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Fig 1 – NASA Neo Average Land Surface Temperature [Day] (1 month) (note: this link requires SL5 RC )
Silverlight 5 Beta was released into the wild at MIX 11 a couple of weeks ago. This is a big step for mirror land. Among many new features is the long anticipated 3D capability. Silverlight 5 took the XNA route to 3D instead of the WPF 3D XAML route. XNA is closer to the GPU with the time tested graphics rendering pipeline familiar to Direct3D/OpenGL developers, but not so familiar to XAML developers.
The older WPF 3D XAML aligns better with X3D, the ISO sanctioned XML 3D graphics standard, while XNA aligns with the competing WebGL javascript wrapper for OpenGL. Eventually XML 3D representations also boil down to a rendering pipeline, but the core difference is that XNA is immediate mode while XML 3D is kind of stuck with retained mode. Although you pick up recursive control rendering with XML 3D, you lose out when it comes to moving through a scene in the usual avatar game sense.
From a Silverlight XAML perspective, mirror land is largely a static machine with infrequent events triggered by users. In between events, the machine is silent. XAML's retained mode graphics lacks a sense of time's flow. In contrast, enter XNA through Alice's DrawingSurface, and the machine whirs on and on. Users occasionally throw events into the machine and off it goes in a new direction, but there is no stopping. Frames are clicking by apace.
Thus time enters mirror land in frames per second. Admittedly this is crude relative to our world. Time is measured out in the proximate range of 1/20th to 1/60th a second per frame. Nothing like the cusp of the moment here, and certainly no need for the nuance of Dedekind's cut. Time may be chunky in mirror land, but with immediate mode XNA it does move, clicking through the present moment one frame at a time.
Once Silverlight 5 is released there will be a continuous XNA API across Microsoft's entire spectrum: Windows 7 desktops, Windows 7 phones, XBox game consoles, and now the browser. Silverlight 5 and WP7 implementations are a subset of the full XNA game framework available to desktop and XBox developers. Both SL5 and WP7 will soon have merged Silverlight XNA capabilities. For symmetry sake XBox should have Silverlight as apparently announced here. It would be nice for a web browsing XBox TV console.
WP7 developers will need to wait until the future WP7 Mango release before merging XNA and Silverlight into a single app. It's currently an either/or proposition for the mobile branch of XNA/SL.
At any rate, with SL5 Beta, Silverlight and 3D XNA now coexist. The border lies at the <DrawingSurface> element:
<DrawingSurface Draw="OnDraw" SizeChanged="DrawingSurface_SizeChanged" />
North of the border lies XML and recursive hierarchies, a largely language world populated with "semantics" and "ontologies." South of the border lies a lush XNA jungle with drums throbbing in the night. Yes, there are tropical white sands by an azure sea, but the heart of darkness presses in on the mind.
XAML touches the academic world. XNA intersects Hollywood. It strikes me as one of those outmoded Freudian landscapes so popular in the 50's, the raw power of XNA boiling beneath XAML's super-ego. I might also note there are bugs in paradise, but after all this is beta.
Merging these two worlds causes a bit of schizophrenia. Above is Silverlight XAML with the beauty of recursive hierarchies and below is all XNA with its rendering pipeline plumbing. Alice steps into the DrawingSurface confronting a very different world indeed. No more recursive controls beyond this border. Halt! Only immediate mode allowed. The learning curve south of the border is not insignificant, but beauty awaits.
XNA involves tessellated models, rendering pipelines, vertex shaders, pixel shaders, and a high level shading language, HLSL, accompanied by the usual linear algebra suspects. Anytime you run across register references you know this is getting closer to hardware.
…a cry that was no more than a breath: "The horror! The horror!"
sampler2D CloudSampler : register(s0); static const float3 AmbientColor = float3(0.5f, 0.75f, 1.0f); static const float3 LampColor = float3(1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f); static const float AmbientIntensity = 0.1f; static const float DiffuseIntensity = 1.2f; static const float SpecularIntensity = 0.05f; static const float SpecularPower = 10.0f; . .
Here is an overview of the pipeline from Aaron Oneal's MIX talk:
So now that we have XNA it's time to take a spin. The best way to get started is to borrow from the experts. Aaron Oneal has been very kind to post some nice samples including a game engine called Babylon written by David Catuhe.
The Silverlight 5 beta version of Babylon uses Silverlight to set some options and SL5 DrawingSurface to host scenes. Using mouse and arrow keys allows the camera/avatar to move through the virtual environment colliding with walls etc. For those wishing to get an idea of what XNA is all about this webcafe model in Babylon is a good start.
The models are apparently produced in AutoCAD 3DS and are probably difficult to build. Perhaps 3D point clouds will someday help, but you can see the potential for navigable high risk complex facility modeling. This model has over 60,000 faces, but I can still walk through exploring the environment without any difficulty and all I'm using is an older NVidia motherboard GPU.
Fig 3 – Babylon SL5 asynchronous scene loading with navigation by David Catuhe (note: this link requires SL5 beta)
Apparently, SL5 XNA can make a compelling interactive museum, refinery, nuclear facility, or WalMart browser. This is not a stitched pano or photosynth interior, but a full blown 3D model.
You've gotta love that late afternoon shadow affect. Notice the camera is evidently held by a vampire. I checked carefully and it casts no shadow!
But what about mapping?
From a mapping perspective the fun begins with this solar wind sample. It features all the necessary models, and shaders for earth, complete with terrain, multi altitude atmosphere clouds, and lighting. It also has examples of basic mouse and arrow key camera control.
Fig 4 – Solar Wind SL5 XNA sample
This is my starting point. Solar Wind illustrates generating a tessellated sphere model with applied textures for various layers. It even illustrates the use of a normal (bump) map for 3D effects on the surface without needing a tessellated surface terrain model. Especially interesting is the use of bump maps to show a population density image as 3D.
My simple project is to extend this solar wind sample slightly by adding layers from NASA Neo. NASA Neo conveniently publishes 45 categories and 129 layers of a variety of global data collected on a regular basis. The first task is to read the Neo GetCapabilities XML and produce the TreeView control to manage such a wealth of data. The TreeView control comes from the Silverlight Toolkit project. Populating this is a matter of reading through the Layer elements of the returned XML and adding layers to a collection which is then bound to the tree view's ItemsSource property.
private void CreateCapabilities111(XDocument document) { //WMS 1.1.1 XElement GetMap = document.Element("WMT_MS_Capabilities").Element("Capability") .Element("Request").Element("GetMap").Element("DCPType") .Element("HTTP").Element("Get").Element("OnlineResource"); XNamespace xlink = "http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"; getMapUrl = GetMap.Attribute(xlink + "href").Value; if (getMapUrl.IndexOf("?") != -1) getMapUrl = getMapUrl.Substring(0, getMapUrl.IndexOf("?")); ObservableCollection
layers = new ObservableCollection (); foreach (XElement element in document.Element("WMT_MS_Capabilities").Element("Capability") .Element("Layer").Descendants("Layer")) { if (element.Descendants("Layer").Count() > 0) { WMSLayer lyr0 = new WMSLayer(); lyr0.Title = (string)element.Element("Title"); lyr0.Name = "header"; foreach (XElement element1 in element.Descendants("Layer")) { WMSLayer lyr1 = new WMSLayer(); lyr1.Title = (string)element1.Element("Title"); lyr1.Name = (string)element1.Element("Name"); lyr0.sublayers.Add(lyr1); } layers.Add(lyr0); } } LayerTree.ItemsSource = layers; }
Once the tree is populated, OnSelectedItemChanged events provide the trigger for a GetMap request to NASA Neo returning a new png image. I wrote a proxy WCF service to grab the image and then write it to png even if the source is jpeg. It's nice to have an alpha channel for some types of visualization.
The difficulty for an XNA novice like myself is understanding the hlsl files and coming to terms with the rendering pipeline. Changing the source image for a Texture2D shader requires dropping the whole model, changing the image source, and finally reloading the scene model and pipeline once again. It sounds like an expensive operation but surprisingly this re-instantiation seems to take less time than receiving the GetMap request from the WMS service. In WPF it was always interesting to put a Video element over the scene model, but I doubt that will work here in XNA.
The result is often a beautiful rendering of the earth displaying real satellite data at a global level.
Fig 5 – NASA Neo Albedo (1 month) with population density bump map overlay (note: this link requires SL5 RC)
Some project extensions:
- I need to revisit lighting which resides in the cloud shader hlsl. Since the original cloud model is not real cloud coverage, it is usually not an asset to NASA Neo data. I will need to replace the cloud pixel image with something benign to take advantage of the proper lighting setup for daytime.
- Next on the list is exploring collision. WPF 3D provided a convenient RayMeshGeometry3DHitTestResult. In XNA it seems getting a point on the earth to trigger a location event requires some manner of collision or Ray.Intersects(Plane). If that can be worked out the logical next step is grabbing DEM data from USGS for generating ground level terrain models.
- There is a lot of public LiDAR data out there as well. Thanks to companies like QCoherent, some of it is available as WMS/WFS. So next on the agenda is moving 3D LiDAR online.
- The bump map approach to displaying variable geographic density as relief is a useful concept. There ought to be lots of global epidemiology data that can be transformed to a color density map for display as a relief bump map.
Lots of ideas, little time or money, but Silverlight 5 will make possible a lot of very interesting web apps.
Helpful links:
Silverlight 5 Beta: http://www.silverlight.net/getstarted/silverlight-5-beta/
Runtime: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=213904
Silverlight 5 features:
"Silverlight 5 now has built-in XNA 3D graphics API"
XNA: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/aa937791.aspx
NASA Neo: http://localhost/NASA-Neo/publish.htm
Babylon Scenes: Michel Rousseau, courtesy of Bewise.fr
Babylon Engine: David Catuhe / Microsoft France / DPE
"You won't make yourself a bit realler by crying," Tweedledee remarked: "there's nothing to cry about."
"If I wasn't real," Alice said – half-laughing through her tears, it all seemed so ridiculous – "I shouldn't be able to cry."


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Each editable page on Wikia has an associated page history, which consists of the old versions of the wikitext, as well as a record of the date and time of every edit, the username or IP address of the user who wrote it, and their edit summary. You can access the history with a button in the drop-down Edit Button menu, along with "Rename." A page's history can also be viewed through the link in MyTools when visiting a page.
Quick summary:
- The newest changes are shown at the top.
- To view a specific version, click a date.
- To compare an old version with the current version, click cur.
- To compare a version with its predecessor, click last.
- To compare to specific versions, tick the left-column radio button of the older version and the right-column radio button of the newer version, and then click the "Compare selected versions" button.
- Minor edits are denoted as m.
- Edits by bots are denoted as b.
Below is an example of a page history using the Oasis skin (Note: The function of the page history screen is more or less the same in Monobook):
Edits are shown from newest to oldest. Each edit starts on a new line and shows time and date, the contributor's name or IP, and the edit summary, as well as other diagnostic information.
Let's look at some of the functions of this page:
- The page name.
- These links take you to the most recent edits (Latest), oldest edits (Earliest) or the next or previous page of edits (Next n / Previous n). Note that the black text in brackets will become links, when applicable.
- The blue numbers list the number of edits displayed on a page - 20, 50, 100, 250 or 500. A higher number increases the length of a page but reduces the number of display pages if more than one. The number you select replaces n in the links to the previous or next pages e.g. (Next 100 / Previous 100).
- (cur) takes you to a 'diff' page - any page showing the difference between that edit and another version of the page history. In this case the diff page is comparing the selected version and the current version. The current revision appears below the changes, so you can see how the page is now rendered.
- (last) takes you to a diff page showing the changes between that edit and the previous version. The most recent version (the one on the same line as the "last" you clicked on) appears below the changes, so you can see how the page was rendered.
- The two columns of radio buttons can be used to select any two versions on the page. Let's say you want to compare the versions corresponding to numbers 10 and 11 on the image. First, click the left radio button next to number 11. The right column of buttons will then fill as far as number 11. Then click the right button next to number 10. Finally click Compare selected versions. This takes you to a diff page showing the changes between the two versions. The most recent version (in this case number 10) appears below the changes, so you can see how the page was rendered.
- This gives the time and date of the edit, expressed in local time according to the preference setting. The date and time link to the version of that day and time. Thus the first line links to the version that was current at the time of loading this revision history, and therefore the result may differ from that of following the link on the page margin to the current version. Even if the page has not changed in the meantime, the MediaWiki:Revision-info message appears.
- The username or IP of the contributor appears here.
- This is the edit summary. It is the text the user wrote in the edit summary box (below the edit box).
- This edit summary begins with an arrow link and grey text. This means the user has only edited a section of the page (named in the grey text). This text is automatically added when you edit a section. A standard edit summary can be added by the user. This appears in black text.
- m stands for minor edits (small corrections to a page). These help you understand the type of changes that have been made.
If the "move page" feature has been used in the past to change a page's name, the entire edit history of the article, before and after the move, is shown. The old title becomes a redirect and loses its edit history. After merging two pages, typically one becomes a redirect. In this case the revision history of the redirect is kept.
Edits made to deleted pages are not kept in contributor's User contribution pages. However, the revision history is kept and can be retrieved by an administrator, who can also undelete the page.
Going Deeper
History and Followed Pages
If one views the history of a watched page directly, without first viewing the page, the edit at the top (the most recent one) may be marked with update marker "updated (since my last visit)" (or the content of MediaWiki:Updatedmarker); this applies if the edit was made by someone else and you have not viewed the page (while logged in) since it was made. The positioning of the message, suggesting that it is a property of an edit rather than a property of the page, is somewhat misleading, because not all edits which have not been viewed yet are marked.
Creating Feeds
Feeds (RSS and Atom) for the history of a page are obtained by clicking the "RSS" or "Atom" links in the toolbox in the sidebar. You may then use a feed aggregator or other tool to monitor changes to the page.
The RSS2Wiki extension will allow you to include the RSS feed into another wiki page.
Linking to a Specific Version of the Page
Yes. If you want the current version, click "Permanent link" in the toolbox in the sidebar. If you want to link to an older revision, click on the correct date for the version on the page history to view the old version of the page.
In both cases the URL of the version in the browser's location/address bar is suitable for use to permanently reference this version.
- If a page contains a time-based variable, its rendered content will use the current date/time, not the time as it was when the revision was saved.
- Templates and images will vary if they are referred to with an expression containing a variable depending on time
- The current versions of templates and images are used; if they have been revised, the page may look different than it was at the time the version was saved.
Exporting Page History
Special:Export produces an XML-file, without the MediaWiki user interface, with the wikitext of the current and optionally all old versions of one or more specified pages, with date, time, user name, and edit summary. How it is displayed, e.g. with or without XML tags, and with or without applying new lines, depends on the browser. Some browsers show "+" and "-" links to view or hide selected parts. Alternatively the XML-source can be viewed using the "view source" feature of the browser, or after saving the XML file locally, with a program of choice.
The feature also allows searching for a text in all versions of one or more specified pages.
Image History
An image or other media file can be replaced by a different image, by uploading a new image file with the same name. All versions are kept. The image history listing forms part of the image description page, which appears when you click on the image. The image history of the current and previous versions. Older versions of the image can be restored.
See also
- Help:Editing - For more information about how to edit.
- Help:Export - For more information on exporting.

subset: commoncrawl


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http://hxc2001.com/download/floppy_driv ... rmware.zip03 December 2017: Firmware STM32 USB HxCFloppyEmulator v126.96.36.199a
Major update !
- New direct file formats support (Read & Write !) :
- Acorn machines : *.ADL,*.ADM,*.SSD,*.DSD and *.ADF file support
- Camputer Lynx : *.LDF
- Commodore C64 : *.D81
- Thomson machines : *.FD
- Sam Coupé : *.SAD, *.MGT
- MSX Machines : *.IMG, *.DSK
- Spectrum : *.TRD, *.SDD
- New menu entry : Target system family selection.
This reduce a lot the risk of erronous raw file identification.
- Lots of RAW file support improvements :
All sector sizes supported, advanced track skew and interleaving support.
FM & MFM support.
- Amstrad CPC DSK support : Fix for the One Disk/double sided Batman demo.
- Fix attempt of the "diymore.cc" OLED screens : OLED init screen delay
menu option added.
(Note : Please avoid these "diymore.cc" screens until i got an idea
what is the root cause of the issue.)
- Internal improvement : Track cache layer improved, RAW files support/identification improved.
Please report any issue to hxc2001 <at> hxc2001.com
Thanks !
http://hxc2001.com/download/floppy_driv ... _notes.txt


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"I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the subject of Aramaic chants," explained Palackal, the parochial vicar at St. Stanislaus Kostka Church in Maspeth.
In continuing his decades-long pilgrimage studying the now endangered 3,000-year-old language believed to have been spoken by Jesus Christ, Palackal explored different parts throughout the state of India for answers.
In a yearlong journey through the country, a trip sponsored by Maspeth Federal Savings Bank, the reverend returned with 65 hours of video footage that he has since whittled down to an all-inclusive film on the topic to air at St. Stan's, located at 57-16 61st St., on Friday, April 25, at 7:30 p.m.
"The people still remember the song and text that they haven't used in 50 years," Palackal recalled from his journey. "These singers were so grateful to me, that someone found them interesting. They thought people had forgotten about these melodies."
After returning home, Palackal said he was surprised most by the lack of understanding that society still has about such a significant piece of history.
"It would have been lost to humanity," he said. "We are doing a service to this cultural treasure."
Palackal added that he recently received a call from Al Jezeera producers, inquiring about his film and findings.
"My plan is to give the recordings to the Library of Congress," Palackal said. "That way it will stay in the world and future scholars will have access to that."