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:

PowerBook G4 Wiki Page

Stroke of Insight

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??

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

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.

A newspaper column by Mary Schmich, published by the Chicago Tribune on 01 June 1997.

This column inspired the Wear Sunscreen song by Baz Luhrmann.

Wikipedia Information here

Taken from plod plod blog: here

Inside every adult lurks a graduation speaker dying to get out, some world-weary pundit eager to pontificate on life to young people who’d rather be Rollerblading.

Most of us, alas, will never be invited to sow our words of wisdom among an audience of caps and gowns, but there’s no reason we can’t entertain ourselves by composing a Guide to Life for Graduates.

I encourage anyone over 26 to try this and thank you for indulging my attempt.

Ladies and gentlemen of the class of ’97: 

Wear sunscreen.

If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it.

The long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience. I will dispense this advice now.

Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Oh, never mind.

You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they’ve faded.

But trust me, in 20 years, you’ll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can’t grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked. You are not as fat as you imagine.

Don’t worry about the future.

Or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum.

The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4 p.m. on some idle Tuesday.

Do one thing every day that scares you.

Sing.

Don’t be reckless with other people’s hearts. Don’t put up with people who are reckless with yours.

Floss.

Don’t waste your time on jealousy.

Sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes you’re behind.

The race is long and, in the end, it’s only with yourself.

Remember compliments you receive.

Forget the insults.

If you succeed in doing this, tell me how.

Keep your old love letters.

Throw away your old bank statements.

Stretch.

Don’t feel guilty if you don’t know what you want to do with your life.

The most interesting people I know didn’t know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives.

Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don’t.

Get plenty of calcium.

Be kind to your knees.

You’ll miss them when they’re gone.

Maybe you’ll marry, maybe you won’t.

Maybe you’ll have children, maybe you won’t.

Maybe you’ll divorce at 40, maybe you’ll dance the funky chicken on your 75th wedding anniversary.

Whatever you do, don’t congratulate yourself too much, or berate yourself either.

Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else’s.

Enjoy your body. Use it every way you can.

Don’t be afraid of it or of what other people think of it.

It’s the greatest instrument you’ll ever own.

Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but your living room.

Read the directions, even if you don’t follow them.

Do not read beauty magazines. They will only make you feel ugly.

Get to know your parents.

You never know when they’ll be gone for good.

Be nice to your siblings.

They’re your best link to your past and the people most likely to stick with you in the future.

Understand that friends come and go, but with a precious few you should hold on.

Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle, because the older you get, the more you need the people who knew you when you were young.

Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard.

Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft. Travel.

Accept certain inalienable truths: Prices will rise.

Politicians will philander.

You, too, will get old.

And when you do, you’ll fantasize that when you were young, prices were reasonable, politicians were noble and children respected their elders.

Respect your elders.

Don’t expect anyone else to support you.

Maybe you have a trust fund.

Maybe you’ll have a wealthy spouse.

But you never know when either one might run out.

Don’t mess too much with your hair or by the time you’re 40 it will look 85.

Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it.

Advice is a form of nostalgia.

Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth.

But trust me on the sunscreen.

Copyright © 2006, Chicago Tribune

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"); or Integer.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 Cache["CompanysCache"] to Cache["CompanysCache10"]throughout the systems code.