iMechanica - iMech - Comments

Hi Alejandro, I had the

Mahdi Kazemzadeh — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 07:12:20 -0400

Hi Alejandro,

I had the same problem. I believe it works, if you refresh the page after uploading the photo and getting the error message! Sometimes it also uploads your photo even though you have got the error message, so check; you might have the updated photo on your account. I know something is not working there, but I kept trying!

Mahdi

Error message while updating my profile photo

Alejandro A. Ortiz — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 19:56:38 -0400

I have tried to upload in many ways my profile photo (in IE and Mozilla) subjected to the following constraints:

Maximum dimensions 85x85

Maximum size 100 kb

And the following error always arose:

The selected file /tmp/tmp_FZcVQT could not be copied.
Failed to upload the picture image; the pictures directory doesn't exist.

Any suggestion?

Thanks,

Alejandro A. Ortiz

get fluid people involved.

Charlie.liang — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 01:15:50 -0400

One important group of people that imechanica shall attract are fluid-structure interaction researchers. I graduated with PhD training only on fluid dynamics, but later on I gained my interests on solid mechanics while working in applied mathematics department. I believe that many researchers of this group are working in departments of mechanical, civil, aerospace engineering as well as applied mathematics.

Fluid and solid equations could be solved all together in an unified approach (http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jcp.2007.12.004) using the Finite-Volume method which is more popular in CFD. This convinces me more that imechanica in the future would include people from both solid and fluid sides, and even applied mathematicans.

I am recently involved with one interesting conference (http://www.fifthmitconference.org/). As a reviewer of Computers and Structures, it appears to me that more and more fluid researchers are sending good-quality manuscripts to participate this conference and publish fluid mechanics papers in this well-known solid mechanics journal. In terms of unifying the divergence between solid and fluid, the solid mechanicians are already pushing harder than the fluid side.

I happen to use TinyMCE on

Barry Koscheck — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 20:49:12 -0400

I happen to use TinyMCE on my petition site. I had my coder implement it into the place where users actually create their petitions. I feel like it gives them a little more creative freedom.

keeping a check on features

Zhigang Suo — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 10:01:00 -0400

I've been reading more books on topics related to the development of iMechanica, and will add them as comments to this post. Please do so when you read a good one.

Yesterday I checked out from my local library the new book Designing for the Social Web by Joshua Porter. The 188-page book is a delight to hands, eyes and mind. Many full-colored screen shots, and concise analyses. I'll let customers at Amazon give you an overview of the book.

On p. 23 of the book, Porter talked about the AOF method of design:

Focus on the promiary Activity.
Identify your social Objects.
Choose your core Feature set.

Toward the end of the chapter he advised keeping a check on features:

Each feature means more complexity.
Just say no to the urge to add too many features.
Don't copy features.

Porter related an anectote about Steve Jobs. Jobs was talking to music industry people, and said the following:

I know you have a thousand ideas for all the cool features iTunes *could* have. So do we. But we don't want a thousand features. That would be ugly. Innovation is not about a thousand features. It's about saying No to all but the most crucial features.

blogs worth millions -- how many $ is imechanica worth?

Mike Ciavarella — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 16:00:15 -0400

http://www.paidcontent.org/ was recently sold for 30millions to the guardian, and Gaia online raises funding.

When imechanica will reach this $millions status?

Guardian Media buys paidContent.org publisher - Yahoo! News UK

The Guardian News & Media has acquired ContentNext, publisher of media and technology business blog paidContent.org, a sign of the growing importance of ...

Gaia Online Gets $11 Million Third Round For Teen-Oriented Virtual World

By
Joseph Weisenthal
- Mon 14 Jul 2008 09:32 AM PST

Gaia Online,
the teen-oriented virtual world and community site, has raised an $11
million third round led by Institutional Venture Partners. The company
has disclosed over $21 million previously, not including an unspecified
amount from Sony (NYSE: SNE),
bringing its total raise to over $32 million. The virtual worlds space
has seen plenty of activity lately, including some major exits, though
it’s still unclear how things will ultimately shake out. Early leader
Second Life seems to have peaked, while Google (NSDQ: GOOG)
recently dipped its toes in (how far they’ll go with it remains to be
seen). Gaia claims 350,000 unique users daily, and 5 million on a
monthly basis. The San Jose-based company has made virtual goods
transactions central to its business model. Release.

A reply from topblogs@engineerjobs.com - http://scienceblogs.com

Mike Ciavarella — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 13:19:08 -0400

Michele,

I asked topblogs whey they did not list these two: here the very interesting and kind answer.

Thanks for the recommendations! There are actually several good ones at
ScienceBlogs.com, but we can't include those, regrettably, because traffic
measurements are such an important part of the measurement, and we can't
isolate traffic from a particular subdirectory on a domain. The problem is
the same for leonardo-energy.org, too.

It may be that we have to abandon that category altogether if we find that
too many blogs are being left out because they don't exist on their own
domain, though, so we'll continue to keep an eye on that.

Thanks again!

So we have a list of all blogs now at:

http://scienceblogs.com/

michele ciavarella
www.micheleciavarella.it

Two important blogs that are not listed there in Energy are :

Mike Ciavarella — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 05:53:00 -0400

What I find interesting is rather this:

Mike Ciavarella — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 05:37:00 -0400

Pay attention also to the suggestions - sign with Quantcast ?

Mike Ciavarella — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 02:40:16 -0400

How Do I Improve My Ranking?

Right
now we only have traffic data for a very small percentage of these
blogs, causing a jam at the bottom of that category. By simply signing
up with Quantcast and adding
their code to your site, you'll automatically jump ahead of the blogs
who haven't when Quantcast starts reporting your numbers.

Additionally,
Quantcast tends to drastically underestimate traffic for sites that
they aren't tracking directly, so even if they do have stats for your blog, those stats could double if you add their code.

It seems to should do more cooking and energy to reach the top!

Mike Ciavarella — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 02:35:00 -0400

Zhigang & Teng,

congratulations also for me. It is good that you are high in the list of blogs. Of course, looking at the list, it is I think fair to have Energy higher up, while I find "cooking" a bit frustrating (despite it is well known that Engineers do not cook well, and indeed I am not exception with my only dish "spaghetti and tuna" in the list!).

Maybe we should study more the list, and the other blogs, to have ideas. I wonder however if we want to remain always a blog, or we want to experiment also the wiki style.

For now, let's celebrate!

Good News.

RoozbehSanaei — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 02:19:03 -0400

This is very good news for imechanicians, Top Engineering Blogs list is very informative too.

Particularly encouraging for me

Teng Li — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 00:30:44 -0400

While scrolling down the Top 100 Engineering Blogs, I found that my blog of "All of Flexible Macroelectronics" (www.macroelectronics.org) is ranked No. 34 in the list. What a pleasant surprise! Thanks again, Zhigang, for posting the link.

That's encouraging news!

Teng Li — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 00:22:25 -0400

Zhigang, thanks for posting this encouraging news about iMechanica.

A more detailed look into the ranking data of the Top 100 Engineering Blogs shows that, iMechanica is almost at the same level with the three No.3 tiers in 3 out of 4 categories, and is just a bit of shy in the category of "The number of feed subscribers reported by Bloglines" (in my view, this category is somewhat statistically less representative than the other three categories, since Bloglines is just one of many feed readers people often use, and by no means the most popular one).

Google Reader Supports Search

Zhigang Suo — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 12:08:25 -0400

Google Reader gets better now. It has added search within your feeds. The most convenient way to read any wed site, including iMechanica, is to use a RSS reader like Google Reader.