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Showing posts from May, 2012

Intel-based smart phone by Orange

via bbc.co.uk An interesting development... I really hope they fail in this endeavour though. Arm is a shining UK company and personally I would definitely choose to support them over Intel.

My bike shenanigans

I don't want to harp on about this as it's been retweeted enough but thought I'd post my bike shenanigans on here too... http://www.thisisnottingham.co.uk/Chilwell-software-engineer-tracked-stolen-bike/story-16106288-detail/story.html

Kent nuclear waste bunker proposal considered

http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-kent-18086988 This story reminded me of this amazing Finnish documentary on nuclear waste http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Eternity_(film) called Into Eternity. I think you can watch the film for free if you follow the links on the wiki. The Finns really think about the repurcussions of what they are doing and how to keep the place known universally into the future as a dangerous place. I honestly fear that we would not pay the same respect to our future generations.

I honestly think our Government is computationally retarded.

http://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2012/05/isps-blocking-porn-sites-is-a-total-kick-in-the-nuts/# Another marvellous tale of idiocy and naivety. There are so many ways around this sort of blocking it's comical and the funny thing is you don't need to be a computer lord to do it. You simply need to be able to ask Google how to do it. Perhaps an alternative approach would be to do the most frightening task of all, tackle the heart of the problem.. as in looking at why people act a certain way in the first place. Cutting a leaf of a nettle doesn't kill the nettle.  Such fun and games.  I really think with the speed in which our world has changed in the past 20-30 years, some of the crustaceous fools in Government need to be put out to pasture. They just can not cope with the changing nature of society. 

Met Police to extract phone data - unless you have autowipe...

via bbc.co.uk I found this news extremely distressing. From a cybernetic point of view, our phone is an extension of ourselves. It contains all the data we can't quite store in our own minds but being external to our bodies doesn't mean it's any more private than our very own thoughts. For example, we take photographs to remind ourselves of people or places or things, we take notes to augment our own mental notes. These are own private thoughts. The fact that they are removing a variety of data without specific intent is paramount to mind invasion. The problem is, you aren't doing anything illegal now but who knows how the law will change in the next 20 years. You may WANT to do something legally wrong but not morally wrong and you are only as free as your right to revolt. This is one of those things that helps curtail that freedom. Luckily there are many tools out there to help us evade such naivety. A tool such as Autowipe http://goo.gl/7u2GX will allow you

Mobile filters censor innocent content

via bbc.co.uk The article makes it sound like this has been going on for years but it was only a year ago it began giving me a ridiculous amount of trouble. I couldn't even research a problem with my boiler. I can only assume it had been added because of some adult film in which a dude comes to fix some woman's boiler... In any case I had to call Orange to get it turned off. It wasn't a particularly difficult process and the whole filtering process can be rendered completely useless by any child that can download a free app on their android. To connect to Tor on Android just download Orbot http://goo.gl/m23q0 And to browse without silly filters just use Orweb http://goo.gl/e5d4x Simplez.

Javascript For Loop troubles

Ah just got another good tip when doing for loops. When you do this.... for(var i = 0; i < array.length; i += 1) { ? //bla bla } The length of the array is accessed on every loop. Slow! Slow especially when going through HTMLCollection objects. This can get round that problem... for(var i = 0; max = array.length; i < max; i += 1) { ? //bla bla } According to Stefanov this can increase the performance up to 190 times in IE7. That's a big difference!

Javascript implied global

I wouldn't do this anyway but I have just read that var a = b = 0; would mean that b is made a global. Because of the right to left evaluation the b = 0 would be evaluated as an implied global. How fiendish.... I'm not sure what sort of person would do this though...

Google Project Glasses

I was thinking about Googles Glasses project. The dreams I have would be for it to be able to recognise faces and bring their name up if you forgot or if they ask you what your doing next week Friday and it brings up a small calendar of that day. The sad thing is we are so far off this actually working it brings a tear to my eye. A quick go on Google Goggles or Google Image search (based on an image you provide) shows that image recognition isnt quite there and a go on Apples Siri or a equivalent can also be a real patience tester. Come on guys it's 2012. Give me the future now!!!

Visual Studio Macro to surround a selection with a HTML tag.

In many of our admin websites and web based tools we highlight domain keywords to make them stand out using:  <span class="keyword"></span> The problem is, I am always forgetting to do it at the time of writing the content and then need to go back and insert all the spans. This can be a bit of a pain so I have created a Visual Studio Macro to help.  The code is in the picture below. Posterous ability to display code is a complete joke. It just replaces the selected text with the selected text turned into proper case and the span class included. Note, I haven't included the closing tag. This is because Visual Studio closes it for you anyway and there's no point working against it by disabling auto complete and then reenabling it again.  As this is about keywords for me, I have mapped it to ctrl+k when in the HTML Code editor. You can map it to whatever you like though.