusion is virtually instant.

And if anyone is curious, the software I used to generate the graph is CuteMol, an

interactive, high quality molecular visualization system. QuteMol exploits the current GPU capabilites through OpenGL shaders to offers an array of innovative visual effects. QuteMol visualization techniques are aimed at improving clarity and an easier understanding of the 3D shape and structure of large molecules or complex proteins.

Canon EF 100mm F2 @ F22

EF 50mm F1.4

You’ll notice the shape of the flare is very different for different lenses, and also the aperture size(F-stop setting) plays a big part in defining the shape of the flare as well.  In general, large f-number(F22) gives a more defined star-burst shape to the flare, while a small f-number (F1.4) gives a softer looking flare.

Anamorphic lens flares, which looks ‘cooler’ in my opinion, are harder to reproduce on a regular consumer camera because they require special anamorphic lenses.

So, my minimalist my portfolio stays, and this blog is created to refill that information void.  Don’t count on too much updates though.  If you need some things to pass the time, I frequent these website:

Blender news: blendernation.com

A software engineer’s insights: codinghorror.com

Inspirational short talks: ted.com

Amazing photo-journalism: boston.com/bigpicture

xkcd needs no introduction: xkcd.com

You think your IT job sucks: thedailywtf.com