Archive for the ‘Tech’ Category
HalfTorQ’s Blog - Haunted Mansion (Game Cube) On Wii crashing
Recently we bought (at a flea market) the game Haunted Mansion for Game Cube, we have a Wii with some Game Cube controllers and a GC Memory card, We saved the game right before the point where we go passed doors with Zombie arms, we had 170 spooks in the lantern at this point and now we find that every time the Zombie arms try to grab at us the game freezes/crashes with a nasty tone and we can only unplug the Wii, it wont even turn off.Here is a vid of the point we get too right when it freezes but this lucky player has no problems:
HalfTorQ’s Blog - Haunted Mansion (Game Cube) On Wii crashing
I’d call then Nerds myself, Geek has more prowess.
Head Tracking - Wii
Cool inventions
If you know Norwegian, please let us know if the LULL, an award-winning product made for GiForm 2007 is just a concept or not.
Craftmade Ceiling Fans Warbirds Tiger Shark Indoor fan.
Gloves designed by Tobias Wong
Brushed Aluminium Armadillo Breadbin
The Large Fish Bowl Book Ends or The Small Fish Bowl Bookends
or 
Skeleton Bones Black Halloween Socks
Gutsy just not ready… “my opinion”
I gave Gutsy a good try for a few weeks but there are too many little quirks, wanted to install an nvidia kernel component when I had the i810 driver, I tried reconfiguring the xorg adapter driver to be the intel and not the i810 and the screen rendering improved but still did not really make me happy as compiz and 3ddesktop didnt work.
cupsys had some access denied messages when installing packages and was generally too quirky right now to be a functional desktop, I knew the risks going to Gutsy and I gave it a shot. Maybe in a few more months I will try again.
I found a great rollback option forum posting that used something refered to apt pinning, worked like a charm:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=2604826&postcount=2
Thumb sucking
I was discussing peanut allergies with a colleage and how it didnt seen to exist in the 80’s, this lead us on to the fact that perhaps the world is too pre-ccupied with being germ free and he came up with an interesting what if…:
“What if thumb sucking in children was a natural developmental process allowing children to expose the immune system to various germs to build immunity, children being very tactile in the learning process and will obviously pick up germs as the y learn.”
I was always encouraged to go play in the dirt as a child, I have no allegies or health issues to speak of as an adult, am I just lucky? :???:
Maryland Professor Creates Desktop Supercomputer
Discussion at PhysOrgForum
Credit: Clark School of Engineering - University of Maryland
A prototype of what may be the next generation of personal computers has been developed by researchers in the University of Maryland’s A. James Clark School of Engineering. Capable of computing speeds 100 times faster than current desktops, the technology is based on parallel processing on a single chip.
Parallel processing is an approach that allows the computer to perform many different tasks simultaneously, a sharp contrast to the serial approach employed by conventional desktop computers. The prototype developed by Uzi Vishkin and his Clark School colleagues uses a circuit board about the size of a license plate on which they have mounted 64 parallel processors. To control those processors, they have developed the crucial parallel computer organization that allows the processors to work together and make programming practical and simple for software developers.
“The single-chip supercomputer prototype built by Prof. Uzi Vishkin’s group uses rich algorithmic theory to address the practical problem of building an easy-to-program multicore computer,” said Charles E. Leiserson, professor of computer science and engineering at MIT. “Vishkin’s chip unites the theory of yesterday with the reality of today.”
Desktop Parallel Processing
Parallel processing on a massive scale using numerous interconnected chips or computers has been used for years to create supercomputers. However, its application to desktop systems has been a challenge because of severe programming complexities. The Clark School team found a way to use single chip parallel processing technology to change that.
Vishkin, a professor in the Clark School’s electrical and computer engineering department and the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS), explained the advantage of parallel processing like this: “Suppose you hire one person to clean your home, and it takes five hours, or 300 minutes, for the person to perform each task, one after the other,” Vishkin said. “That’s analogous to the current serial processing method. Now imagine that you have 100 cleaning people who can work on your home at the same time! That’s the parallel processing method.
“The ’software’ challenge is: Can you manage all the different tasks and workers so that the job is completed in 3 minutes instead of 300?” Vishkin continued. “Our algorithms make that feasible for general-purpose computing tasks for the first time.”
Vishkin and his team are now demonstrating their technology, which in future devices could include 1,000 processors on a chip the size of a finger nail, to government and industry groups. To show how easy it is to program, Vishkin is also providing access to the prototype to students at Montgomery Blair High School in Montgomery County, Md.
Tagging email as SPAM using PEP
Islandnet.com has PEP, which stands for Personal Email Processor, I’m going to be blogging about certain Islandnet.com related technologies and offerings because I work for them and I like what they offer.
PEP allows you to do some really powerful stuff with email, you can use PEP to test email headers like X-Spam-Score or X-Spam-Report. In this posting I am going to describe a using PEP to test email and lable it as possible spam for filterinf in the receiving email client, here are some sample entries from my mailrule file:
strip if X-Spam-Score > 4.9 Subject
insert if X-Spam-Score > 4.9 Subject "POSSIBLESPAM: {subject}"
jump if X-Spam-Score > 4.9 @WANTED
strip if X-Spam-Report contains "http://rhyolite.com/anti-spam/dcc/" Subject
insert if X-Spam-Report contains "http://rhyolite.com/anti-spam/dcc/" Subject "POSSIBLESPAM: {subject}"
jump if X-Spam-Report contains "http://rhyolite.com/anti-spam/dcc/" @WANTED
strip if vscan matches * Subject
insert if vscan matches * Subject "VIRUS: {vscan}-{subject}"
jump if vscan matches * @WANTED
strip if X-Spam-Report contains "SARE_EBAY_SPOOF_NAME" Subject
insert if X-Spam-Report contains "SARE_EBAY_SPOOF_NAME" Subject "POSSIBLESPAM: {subject}"
jump if X-Spam-Report contains "SARE_EBAY_SPOOF_NAME" @WANTED
strip if X-Spam-Report contains "SPAMCOP" Subject
insert if X-Spam-Report contains "SPAMCOP" Subject "POSSIBLESPAM: {subject}"
jump if X-Spam-Report contains "SPAMCOP" @WANTED
strip if X-Spam-Report contains "PYZOR_CHECK Listed in Pyzor" Subject
insert if X-Spam-Report contains "PYZOR_CHECK Listed in Pyzor" Subject "POSSIBLESPAM: {subject}"
jump if X-Spam-Report contains "PYZOR_CHECK Listed in Pyzor" @WANTED
strip if X-Spam-Report contains "MSGID_DOLLARS" Subject
insert if X-Spam-Report contains "MSGID_DOLLARS" Subject "POSSIBLESPAM: {subject}"
jump if X-Spam-Report contains "MSGID_DOLLARS" @WANTED
strip if body,top,bottom contains "Red Hot Opportunity" Subject
insert if body,top,bottom contains "Red Hot Opportunity" Subject "POSSIBLESPAM: {subject}"
jump if body,top,bottom contains "Red Hot Opportunity" @WANTED
strip if body,top,bottom contains "Short Term Target" Subject
insert if body,top,bottom contains "Short Term Target" Subject "POSSIBLESPAM: {subject}"
jump if body,top,bottom contains "Short Term Target" @WANTED
@WANTED
As you can see above the code strips the subject and appends the word POSSIBLESPAM: to the begining of the subject and then jumps to the end of the mailrule @WANTED
You could as easily have this method sort email addressed to different people into different folders in a mail progrma by setting the subject to something different depending on the email address its sent to.
Well, more on Islandnet.com stuff later…