The New Zealand Supercomputing Centre, located in a telephone exchange off Cambridge Tce, has bought another 252 IBM blade servers each with two Intel 3.2GHz processors, boosting its processing power by 50 per cent and giving it 1550 processors in total.
The studio, which will be called Wingnut Interactive, will be a joint partnership between Microsoft Game Studios and its subsidiary studio, Bungie. It will work on the creation of a new title in the hit “Halo” series of games.
Jackson and his Academy Award-winning screenwriter, Fran Walsh, will be directly involved in the creation of the new “Halo” title.
While in Sydney I saw An Inconvenient Truth. The Sydney thing is relevant because I got to enjoy an extra shot of self-righteous pleasure. An entire cinema of Aussies gasped in shock when it was pointed out that Australia hadn’t ratified the Kyoto Protocol.
I found the movie very interesting. The presentation is beautiful and I found Al Gore engaging as a speaker. Because I am up to my eye balls in a lot of this info now days, it wasn’t a terribly shocking movie… but I thought the parallel he makes with smoking was very insightful.
Anyways I found this over at umami, the Futurama trailer to the movie… very funny:
I wish we had more movies of this sort of format… I’d happily pay the price of a cinema ticket to see an interesting lecture.
I have started working with Adobe Acrobat 3D… wow! Based on the work done by the 3D kung-fu masters at Right Hemisphere it allows you to embed 3D objects into PDF files. Publishing is quick and easy… and the end result is oh so effective (the demo file is a bit clunky, but I am able to spin out simple documents that are about 200K in size). A great feature is that it is backward compatible… so users of viewers that don’t support the 3D content still get the ‘2D’ version.
Richard seems to have been impressed but the combination of free coffee and Bob reworking Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A Changin’:
Other highlights from today included an intro video message delivered by Tim Berners-Lee (looking very Max Headroom-ish I must say), free coffees thanks to the good folk at Provoke (visitors, ask for a “flat white”), some nice Microsoft shwag, the Freedom Is exhibit, and a song performed by ‘Bob’ - a web-themed version of Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A Changin’ (yes, Web 2.0 was in the lyrics!).
She worked colossal hours without pay. The office equipment didn’t work properly. She stayed in ratbag hotels. But now 31-year-old Wellingtonian Claudia Batten has sold her software company to Microsoft. For up to US$400 million (NZ$643 million).
Batten is now flying high among the ranks of the dotcom millionaires in a deal which dwarfs even the recent purchase of Trade Me.
Four years ago, Batten founded Massive Inc with two expat Australians in New York, to develop software that downloads advertising into online video games - a world first.
Great to see even more software/tech money making it’s way into NZ.
Listening to: English Girls Approximately - Ryan Adams
On Friday I was lucky enough to attend the presentation by Aquaflow Bionomic Corporation. The presentation focused on the technology and the opportunity. I was lucky enough to meet most of the people in the team (a few of whom I already know from other projects) and ask questions about how things work.
One of the many attractions of this is that it embodies a closed carbon cycle and that it intrinsically locates energy production besides energy consumption.
There is little doubt that the ability to create diesel from the outflow of a sewerage plant (ie. essentially ‘wild’ conditions) is significant science… and then to be able to create a system that actually produces diesel is some serious technology. I saw both these things on Friday. What is even more exciting is that I can count myself amongst the first in the world to see this. Probably the most impressive thing is that the team is made up of people who really understand what they have on their hands.
UPDATE: An important byproduct is water that is clear of algae… which at the very least can be used for grey water type applications such as irrigation.
Algae are the simplest plant organisms that convert sunlight and carbon dioxide in the air around us, into stored energy through the well understood process of photosynthesis. Although the exact bio-diesel manufacturing technology is a well-guarded secret, the process involves processing the algae pulp before extracting lipid oil which is turned into bio-diesel.
The bio-diesel is generated from the bio-mass of the algae, not from the sewage. The generating capacity is based on the ability of the pond to produce algae.
Marlborough Company Produces World’s First Sample Of Bio-Diesel From Algae Extracted From Region’s Sewerage ponds.
Marlborough-based Aquaflow Bionomic Corporation announced today that it had produced its first sample of home-grown bio-diesel fuel with algae sourced from local sewerage ponds.
“We believe this is the world’s first commercial production of bio-diesel from algae outside the laboratory, in ‘wild’ conditions. To date, bio-diesel from algae has only been tested under controlled laboratory conditions with specially selected and grown algae crops,” explains Aquaflow spokesperson Barrie Leay.
Bio-diesel could eventually become a sustainable, low cost, cleaner burning fuel alternative for New Zealand, powering family cars, trucks, buses and boats. It can also be used for other purposes such as heating or distributed electricity generation.
I will be popping over to Marlborough this arvo for the formal briefing… hope to return with comments and photos.
