Valerie Logan, HP worldwide vice president of strategy & portfolio, information management and analytics, discusses how government can lower its costs with technology in this interview with FedScoopTV. [found via @fedscoop ]

Scientists at NASA are working on a warp drive that can bend space in such a way to propel a ship up faster than the speed of light: ten times the speed of light! Moreover, this technology is not as far off as you’d think. From the article, "Perhaps a Star Trek experience within our lifetime is …

The Screen Scraper Utility Kit for WinRT has been downloaded 777 times. After surviving 12/21/2012, clearly this is another run of good luck.

It turns out that the onboard clocks on the GPS satellites have to be slowed down so that they appear to run accurately from the surface of the earth. Why? Due to relativity, gravity and motion. Watch the video. Very interesting.

This great article by Iris Classon shows you how to dynamically change Style resources at runtime in WindowsRT and it’s too good not to share.

Local developer genius and user group speaker, Roberto Hernandez has just released his first Windows 8 Store app: Rumble Radar. Rumble Radar uses an open government data feed from the United States Geological Survey and a great example of using free data sources in your applications. Read more …

SitePoint’s HTML5 Developer Center has a great link to seven videos that walk you through creating an HTML5 Windows 8 App with Blend. Fellow Developer Evangelist Dr. Doris Chen leads you through all the videos. If you liked these videos, be sure to sign up at 30 to Launch, where you can opt in to …

Since I’ve been offline for a little while, the comment spam on my blog has built up quite a bit. As usual, the bad posts get deleted. Every once in a while, I get a good laugh at the spammer’s efforts. I honestly don’t see the connection. Do you?

Researchers in Pittsburg, working on behalf of Disney, have created a robot that can play catch and even juggle. It’s time for me to start building robots.

It’s been a while since my last blog post. I took the last few weeks of the year to unwind and take a vacation just before Christmas. Now, I’m toned, tanned, rested and ready to make 2013 a great year!

University of Michigan Professor Lampe uses gamification in his 200-student lecture classes to better engage his students.   [found via Slashdot]

Here’s a graphic that demonstrates all the features that Azure now supports. Click the picture to see it larger.   Try Azure for free now.

In this session from Build 2012, Aaron Hillegrass from the Big Nerd Ranch covers the top 10 things iOS developers need to know about Windows Store Apps. Aaron has a number of talks up on Channel9, which iOS devs would find useful. As always, the best way to get up to speed on Windows Store app …

What improvements were made to graphics in Windows 8 ? Watch this video on Channel 9 to get the lowdown on what’s been improved:   For even more information on graphic improvements in Windows 8, check out these links: Hardware accelerating everything: Windows 8 graphics Windows Graphics APIs …

The Windows 8 App programming model allows for the creation of WinRT Components that can be created in C/C++, C#, or Visual Basic, but consumed by all the languages Windows 8 supports: JavaScript, C/C++, C#, and Visual Basic.

That’s right, you can write code in C++ and use it from JavaScript. …

Remember those who died in the attack on Pearl Harbor 71 years ago. From WikiPedia: Ships lost or damaged (emphasis added) Battleships Arizona: Exploded; total loss. 1,177 dead. Oklahoma: Capsized, 429 dead. Refloated November 1943; capsized and lost while under tow to the mainland May 1947 [91] …

Vision Mobile has an interesting write up on “Which Apps Make Money?” The whole article is worth reading, but here are some interesting tidbits: “In the games and software/IT industries, revenues are, to a large extent, generated by app sales which is a core business activity. In other verticals, …

I speak to a lot of developers about creating Windows 8 apps. Inevitably, the question of design comes up and I talk about the origins of our design language in transportation graphics. As much as I can get across the core concepts in a 60 or 90 minute talk, there’s a lot more to creating a great …