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I think they aren't going for the Robo cop look, shame that.



[BBC Article]

The two principle scientists behind the development of what is now in the majority of imaging devices have been recognised by being given the 2006 Charles Stark Draper Prize, this is essentially the engineering equivalent of a Nobel award. Not bad, and they get a nice $500,000 award, which I'm sure will go down nicely. I do wonder what we would do without CCDs (charge-coupled devices; essentially convert photons (packets) of light into electrical charge) as we just use them in so many applications, though we could use CMOS or the more conventional photographic plate (though the quantum efficiency for these is crap and you don't get immediate output). More can be found in this [New York Times Article] and more info on the development of CCDs can be found on [Wiki].

Yep, well you can now and this is a good step forward for future space based missions. This is crucial for future space based interferometers, be it detection of gravitational waves or future optical telescopes. Anyway what did this? NASA's Messenger probe, which is currently on the way to Mercury, and a group station in the US. They exchanged laser signals and could lead to some cool new developments in space based communications. Currently it is microwaves that are used but in comparision to laser communications this is crap, you can get much better data transfer rates with Laser beams. Anyway more can be found in this [BBC article]

Now this just seems that a couple of apple's trademarker lawyers (I guess they will be lawyers) have gone stupid and maybe a little crazy! Take a look at the case of Apple sueing a product made for arcades called: PROFIT POD, and nope it has nothing to do with music and looks nothing like an Ipod. The full article can be found at: [engadget.com].

I personally really like apple products, thats why I own a powerbook and a Ipod. Shame they employ some ultra-aggressive lawyers. Oh and apple for future reference here is the dictionary (http://dictionary.reference.com/) definition of pod:

" 1. Botany.
- A dehiscent fruit of a leguminous plant such as the pea.
- A dry, several-seeded, dehiscent fruit. Also called seedpod.
2. Zoology. A protective covering that encases the eggs of some insects and fish.
3. A casing or housing forming part of a vehicle, as:
- A streamlined external housing that encloses engines, machine guns, or fuel.
- Aerospace. A detachable compartment on a spacecraft for carrying personnel or instrumentation.
4. Something resembling a pod, as in compactness.
" - there are many more variations at: [http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/pod]

well that's what google say... they would rather you not use the term "I googled it" and would rather you use "I used Google to". Personally I probably use the later more but.. still when did google become the authority on the English language and its day to day usage? It seems that Google are afraid of losing their special trademark and if it was just to become another verb then they would lose the capitilisation or something like that, as if that is really going to affect their stock price! Read more [vunet.com]

Well Dell I recalling batteries from their laptops... and this is why: [dell_fire_2.jpg], [dell_fire_1.jpg], [dell_fire_2.jpg - dif]

I knew the day would come. I love the football manager series and I'm ashamed to say that it was probably the reason I hung on to having Windows installed on my machine for so long. If you have no idea what I'm talking about [the game's site]. Its a pretty addictive game. Anyway, I've been missing it. So I decided to try and figure out how to install it in Ubuntu. Installing games in Ubuntu is all about the WINE. So after popping the disc in the drive and typing wine setup.exe and it crashing I knew I was going to have to do some playing. This is not a bad thing, I'm a geek, I like playing. I read a post ([this one, post 39]) which gave some very good background info and suggested that there was a problem with the copyright protection. So I booted up my windows virtual machine, [see this post] about how to install Virtual Box and get Windows running like any other application in Ubuntu, and installed it in there. This is when the confirmation of the securerom (?I think) protection was obvious. The game wouldn't run. I downloaded the latest patch from the FM site and there you go it ran! Wooh!. It is just a simple process of then copying over the files from the virtual machine into the .wine/ directory and running the task, like: wine "C:\Program Files\Sports Interactive\Football Manager 2008\fm.exe" --fullscreen_width=1280 --fullscreen_height=1024

I've been happy able to play the game and beat West Brom U18's!

One of my favourite games ever is Imperialism (you can find a review of this old game, [here], from the title you can guess the idea. Its Civ like in some ways but completely different in many ways, its turn based and you aim to conquer the world - so I guess its similar. The units don't have quite the same freedom but it brings so many different and cool things. Anyway after my experiments with getting more recent games working on Ubuntu I thought I'd give and older one a go. Now I have this working though a few things aren't quite ideal and I'm yet to properly have a game. To wet your appetite here is a screenshot...

If you have a copy of Imperialism then follow the below, if you don't skip down a bit (it might actually be quicker... but you lose movies and sound if you don't have the disk - nothing much really though and it makes the installation quicker).

So does it install straight out of the box with Wine, answer nope. There are a few issues and I reckon I could have probably gotten around them, the most important is the 16-bit issue, but you can around this by setting,

sudo sysctl -w vm.mmap_min_addr=0

before you run wine. This is not ideal and still the installer crashes, you need to run it in Windows 98 compatibility mode but it still doesn't work... bloody windows. So the solution - like with [installing football manager 2008] it is much easier to just boot up a virtual machine with XP (or some other windows installation) on. Make sure you run the setup.exe in Windows 95 compatibility mode. You should then be able to install the software. Don't worry with Directx 5! You won't need this. Once installed copy over the install directory to your ./wine/drive_c/ area. In Ubuntu now run the program, does this at the command line. It should now run, it might ask you to change the screen resolution. I did not. I have tried this install procedure a few times and it seems that you need to run the game twice after install to get it to work (not sure if it needs to create some files...). It then seems to work like a dream. Oh you might want to install the patch (probably best to do this in the VM before you copy it over... you can find the patch [here] or [here] (after thought: It's much quicker to grab the files with the patch applied as suggested below...).

Currently I can't get it to work with a menu item, but I don't mind using the command line, its fairly easy to just type:

wine /home/me/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Imperialism_1/Imperialism/Imperialism.exe

How to get a copy? Buy one - well that is not that easy now. So see: [here] - follow the links to the yahoo group and join. You will find a nice patched copy. It is all installed, so you should have to just type wine Imperialism.exe in the correct directory (I quickly tried this and it seemed to work well).

If you want to learn more about Imperialism I suggest looking at either [this site] or [this one] though the later is in French and mostly aimed at the Mac version of the software (which I've run on my powerbook before, great fun!). Oh and don't forget the Daily Imperialist and the attached yahoo group

Oh I also remembered a nice "tip" (yeah a cheat effectively): Balanced Resources
In the new game screen, ctrl click on the globe and type "Pippin". The red country will start out with balanced resources.