October 2011Monthly Archives

Creative Ziio 7″ com.zii.launcher force close

Well I’ve just had the last straw with my ziio. I turned it on today and the primary launcher has decided to crash.

I tried as many things as I could and the only thing that I managed to get working was to smash the home key at the same time I was clicking “Force Close”. I managed to open the task switcher then after a hundred or so attempts, started the Task Manager.

From there I was able to find “Settings” and go to Privacy -> Factory Data Reset.

After the reset I was able to successfully get things back up and running but I literally could not do anything else bar the reset.

Quite disappointing. I’m now looking to get Android Market on the device so I can get some DECENT apps running on it :)

Bradley

2011-10-29

Android, Technology

0 comments

Two of the greats, lost

Everyone heard of the loss of Steve Jobs. It’s a sad loss and the world is lesser for it, but yesterday I heard of yet another great who had passed away.

Dennis Ritchie, amongst other things, created the C programming language and was instrumental in the UNIX operating system.

To lose two of the greats only three days apart is a shocker! May they both rest in piece. Thank you to you both for your incredible contributions to humanity! You will be missed.

Bradley

2011-10-14

IT, Programming

0 comments

FTL Neutrinos could be explained by relativity

Recently the scientific world was sent into a frenzy with the possibility that an experiment had actual proof that the speed of some particles did in fact exceed the speed of light.

My own recent post linked to the source of the information.

As I said in the post, as long as it could be corroborated then this would be one of the most life changing discoveries of this century.

Well it would seem that there is a theory as to how these neutrinos were able to reach the OPERA detector 60 nanoseconds ahead of schedule. There could be something that was not taken into consideration during the experimental testing explained here.

Again, this is just a theory that could explain the results, not definitive proof that the experiment was incorrect.

Let’s see where this goes shall we?

Get selected radio button value by input name

There are times when you have a radio group and you want to get the item that was selected, specifically the value of the selected item.

We also want to know whether nothing has been selected as yet (especially when validating forms).

function getSelectedRadioValue_ByInputName(inputName) {
	return $('input[name=' + inputName + ']:radio:checked').val();
}

Simply pass in the name of the radio group and it will return either:

The value of the radio item that has been checked, or
Undefined if nothing has been checked

Nice!

sudo with no password

After installing God knows how many linux systems, one of the things that I always seem to forget (amongst other things) is how to bypass the need to type your user password when accessing sudo.

myuser   ALL=NOPASSWD: ALL

Put that into visudo and the days of typing and typing and typing your user password when accessing sudo are gone q:)

Bradley

2011-10-05

0 comments

Project: Colonise the Galaxy

Stephen Hawking said, (paraphrasing) “If the human race is to have a future, it is not on the planet Earth”. He was referring to the fact that our planet is unable to sustain the human race for that much longer without suffering a devastating series of environmental events which would cause the balance of life on Earth to be tipped on its head.

http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/09/29/163231/a-third-of-sun-like-stars-may-have-warm-earth-analogs details a claim that suggest there are millions of “Earth-like” planets orbiting “sun-like” stars within our own galaxy.

Can’t wait to put my name down on the list of colonists :)

When will people learn?

All your photos posted online are leading to one inevitability, that you will be identifiable anywhere in the world in (almost) real time from now on.

Use of the clouds computing capacity has given birth to an almost real-time facial recognition.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/09/cloud-powered-facial-recognition-is-terrifying/245867/

They can start from a simple photo with no other information and based on the amount of crap you’ve uploaded to sites like crapbook, your personal information can be ascertained through data accretion.

From your photos they can ascertain:

Who you are
Who you associate with (ie. identify others in the photo)
Determine your geographical location (ie. analyse the buildings and backgrounds in the photo to determine an exact geographical location of where the photo was taken)
The time of day it was taken (ie. using shadows and the geographical location a simple mathematic equation can calculate the time of day) and build patterns as to where you go and WHEN you go there
And sooooooooo much more!

When will people learn that putting your life’s story online for the world to see is incredibly stupid?

Bradley

2011-10-03

Lifestyle, Security, Technology

0 comments

Electrolysis without electricity

Well I didn’t think I’d see the day that something of this calibre reached fruition but fortunately I have.

One of my pet projects in the past was electrolysis to produce hydrogen gas as a means to power a combustion engine to generate electrical energy though the output was always less than the input.

Now we can use the ultimate renewable energy source, the star which we orbit!

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/artificial-leaf-0930.html

Can’t wait to get my hands on one of these babies!

Bradley

2011-10-03

Fun, Science, Technology

0 comments