Category: Geek Stuff

Science and Honesty

Stephen Hawking is said to be one of the most influential scientists in modern physics. He delivered a speech on Thursday about the prospects of physics ad its implications on science.

A couple of my favorite quotes:

When asked about his thoughts on President Bush’s proposal to put a man on Mars within 10 years, Hawking simply replied: “Stupid”.

Hawking answered one question with more seriousness than others–that concerning his feelings about the U.S. government’s policy on stem-cell research.

In Britain, he said, stem-cell research is seen as a great opportunity.

“America will be left behind if it doesn’t change its policy,” he said.

Bush’s fuzzy science seems to be everywhere.

Risk on Google Maps Plus Other Mac Games

Have you ever played the board game Risk? Some dude created one using Google Maps. Slashdot reports that a multi-player version is in the works…

Risk on Google Maps

I remember playing my very first games of Risk on a dinky Macintosh SE (the original all-in-one Mac), running System 4 with only 1MB of RAM.

Mac original OS
Image courtesy of Wikipedia

Later I graduated to playing the first version of Prince of Persia when it became available. And let’s not forget the original Oregon Trail, apparently an educational title for social studies (but what did I care; it was a GAME!).

Prince of Persia
Image courtesy of Prince of Persia Unofficial Website

Oregon Trail
Image courtesy of Answers.com

via [Slashdot]

Free Video for All

Everyone seems to be on a hurry to make video sharing the trendy thing to do, making photo sharing the thing of the past. Revver has a huge library of videos that makes killing time a much easier task on lazy Friday afternoons.

Revver’s competitor, YouTube offers a similar service. Both companies received millions of dollars from venture capitals for making video sharing the new “Flickr” (now a Yahoo company).

There are a number of other smaller operations doing exactly the same thing. OurMedia, vimeo and DailyMotion are all part of this online video “revolution”.

Of course, what’s a revolution without the bloggers taking on the multi-million dollar seeded companies. Blip.tv is a blog that features tons of videos. Even more interesting, VlogMap shows a geographic map of where various different vlogs are using Google Maps.

Speaking of Google, the monster search machine recently debuted its video search feature. And a search war is never complete without Yahoo video search and MSN Video. One word on MSN Video: damn Microsoft has to make an online app that requires a Windows-only plugin to be installed. Get with the party, Microsoft.

While researching on various video search and sharing sites, I found an independent cable network “Current.tv“. Apparently Google has a hand in the venture since the network broadcasts “Google Current” as part of its programming. Former U.S. Vice President, Al Gore chairs this hip start up.

It’s interesting to note that not only is Google dominating the online battle, the company is diversifying into chatting, broadcast programming and a supporter of the open source movement.

Resume Woes

After a short chat with Simon about prospects of getting a job as a web developer in New York, I decided to give it a shot. So I happily logged on to my HotJobs account via Yahoo to start refurnishing an old IT Tech Support resume and transform it into one suitable for a web developer position.

About an hour and a half into editing the resume, 90% done, HotJobs’ database freaked and returned a completely rubbish resume.

I just wasted 1.5 hour of my life on HotJobs for a resume that I’ll never get to use.

This is yet another reason why I should stop using Yahoo all together. Interesting how something as stupid as losing a resume can make someone depressed… as if not having a job for almost a year (with Grace constantly making sure I remember that) is not bad enough; it was adding insult to the injury. Stupid HotJobs.

Earth Browsing

I guess there’s a whole community of Google Earth enthusiasts out there sharing what they found with each other. Since the forum is hosted on Keyhole.com, the company that actually made the software that is now Google Earth, I guess it’s endorsed by Google in some fasion.

There’ll be a day when Google Earth is banned from some offices, much like chatting clients and personal emails in some companies are actively forbidden.

RHCE Links

As part of prepping my next “career move”, I was looking into getting a RedHat Certified Engineer certificate to match what my resume says I know. I found a site that has quite a number of useful links.

Having a fine art degree in computer art, worked in a (practically failed) education technology start up with a diversified (but not professional) knowledge in a bunch of stuff don’t really prepare me for any kind of position really. Everywhere I looked, people are looking for hardcore specialty expertise in one area or another, especially in Silicon Valley. Maybe our luck will soon run out as everything in the bank will be depleted in no time.

Everybody dreams of a beaufiful American Dream. But sometimes it’s holding on to the illusion of such dreams that’s hard to let go.

OSX Spotlight Hogs CPU

For the past couple of weeks, the fan on my PowerBook would just start spinning like crazy out of the blue. Checking the CPU usage didns’t really yield any satisfactory results. But I finally found the culprit — Spotlight.

According to Many Ayromlou, sometimes Spotlight does hog the CPU, most likely when it’s trying to index corrupted metadata. So I applied the fix suggested by the site:

1) Using the mdutil command-line utility in Terminal, turn off indexing for each of your drives. example:

1
$ sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes/<i>your_hard_drive_name</i>

2) Then use mdutil to remove the indexes from each drive

1
$ sudo mdutil -E /Volumes/<i>your_hard_drive_name</i>

3) Physically remove the .Spotlight directories from the root of each drive.

1
2
$ cd /
$ sudo rm -fr .Spotlight-V100

(do the same for your second or third drive) BE CAREFUL WITH THAT RM COMMAND! One typo could ruin your day.

4) Use mdutil again to turn indexing back on for each drive

1
$ sudo mdutil -i on /Volumes/<i>your_hard_drive_name</i>

5) Spotlight will now re-index all drives and should behave in a normal fashion. (No longer uses 60%-80% of your CPU)

As Spotlight tried to re-index my entire hard drive again, I snapped this shot…
Spotlight indexing

Even though it estimated 10+ hours to index all of 23GB of files on my hard drive, the actual time it took to index everything was more like 2 hours — a far more acceptable time.

All this was done while I was trying to feed Bryan, change his diaper, check my email, read the online forums from SCAD eLearning, browse through the news and send a homework-related mass email.

And Still More eBooks

Earlier, I wrote about a project that’s set out to digitize books in the public domain. The Open Library Project is working on doing just that as well. Google is also working on Google Print in an effort to digitize all known human knowledge. Yahoo and Microsoft, again late to the party, is playing catch up by leveraging the Open Library Project. It’s always fun to see for-profit enterprises hiding behind non-profit efforts only to find ways to make profit out of the venture later. But that’s not to say what Google is doing is all for the good of mankind either. They’ll probably find ways to stick unsuspecting ads in the reading of “Declaration of Independence“.

News.com has a facinating article about the whole war on digitizing the human knowledge.

Another project referred to in the article worth mentioning again is LibriVox, an open source project that is working on free audio books. With so many open source projects going on, it seems like the world is moving towards a “StarTrek Economy“ where things are not driven by money, but the common good of all beings. Sounds like a socialist movement to me.

Blog Spammers

Boy, was I glad that I turned on the spam moderation feature that came with WordPress earlier this month. A couple of other morons kept posting more spam links to their sites. When I went to the WordPress control panel to see if any “potential” spam comments were awaiting for moderation, I almost fell out of my chair when I saw “96”. God damn it, spammers.

Blog Spammers

Google Humor

Google has been serving ads in its free Gmail service (2.5GB+ free space and counting). Not too long ago, Google started experimenting running short clips of news on top of the messages, with which I assume is going to be another way for revenue in the future.

I was deleting spam messages in my Gmail account when I noticed that the clips feature links to various recipes instead of news. A bit of Google humor there…

Google humor