Sam’s random musings

Dr. Shakes is a simple program designed to help illustrate many of the basic concepts underlying modal analysis for structural systems. It is intended to be used for instruction both in demonstration and hands-on contexts.

Wouldn’t this of been a fun way to investigate vibration concepts at the U

SAJAX: XMLHTTPRequest Toolkit for PHP:

Simple AJAX programming toolkit for PHP, from ModernMethod. (Via Kottke.)

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(Via Daring Fireball Linked List.)

Arthur Ashe:

“From what we get, we can make a living; what we give, however, makes a life.”

(Via Motivational Quotes of the Day.)

PNG Headers:

Bryan Bell has a need trick from layering two pngs for a slick and easy to update header image, you’ll see it soon here..

(Via BryanBell.com.)

Some Ajax Links:

Everyone is talking about Ajax these days and I wanted to save a few links that I would like to catch up on, including the writeup from Adaptive Path.

Owen created an Ajax based theme for Wordpress with inline editing. Cool usage of Ajax.
Twilight Universe wrote a plugin for Wordpress with the same utility. Again, cool code.
XMLHTTPRequest tutorial that is a must read.
SAJAX or Simple Ajax Toolkit for PHP Now all you do is include the code.
More explanation of REST, XML, XSLT and XmlHTTPRequest
Javascript native XMLHttpRequest
Do you DOJO with XmlHTTPRequest?

Thanks to various sources including Asymptomatic, Photomatt and Whump.com

More good Ajax links

(Via Weblog Tools Collection.)

Underdog “Stinky” robot beats MIT in underwater bot championship:

Wired has the story of how four students from Carl Hayden Community High School in Phoenix, Arizona beat some of the best schools in the country, including MIT, to win the national underwater robot championship. The students, who are all undocumented Mexican immigrants, built their robot on the cheap in just three days, using PVC pipe, off-the-shelf electronics and a few tampons. Called “Stinky”, the bot can record sonar pings and retrieve objects 50 feet below the water’s surface. In addition to the top prize, the bot also ended up winning the design and technical writing awards. The team’s total budget ended up being just $800, compared to $11,000 for the MIT team.

I love this, living in Arizona we rarely get to see/ read/ hear about positive stories about immigrants there really is a deep groundswell of resentment coming here. It is also good to hear something good in education in a state that is 50th in the nation in per student funding. (that’s 50th out of 51 states + DC) so we’re not last but pretty close. Perhaps it is time to start saving the moola for private school…

(Via Engadget.)

Evolt: Higher Search Engine Positioning (10 Steps):

Evolt.org has a few suggestions in one of their new posts about how you can use 10 steps to obtain higher positioning in search engines.

Some good simple hints

(Via PHPDeveloper.org.)

Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide:

Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide: Tnis is more of a quick reference for me but the detail is incredible. Thanks Forever Geek.

(Via Weblog Tools Collection.)