I’m not the least bit religious, but I can’t help but think the big man isn’t happy when hear that the worlds largest statue statue of Jesus, Christ the Redeemer was struck by lightning. This is according to the Daily Mail among others with at least one suggesting it might be a hoax. There seems to be only one image floating around the Internet and it’s low quality so the chances of it being a hoax are real, although the statue is likely to be the highest point for miles around so it probably gets struck by lightning quite frequently.
Some interesting facts about the statue: it sits on top of Corcovado mountain in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, is 39.6 metres tall, weighs 700 tons, took nine years to build and was completed on October 12, 1931. That’s one hell of a statue (pun intended).
Want to be able to open Windows Explorer and have it automatically open a certain folder instead of having to drill down through the folders? It’s easy to do with switches that can be used with windows explorer.
Explorer switches:
/n -opens a new explorer window
/e -opens in explorer view
/root, -selects root folder in left pane
/select, -opens parent folder of selected foldername
%SystemRoot% is a system wide variable which refers to the path and folder name where system files are located. Typically this is C:\Windows, although you can designate a different drive or folder when windows is installed. you can use %SystemRoot% to replace the actual location of the folder that contains the windows system files.
To identify your systemroot folder, click Start –> Run, type %SystemRoot% and click OK. This will open windows explorer with your system root folder displayed.
Confusingly if you go Start –> Control Panel –> System –> Advanced tab –> Environment Variables, scroll to the bottom of the list and double click windir you will see that %SystemRoot% is a “Variable value” of a variable named windir.
I came across an interesting physics thought experiment. There are lots of sites discussing it but it seems to have originated here.
A plane is standing on a runway that can move (some sort of band conveyer). The plane moves in one direction, while the conveyer moves in the opposite direction. This conveyer has a control system that tracks the plane speed and tunes the speed of the conveyer to be exactly the same (but in the opposite direction). Can the plane take off?
This answer seemed obvious to me at first, the plane does not take off because the conveyor belt keeps the plane stationary preventing the planes wings from getting lift. This is incorrect. The thing that confuses people, including me at first, is that the movement of the conveyor does not keep the plane stationary or move it backward, it just spins the wheels. Because the wheels are spinning faster the wheel mechanism will generate more friction than normal, but this would not be enough to prevent the plane from taking off.
So basically, the plane needs its normal take off thrust plus some additional thrust to over come wheel mechanism friction in order to take off. If you assume the system is frictionless then only normal thrust is needed. That’s my understanding anyway, what do you think?
Numeroussitesarereporting that Facebook Chief Technology Officer Adam D’Angelo is leaving Facebook. Yesterday I speculated about the actual reasons behind the announcement to discontinue Network Pages and less than 24 hours later comes the news of the departure of the co-founder and CTO. According to All Things Digital the loss of their CTO is not exactly on good terms:
…according to sources close to the company, D’Angelo felt his responsibilities no longer fit well with his skills and interests.
In other words the company has changed into something D’Angelo no longer want to be part of. I feel this confirms my suspicion that there was something more behind the odd announcement to discontinue a popular and useful feature. The more I read about Facebook the more I think there are strong political machinations occurring at the highest management level and again, only time will tell if this is a good or a bad thing for the company.
Facebook networks are great way to connect with people in your city, country, area, or topic of interest, and C|net is reporting that Facebook will be discontinuing network pages soon. I have confirmed that this is indeed true as the following message now appears on my facebook account…
Network Pages will be discontinued soon
Facebook will soon be removing Network Pages from the site. Please keep this in mind when communicating with others on the Wall and on the discussion board. You can use Groups to connect with the people around you.
This announcement by Facebook is hard to understand. There must be a very good reason for it, at least in Facebooks eyes (pun intended:). I’m more than curious to know exactly what the reason is, because it is hard to imagine why they would remove such a useful feature from their popular network.
The reason for the change may simply be to consolidate the now separate networks and groups, making the new groups communication system even larger and more powerful. But the skeptic in my says there is something else behind the move but only time will tell. In the meantime, here’s a Facebook parody from sketch group Idiots Of Ants, definitely worth a look if you need a laugh…
I added this site to Technorati.com barely a week ago and things were going great at first but in the last couple of hours I have been getting constant errors. When I visit the site I get the following friendly message:
Doh! The Technorati Monster escaped again. We’re scouring the blogosphere attempting to find it. Back in a flash!
And this is what it looks like:
Sometimes I don’t even get the Technorati Monster error page and instead get a Proxy Error that looks like this:
Technorati is a great service for bloggers so It would be a real shame if they couldn’t sort these problems out quickly.
A keylogger records keystrokes which is an obvious security threat to sensitive information like your banking password. Keyloggers work by recording every single keystroke that is entered via keyboard, so a person with access to the keylogger can see those keystrokes including any passwords that were typed. Obviously you don’t want this to happen because it could result in the draining of your bank account.
The goal of this article is to help avoid this happening to you and luckily there are a few simple methods that can be used to defeat a keylogger. Knowing at least one of these methods is critical if you are using a public computer, such as those found at an internet cafe’s which have an extremely high risk of infection with a keylogger of some kind.
What exactly is a Keylogger?
Keyloggers come in both hardware and software types. A software keylogger can be installed in different ways such as via an infected email message or when installing software, especially software downloaded from the internet. Hardware keyloggers require physical access to the computer and come in both USB or PS2 versions, which look something like this… Read the rest of this entry »
1. Run regedit and drill down to:
HKey_Local_Machine\Software\Microsoft\WindowsNT\Current Version\WPAEvents. Select WPAEvents then on the right double click “oobetimer” and change at least one digit of this value to deactivate windows.
2. Choose run from start menu and type this command in the run box:
%systemroot%\system32\oobe\msoobe.exe /a to get the Activate Windows wizard, select “Yes, I want to telephone a customer service representative to activate Windows”, click next.
3. In the next screen click the “Change Product Key” button.
4. In the next screen enter your new product key, then click the update button.
5. Close the wizard, reboot and enter the command in step 2 to verify windows is activated and you should see “windows is already activated”.
Ok I know this sounds bizzare so hear me out before you get your knickers in a knot. I wanted to add a link to the blog from the main page at www.intreipd.com.au, so I changed the name of an existing flash button and gave it an appropriate name. When I uploaded the new page and button then loaded it in my browser neither the new button or the old button appeard. I sort of expected this because I have encountered it in the past when changing flash buttons, and I have no idea why.
So I cleared my Firefox 2 cache and reloaded the page, no change. I then fired up both IE and Opera but still the new button did not appear. I went back checked everything, no spelling mistakes in the code and all the needed files were indeed on the server. Loaded the page on my laptop, still no dice. So I’m getting a little frustrated about now wondering why it was happening and whether or not users could see the button because it looked stupid with just a gap where there should be a button. I was sure it was some sort of weird caching problem so I came up with the idea of doing a clean browser install. The only other browser I had on my drive was Firefox 1.5 so I installed that and lo and behold, the button works.
So it was indeed a cache problem. I still don’t know what or why but I am finally getting to the point of this post, I like Firefox 1.5. Not because it loaded the flash button properly, that would have happened with any clean browser install. No, I like 1.5 because it is loading pages faster than 2.0, and also because there is just one close tab button, so I can just click on one spot to close multiple windows. Just a few taps of the button and all the tabs I don’t want are gone. Nice. Now that I think back to pre 2.0 days I can remember thinking this was one (of many) reasons why Firefox was better than safari which had a close button on every tab.
Now I’m sure someone will tell me about better security or better features of Firefox 2 but I’ m not too interested in that, all I want to do is load pages as quickly as possible and use it as quickly as possible and on those fronts I have to say 1.5 has 2.0 beat. You might also say that 2.0 is infact faster than 1.5 but thats not my experience. So it has me a little worried about the impending Firefox 3.0 release, I haven’t used the beta so I Just hope it lives up to the hype because despite my criticism, I do love firefox.
Gizmodo are reporting that the creator of the Macgyver series Lee David Zlotoff has announced a MacGyver movie is in the works. They say he announced it at “Maker Fair 2008″ but there isn’t anything on makerfaire.com about it. This is one rumor I hope is true.
If this is true it could be the biggest development in medicine, possibly ever. I say if it is true because you just cant blindly believe anything you read or hear in the media these days, but thats a whole other blog post. Basically a 69 year old from ohio had the tip of his finder severed by a model aeroplane propeller. His finger was treated with ‘Pixie Dust’ then his finger tip grew back in just four weeks. Yes the whole thing finger grew back without scarring as if the injury never happened. It sounds too good to be true and with the medias history of picking up fake news I’m somewhat skeptical. I’m keeping an open mind though in the hope that it is completely true, because if it is it could be an amazing advance for the human race. Just imagine for a moment being able to regrow limbs, or even better being able to re-grow failing or diseased organs.
On a completely different topic to that last post, McDonalds Australia recently re-introduced the McFeast and when I heard about it I felt just a little bit fuzzy inside. Not because I’m a huge Maccas fan, but because it is easily their best burger and the closest thing to a real hamburger they have ever made and several years ago they stopped making it. But have you noticed that it’s not a McFeast but a McFeast Deluxe. That shouldn’t be a problem I thought because Deluxe is better right? Well I have tried the burger and it’s fairly close to the original but there is just one flaw, they use way too much sauce. It tastes OK but the excessive amount of sauce drips out everywhere and just ruins the whole experience I telly you.
While on the topic of Junkfood re-releases I have to mention Maggie 2 minute noodles. Again I’ve never been any huge fan but they go down well when your hungry and need food instantly. The problem is that Maggie have re-introduced them as New Maggie noodles. Why they have done this is I can only guess but the problem this time is that the new flavours are disgusting. I notice that the noodles are no longer made in Australia but imported from Malaysia this is obviously why they taste so different. I have no problem with them being imported and nothing against Malaysia, in fact my girlfriend is half Malaysian but I do have a problem with the fact that they are so bad I just cant eat them. I guess they are doing me a favour because I definitely won’t be buying them anymore so that’s less junk food in my diet. Thanks Maggie!
