Archive for October, 2006

You don’t always find nice little online video games that would appeal to all members of the family. Nonetheless, this is what I found on the nice little Orisinal web site (Morning Sunshine).

Recommended to the whole family (really from the youngest to the more mature).

A company named Genetic Savings & Clone, based in California, was created to sell expensive pet clones: Clone your cat for 32,000$ and more. Unfortunately, in the 6 years of its life, the company could sell only 2 animals. They went bankrupt.

Finally, not everybody is dumb enough to buy a cat of that price (you should forget about getting the same cat).

Spiral is a geometric form of spectacular elegance. Despite its apparent simplicity, it grows into an astounding variety of images. The Spiral Pictures web site is a vibrant hommage to this mathematical form with photographic pictures specially selected for this.

Mark James, a part-time web developper, produced more than a thousand slick little icons that are distributed freely on famfamfam.com. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License, which means that if you want to use them, you only have to remember to state clearly that Mark James is the author and to include a link back to his web site.

I like the silk icon collection, but there is also a very useful collection of 239 small country flags.

SingleMalt.tv is really the TV for you if you are speaking English and in love with great whishky.

The TSA’s changes to the complete liquid ban may require persons with augmented breasts (or other body parts) to comply with further inspections at security checkpoints.

Really, can you imagine what it will be for a person having had surgical breast augmentation to suffer that kind of “search“? I’m not speaking about the young bimbo who was willing to impress the alpha males. But some women do have this kind of surgery just because they need it (breast cancer comes to mind quite easily) and I’m sure that they are not easily accepting to suffer this.

I’d rather think that this novel idea came out of the deranged mind of an old perverted fan of the comedy movie “Airplane!“.

Librivox is a web site where you will find audiobooks read and recorded by volunteers who give them freely to you and any visitor. It is mostly english books and works, but there starts to appear a few non-english literature (some French, some German, for example).

The selected works are part of the public domain and are no longer covered by copyright. The readers are volunteers and sometimes share the reading of a long book between several people (a novel may be split in chapters read by seevral different people). Download is completely free and there is also a podcast feature on the web site.

The catalog currently contains a bit more than 100 long books and some more short works. Some examples:

• Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Who does not know it?)
• Swift, Jonathan. A Modest Proposal where Gulliver’s travels author ironically proposes to solve starvation of poor catholic children by raising them to sell them to protestant families.
• Tagore, Rabindranath. Sadhana, the Realisation of Life
• Yeats, William Butler. The Song of Wandering Aengus (some poetry, too).

As the downloaded files are completely free of any DRM kind, they can be read on any MP3 or OGG Vorbis walkman.

This could be useful to people willing to listen to classical works from their car or while jogging, unable to read, or willing to learn a new language by listening to it.

I recently found a intersting list of modems/routers that do not survive well with P2P applications (let’s remember here that these applications can be very stressful for a network and its devices: hundreds or thousands of connections with a total traffic usually reaching the maximum limit of the network link). This is a list of incompatibilities collected for Azureus, but it also applies to uTorrent and probably most of the other P2P applications (including my own prefered BitComet).

Reason not yet verified

• Apple Airport Extreme (802.11g wireless with 128-bit WEP)

Due to too many connections

• SpeedStream 5660 in Router/NAPT configuration. There is no firmware newer than 2.(3).7. Switch to bridged mode and firewall your network to fix it. Otherwise, when it dies just power-cycle the router and continue on.

The following modems/routers have known problems with too many global connections, limiting them to 200 or less should fix the problems:

• D-Link 302G
• D-Link DI-624
• D-Link DSL-G664T
• Linksys BEFSR41V4/BESR41
• Linksys Wireless-B
• Netgear DG632
• Netgear DG834G
• Netgear MR814
• Netgear WGT524
• Netgear Rangemax 802.11n WPN824
• W-Linx MB401-S (and SMC Barricade 7004 BR, which is identical in construction)
• Westell 6100

Due to UPnP

• Most D-Link 5xx and 6xx (can also be caused by too many connections)
• D-Link DI-604
• Dynalink RTA1025W
• TP-LINK TL-R410
• ZyXEL Prestige 660H(W) (Firmware versions PE8+ will fix this)
• Some SpeedStreams

Due to Port Forwarding

• D-Link DI-514 (not port forwarding UDP protocol consistently)

Common fixes for routers/modems freezing/crashing/etc

• Updating the router firmware
• Turning off the UPnP (in the client and in the router) and doing manual port forwarding
• Restricting the number of global connections to 200 or less (may need to go below 100, depending on the router)
• Turning off DHT
• Lowering net.max_halfopen and bt.connect_speed
• Putting the modem/router into bridge or gateway mode (doesn’t apply to modems that aren’t routers)
• Getting a new router/modem

Sources: µTorrent FAQ and Bad routers – AzureusWiki.

The Annals of Improbable Research (a magazine dedicated to the public celebration of the research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK) have organized the 2006 ig Nobel awards. The categories are less rigid than their equivalent in the more presentable cousin of the family (the Oh! so dull Nobel prizes) since there are established specially on the spot after the needs of the excellent research thus selected. For example, this year’s laureates:

• NUTRITION: Wasmia Al-Houty of Kuwait University and Faten Al-Mussalam of the Kuwait Environment Public Authority, for showing that dung beetles are finicky eaters.
• ACOUSTICS: D. Lynn Halpern (of Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates, and Brandeis University, and Northwestern University), Randolph Blake (of Vanderbilt University and Northwestern University) and James Hillenbrand (of Western Michigan University and Northwestern University) for conducting experiments to learn why people dislike the sound of fingernails scraping on a blackboard.
• MATHEMATICS: Nic Svenson and Piers Barnes of the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organization, for calculating the number of photographs you must take to (almost) ensure that nobody in a group photo will have their eyes closed.
• PHYSIQUE (ou CUISINE ?) : Basile Audoly et Sebastien Neukirch de l’Université Pierre et Marie Curie, à Paris, pour leur étude des raisons pour lesquelles des spaghettis secs, se cassent préférentiellement en plus de deux morceaux quand on les plie.
• BIOLOGY: Bart Knols (of Wageningen Agricultural University, in Wageningen, the Netherlands; and of the National Institute for Medical Research, in Ifakara Centre, Tanzania; and of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in Vienna, Austria) and Ruurd de Jong (of Wageningen Agricultural University and of Santa Maria degli Angeli, Italy) for showing that the female malaria mosquito Anopheles gambiae is attracted equally to the smell of Limburger cheese and to the smell of human feet.
• PEACE: Howard Stapleton of Merthyr Tydfil, Wales, for inventing an electromechanical teenager repellant – a device that makes annoying noise designed to be audible to teenagers but not to adults – and for later using that same technology to make telephone ringtones that are audible to teenagers but not to their teachers.

This nice list of reasearch culmination is certainly making the Nobel committee members faint at not having spotted the real scientific achievements of this year. In this context, it was important to notice that this year, Roy J. Glauber could return to his official position as Keeper of the Broom or Sweeper of paper airplanes after missed ceremony last year (He had to go to Stockholm to receive his 2005 Nobel prize of Physics).

As the PC I use to run BitComet is rather old (it’s still running under Windows 98) it is easy to believe that this configuration is a good basis that will work on any small machine and old configuration for BitTorrent.

Of course, it would also work very well on a bigger machine or on a fuller Operating System like Windows XP. So, everybody should be able to make use of this information.

All the options

I don’t try to limit download, but I stop the maximum upload a little under my maximum ADSL upload rate. It gives me great confort in order to keep navigating and reading/sending email while BitComet is running.
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This time, this is Hitachi who announces a global recall of its Sony-manufactured batteries. Only 16,000 this time, after Fujitsu (287,000 units this week), Dell (more than 4 millions in August) or Apple.

  

Acer (one of the world’s largest laptop PC manufacturer who let a number of others re-brand their machines) is allegedly talking with Sony already.

The plot is thickening with more and more of these recalls, leading to easy to forecast financial costs for Sony.

It’s been years that I was looking again for images I found and used on September 11, 2001. They were showing flight patterns over the United States of America (the way commercial airline flights criss-cross the country). Here are the animations showing the enourmous density of planes in the US of A skies.

Flight Patterns

Outdoor photography is a great activity. It associates going outside in the wild (or at least in the free nature) and our passion for photography. But it can be also prepared on the web. This is the reason I collected a few good web addresses for web sites taking seriously the outdoor photographer needs and interests:

• Digital Outback Photo (DOP): The ever better web site.
• The luminous landscape: A lot of Canon hardware, but a welcome variety and a very good technical level (and good photos, too).
• Outdoor photographer: Tips, hardware reviews (slanted toward Nikon stuff) and nice photo locations make a good combination for you to look at.
• Moore photography: Nice nature images
• Outdoor eyes: Selling good quality outdoor photo prints from a large choice of photographers, presenting some good tips and techniques (like this surprising “The Use Of A Laser Pointer To Focus In Dim Light“)
• Stages de Téléobjectif-ASCPF for the French speaking and to shoot in the Rambouillet forest (South of Paris).
• Benelux Nature Photo: THE forum for French-speaking amateurs of animal and wildlife phtography.

I would also add the nice English newspaper titled “Outdoor photography” (unfortunately, very badly distributed in France).

Do you have some other addresses to offer?

IMPORTANT: After my precedent post about the Internationale Zurich Gruppe, it appears that a very important development happened a few days ago with a Warning (”mise en garde”) produced by the very official Finansinspektionen, from Sweeden.

If you look at the comments back into my original post, you’ll see that people are having a very difficult time coping with this company. It is quite possible that this may not be a legit financial venture but a real international scam.

Personnally, I would advise not to invest any money in this company. And always remember that if you entrust your funds to some company, it would better be VERY reliable.

Source: Autorité des Marchés Financiers, Paris.

I recently had a little problem to solve: I want to update (very) quickly the display of a web page. For this kind of job, there is usually the easy solution to write the command in the headers of the HTML page using the META REFRESH tag, but this is acceptable only if you meet two important conditions siimultaneously (in most cases, this is no problem indeed):

• get a free access to the server generating the web page you want to display, in order to modify its HTML code,
• accept a maximum update frequency of one second (this is normally more than enough if you are working on the Internet, but I am working with HTML technology on a local application for a non-networked PC).

Not able to meet those pre-conditions, I went searching for my own solution to the problem. My first ideas were:

• Use Opera (it includes an auto-reload feature on a page-by-page or tab-by-tab basis); But the highest reload frequency is still one second.
• Use the ReloadEvery plug-in for Firefox; But it has the same constraints.

In both cases, I did not have access to the source code to apply modifications that would probably have turned to be merely trivial. I should find another solution and I turned to Javacript code.

It consisted in writing a little Javascript code snipet that I would integrate into an HTML page to request a fast reload (every 200 milliseconds) of the interesting web page.

In order to share that little knowledge I acquired, here is the code.

Yes! They are shooting very high-power laser flashes at the American satellites in the alleged intention to blind the spy satellites (temporarily or permanently). Nothing is really said as to whether they succeeded.

Source: DefenseNews.

I live in a 30-level building with fourn (4) independent lifts to reach the 200+ flats. Unfortunately, today (after several days of incidents), the last of the lifts broke down.

No way to get in or out (apart from climbing by foot 28-level stairs)… Grrrrr! I hate Otis for not being bright at repairing those.