The new Apple iBoob?

iMac, iPod, iBook, iRaq, what has Apple invented this time? The iBoob! Seems they are (I guess each customer needs at least two) priced ok but how would one recharge them remains a question. Okay, you know, this is just another IT joke.

Jason's blah blah blah

• Configuration used for installing PHP5 on Mac OS X:

./configure --prefix=/usr/local/php5 --with-xml --with-zlib --with-gd --with-png-dir=/usr/local --with-jpeg-dir=/usr/local --with-apxs=/usr/sbin/apxs --with-freetype-dir=/usr/local/

This doco on how to install gd library on OS X is particularly helpful:
http://www.libgd.org/DOC_INSTALL_OSX

• To validate a regular expression in the nutch conf files:

cat FILE-WITH-URLS | nutch net/nutch/net/RegexURLFilteror by calling "nutch net/nutch/net/RegexURLFilter" and entering the URL by hand.Everyline line beginning with a "+" ist accepted - a line with a "-" is accepted. For example: $ echo "http://www.nutch.org" | nutch net/nutch/net/RegexURLFilter run with heapsize 256 -Xmx256m 050202 173520 loadingfile:/home/nutch/nutch-0.7/conf/nutch-default.xml 050202 173520 loading file:/home/nutch/nutch-0.7/conf/nutch-site.xml 050202 173520 found resource regex-urlfilter

Canberra Suburbs

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• Driving from Lloyd Pl Kambah to the Old Parliament House via the Pkwy, Cotter Rd and Adelaide Ave is a 17lm trip, which took about 15 minutes when the traffic is light, and there are about 4 ro 5 traffic lights along the trip.
• Driving from Erindale Shopping Centre to the National Library is a 16 km trip, took about 20 minutes via Yamba Dr and Adelaide Ave when the traffic is light. There are about 5 traffic lights along the trip.
  
• Driving from the intersection of Mirrabei Dr and Gundaroo Rd (Ngunnawal/Nicholls) to the National Library via Gundaroo Rd, Gungahlin Dr, Barton Hwy, Northbourne Ave spans 14.5 km and took about 20 minutes when the traffic is light, and there are about 10 traffic lights along the trip, most are on Northbourne where traffic is very sluggish.
  

Mawson / Lyons are both small, thinly traded suburbs located in Woden Valley. These suburbs are affordable and people can go in there and do some work to the older style homes to make them more comfortable.

Curtin, also located in Woden Valley, many experts believe it's undervalued and offers good growth prospects.

Gordon's median house price grew strongly in the past year, largely boosted by new development. This area has a natural restriction on the supply of land since its near the NSW border. Values are expected to grow but in the long term.

Math jokes: glad humanbeings still get imagination

Orbeon trivia

(05/07/07)

1. Sometimes the updated XHTML pages are not properly rendered in browsers. To solve this problem, a page has to be refreshed using the browser's force reload feature (eg cmd-shift-r).
2. Each form page should consist of at least one model, with instances declared in a hierarchical order: model:instance:group
3. The "incremental" attribute allows the change of an input to take effect while typing.
4. The presentation of dates in Orbeon can be customised as per W3C standard. However, the date has to be initilised when defining an instance in ISO format. Otherwise Orbeon will throw an error saying "Invalid date format, too short".
   

How to install ATI catalyst driver on FC6

(1) Install the official ATI driver to have the control centre in the program list.
(2) Do the following:
(2.1) rpm -ivh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-6.rpm
(2.2) yum install kmod-fglrx

No common sense...

Hierarchical Equal Area isoLatitude Pixelization from NASA JPL

HEALPix is an acronym for Hierarchical Equal Area isoLatitude Pixelization of a sphere. As suggested in the name, this pixelization produces a subdivision of a spherical surface in which each pixel covers the same surface area as every other pixel. The figure below shows the partitioning of a sphere at progressively higher resolutions, from left to right. The green sphere represents the lowest resolution possible with the HEALPix base partitioning of the sphere surface into 12 equal sized pixels. The yellow sphere has a HEALPix grid of 48 pixels, the red sphere has 192 pixels, and the blue sphere has a grid of 768 pixels (~7.3 degree resolution).

Another property of the HEALPix grid is that the pixel centers, represented by the black dots, occur on a discrete number of rings of constant latitude, the number of constant-latitude rings is dependent on the resolution of the HEALPix grid. For the green, yellow, red, and blue spheres shown, there are 3, 7, 15, and 31 constant-latitude rings, respectively.

Text copied from JPL, NASA: Source

Invisibility cloak? There might be a way

Researchers using nanotechnology have taken a step toward creating an "optical cloaking" device that could render objects invisible by guiding light around anything placed inside this "cloak."

The Purdue University engineers, following mathematical guidelines devised in 2006 by physicists in the United Kingdom, have created a theoretical design that uses an array of tiny needles radiating outward from a central spoke. The design, which resembles a round hairbrush, would bend light around the object being cloaked. Background objects would be visible but not the object surrounded by the cylindrical array of nano-needles, said Vladimir Shalaev, Purdue's Robert and Anne Burnett Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

More details at: Engineers create 'optical cloaking' design for invisibility, Purdue University

RFIDs, a library thing

I've been helping out a library to retrieve books from a floor that was damaged by storm a few weeks ago. Things went pretty fine at the beginning, finding books by the Library of Congress call numbers, taking them back, putting them on trolleys, giving them to the readers... Until one night, when I was totally exhausted, I had a thought about the RFIDs used in libraries. Wouldn't it be sweet to track down a book with a 'book detector' rather than going through all the shelves?

Now, RFIDs, this page from ALA explains the basics:

http://www.ala.org/ala/pla/plapubs/technotes/rfidtechnology.htm

However, a $0.85 ID for each book means it'll cost a lot for a library with thousands books in its collection.