A forum for software and hardware engineering relevant to mechanicians
Today I learned a neat web service, SharedCopy. If you have a web page that you'd like to share with other people, you can click the SharedCopy bookmarklet, add notes and simple shapes, and send the annotated web page to other people. It is easy to learn; see a write up at Lifehacker. Here is an example that I made.
This video produced by a manager of Google describes several collaboration services:
I have signed up with Google Apps using iMechanica as a domain name, with up to 10,000 accounts. Here is the start page: http://partnerpage.google.com/imechanica.org. But I have not thought up a good use for the iMechanica community. If you have a good idea, please leave a comment below.
Say you have learned how to subscribe to RSS feeds using a feed reader, or an email account. You are ready to create your own RSS feeds.
A post is like an atom, and a feed a molecule. You can be a chemist to create your own molecules by discovering ways to form feeds. Here is the basic chemistry of posts.
Atoms
You can receive posts and comments by email. They are faster than uploading webpages. They come into folders other than your regular emails, so you don't need to look at the posts if you have no time.
I use Thunderbird. Other email applications might have the similar feature. (If your email applications do not have this feature, you can always set up a feed reader.)
Almost all articles in the New York Times are free online, for about a week, and then go behind the pay wall. However, NYT permits readers to generate permanent links to individual articles. Here is a link generator created by Aaron Swartz. Paste the URL of an NYT article into the box, and click "Go". You will see a the URL of the permanent link to the article. You should use this permanent link in your blog posts.
We mechanicians like to argue over a whiteboard, but we are often too far apart. Skype allows us to phone each other, and Google Doc allows us to write together. Both Skype and Google Doc work over long distance and free of charge. But still, we'd like to sketch a little figure and write a few equations. We miss our whiteboard.
I just come back from a visit to the Institute of High Performance Computing, of Singapore. After the scheduled business, Chun Lu, the Program Manager of Large-Scale Complex Systems, kindly arranged me to give a tutorial of iMechanica at the Institute. He also pointed out that many people have had experience with online communities. It should be useful for us to
Hello,
I am trying to buy a new computer system for performing computational mechanics simulations. We plan to run different ranges of models, simulations: non linear, plasticity, contact etc.
I was browsing the market, it seems that the new QUAD CORE XEON 5300 series from intel is the new processor which has 4 core processor. There are a lot of talks about multi-threading, multi-coring in the web, which made me more confusing.
Let's say you'd like to make a hyperlink to a specific quote in Michelle's post, a link like this one. You can make such a link by going to http://citebite.com/. This little tool is so easy to use that anything I say will just complicate its simplicity. Give it a try.
At the suggestion of Joy Sircar, the Chief Technology Officer at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, of Harvard University, iMechanica has just added a forum called Technology Corner. As Joy has framed it, this new forum intends to host conversations on software and hardware technologies that might be relevant to mechanicians.
Here is a question I have. Lately I've heard the phrase Grid Computing a number of times. It is about networking lots of computers and other electronic devices, and supply users with computing power like supplying electricity. That is, computing power will become a utility. One might even hope software will also become utilities. Some people say that Grid Computing will happen in just a few years, or may be already here. Here is a collection of essays in Nature on 2020 Future of Computing.
