Top 10 Ways to Build Muscle Mass Fast at Ririan Project

From BFS to ZFS: past, present, and future of file systems at Ars Technica

How to Stay Healthy While Sitting At Your Desk All Day at Diet Hack

Flickr

Digg

coComment & commentful
last.fm

del.icio.us

scuttle

No doubt that you are familiar with the above technologies but maybe not scuttle (mentioned in a previous post), what I am finding is that I am enjoying more and more the community behind these services, finding friends on last.fm who listen to the same music that I listen to and then discovering music through them. Finding links to sites that I would have never found otherwise through del.icio.us again through friends and searching. I can get lost for hours on Flickr combing through photos from groups, looking at photo streams of people how have commented on my photos and learning more and more. As a dedicated slashdot visitor I was a bit cautious about digg but after I tried gave it a go I couldn’t stop it’s now on daily list. The comment services I am still reviewing as per here, so far I have had some good results which I will report back on later.

I am conscious that I do need to experience real life, going out, spending time with friends etc… but this isn’t always possible for one reason or another this has had a few effects so far, not only my boredom but the lack of content that I am able to put up on this site I will try to change that in the coming weeks but for now it’s a rather exciting way for me to gather information about topics that I really enjoy and world I couldn’t have imagined years ago.

I had seen del.icio.us and how it managed bookmarks but I had also seen scuttle and it had the same sort of concept even though it was a little bit late into the game, but the attractive thing to me about scuttle was that it allowed you to download the source and run it on your own servers, which I have done of course. So I have been tracking the comments and conversations through there, but as is the case I always forget to check them and time passes.

So I discovered commentful which again is and online way to track comments, what I liked was that you were able to install a FireFox plugin that put a little orb in the corner of the window and when ever a new comment appeared in a post that you were tracking it would blink. Clicking on the flashing orb would take you to your page and it would highlight the post that had been recently commented since you last checked or chosen to track. You don’t have to be a blogger to use it, and you don’t have to had commented on your chosen post. Simple, easy to use and exactly what I wanted.

Since becoming a blogger my web 2.0 world has slowly expanded (more on that later in another post) so it was through surfing some blogs (paulstamatiou.com) that I discovered cocomment being curious I decided to try it along side commentful to see how they compare. So far so good, they give you a bookmarklet and a FireFox extension to use when making or tracking comments and posts. Along with all there there is a bit of a community you can observe as well, they have a list of most commented sites as well as users.

I have also added some javascript that makes it easier for those how use cocomment to comment on this blog, to see if that helps with the tracking for both myself as well as others.
I will soon put up a link to my personal comment page so that you can see the places that I go and what I say – that is if you find it useful.
What I would like to know is what do you use to track comments or post on sites that you visit?
Do you find what I have done with cocomment on this site useful or a annoying?
Do you use cocomment yourself, why do you find it useful?

I was already looking at the slide-phone Nokia 6280 as a possible option and seen the Samsung D600 in action so I was looking at the D900. But in the end it just got to the point where I needed a new phone and didn’t care what I got as long as it worked….well and kinda cool as well.

After years (about 5) of not ever using a Nokia I finally got myself one, honestly I can see the reason that they sell so well. The have a target audicence with each of the line ( I think that the 6 Series is target towards the business audiece) and eveything that they want is availale in the price range. I suppose the big advantage is the fact that the user base is so large there are many people making stuff for them – games and themes are one of the first things that I tried out.

Pretty happy with the phone, I’ve only had it for a week and I’m a little amused that I fussed over features such as radio, mini SD card, message storage, address book. I have just been using it as normal and haven’t really touched any of the extra stuff…well that is until now.

Now I just have to decide if I should upgrade my PDA…maybe I should have got an O2 Mini

First it was using it with Windows and the Palm desktop, as ugly as it is, it does work and keeps all my contacts and calendar in one place, useful for reminding me about birthdays and things to do. I consistently have to plan for things in advance and always seem to forget about them, but with the calendar I was able to plan and remember which helped greatly.
Then came along my first phone with bluetooth (K700i), bluetooth was already being used when I got the PDA with friends who were ahead in the mobile phone game and those who got PDA’s after me. Mainly it was just playing around, passing files to each other, and a great little app that I can no longer find, blueboard let a number of users could share a virtual whiteboard and draw and pass messages to each other….hours of endless childish fun!

Being able to pass files and contacts wasn’t the most used feature of my phone and PDA but it was useful occasionally, like when I cracked the screen on my K700i and was not able to read it, I had kept the contacts in my PDA and phone up to date and didn’t really worry about loosing anyone.

For the better part of this year I have used a pretty basic non-bluetooth phone (shock horror I know), not a big deal, but I have now acquired a new phone which has bluetooth and some new features that I’m thinking of using.

Since google calendar came out I have been using that, mainly because it was a something new and I jumped on the bandwagon, it wasn’t bad except for the fact that you can only edit calendars from the web interface and nothing else. Me having my Mac it was easy to subscribe to the google calenders through iCal and view them (but not edit) there.
For the most part of this year I have also been syncing my Palm Tungsten with my iBook as well, mainly fur curiosity to see how it was to use.
The Palm Desktop looks just plain ugly on a mac compared to everything else, so I have started letting the mac use iSync so that the Tungsten|T calender is synced to iCal and the contact to the AddressBook, not too bad but not ideal.

Now finally it can all come together, I have a phone, a computer (iBook) and a PDA that might be able to sync together, well the most important parts anyway (calendar, address book) I just don’t know if I should do it, and the other decision that I might have to make is if I should buy myself a new PDA, specifically the Palm Tungsten T|X. The cost of a new one outweighing how much mine first cost at around $500 doesn’t at this stage seem such a bad idea, but then again there are so many things that I want, a MacBook Pro being one of them as well. But at $4000 is well beyond reasonable reach.

I don’t have bluetooth on either the iBook or the computer, so I’m going to start looking around for the bluetooht dongle to attach, and when that happens I will see how it goes, I think that it might be a good idea, to at least have my calendar available on my phone when it isn’t possible to carry my palm with me.

I will let you know how I go.

Recently the choice was made for me with and iRiver H10 20gb, so far I’m pretty happy, it probably helps that I’m slightly technically minded so I don’t mind using alternative methods and using multiple tools to load songs and re-build the database so all the tags get read.

The only thing that I haven’t figured out is how to automatically sync podcasts, which I will be investigating in the next couple of days. The iRiver that I did get is one that uses the MTP (Media Transfer Protocol) I wasn’t really big fan of this idea in the first place so I thought that I would give it a shot, turns out it didn’t work too well in my case, were as instead of transfering the audio files across it copied them to a different location and attempted to re-encode them into wmv format…not cool!

Fortunately for me there is a way around this, having known this before hand it just took a minimal amount of searching through my bookmarks to find the appropriate link.

easyH10 is an opensource application that is able to rebuild the iRiver database so that the songs that you uploaded can be read by the playlists based on the mp3 tags, instead of using the inbuilt file browser. For me to get it to be recognised as a USB device I had to reset it and then hold down the select button while powering the device on – don’t worry there is plenty of documentation on the website.

The application worked a treat I was able to upload my music including come choice playlists that I made using winamp and it was all read and made to work with the iRiver, the one thing that they don’t tell you though is when you open up the iRiver as USB device some of the folders are hidden particularly the /Music/ folder as you upload the music the folders should also be hidden otherwise for some reason it will not be recognised and there for not be put into the iRiver database, must be something to do with the firmware.

Very happy with it so far, I am able to listen to the radio as well which was another reason it was chosen which works great, I will post again once I am able to find a solution to the auto sync of podcasts.

I’m uncertain what it is but I find them so much more interesting to watch, it’s probably because of their instability and the fact that they don’t confirm to the traditional guidelines to what a hero should embody and don’t follow the normal rules.

Wikipedia probably has the best definition:

When the anti-hero is a central character in a work of fiction the work will frequently deal with the effect their flawed character has on them and those they meet along the narrative. In other words, an anti-hero is a protagonist that lives by the guidance of their own moral compass, striving to define and construe their own values as opposed to those recognized by the society in which they live. Additionally, the work may depict how their character alters over time, either leading to punishment, un-heroic success, or redemption.

I hope that there are more stories and characters that emerge as this, because as the traditional hero ( Superman, Justice League, Sir Galahad are probably the best examples) might have had its time, the world today isn’t able to believe that someone can be that pure and wholesome and still be mentally stable. Such characters I think will remain in the realm of fiction, but someone with a flaw that would be his/her downfall that makes them more human, more damaged more like us.

I would like to note the fact that I’m mainly referring to fictional heroes here, there are many cases for people to be considered heroes or to have possible heroic qualities the list is way to long (Gandhi, Rosa Parks, Mother Teresa) and can list those that have fought for a cause or an ideal that should have existed but didn’t, I am not arguing this.

Like The Architect said in The Matrix Reloaded possibly an imperfect world is a perfect one, so possibly making characters flawed like us makes them more believable, it makes sense because many of the comic book anti-heros are some of the most revered that you will come across: Batman and Wolverine are the best examples off the top of my head.

I have been playing around with DNS services for a while and during reading noticed that most people believed that BIND wasn’t up to standard anymore and a more acceptable service to go for would be djbdns, the documentation on the site is great and with other sites like life with djbdns and djbdns rocks and there wasn’t with the help of the above three sites I was able to setup a suitable caching name server for my home network. The only problem that I had was because of the way dnscache and tinydns is setup it cannot run on the same network IP so as a result tinydns will normally run on 127.0.0.1 and dnscache will run on the private or public IP. This worked great for me, except for one reason or another I wasn’t able to get dns lookups for my local machine to work.

After some searching I decided that it would be best to head towards dnsmasq

As good as djbdns is for what it does it was probably a bit of overkill for the kind of network that I was running considering that it was a home network with about 5 computers connecting to the Internet at any one time.
dnsmasq was probably more suitable to what I wanted to do, but then again it probably won’t be useful in the corporate environment because I’m not sure how it would scale and it doesn’t (i think) have services that are able to publish DNS recoards to the Internet.

Because I run a Debian system the install was dead simple:

$ apt-get install dnsmasq

and from that you can control the service with these commands:

$ /etc/init.d/dnsmasq start
$ /etc/init.d/dnsmasq restart
$ /etc/init.d/dnsmasq stop

But before we do that I will need to configure it to suit my needs.

Go ahead and edit the hosts file as root:

$ nano -w /etc/hosts

$ /etc/init.d/dnsmasq restart

192.168.1.21 vacantmind.net
192.168.1.22 proxy.vacantmind.net proxy animal
192.168.1.11 wombat.vacantmind.net wombat

Once this has been done you have to enter the IP address of the DNS server to the clients on the network, for windows machines this can be done with editing the IP config.

In GNU/Linux machines this can be done with editing /etc/resolv.conf

But since dnsmasq is also able to act as a DHCP server we will also get it to do that as well.

Edit the file /etc/dnsmasq.conf

The simplees way to do this is to uncomment the line

dhcp-range=192.168.1.100,192.168.1.150,60h

The first two parts is the IP range and the last bit is the time of the lease

Also make sure that the following lines are uncommented

dhcp-leasefile=/var/lib/misc/dnsmasq.leases

# For debugging purposes, log each DNS query as it passes through
# dnsmasq.
log-queries

That way in the terminal type the following command

$ tail -f /var/log/syslog

and you should see the following: ( i went to http://www.quotationspage.com/qotd.html )


Jul 3 23:38:15 localhost dnsmasq[1712]: query[A] www.quotationspage.com from 192.168.1.10
Jul 3 23:38:15 localhost dnsmasq[1712]: forwarded www.quotationspage.com to 203.12.160.35
Jul 3 23:38:15 localhost dnsmasq[1712]: reply www.quotationspage.com is
Jul 3 23:38:15 localhost dnsmasq[1712]: reply quotationspage.com is 67.15.52.101
Jul 3 23:38:16 localhost dnsmasq[1712]: query[A] www.quotationspage.net from 192.168.1.10
Jul 3 23:38:16 localhost dnsmasq[1712]: forwarded www.quotationspage.net to 203.12.160.35
Jul 3 23:38:16 localhost dnsmasq[1712]: reply www.quotationspage.net is 66.98.180.223
Jul 3 23:38:16 localhost dnsmasq[1712]: query[A] as.casalemedia.com from 192.168.1.10
Jul 3 23:38:16 localhost dnsmasq[1712]: forwarded as.casalemedia.com to 203.12.160.35
Jul 3 23:38:17 localhost dnsmasq[1712]: reply as.casalemedia.com is
Jul 3 23:38:17 localhost dnsmasq[1712]: reply as.casale.com.akadns.net is 70.86.209.194
Jul 3 23:38:17 localhost dnsmasq[1712]: reply as.casale.com.akadns.net is 70.86.34.162
Jul 3 23:38:17 localhost dnsmasq[1712]: reply as.casale.com.akadns.net is 70.86.117.114
Jul 3 23:38:17 localhost dnsmasq[1712]: reply as.casale.com.akadns.net is 70.86.117.146
Jul 3 23:38:17 localhost dnsmasq[1712]: reply as.casale.com.akadns.net is 70.86.117.178
Jul 3 23:38:17 localhost dnsmasq[1712]: reply as.casale.com.akadns.net is 70.86.117.194
Jul 3 23:38:17 localhost dnsmasq[1712]: reply as.casale.com.akadns.net is 70.86.209.18
Jul 3 23:38:17 localhost dnsmasq[1712]: reply as.casale.com.akadns.net is 70.86.209.98
Jul 3 23:38:17 localhost dnsmasq[1712]: query[A] a.tribalfusion.com from 192.168.1.10
Jul 3 23:38:17 localhost dnsmasq[1712]: forwarded a.tribalfusion.com to 203.12.160.35
Jul 3 23:38:17 localhost dnsmasq[1712]: reply a.tribalfusion.com is 204.11.109.64
Jul 3 23:38:17 localhost dnsmasq[1712]: reply a.tribalfusion.com is 204.11.109.61
Jul 3 23:38:17 localhost dnsmasq[1712]: reply a.tribalfusion.com is 204.11.109.62
Jul 3 23:38:17 localhost dnsmasq[1712]: reply a.tribalfusion.com is 204.11.109.63
Jul 3 23:38:18 localhost dnsmasq[1712]: query[A] cdn5.tribalfusion.com from 192.168.1.10
Jul 3 23:38:18 localhost dnsmasq[1712]: forwarded cdn5.tribalfusion.com to 203.12.160.35
Jul 3 23:38:18 localhost dnsmasq[1712]: reply cdn5.tribalfusion.com is
Jul 3 23:38:18 localhost dnsmasq[1712]: reply cdn1.tribalfusion.com.edgesuite.net is
Jul 3 23:38:18 localhost dnsmasq[1712]: reply a889.g.akamai.net is 59.167.192.16
Jul 3 23:38:18 localhost dnsmasq[1712]: reply a889.g.akamai.net is 59.167.192.9
Jul 3 23:38:18 localhost dnsmasq[1712]: query[A] pagead2.googlesyndication.com from 192.168.1.10
Jul 3 23:38:18 localhost dnsmasq[1712]: forwarded pagead2.googlesyndication.com to 203.12.160.35
Jul 3 23:38:18 localhost dnsmasq[1712]: reply pagead2.googlesyndication.com is
Jul 3 23:38:18 localhost dnsmasq[1712]: reply pagead2.google.com is
Jul 3 23:38:18 localhost dnsmasq[1712]: reply pagead.l.google.com is 72.14.203.99
Jul 3 23:38:18 localhost dnsmasq[1712]: reply pagead.l.google.com is 72.14.203.104
Jul 3 23:38:19 localhost dnsmasq[1712]: query[A] client.pluck.com from 192.168.1.10
Jul 3 23:38:19 localhost dnsmasq[1712]: forwarded client.pluck.com to 203.12.160.35
Jul 3 23:38:19 localhost dnsmasq[1712]: reply client.pluck.com is 66.179.81.247
Jul 3 23:38:20 localhost dnsmasq[1712]: query[A] b.casalemedia.com from 192.168.1.10
Jul 3 23:38:20 localhost dnsmasq[1712]: forwarded b.casalemedia.com to 203.12.160.35
Jul 3 23:38:20 localhost dnsmasq[1712]: reply b.casalemedia.com is
Jul 3 23:38:20 localhost dnsmasq[1712]: reply b.casalemedia.com.edgesuite.net is
Jul 3 23:38:20 localhost dnsmasq[1712]: reply a1083.g.akamai.net is 59.167.192.16
Jul 3 23:38:20 localhost dnsmasq[1712]: reply a1083.g.akamai.net is 59.167.192.9


And that should be it.

My dhcp server with dnsmasq won’t be fully implemented once I have the IP forwarding and routing properly configured on this box and I will cover that in another post.

I’ll just mention a few good quotes here:

“We have to manage the ethics of the scientists making the robots and the artificial ethics inside the robots.”

…identified key areas that include: ensuring human control of robots; preventing illegal use; protecting data acquired by robots; and establishing clear identification and traceability of the machines.

“Scientists must start analysing these kinds of questions and seeing if laws or regulations are needed to protect the citizen,” said Verruggio. “Robots will develop strong intelligence, and in some ways it will be better than human intelligence.

How far should robots be allowed to influence people’s lives? How can accidents be avoided? Can deliberate harm be prevented? And what happens if robots turn out to be sexy? “The question is what authority are we going to delegate to these machines?” said Professor Ronald Arkin, a roboticist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. “Are we, for example, going to give robots the ability to execute lethal force, or any force, like crowd control?”

The whole idea is that there will be a team drawing up a code of ethics for both robots/AI and the scientists who create them.

I totally agree with the article above but there are few things that got me thinking that I want to elaborate on.
1.) If we are able to design AI that is similar to us (which I think is almost impossible) we have the problem of their place in our society, because if they are able to behave like humans, then we face a problem ethically of how we treat them: as robots or living things?

If they begin to exhibit basic interaction such as a dog or cat for example then they possibly stop existing as a robot, because if you were to visually ignore the differences between a biological dog and an AI dog why would you treat one crueler than the other if it didn’t obey – why because it’s a robot, but then what defines a robot if the interaction is the same as a biological dog, the internal differences?

If you were presented with two dogs who looked visually exactly the same but underneath one was biological and one was a robot how would you know which one was which? Which one would you choose? The one that obeyed commands better – probably the robot. (I’m obviously disregarding toiletry functions)

The above also extends to humans, like the article says if they are going to be used for crowd control can we as humans hold them ethically responsible for hurting others, if their response to pressure being applied was to push back harder to control the crowd, or if someone was to climb on top of them would they throw them off causing an accidental injury. Can the robot be held ethically responsible, we hold humans responsible when they have done something wrong, but can you send a robot to jail when the possibly of its lifetime is infinity?

But this has probably been thought of by limiting their input/output responsiveness (knowledge) of themselves and the world around them.

2.) Philosophically if we were able to design something that was similar to us, then we face the challenge of defining them no longer as robots but almost humans – which brings us back to ethics again, and if we can truely treat them as servents. This depends of course on how “aware” the preposed AI is supposed to be.
The article mentions something about sex:

“People are going to be having sex with robots within five years,” he said. So should limits be set on the appearance, for example, of such robotic sex toys?

Funnily enough aren’t people having sex with robots already? If you don’t know about this already you should do a search on the Internet for sybian.

The idea of having a robot that could help the elderly is a great idea but I suppose that we have to consider the consequences and limit the abilities of the robot not only for ethical and philosophical reasons but to alleviate the responsibility from the machine.

This is all conjecture of course, and mine at that, because if there is to be a regulating body they would have surely thought about this and restrict how much the potential sentient artificial intelligence, or artificial life would know so to restrict it’s actions, like what is happening now. Hopefully preventing any disaster – major or minor – later on.

To critics who scoff that intelligent robots are a long way off, the roboticists easily riposte that machines can already exert surprising influence over our lives — think about the influence of the internet.

Just my 2 cents.

But then when I went a looked for it in my Palm Pilot the password had somehow disappeared.

So after hunting through some documentation I finally found out how to reset the root password.

These instructions are specific for FreeBSD because that is what my webserver runs.

Everything below has been done using the command line.

Check that the process is running:


ps aux | grep mysql

mysql 618 0.0 1.8 59712 6832 ?? S 27Mar06 39:03.31 /usr/local/libexec/mysqld –defaults-extra-file=/var/
mysql 543 0.0 0.1 1660 568 con- I 27Mar06 0:00.01 /bin/sh /usr/local/bin/mysqld_safe –defaults-extra-f

Now stop the mysql process

/usr/local/etc/rc.d/mysql-server.sh stop
Stopping mysql.
Waiting for PIDS: 618, 618.


Restart MySQL in safe mode:

mysqld_safe --skip-grant-tables

Connect to MySQL (normally localhost):

mysql -h 'your_hostname' mysql

Update your password, by replacing the ‘your_new_password’ below with your new password

mysql>update user set password = password('your_new_password') where user = 'root' and host='localhost';

Flush the privileges:

mysql>flush privileges;

quit mysql:

mysql>quit;

Stop mysql:

/usr/local/etc/rc.d/mysql-server.sh stop

Restart mysql:

/usr/local/etc/rc.d/mysql-server.sh start

And you should be done from there, you should be able to connect to mysql using your root account and new password.

I have been kind of involved in the project for some years but never really got practically involved, hopefully until now.

I have started buying gear for the setup, but then I got up on the roof and hit a bit of a wall, it looks like I am completely surrounded by trees which going to be a problem because i need Line of Sight to the other person that I am trying to connect to.

I have so far found it a little hard to get good info on the way that I want to do things, so I will try to document what I will be doing so that hopefully I will be able to help someone.