Hello world!!!!
Powerbook Project
November 27th, 2009So when I went to University a friend kindly gave me a his old Powerbook G4.
It was a little bit battered and beaten and the paint had worn off around the edges.
It lasted me a few months before I woke up one morning opened the laptop and the hinges for the screen broke. This also broke an internal power supply to the screen.
After ordering new hinges from ebay and soldering the wires back together, the screen finally gave up on me and lost power.
I found out pretty quickly that Mac OS X can use an external monitor other than the laptops primary screen.
After a year I collected the laptop from my mums house where it had been gathering dust.
I didn’t really have a use for the laptop without a screen, however I had been looking for a Mac Mini or Popcorn Hour like device to play my collection of movies I have in the AVI format.
The Mac mini is priced at £400+ and Popcorn hour is about £100+.
Being cheap and creative I decided to see whether the could be used as a media centre device with a grand price tag of £0.
So my step by step guide goes like th
is:
Step
So the laptop specification:
- 667Mhz G4
- ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 with 32 MB of DDR SDRAM
- 256MB of RAM PC133
References:
TED: Kevin Roses suggestion
February 27th, 2009This linked video was a suggestion made by Kevin Rose on Diggnation.
This video from TED is brilliant. When you think about it how many brain scientists have a stroke and can recover and report back on the experience. Which makes you think do we have experience everything to totally understand it?? Or can we learn retrospectively??
The biggest problem with AI is understanding and replicating cognitive thought, so how can you make a machine self aware. According to Jill Bolte Taylor, the human brain is made up of 2 separate processing units. A serial processing unit (left side) and parallel processing unit (right side).
The parallel unit deals with the inputs from all of our receptors to the outside world, whilst the serial unit deals with repetitive tasks and language and speech.
If the brain is only made up of 3 cores, 1 big serial unit and 2 parallel units then basically if you have an 8 core Mac Pro that is smarter than a human brain right?
Well processing wise yes, however computers are designed to process large amounts of binary data (bits). This is digital and therefore the data can only be in two states on or off, however a human brain deals with information in an analogue form which makes it a different machine all together. That said computers can deal with analogue input however this is not pure analogue, it is converted with ADCs which are not 100% accurate.
So are we closer than we think?? How far away are we from reaching our goal of having cognitive machines??
Why Mac OS X is the leading OS.
January 29th, 2009Ok, I’m not that much of a Mac Fanboy.
But Mac OS X is the leading operating system because its easy to use and reliable
First off, most people have used a PC and the transition from PC to Mac is the hard part:
It basically starts like this: “Where is everything??? ”
And ends like this: “I’ll just use my Mac rather than my PC”
There are a few things I think Mac need to think about in the future though:
The dock: Maybe clustering Apps that aren’t being used together??
Expose and multiple desktops: Love it there is the all annoying Javascript alert box which pops up from Safari on a desktop I moved the window from or a desktop I’m not viewing anymore.
And then I spend 5mins looking for the lost Alert Box.
Airport: Connecting to my router is annoying. “Hey I’m just not gonna find your router, turn me on and off 20 times to fix this 
”
Mail has to be force quit at least once a day!!!.
But all this aside, when the cookie crumbles and I want to develop my website and just check the internet, Mac is always my first choice and generally becuase I never turn it off…..
Now Windows: it is overcomplicated.
They have managed the desktop space nicely:
i.e, if you have two screens next to each other one with Mac OS X and one with XP you’ll see that OS X doesn’t provide much “window space” however that said, Windows is packed full of crap.
Generally none of it is use.
Disk Space
What you are seeing probably isn’t true.
Disk usage for instance: I want to burn a folder it says: 4.4GB on windows, but its actually 4.8GB on disk – huh???? I know why but why lie, why provide 2 different sizes, it just confuses people, on the Mac its accurate so why can’t windows do the same???
On Windows there is just too much information which you don’t need.
I thought maybe with Vista they might tone it down but they haven’t its just as cluttered.
The other thing with windows is “Ctrl+Alt+Delete” becomes your best friend
A12 Sucks
January 29th, 2009Driving to and from work has been a complete nightmare, because of this dual carriage way.
The main problem in the mornings, is drivers in ability to be able to keep a consistent speed and to make sure they close the gaps.
When your in a traffic queue you will always get some knob who will try to undertake, its just the way the world works, I have been that person myself.
However when driving every day on the same road you see the same people trying to under take.
And these people are not to blame for the A12 being ground to 30mph.
Its the morons who don’t know what a rearview and wing mirrors are and how you use them.
They must sit in their own little world dreaming about fluffy clouds etc but what they don’t realise is by leaving such a huge gap in front of them the jamming person undertaking will take it and then mostly likely will brake.
The person in wonderland will then realise there is actually a braking car in front of them and brake harshly.
String Class
January 8th, 2009So whilst working on a Legacy system I realized that I either spend all day tearing my hair out trying to find errors that are caused by the string type or praise it for its simplicity.
The ease of making objects Human Readable has to be admired: ObjectA.ToString();
But In the short term strings are easy to put in your code here there and everywhere, however if you are aiming to build an Application that is scalable and maintainable:
Please save the people who are going to maintaining your Legacy system in the future, hours of their lives.
Common String Debugging Errors:
- Inline SQL:
"SELECT * FROM TABLE" - DataRows:
col["Columnname"] - Parsing:
Int32.Parse("123");orInteger.parseInt("123");
Depending on the size of the project depends on whether this problem really counts , if your writing a program for a small audience don't worry about this as much (Unless your a Perfectionist).
So start by removing all inline strings from your code. No Qoutation marks anywhere.
Consolidate them in to one maintainable area of code that doesn’t require compiling ie Configuration Files, Static Files…
So for instance I have a static class called CacheKeys which holds all the strings for the Cache.
public static class CacheKeys
{
public static string People { get { return "PeopleCache"; } }
public static string Company { get { return "CompanysCache"; } }
}
So to get Companies from the Cache Cache[CacheKeys.Company] can be used throughout the system.
This means if we wanted to update the key from "CompanysCache" to "CompanysCache10": in the CacheKey class example we only have to update the Company Property rather than updating to Cache["CompanysCache"]Cache["CompanysCache10"]throughout the systems code.