Retired Robots

From Boadacia the 6 legged pneumatic walker, to Pebbles, an original part of the Mars rover development project, I've found this (mostly) pictorial history of American mobile robotics featuring the retired robots of MIT's Mobot Labs quite an amusing stumble:
http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/humanoid-robotics-group/retired-robots/retired-robots.html

Security Spotlight: Ghostery plugin saves users from privacy thieves, gives back choice

"Ghostery allows zero-tolerance blocking of anything ad related, complete (visible) open communication with ad companies, or countless measures in between - determined by you, the informed web user."

Imagine someone following you around all day spying on everything you do and recording all of your habits. Bad news is, it's happening already and it's called Targeted Behavioral Advertising (or "Online Behavioral Advertising", aka "OBA"). Even worse is, by the time most malware/adware security apps scan and (if they) detect the presence of such files, it's already too late. What can you do about it? Stop it at the source with this browser plugin.

Commercial privacy thieves and their cohorts beware; I've been using Ghostery now for over a month, and the amount of advertiser data pilfering it blocks is simply amazing.

Ghostery at work in your browser. An invaluable plugin.

So, how is it possible to tell if your privacy has already been compromised?
Ever wonder how websites are able to track and tailor ads to your "interests"? That's only the half of it. What's even more creepy is that most files of this nature that wind up stored on your system when you surf are unlike normal browser cookies, in that they have no lease or expiration--- endlessly tracking your surfing habits.

While some of these web sites, companies and their third-party affiliates use collective data to track what is called "non-personally identifiable information"for web traffic analysis and research methods that are used to enrich the overall browsing experience, it is totally up to the company to define what's personal and not personal, and this arbitrary decision is not left up to the end user. There are other viable ways of tracking user habits on the server side by using transactional analysis to observe user input that is inherently non-personally identifiable for statistical purposes (i.e. - tracking popular keywords in searches, links and pages visited). Instead these sites take this "non-personally identifiable data" from your user profile information on membership websites, keywords from within the depths of someone's e-mail, and even worse---arbitrarily installing browser-based files on the client's computer to snoop through their browsing history and other saved information without their total informed consent and a way to "opt out" without having to opt completely out of just browsing a site and or total use of their member services (i.e. - social networks).

For a BBB "Trusted Site" this service AboutAds.Info advocates user choice over privacy of shared information; However if you look to the right, the purple box shows a list of Ad services so long, it wasn't fully displayable on the page. The final  number showed 52 ad companies by Ghostery--- most of which are not included on their opt-out list of the other 78 they offer to "help you block". As such, this service is both misleading and unethical.

While a growing list of 78 companies have a way through AboutAds.info to opt-out of their services by storing even more information in your browser via one of these non-expiring internet files, it's only as effective as asking a company or national roll to place you on their "do not call" list that you personally have to carry around "in your back pocket" so to speak on your own computer and does not block them from less ethical methods of tracking data anyway. Not to mention, AboutAds seem not to include most of these "blockable" companies in their very own list of 52 other ones which they unethically subscribe to for tracking your life online. Furthermore, a service such as this does not provide visibility to the end user on even what supposed "blocked companies" are actively attempting to track their data, and it doesn't display exactly what else is being placed in another non-expiring browser file.

In short, it's only a matter of taking back a bit of your privacy with personal choice over what and how you share. Actions on part of end-users the world over are limiting ways sites are allowed to use our data---and that is already making a difference.

Check out Ghostery and find out how web sites are watching you,

Or go directly to the download link for your brower:
http://www.ghostery.com/download

Just a footnote - Like most all free services, I don't have total control over the content on this page. This blog site is powered by Google and likely uses a feature called 'Google Analytics" and "Google Ad Words". Additionally, I subscribe to Amazon and allow products to be displayed on the side of my block through their affiliate program.  I do personally not use any of the information collected and used by Google, Amazon and their internal or third-party affiliates. See any other ad services reported by Ghostery or a similar tool on this blog site? Leave me a note in the comments section!

G is for Galaga

I formulated this yesterday when I was bored.
It was supposed to be a super awesome bonus round question to a bunch of technicians at work for 80's day...
So go grab a rom or a service manual and amuse me.

In the original 1981 release of Galaga, with single player selected, and rapid fire board installed, users can experience what with these dipswitch settings:

SWITCH 6J
SW#1:ON
SW#2:ON
SW#3:OFF
SW#4:ON
SW#5:OFF
SW#6:ON
*SW#7:OFF
SW#8:ON

SWITCH 6K
SW#1: OFF
SW#2: ON
SW#3: OFF
SW#4: OFF
SW5: OFF
SW#6: OFF
SW#7: OFF
SW#8: OFF    


(*not used)

AVG makes me sad

I just attempted download of the Eclipse IDE for the Android SDK within Firefox. (*This in itself is somewhat exciting, since now I'll be able to finally work on some Android app development.)

Since I'm tethered through my phone and knew it would be awhile, I decided to try to open a zip file containing something AVG decided to invalidly recognize as trojan/malware. (Telling it to ignore still wouldn't allow me to open the file, and turning off .zip file parsing in advanced properties still didn't do the trick.)

After some research, I determined this was an issue with the MS Office AVG plugin. Simple enough, I just find it and disable it somehow, right? 

I guess AVG Free v. 9 has a paradigm inability to disable MS Office Plugins.

I tried through command prompt, but I guess this syntax string is a bit out of date. Oh well. 

So, I decide to try the Control Panel --- > Programs and Features route. Unfortunately the only option is a complete uninstall, which I really want to avoid since uninstalling ANY antivirus suite can be quite a chore.

I go exploring.

Eventually I come across the setup.exe file in its native folder. I open it, and immediately AVG hijacks my browser and decides to shut everything down without authorization or advanced notice. NOOOOO! Don't cancel my Eclipse download!!!!! It's only been a couple of hours now... :*(

Just like that, it's gone... Firefox's attempt to recover via the download manager just starts the whole thing over again. Great!!! Not much I can do right now, I'm in the middle of trying to fix this new issue with AVG. So I'll just fix this AVG thing real quick, then restart my download in a minute... or 45.

Back to the matter at hand. Continuing with the process, I'm now looking at an add/remove feature dialogue within the installer which gives me a few more options of disabling specific plugins, and bingo: there it is ---> uncheck MS Office AVG plugin. Good. Hopefully it's just "next/yes/OK" from here on out.

Not so fast. 

I get a prompt that says "choose a package/installer" with no particular other instructions than a pop-up requesting a .dat file extension. So I browse to said AVG9 folder, find it, and get an error dialogue, "file package file open failed, HResult 0x80004005."  I suppose this is because when I actually browse for the file in the pop-up, and TRY to select ANY file whatsoever, it still leaves the text box path blank upon returning to the installer once the browse window is closed. So I just type the path in the box, right?

Wrong again. Still, I get an error, somewhat different : "File package file open failed. Invalid header id."

In the AVG forums it was suggested that this may be a registry issue with the AVG install itself and should be resolved through a full repair via the setup. Attempting to repair results in the same thing, request for the package/installer .dat file and another dead end. This resulted in me finally having to temporarily uninstall AVG (overkill, much?) just to open this one little zip file I've been trying to open for the past hour.

While this is uninstalling, back to Eclipse. Instead of trying the alternate download link for the Amazon cloud, this time I think Bittorrent might be slightly faster. Luckily since my download folder for Firefox is directed to the same download folder as uTorrent, it detects the partial file so I don't have to wait for it to re-download again. WOOHOO!!! I guess this process never occurred to me for some reason. It's the simple things in life that can completely make your day... (either that or being so blond underneath that I'm just now realizing that's what Bittorrent is really all about.)

 Moral of the story:

I could imagine this being a multiple phonecall issue spanning several hours (and transfers) through numerous parties within the tech support realm.  I don't know what I would do if I were just another end-user. Fingers would be pointed, people would be blamed, and still, nothing would have been accomplished... but at least I can sleep tonight knowing I've tried everything within the power of most any other support analysts barring a phone call and an open case to AVG's software engineers/product developers. Doesn't seem like they're jumping on it though since so many others are reporting this problem... then again, who am I to complain about freeware? I guess it's the fact that I've been an avid user/supporter of AVG since 2003 and I've noticed (until recently) it's been completely stellar and virtually free of requiring user input beyond initial installation and what used to be the frequent update notifications (almost daily) which have now turned to "only if I look for them" or I've somehow prompted it by playing around inside the application once in awhile. Not saying I won't reinstall it, I'm just pretty disappointed since I've endorsed this product by suggesting it to other users over the years who I know are autonomously incapable of providing basic support for their own systems.

Apple versus the 'Free World'

Let's play I Spy. How many things do we love and enjoy (that aren't Apple) but are built on a proprietary architecture? Pretty much everything that doesn't fall under GNU/GPL, right?

Okay. Of those things, how many include a back-end that's totally built on the most familiar open-source architecture to date? FreeBSD anyone? ;-)

I don't have time to cover every electronics platform (video game consoles, toasters). Instead I'd like to focus on one of the biggest current topics crossing the worlds of mobile, micro, and desktop computing: "Apple versus the 'Free World'".

Let's start with those claims that "Apple is a proprietary ~blah blah blah~, long live the free world and all that is open source," by analyzing some foundations of what "open source" truly IS.

First, what does "open source" mean to you? Most people associate open source with freedoms to do things with hardware/software that normally wouldn't be achieveable within a proprietary hardware/software architechture. Take for instance, one of the first major public releases of proprietary hardware (the HTC Dream) with a open source mobile software platform (Android).
About half of my friends who use Android, when asked why they prefer it over an iPhone, reply with "because it's open source." Then I say, "Well... what have you done and what do you plan on doing with its opensourcedness? Tethering? Rooting? Application development? (Okay so you plan on quitting your job and building $2 apps only to live in your mom's basement...riiiight!)

Once we've cleared up most of these misconceptions, the usual retort is, "but it multitasks."
Bingo!
That's a valid reason to use it over the iPhone, which is why I love my G1 so much. Android 2.1 (with or without Sense) sickens me, because it's trying (and failing) to be pretty and multitask as a functional phone. This is where I draw the line... where smartphones become "dumbphones", and I have to say... "No thanks." This is also why, after owning 4 separate Windows Mobile devices that missed calls due to the core phone app failure because of too many running processes, that I gave up on Windows Mobile.

Apple does a good job at effectively using its hardware within the limitations of the general consumer's disposable income price expectancy, and being pretty, without multitasking capabilities. It can do all of those things most people claim they use an "open source" handset for, and open source in itself simply ≠ the ability to effectively multitask.
Android 1.6 can effectively multitask being not as pretty, but pleasantly acceptable for the busy hardware spec limit-pushers.
On the other hand, Android 2.1 bugs are almost as prevalent as bugs seen in Android 1.5 , with forced archival of SMS messages due to poor OS app management, the sluggish UI with multitasking... just to name a couple. Nexus, no thank you... hardware is fast, but software is too much for it to handle. Maybe when we re-write 2.1 and push a major release ala 1.5 to 1.6, you'll have my interest. Probably by then, iPhone/iPad OS will have multitasking, which could make me question where my brand loyalties lie.

Let's change gears and talk about netbooks. There's my Dell Mini 10. It shipped with 1.6 GHz Atom proc running 1 GB of ram at 533 and Windows 7 Starter edition (Aero/Dell branded Stardock enabled). With my MSDN I immediately upgrade to Windows 7 Ultimate, which seems to run fine until I begin my normal multitasking regimen. (Opening 7-20 tabs within Firefox from a seed blog to research referenced terms, studying pro audio development, photoshop techniques, wordpress plugins/CMS feature testing for my future websites, etc.) Last night I decided to try a micro version of audio editing with Audacity as my sandbox to test some supercool VST plugins for my recent fetish in 8-bit / chip music synthesis. In failing to recognize a valid audio output device in Audacity, I turned to the community to find that *gasp* everybody uses Hackintosh for any type of multimedia development, because it's the only thing that works on that hardware. Then, it hit me... the answer to the question, "Why does the multimedia community prefer Apple products over anything else," was realized: OS-X is a minimalist OS and it's really optimized for the hardware it's running on. It's basically running a rebranded base XWindows UI Gnome, and some system icons in an animated dock for its "pretty factor", but that's it. So if Dell can develop hardware that just so happens to work seamlessly with such a great OS, why would I ever invest in a proprietary hardware/software combo to do the same thing?

The best way to approach this question:
Are you a mobile user or a desktop user?

- Mobile user: Your hardware is totally proprietary to the manufacturer, with no ability to modify it without serious chances of bricking the device. Memory upgrades are limited, and in a lot of cases the FSB is modified so that 3rd party upgrades are prevented by the system BIOS firmware. Yuck!
Additionally, to my knowledge, nobody has developed a full sized notebook with hardware that seamlessly runs a variant of Mac OS-X like the Mini 10 does, which would give cause to take a look at a Macbook Pro.

- Desktop User: With PC, you have free choice over hardware/OS solely dependent upon what it can take. Sky is the limit, all major components are upgradable within form factor/bus architecture, however no particular OS is build specifically to your components without some major day-to-day usability sacrifices, and bugs are prevalent in even the most end-user "stable" OS choices. If you're a gamer of the anti-console type and are obsessed with bleeding edge graphics, this is the most supported option.

Before going further into the Desktop analysis, let's do a quick run down and comparison of the three most popular OS types for end users (also available for notebooks):

Windows: OS with most mainstream support for software and gaming. Lots of bloatware even at OS level, requires heavy tweaking for hardware optimization. Moderately easy to use for the general public, however users at all levels of expertise have major/constant complaints. End user support experience very poor. Employees/Developer income moderately decreasing, yet employer productivity expectations increase exponentially compared to the rest of the IT industry*.
(*I found this out listening to NPR one Sunday. If anybody can find the NPR article or show referencing this, I give you mucho props... otherwise, go research Bureau of Labor and Statistics data at bls.gov, or go pay for a GAP analysis report of Labor productivity vs Compensation with at least a date range of 2000-present...) Windows users aren't considered very uber.

Linux: Incredible control over the OS comes at a price --- constantly fixing minute details of application code, but the kernel can be built specifically optimized for your hardware. Requires heavy tweaking for software functionality. Intermediate/advanced learning curve for the general public. Modified Unix-based back-end operating environment. World community-driven support with most of the focus on just a few its hundreds of concurrent flavor versions (aka distributions), but virtually no centralized end user support.
Most software under GPL/GNU and is free and developed at the expense of the software engineer's own time, which may quickly become abandonware over a short period of time. If you're among the 1337, this is for you.

Mac OS: Virtually no tweaking necessary. Top tier multimedia development software support. Even has support for MS Office. Labelled proprietary, though optimized OS specifically designed for the hardware. Modified Unix-based back-end operating environment. Awesome support ratings. Happy users all around. Employees/Developers happy and paid well. All major complaints come from non-users, with subject centered around it being "proprietary" (most arguments unfounded). Uberness is limited to a single button mouse, left to personal interpretation.

Final Thoughts
In all, we like choices... but I guess the ultimate defining question as to how our loyalties lie simply boils down to this: Freedom is never free, there's always a price. I'll continue to be a Desktop PC user, but heavily considering moving mobile platforms to Apple products. If pro audio development experiments work out with a modified OS-X install on the mini, chances are, I may consider the future investment if it means a paradigm difference between functionality and constant bugs within both XP and Windows 7 in ProTools even on my desktop. Not that I need a lot of end-user support, but happy employees=more willing to provide better product support, so there's that too. One last thing... did you know about the Apple OpenSource Library? http://www.opensource.apple.com/ Yeah... I just found that out. VERY interesting stuff...



Short disclaimer:
~The opinions expressed in this blog do not reflect that of the opinions of any of my friends, family, co-workers, employer, or Facebook.~ 

*** Update: Prompted response by Apple?
Since this was posted, Apple responded literally a day later with their announcement for multitouch coming to iPhone 3GS and iPad this summer. Read more here, courtesy of Readwriteweb.com

Original Post: Wednesday, April 7th, 2010 @ 12:04 PM CST  (Wordpress / Facebook)

Trying to root your Android phone? Bootloader stuck at serial0 ? Did you download DREAIMG.sph in Windows 7?

Trying to root your Android phone?
Bootloader stuck at serial0 ?
Did you download DREAIMG.sph in Windows 7?

Chances are, the file extension is just assigned as a ".txt" file.


Properly renaming file extensions in Windows 7

- For some reason when I downloaded DREAIMG.sph from my web browser, Windows 7 thought it

was a text file. Renaming from Explorer will NOT work, as it just appends the file name and

leaves the .txt extension. I believe this occurs when simply clicking the link for the .sph

file to download in most any web browser (instead of "save target as" or "save link as"),

causing it to force an attempt to load as a text-only file, which Windows 7 thinks is a

text file when you download it.


Fix:

- Click on the Window pearl and type " cmd.exe " (without quotes) in the search box.
- cd to the folder you downloaded DREAIMG.sph in. You'll most likely find that it's named DREAIMG.sph.txt . 
- RENAME DREAIMG.sph.txt DREAIMG.sph
- Recopy to freshly formatted (FAT32) SD card in phone.
- Reboot to boot loader (*camera button+power button) *camera button+thumb scroll on older phones
- Follow instructions for the flash.
*** If you're still stuck on the bootloader at serial0, just press Call+Menu+Power buttons on your phone to reboot. Battery disconnect is unnecessary.

I support CyanogenMod.
http://wiki.cyanogenmod.com/index.php/

Remoting in to my Windows 7 x64 box at home from my G1 using UltraVNC Server and AndroidVNC Client

***********************************************
I finally figured out how to remote in to my 64-bit Windows 7 Desktop using my Android-based (v1.6) phone last night. It was surprisingly easy, and the best part about it: it's FREE. What's even cooler? This is my first "instructable" for the blog. :-D

Step 1:

Downloads

•  UltraVNC (uVNC) Client/Server package and select your box's OS. We will configure the server portion. *If you're running 64 bit Win7, be sure to download that.

•  AndroidVNC from your phone or other Android client device at the Market

Step 2:

Install UltraVNC

1.) Ignore that it doesn't say Windows 7, and hit next.

(Click image to enlarge)

2.) On this, select "Register UltraVNC Server as a system service" and "Start or restart UltraVNC service".

(Click image to enlarge)

3.) Pretty much the only thing you need to worry about is clearing out the password and setting your own. This is what you'll use to connect to your session, and I suggest using something at least 8 characters, alphanumeric with at least 1 symbol. If you only have one Windows logon you can skip the "Require MS Logon" authentication step. If you're only configuring VNC Server for one client on your network, you can skip the port config. 
Hit Apply and you're done with configuring the server portion.

(Click image to enlarge)

Step 3:

Gather host IP, configure your router.

1.) Gather your host IP, if you don't already know it. (If you don't know how to do this, you shouldn't be attempting this activity.)

2.) Login to your router to configure port forwarding.  (Again, if you can't get into your router to do this, you shouldn't be here.)

Depending on your router type, you'll want to configure port forwarding to allow port connectivity to 5800 and 5900. I have a Linksys router, so I'll use that as my example. Insert the last octet of the server's IP address by each. Now I'll flip over to the "status" tab to grab my public IP, which I'll need for the AndroidVNC client config. (Not shown for personal security...duh!)

(Click image to enlarge)

Step 4:

Configure AndroidVNC Client login/Viewer Color Format

 1.) Enter your Winlogon in "nickname"

 2.) Enter the password you setup for your VNC server

 3.) For address, remove localhost and type in the public IP for your router.

 4.) Use port 5900

 5.) Before you connect, check your Color Format. I made this mistake only once. If you don't uncheck "Force full-screen bitmap" , Android will spaz out after Win 7 starts to change color schemas. Don't ask me why, I didn't write the drivers.

6.) Connect! Now you should be able to see your remote desktop.