Engineering and technology notes

Dorothy Vaughan

Dorothy Johnson Vaughan (September 20, 1910 – November 10, 2008) was an African American mathematician who worked for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), and NASA, at Langley Research Center inHampton, Virginia. In 1949, she became acting supervisor of the West Area Computers, the first African-American woman to supervise a staff at the center.

She later was promoted officially to this position. During her 28-year career, Vaughan prepared for the introduction of machine computers in the early 1960s by teaching herself and her staff the programming language of FORTRAN; she later headed the programming section of the Analysis and Computation Division (ACD) at Langley.

Vaughan is one of the women featured in Margot Lee Shetterly‘s history Hidden Figures: The Story of the African-American Women Who Helped Win the Space Race(2016). It was adapted as a biographical film of the same name, also released in 2016.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Vaughan

Katherine Johnson

Katherine Coleman Goble Johnson (born August 26, 1918) is an African American physicist and mathematician who made contributions to the United States’ aeronautics and space programs with the early application of digital electronic computers at NASA. Known for accuracy in computerized celestial navigation, she conducted technical work at NASA that spanned decades. During this time, she calculated the trajectories,launch windows, and emergency back-up return paths for many flights from Project Mercury, including the early NASA missions of John Glennand Alan Shepard, and the 1969 Apollo 11 flight to the Moon, through theSpace Shuttle program.[1][2] Her calculations were critical to the success of these missions.[1] Johnson also did calculations for plans for a mission to Mars.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherine_Johnson

Lua: getting started

Lua is a powerful and fast programming language that is easy to learn and use and to embed into your application. Lua is designed to be a lightweight embeddable scripting language and is used for all sorts of applications from games to web applications and image processing. See the about page for details and some reasons why you should choose Lua. See what Lua programs look and feel like in the live demo.

Source: Lua: getting started

App Inventor Tutorials and Examples: Manager Screen | Pura Vida Apps

The recommended method of switching screens in App InventorNote: Before starting to create another screen, first you should think about is it really necessary? See also Building apps with many screens and SteveJG’s post about advantages/disadvantages, because in only one screen you also can use vertical arrangements to simulate different screens, just set the arrangements to visible = true/false as needed…See also Martyn_HK’s example about how to use Tabs in App Inventor and another example from Cyd.Note from the Colored Dots tutorial:You can have many screens in an App Inventor app, but a screen always returns to the screen that opened it. On the other hand, you can get the effect of screens switching to arbitrary other screen by setting up a “manager screen” that is used for opening all the other screens. When a screen wants to switch, it returns to the manager with a value saying which screen to open next.This version demonstrates the use of a manager screen. If in a screen you want to go to another screen, you always go back to the manager screen telling him where you want to go. With this method, there only is one screen active in any moment. Additionally the back button will be catched with the Screen.BackPressed block.Note: if you only use the open another screen and never the close screen block, you will run out of memory after a while. Also reopening an already opened screen is a bad idea. For example if you open Screen1 twice, you also have to close your app twice!

Source: App Inventor Tutorials and Examples: Manager Screen | Pura Vida Apps

Creating new objects at runtime – Google Groups

Hi people!! I am loving the App Inventor, I have previously tried some droid dev using eclipse and the android SDK but I found it so hard to get to grips with. I am written a few apps and now am trying to write on that allows me to take pictures of my friends and assign their numbers to them… i want to be able to click my friends faces and call them from within the app but… is it possible to create new buttons at runtime? when i take a picture it should change the buttons image property to d

Source: Creating new objects at runtime – Google Groups

Representational state transfer

Representational state transfer (REST) or RESTful Web services are one way of providing interoperability between computer systems on the Internet. REST-compliant Web services allow requesting systems to access and manipulate textual representations of Web resources using a uniform and predefined set of stateless operations. Other forms of Web service exist, which expose their own arbitrary sets of operations such as WSDL and SOAP.[1] “Web resources” were first defined on the World Wide Web as documents or files identified by their URLs, but today they have a much more generic and abstract definition encompassing every thing or entity that can be identified, named, addressed or handled, in any way whatsoever, on the Web. In a RESTful Web service, requests made to a resource’s URI will elicit a response that may be in XML, HTML, JSON or some other defined format. The response may confirm that some alteration has been made to the stored resource, and it may provide hypertext links to other related resources or collections of resources. Using HTTP, as is most common, the kind of operations available include those predefined by the HTTP verbs GET, POST, PUT, DELETE and so on. By making use of a stateless protocol and standard operations, REST systems aim for fast performance, reliability, and the ability to grow, by re-using components that can be managed and updated without affecting the system as a whole, even while it is running.

The term representational state transfer was introduced and defined in 2000 by Roy Fielding in his doctoral dissertation.[2][3] Fielding used REST to design HTTP 1.1 and Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI).[4][5][6] The term is intended to evoke an image of how a well-designed Web application behaves: it is a network of Web resources (a virtual state-machine) where the user progresses through the application by selecting links, such as /user/tom, and operations such as GET or DELETE (state transitions), resulting in the next resource (representing the next state of the application) being transferred to the user for their use.

Source: Representational state transfer – Wikipedia

Ixia (company)

Ixia is a globally traded public company operating in around 25 countries. Ixia is headquartered in Calabasas, California and has approximately 1750 employees worldwide.

Ixia’s key customers include manufacturers of network equipment such as Cisco and Alcatel-Lucent,[1] service providers such as Verizon, NTT[2] and Deutsche Telekom,[3] and many enterprises and government agencies.

History[edit]

Ixia was founded by Errol Ginsberg and Joel Weissberger in 1997. Atul Bhatnagar[4] succeeded Ginsberg as President and CEO in 2007. On 19 March 2012 Ixia announced Victor Alston as President and Chief Executive Officer, with Ginsberg remaining Chairman of the Board and Chief Innovation Officer. On October 2013, Ixia announced Victor Alston’s resignation as Chief Executive Officer, and he was replaced by Ginsberg as acting CEO.[5] On August 21, 2014, the board named Bethany Mayer President and CEO. Mayer was also named to the board of directors. [6]

Historically an IP/Ethernet testing house, the acquisition of Catapult Communications in June 2009[7]established Ixia as a player in the wireless market. Ixia made a second significant acquisition in 2009, buying Agilent Technologies‘ N2X Data Networks Product Line for $44 million.[8] Ixia further expanded its testing capabilities by acquiring Wi-Fi testing company VeriWave, Inc. in July, 2011.[9] On 4 June 2012 Ixia announced the completion of the acquisition of Anue Systems, Inc., a leading developer of network visibility/tap aggregation solutions founded by Kevin Przybocki, Hemi Thaker, and Chip Webb. On August 24, 2012, the company announced another acquisition, BreakingPoint Systems,[10] a leading company in network security testing. Ixia continued its acquisitions by announcing the purchase of Net Optics[11] on October 29, 2013.

On January 30, 2017, Keysight Technologies Inc. agreed to buy Ixia for about $1.6 billion in all-cash, with the deal expected to close by October 2017.[12][13]

Tools and services[edit]

Ixia’s test and simulation platforms are used by network equipment manufacturers, service providers, enterprises, and government agencies to design and validate a wide range of wired, Wi-Fi, and 3G/4G networking equipment and networks.

Ixia Worldwide Headquarters, Calabasas, California

Ixia provides a wide range of testing, visibility and security solutions for enterprises and governments, service providers and network equipment manufacturers

Source: Ixia (company) – Wikipedia