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Microsoft Research has released an application under the name of Project Tuva. It’s aimed to release inspiring scientific videos and content. They couldn’t choose any better than Richard Feynman to start with.

I get hooked to Richard Feynman not too long ago. But since I saw some of his videos, I can help but try to read and see all the material available. He has its own way to explain things, very approachable and fun. If I had too choose two adjectives to describe his talks I’d said inspiring and motivating.

And what about Project Tuva? Well, it looks really nice. They have built a cool interface using Silverlight. It has lots a useful features like captions, timelines, interactive content and a lot more.

Highly recommended. +1 to Microsoft for this!

By the way, it doesn’t seem to work with Firefox 3.5 (at least not for me), it hangs on Preparing content. No problems using Internet Explorer 8.

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of serial programming in C# to communicate medical equipment with a Windows Forms applications. If you have ever tried it you’ll know that serial communications in .NET, although conceptually easy, have a lot of little quirks. Sometimes you wish to monitor exactly the traffic that is flowing in the serial port.

Unfortunately there’s no way to open a serial port which is already in use. One possible solution is to use a Y-cable and split physically the cable. Today I’ve discovered a very nice tool from SysInternals (Microsoft now) called PortMon. It is capable of monitor and display serial port activity and it can even do it remotely. Basically you get a serial port sniffer.

If you just care about the OPEN, CLOSE, READ and WRITE operations, open the filter dialog and type:

IRP*

If you are doing any kind of serial port programming this tool is highly recommended. 

Some time ago I bookmarked a post by Charlie Kindel recommending a science fiction book that was being published online, daily and for free. At that time I was pretty busy and I chose to not get hooked… now I know it was a wise decision.

Now that I enjoy more free time I’m reading it avidly. My initial plan was to read just one chapter each day. Impossible. I think Cheeseburger Brown (yeah, that’s the author’s pseudonym) has a gift. It’s able to describe a pretty unusual scenes (another world for example) in just enough words to make it appear visually in your mind, then the action takes prominence.

You can still read Simon of Space online or buy it at Lulu. Save your eyes some pain and buy it. You won’t be disappointed.

Still don’t grasp how come all the world financial system has collapsed? Well, I must admit I didn’t understand it until I saw this really cool video. Even if you’re not familiar with the financial jargon you’ll understand it:

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis.

Time Magazine posts in their blog the graph that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office showed to answer the question: How bad is it?

It shows job losses in recent recessions.
Sure there are other ways to present this very same data, but this graph talks for itself. I’d like to see this same graph filled with Spanish data.

Seriously. If you haven’t heard about the TED conference yet, stop reading right now and just jump to their site.

From their about page:

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.

The talks have been recorded in video and they were released to the public only a few years ago . No matter which topic the talk is about, it’s always mind blowing. The talks are only 20 minutes or less, but in such a little time they are able to inspire you. If you have 20 minutes a day, I strongly recommend you to watch every single talk they have.