Another inch toward a Star Trek reality comes in the form of NeuroSky's Brainwave Starter Kit, a brain-computer interface package that lets users analyze and visualize their own brain waves on Android and iOS. Users simply slip on the MindWave Mobile EEG headset and view their own brainwaves displayed on their handset in the colorful Brainwave Visualizer. The brain waves visibly change in real time, as one chills out to relaxing music and then does some intensive programming or imagines something Marvin Gaye sings about. The MindWave Mobile safely measures and outputs the EEG power spectra (alpha waves, beta waves and so on), NeuroSky eSense meters (attention and meditation) and eye blinks. The device consists of a headset with an ear clip and a sensor arm. The headset's reference and ground electrodes are on the ear clip, and the EEG electrode is on the sensor arm, resting on the forehead above the eye. Next up: when will someone finally make a transporter?
The model for the Open-E Data Storage Software is an all-in-one universal storage system that allows businesses of all sizes to leverage off-the-shelf servers to build and operate virtualized storage infrastructure. The Linux-based Open-E DSS V7 data storage software is used for building and managing centralized data storage servers—NAS and SAN—and now includes Hyper-V Cluster Support, as well as the new product Open-E Multiple Storage Server Manager for simplified central management of all storage resources. Built-in enterprise-class features include active-active failover, active-passive failover, volume replication, snapshots and continuous data protection, among others.
In response to the increasing prevalence of low-cost, low-power ARM processors in the aerospace, defense and transportation industries, AdaCore has developed the GNAT Pro Safety-Critical product for ARM Cortex micro-controllers. This bareboard GNAT Pro Safety-Critical product provides a complete Ada development environment (or Eclipse plugin) oriented toward systems that are safety-critical or have stringent memory constraints. Developers of such systems, says AdaCore, now can exploit the software engineering benefits of the Ada language, including reliability, maintainability and portability. The ARM platform adds to the GNAT Pro Safety-Critical product offering, which already is available for PowerPC and LEON boards, allowing easy portability among all three platforms. The technology does not require any underlying operating system, so it can be deployed on very small memory boards.
The big news from Little Apps is Little Software Stats, a new open-source software package that enables software developers to track how users are using their software. Little Apps says that Little Software Stats is the first program for obtaining runtime intelligence that is both open source and free. Because the program is designed and developed using MySQL and PHP, most Web servers can run it. Information that can be gathered includes executions, installations, exceptions and geographical location.
Impress.js is a classic open-source project. The closed-source world creates a slick app—in this case, the Prezi presentation tool—and charges much more than free. Next, creative (and cheapskate) open-source developer says “I want that, and I want it free”—in this case, Impress.js. Impress.js, not to be confused with OpenOffice.org Impress, is a free and open-source JavaScript library inspired by Prezi that utilizes the CSS3 transitions found in modern Web browsers. If this sounds interesting, the path to mastery can be found with Rakhitha Nimesh Ratnayake's new book Building Impressive Presentations with Impress.js. Ratnayake explores the features of Impress.js, which allows one to create presentations inside the infinite canvas of modern Web browsers that work anywhere, any time and on any device. Readers will learn how to build dynamic presentations with rotation, scaling, transforms and 3-D effects. Advanced users will find out how to extract the power of Impress.js core API events and configurations to modify existing functionalities, as well as extend the core library to create custom functionalities for different types of applications, such as sliders, portfolios and galleries.
Whether or not game development is your vocation, you have to admit the material in Physics for Game Developers, 2nd edition, is inherently super interesting. In this book, the authors explore the key knowledge behind bread-and-butter game physics that go into modern games for Nintendo Wii, PlayStation Move, Microsoft's Kinect and various mobile devices. Readers also learn how to leverage exciting interaction gadgets, such as accelerometers, touch screens, GPS receivers, pressure sensors and optical tracking devices. The updated 2nd edition includes new chapters on deformable and soft bodies, fluids and the physics of sound for incorporating realistic effects, including 3-D sound. Major topics include digital physics, the physics of sound, rigid body mechanics, fluid dynamics and the modeling of specific systems based on real-world examples.
VanDyke Software says that many of its customers run Windows just so they don't have to give up the wide range of functionality found on its SecureFX secure file transfer client. Now Linux and Mac OS X users can enjoy that same functionality natively with the new SecureFX 7.1, which delivers features like multiple file transfer protocols, site synchronization and easy recovery of interrupted transfers. Secure file transfers can be performed with SFTP, FTP over SSL and SCP; FTP is provided for use on legacy systems. Aesthetics also are important for VanDyke, which offers a tabbed visual user interface in SecureFX 7.1 allowing for easy learning and organizing for optimum productivity. Also new for SecureFX 7.1 is a dependent session option that can be used to link a session to an SSH2 session that it depends on, which allows connection to a jump host before connecting to other sessions.
MailerQ is a high-performance mail transfer agent designed to do one thing: deliver e-mail at blazing speed. Leveraging RabbitMQ to send up to 10,000 e-mail messages per minute, MailerQ is targeted at users who want the functionality of programs like Port25's PowerMTA but can't stomach its high price. With MailerQ, users are limited only by the ability to process incoming e-mail at the receiving end. The application puts e-mail messages in a queue and enables its users to manage these messages themselves and change parameters, such as send rate per receiving domain or IP or the number of delivery attempts. To be as efficient as possible, MailerQ stores messages in Couchbase NoSQL, which allows the retrieval of content only when an SMTP connection has been established, thus reducing the amount of data being passed back and forth in RabbitMQ message queues.
