Google Street View Now Available in Ireland

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A big bone of contention in many countries, Google's Street View mapping service today goes live in Brazil, Ireland and Antarctica, meaning Street View now has a presence in all seven continents.
Launched in May 2007 in five US cities, the panoramic imaging service has gone on to map cities on every corner of the planet, attracting ire and admiration along the way.
Brian McClendon, vice-president of engineering at Google Earth and Maps, wrote on the company's blog: "We often consider Street View to be the last zoom layer on the map, and a way to show you what a place looks like as if you were there in person – whether you're checking out a coffee shop across town or planning a vacation across the globe. We hope this new imagery will help people in Ireland, Brazil, and even the penguins of Antarctica to navigate nearby, as well as enable people around the world to learn more about these areas." more

CCEnhancer Makes CCleaner Even Better

CCleaner is one of the most popular programs for cleaning up the extra files and leftover data on your PC. Although I haven’t had much use for it on my more modern PCs (Windows 7 apparently does its own maintenance regularly) I know I’ve used it in the past to restore friends’ older and somewhat abused PCs to a fresh and clean state, sometimes even dramatically boosting performance in the process.

But I did not know of this: CCEnhancer can add to CCleaner’s capabilities by providing support for hundreds of extra programs beyond those supported by default.

According to FreewareGenius, the add-on app supports 270 extra programs including things like Quicktime and Flash, for example, it works even as a portable app, offers 1-click operation and is simple to use. Nice - who knew? You can try CCenhancer for yourself, just download it from here. It’s free, but donations are accepted.

Panasonic Toughbook S9

Panasonic's Toughbook line hasn't only been impressing in extreme durability lately, but also in extremeweight-loss. Joining the 3.2-pound Tougbook C1, is the newest 12.1-inch Toughbook S9, which weighs just three pounds. And yes, Panny's claiming it's the lightest 12-incher with an optical drive, and our quick research seems to prove that claim right. Even more impressive is the power that's packed into the featherweight chassis -- it's got a Core i5-520M processor, 2GB of RAM, and a shock-mounted 320GB hard drive. Thought that Panasonic gave up the durability for that weightage? You'd be wrong -- the magnesium alloy case can still withstand a 2.5-foot operating drop, meets all the Mil Spec 810-G drop procedures, has a spill-resistant keyboard, and can take more than 220 pounds of pressure on its lid and base. It does sound great for when someone drops it off the airport security belt, but that's until you hear about the physical beating it'll take on your bank account -- it'll retail for $2,499. Yeah, we wish we had better news to end on, but perhaps the press release and pictures below will turn that frown upside down. More

Netduino Plus

The two new Arduinos should spell good things for the Arduino heads out there, but meanwhile, on the other side of the tracks... Secret Labs is launching its .NET-friendly Netduino Plus, which adds Ethernet and microSD to a regular Netduino board (which in itself is a sort of high powered, Visual Studio-compatible Arduino, with a 32-bit 48MHz ARM7 processor, instead of Arduino's 8-bit number, but pin compatible with Arduino "shields"). Unfortunately, the networking code eats of a good majority of the board's already meager code storage and RAM, but you can always flash the original Netduino's firmware on here if you'd like. Right now the board is in a "public beta" while the firmware gets some extra tweaks, but you should be able to drop $60 on the final model by the holidays.

Buy a Netduino Plus from here...
Download development kit here...
See few sample projects here...

Microsoft Research Lab: Z3 - An Efficient SMT Solver

Z3 is a high-performance theorem prover being developed at Microsoft Research. Z3 supports linear real and integer arithmetic, fixed-size bit-vectors, extensional arrays, uninterpreted functions, and quantifiers. Z3 is integrated with a number of program analysis, testing, and verification tools from Microsoft Research. These include: Spec#/Boogie, Pex, Yogi, Vigilante, SLAM, F7, SAGE, VS3, FORMULA, and HAVOC. It can read problems in SMT-LIB and Simplifyformats.

Links:

• Introduction

• Z3 at Channel 9

• Documentation

• Download

• Tutorial, Publications and Slides

• Papers With Z3 Applications

• People

• Mailing Lists & Forums

• FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)

• Z3 Blog

• Awards

• Status

• SMT Links