Adobe and the slap on Apple
Well, for some weird reason, Apple refuses to give in and have Adobe port Flash over to the iPhone. It would be a massive advantage if we could see an iPhone with a full blown version of Flash, as opposed to Flash Lite. But... Apple won't bend. So what does Apple do? The best it can do right now: get people angry at Apple.
Below is the image that people will see when they try to download Flash on their iPhones (courtesy of Engadget):
A day in the life of a Presario CQ60
So here I am now, finally alone. My owner won't leave me alone for a second during the day! I'm surprised he gave me some rest now, I guess I should enjoy it.
Well, first things first so I should introduce myself. I'm an HP Compaq Presario CQ60-200EP and by the looks of it, I must be pretty darn good as my owner uses me every single day! It can be maddening at times... having him (literally) push my buttons all the time...
Lately he's done a smart move though and installed Windows 7 on me. I feel so much lighter now. It's as if I went to the gym regularly for a year... except I didn't!
I don't get to do much fun stuff very often but he does a lot of work with me and in a way I'm happy with that. I like feeling useful and handy and I know my owner trusts me with some pretty serious stuff...
I pack a generous 15.6 inch screen which is pretty wide and still portable (in your face, you 17 inch monsters!). All in all I was very affordable and I'm a dual core, from Intel - by far the best CPU maker out there right now. My graphics are also by Nvidia which is pretty darn good, I say. You know, I also have a DVD burner with lightscribe which is the next best thing these days and did I mention that I have an integrated card-reader, a webcam and an HDMI output?! I love it when he plugs me in to his 52 inch flat screen. I feel like a whole different computer when he watches 1080p movies with me!
Do you need a laptop? If you do, I have a few brothers that would gladly live with you and accompany you everywhere! I'm a sexy piano-black and have a cute aluminum "Q" on my lid. Interested? Well, for a limited period I can get you $30 off in orders over $150 on the HP Home Store. Sounds good?
Just go over to the HP Home Store and use the following coupon code: SV2132.
Keep in mind though! This coupon is valid through the 31st of October or while supplies last! So get yours while it is still time!
(Restrictions and exclusions apply)
Imageshack Hacked? – Yes!
The famous website for hosting images, imageshack.us, has just recently been hacked with the manifesto below. Our sources say all images were replaced with this manifesto, but according to the manifesto itself «no images were harmed in the making of this... image». Let's hope for the users' sake that this is indeed true.
It remains to be seen what does Imageshack actually have to do with the topic of this manifesto...
Musical Tesla Coil Plans [Updated...]
A great deal of people seem to land in my blog searching for the plans for building a Musical Tesla Coil. Therefore, I decided to do some researching myself and I am posting here my findings. I hope you find them useful 
Very Detailed Technical Plans [Broken]
Till the next time!
Update: So apparently I still get loads of hits from people trying to get their hands on the schematics for Tesla Coils. I'm afraid I can't help you much on musical Tesla coils, but here's a great website that describes all that you need to know to build just a funky Tesla coil: http://www.alansharp.co.uk/homepage.htm - now, go crazy! If you manage to build one, be sure to come back here and post an image. If you post one on the comments zone, I'll incorporate it into the post
Ethical Hacking
'Times are a changing' - nowadays more than ever this is true. Companies and individuals rely more and more on the Internet and let's be honest: the Internet is not a safe place, not by a slim chance. I'm not even talking about viruses, which on their own are a pretty big threat. What I am going on about are hackers. You know, the evil guys who want all your money and your credit card numbers.
Don't take it personally, no hacker has a grudge especially against you or your company, but unless you take preemptive measures to be on the front line, then you are at risk. There is a chance that you are at risk right now. This is the sort of thing where you cannot possibly think "this only happens to other people" - well, think again, it happened to electrical power plants in the US.
Are you convinced that you need to do something about it yet? I hope you are.
So what's the whole idea you ask? Well, the idea is being ahead of the hackers, it is thinking like an hacker so that you can be preemptive and patch the holes in your organization. Do you know how store-owners set up motion sensors near windows that can easily be broken? The idea here is just the same.
This concept is called ethical hacking. You are taught on the ways, tricks and subterfuges of hackers so that you can have a different insight on your company. Believe it or not, but the biggest flaw in computer systems is actually us, the users. We are easily duped and deceived by people pretending to be who they aren't, and this has reached astronomical levels. The most blatant case nowadays is when you get an e-mail that pretends to be a legitimate e-mail from your bank, from a work-mate or simply people who would be innocently sending you pictures.
Well my fellow Internauts, no enough care is much care these days. The EC-Council provides you with the security training that you need not only to help yourself and your company, but also to help other companies. This of course is an investment that can get a return flowing in so in the end, it is all benefits! This isn't all; if you are trained in IT Security, your job opportunities simply tenfold. Is that not what everyone wants at a time of recession and crisis?
The iClass by the EC-Council has the following categories:
-Security Fundamentals
-Ethical Hacking
-Penetration Testing
-Computer Forensics
-Disaster Recovery
-Secure Programming
So whether you are a newbie (hey, there's no shame about that!) and you need the fundamentals, or whether you fancy a job at a crime lab doing scientific forensics for a living, the iClass covers it all. You just take your pick!
If you are interested, and here's hoping that you won't miss this great opportunity, then here are some links that will help you on the EC-Council site.
Program Site:
http://iclass.eccouncil.org/
Different Certifications:
http://iclass.eccouncil.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=68&Itemid=91
The CEH (Certified Ethical Hacker) :
http://www.eccouncil.org/ceh.htm
Certification Center:
http://www.isc2.org/
CompTIA:
http://www.comptia.org/
Accelero Twin Turbo by Artic Cooling – Review
Recently I had been having a problem. My graphics card (a humble PowerColor HD4850) was overheating to smithereens. Each time I wanted to play a game I would manually pump up the only small fan, increasing the noise tenfold, only to keep the temperature at a scorching 100ºC.
Yes, you read correctly. Under load (running Team Fortress 2) this card would easily reach the 100 degrees Celsius. The funny thing about it? It wouldn't absolutely stutter at all!
After having done research on it, I came to the conclusion that this card was simply hot by nature. Or, better put, the stock cooler is not appropriate for the kind of heat this graphics card generates. There is being hot and there is not having appropriate cooling. This case is most certainly the latter.
My results, despite not having screenshots of it, were of:
- 80ºC idle (with the fan at 40% - which is the maximum I was willing to go noise-wise)
- 100ºC ++ load (with the fan at 80% and a deafening noise that even got my mom scared about it)
Now, while the card was most certainly designed with this sort of temperatures in mind, heat rarely does any good to electrical components. When we're talking about temperatures enough to make your kettle whistle, then you know you should do something about it.
I did.
Today, I bought the Accelero Twin Turbo and at first I was a little reluctant. I was afraid it was just going to be more of the same as the stock cooler, with little improvement. I couldn't have been more wrong. The installation is pretty straight-forward, although, to its own right, the RAM and voltage regulators heatsinks definitely could use more glue. With a little nudge I managed to remove one of the heatsinks so I am still wondering how they will hold up through time (literally).
This cooler packs quite a punch when compared to the stock cooler. It comes with two 80mm fans, attached to a massive aluminum block, which has a copper pipeline system that goes straight to the actual block that attaches to the GPU. Keep in mind that space may be an issue with this cooler; if you are going for CrossFire then think again about buying the Twin Turbo as your graphics card will use up THREE slots on the back of your computer case.
It is crazy, I know, but right now I have the same 40% setting on the fans (this cooler is pluggable to your graphics' card fan power supply) and I get a cool 33ºC . While gaming, it never goes above the 36ºC and that is with the very same 40% !
As far as noise goes, it can't even compare to the stock cooler, which is actually expectable. There is a trade-off between the size of a fan, the amount of air it can move per second and the noise in decibels it produces. Basically, with a bigger fan, you can move the same (or a bigger) amount of air with the same (or less) noise. These two fans are really silent, barely audible. If I push them to 100% then you actually start to hear them, but at 100% they are less audible than the single, stock fan, at 80%.
So if you still needed any proof that this is the cooler for you, look no further. This will solve ALL your temperature problems and I advocate that this graphics card should actually come with one of these coolers by default.
What Apple could do (and doesn’t) to have the upper hand at Microsoft
Howdy everyone,
I was thinking the other day (yes, this does happen every now and then) and something hit me: what is the big issue with developing any kind of software these days? Optimization, right? This is truer on a special case and I am refering to the operating systems. Windows, Mac OS, Linux-based... you know the drill.
Optimization is by nature, a very herculean task, especially when you are developing a piece of software to run on a wide variety of platforms and environments. Sure, some of the most recent computers come with dual-core CPUs, but pretty much all operating systems must still be able to operate on single-core processors, just as they have to be able to handle 4 or 8 cores effectively. This is not only true in the case of processors but also on RAM. If an operating system is running on 256Mb of RAM, it must certainly behave differently resource-wise than it will behave on a system with 4Gb of available RAM. More to the point, what is the use of having 4Gb of RAM, if 3Gb stay unused at all times? One could argue that having available memory is good because it allows the applications to use more as they need it, without resorting to swap files, but for the most part it is wasted memory, a precious resource in our computers.
With this said, for companies like Microsoft, it certainly is hard to develop an operating system that will efficiently handle old and new, resource-limited and resource-boasted platforms, simply because they create Windows for a variety of hardware. Windows will run on AMD, Intel and VIA and although they all are x86-based, there are certain instructions, that could be used to optimize but are not, because if my Core 2 Duo has SSE4, my friend's Athlon XP 3000+ hasn't got this set of instructions and therefore an application optimized for my CPU won't actually run on his.
This is, to some extent, the story of Windows Vista. Windows Vista brought quite a few innovations when compared to XP but it had a problem: if your resources are on the lower end, your computer will feel like a sloth on a lazy day and XP feels like cool breeze when compared to Vista. However, if you have ever had the chance to try out Vista on a powerful system, you'll be in awe simply because it will feel as fast as XP and you have all the goodies. Windows 7 by the way, is set to change this, but let us keep that to a different post as that is off-subject.
So, what is the main characteristic of a Macintosh computer? Until very recently, they used hardware unlike that of PCs but not anymore, their hardware is now similar and compatible with PC hardware. Actually, its parts are normal PC parts, with Intel CPUs and Intel/Nvidia/ATI graphics cards so what is really different? It's simple: they come assembled and are not meant to be disassembled at the risk of getting your warranty voided.
My point is that if Apple keeps such a high-standard on their computers and keeps them so expensive, why not turn the competition knob a notch? Pack their computers with like 8Gb of RAM at least and with 1Tb hard drives. In a way, Apple has started optimizing since Mac OS 10.5 will only run on at least the Core 2 Duo platform and this is a good thing, but I still think that RAM is a major factor in computers that is being systematically (and wrongly) left behind. However, if you have 8Gb of RAM, you could almost reserve 4Gb just for pre-fetching most used applications before the user needs them, and still have plenty of RAM for the average user to mess with. Maybe we need to go big and supersize and make a break with the past of computing.
What is the real problem? Not knowing in advance when and how much RAM the user will need. So if an operating system starts using all the available (free) memory to pre-fetch applications, if at some point the user needs an application that requires, say, 512Mb of RAM and that program wasn't pre-fetched, the OS will have to quickly ditch 512Mb of that pre-fetch RAM and quickly load that program into memory. The problem? This can't happen quickly because the program will be loaded from the hard drive and the hard drive is inherently slow.
Effectively, the memory allocation algorithm has to have something like a behaviour analysis module. Something that records the user behaviour and finds patterns, and even then it has to give room for the unexpected. A good memory allocation algorithm isn't the key to all of the problems though, if for instance there isn't enough RAM available, then an algorithm can't make miracles no matter how good it is.
To finish my post: Apple can control both their software and hardware, as the Portuguese saying goes "they have the knife and the cheese" so I sincerely feel that they can do way much more for their users in terms of performance. I do reckon that Mac OS users do not typically complain about performance, but what is also true on a computer is that it can always be faster.
Microsoft Dreamway 2008 – Steve Ballmer
Howdy my faithful readers.
Today I am here to talk about Microsoft Dreamway. My goal is to outline what I have learned from it and how much of a great experience that it was.
First off, I was the very first MSP to arrive there, so I checked myself in and waited around for more people to come. Finally more and more people started coming and another MSP came, Vânia. "Okay... what to do now? Let's get coffee." . After messing around with the map, we finally figured out where the foyer was and where we were meant to eat cookies(!) and get our morning coffee.
After waiting for a while longer, more and more Student Partners started showing up and eventually the speeches started. The first one, with Pedro Rosa, was as usually quite good and before we knew it, we were having coffee again on the morning Coffee Break. Then off to speeches again, this time with Nuno Godinho; a speech on creating rich applications with Silverlight. Besides the fact that Nuno lost the notion of time on both of his speeches, they were quite helpful and inspiring. I had been wanting to try Silverlight for a while now and this was just the spark to get it going. Then came the speech about Visual Studio, which (I'm sorry but) it was the less attractive one, even if I work with Visual Studio on almost a daily basis.
And then it was time to lunch. They served some "weird" thing with codfish and ... stuff BUT, the desserts were delicious so all in all, despite having to stand during the whole thing, it wasn't so bad.
Stuffed up and cosy and the moment of the day arrived: Steve Ballmer's keynote speech. Massive crowd waiting at the doors of the main auditorium and when we were finally allowed in, it looked like they were offering free candy on the inside! Everyone wanted in, and lucky me, I got a place right on the second row 
(yeah, the original plan was to catch a drop of Steve's saliva and sell it on eBay afterwards , but that just didn't happen... 
bummer!). Turns out that the first speaker wasn't really Steve Ballmer but Miguel Caldas, who was also going to give a keynote speech but on Internet Explorer 8.
*sigh*
Don't take me wrong, Miguel was, to say the least, captivating, enthusiastic and funny: the perfect mixture in a speaker, so despite us all being fooled into thinking that we were going to be hearing from Steve first, it was quite good to hear all about IE8. As Miguel said: on IE8, Microsoft is finally caring about standards and about developers. We all know how much of a pain in the rear it is to develop something that looks the same in Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and Safari (...and some other browsers out there 
like Miguel said - clearly talking about Chrome).
After a while into Miguel's speech, Steve arrives on the building and he's announced with a quite funky music. This was THE moment of the day and I was enjoying it to the fullest! Steve delivered a fun and objective speech, and I found out how powerful his voice really is I bet he wouldn't really need a microphone nor speakers to get his voice to reach to the people back in the last rows. He does talk loud but also very clearly and without much of an accent.
So, about this speech, Steve basically pointed out where we are today and how things are developping at Microsoft, and how things are most likely to look in 10 years from now. He was also suspicious about someone being there to evaluate his IQ, as he kept tripping on one of the LCDs laid in front of him, on the ground so he said he "suspected that someone was judging his ability to learn" - you failed Steve.
So to cut this post short, afterwards we had the second part about Silverlight, then another coffee break and lastly, Pedro Rosa again, this time talking about Virtual Earth and how it can be used as a base to develop so many interesting and useful things. Definitely something to be looked upon. I still have to know more about the licensing because depending on that, I may be going to use it on a secret ASP .NET project of mine 
.
In a nutshell: the event was brilliantly organized (some chairs on the foyer and on the lunch-tent wouldn't have hurted though...), I got in for free thanks to being a Microsoft Student Partner so... free education, free food and a free good time with friends... hell yes! I'm all for that!
Oh and Steve, thanks for your e-mail address. And yes, I know you have wanted it for a while now, and I've decided to concede: you can come to my place whenever you like. Yes, really.
P.S. Please bring a copy of Windows Cloud!
Solid State Musical Tesla Coil
Ok, so this isn't much in concordance with what I have posted before but hey, it is still technology at its peak and I loved the concept. For those who don't know, Tesla Coils get their name from their inventor, Nikola Tesla. The initial idea was to actually transport energy through wireless means, very much like Intel is attempting except that with Intel's plans apparently there's no human electrocution involved. I know, sad .
Anyhow, I'm going to leave you to the point of this blog post which is the use of Tesla Coils pretty much as speakers. Some guys built the paraphernalia needed to convert musical waves into digital tones, so that they can afterwards be used as triggers to the coils. Typically we wouldn't hear such a coil ressonate, but the whole idea is that they turn the coil on and off enough times per second to insert the noise into a range that is actually audible by humans. You can learn more about it on this video, which explains it briefly. Don't bother if you're not a tech geek.
Now, to the actual amazing videos, we have:
Tetris Theme
Mario Bros Theme
Zelda Theme
Ghostbusters Theme
Hope you enjoyed it as much as I did, simply because it jaw-dropped me. If you did enjoy it, please feel free to drop me a comment, or better yet, DIGG this article .
As an end note, if you like this concept, I would also recommend watching the movie The Prestige with the great Christian Bale (I'm sorry, now I'm just teasing the Batman fans...) which happens to be one of my favourite movies of all time. Enjoy!
Google Chrome Released
Here it is, the browser made by the guys at Google. First things first, and a thank you to Pedro Sousa is due for having brought this to my attention as I had no idea that Google was even working on their own browser.
To be honest, I have been trying Google Chrome for a few minutes now and I was very impressed. It looked like and improved Firefox but now I've just logged into my blog and the rust started to show. Basically, in the admin panel of wordpress, everything is out of place and a real mess. Who is to blame? I have no clue. But all of this worked on Firefox...
I think that the major advantage I have found so far is the fact that each tab runs on a different process, which is the way things should be. That way, when one page crashes, it isn't your whole browser that goes down but just that very page. In a time where web exploits are at their peak, this is very important. Also kudos to the fact that you can easily detach tabs from a window into a separate window, and then add tabs to that window that you just created. It really is THAT easy!
The major disadvantage, is the fact that you can't switch dictionaries quickly and conveniently from the context menu inside a "textarea" which you can do on Firefox. For someone who has to alternate between Portuguese and English dictionaries, this is a major turn-down. Specially because it seems that you even have to restart the browser for the changes to take effect. Bad, bad Google. What were you thinking?!
Other than this I have also loved the seamless integration with Windows Vista. Chrome just integrates much better on Vista's look than Firefox does. Firefox barely supports transparency, whereas Chrome allows for transparency, even on the zone where the tabs reside.
In a nutshell, it's still a beta version, and that does show. Try it at your own peril, but try it nonetheless. I think you will be impressed.