Category Archives: Testing Applications and Tools

Software, hardware, and other things we’re testing.

Robot Rodeos Conjure Up Disasters and Pancake Contests

Extreme Hazard robot essaying an obstacle course at the Robotic Vehicle Range, Kirtland AFB, Alberquerque, NM. Sandia National Labs.

Extreme Hazard robot essaying an obstacle course at the Robotic Vehicle Range, Kirtland AFB, Albuquerque, NM. Sandia National Labs.

A sultry day was in the offing near Purnell OK, the seat of McCurtain County in the state’s southeast quadrant, just a dozen miles northwest from the triple point where Arkansas, Texas and Oklahoma meet. One hundred forty miles northeast, the National Weather Service Doppler radar station KSRX at Ft. Smith Arkansas, was monitoring a cold front approaching from the west, driven by a mass of cool dry air sweeping down from the northern plains. Typical for the late spring in the American prairie, this eastbound mass was colliding with a warm, wet air mass streaming north from the Gulf of Mexico, now roiling under a cool dry tongue at 700 mb. Buoyant but trapped under heavier cool air, supercells were forming in the humid 850 mb surface layer twenty miles west of Purnell.

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"Gunman Reportedly Filmed Lethal Shooting Spree at French Jewish School"

This is now even more disturbing; off-hand, we don’t remember a similar fact-pattern. From   Jewish School Shooting in France – by Scott Sayare and Steven Erlanger at The New York Times (10:04 today):

¶ TOULOUSE, France — A day after an attack outside a Jewish school here killed a rabbi and three young children, the French authorities offered fresh details on Tuesday of an assault that has stunned the nation and terrorized the city, saying the lone gunman seemed to be filming his actions as he coolly shot his victims to death.

Claude Guéant, the interior minister, told a French radio station that surveillance footage from the school’s security cameras showed what appeared to be a video camera strapped to the gunman’s chest — adding a lurid detail to the most deadly attack against Jews in France in 30 years.

With the nation’s terrorism alert at its highest level — “scarlet” — the French authorities pursued a broad and high-profile search on Tuesday for the assailant, but Mr. Guéant said little was known about him.

The attack has been linked to two earlier shootings of French paratroopers, with the police saying that the same gun, a .45-caliber automatic pistol, was used in all three assaults. The authorities have also said that the methods were the same — a man on a powerful motorbike, also the same in each instance, who killed and then fled.

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The “scarlet” alert level, one step short of a formal state of emergency, gives security forces wide powers that include the authority to close some public places like railroad stations and deploy mixed patrols of police officers and soldiers, news reports said.

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Testing: Xmind – promising MindMapping application – plus more

Currently testing XMind, which is a mind-mapping application, but does more than that. We’re still on the upwards slope of the learning curve, and, like many new applications, the help files don’t necessarily anticipate beginners’ questions.(We’d like to see more “markers” – or icons, for instance. And if you can export to HTML, can you edit the HTML file – and how?).

But we think it’s very promising. The free version is very generous – and the paid version – $49/year or $6/month – does have some additional features. More on this as we have time to test it.