Technology, Many Threads To Follow

I'm not sure it's good or bad that I've been making close to daily posts recently. I have a lot of different interests and my mind is constantly churning so it isn't that hard for me to do at least a "drive by" or short take every day with the occasional longer form posting. If I didn't have a day job I could do more than that. Given what BLOGING pays (close to zero if anyone was wondering) odds are I won't be upping my output anytime soon.

For a combination of reasons I've been working my way through several different technology areas recently.

I used to be very deeply into high performance computing. I'd gotten way behind the past few years and want to catch up. There are a lot of very interesting things going on in this space with Intel, NVidia and AMD all lining up to duke it out for supremacy in the race to exaflop computing. Each is taking a different approach so it's going to be interesting and complicated to follow and handicap this race. I'm sure I'll be writing more about this in the coming months.

The recent announcements in the area of light field cameras has gotten me very curious about the science and technology that makes such wonders possible. Once I feel like I have a decent grasp on that I want to explore a little bit where things might be heading. I've seen the announcement of Lytro's emergence from stealth mode in all sorts of places so it's clear this technology has captured a lot of peoples imagination. Interestingly the concepts aren't exactly new, but putting them together into an affordable consumer product seems to be an impressive feat, particularly if the initial product lives up to the hype.

The whole HTML5/Javascript debate in regards to Microsoft and various other companies is also taking up a few cycles as I try to get up to speed on what is going on below the covers of these technologies. When the entire industry seems to be converging on a particular combination of technologies it's important to understand why, and where that might lead.

Social network influence sites have also been a bit of an obsession recently. I've been spending a fair amount of time on Empire Avenue trying to figure out what they are doing and how likely it is to succeed along with continuing to monitor Klout and Peer Index. Luckily I have no plans for world dominance because given my numbers any such aspiration would be clearly in jeopardy at this point.

Finally, I'm scheduled to take the Cisco CCNP switch exam on a few weeks so I'm getting to spend some time delving into the subtleties of layer 2 and layer 3 switching and related technologies.

Throw in my wood working and Luthiery aspirations and my plate is fairly full. It's good not to be bored.

Image via Wikipedia

Related Articles

• Intel Aims For Exaflop Supercomputer By 2018 and Cray claims current XK6 maxes out at 50 petaflops (nextbigfuture.com)
• ARM, NVidia, Intel & Microsoft (emkey1.blogspot.com)
• Lytro and the Magic Camera (adailyglimpse.com)
• Intel will introduce 50 core processor in 2012 (nextbigfuture.com)