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Around The Web Audio/Video

Sea Otter Stacking Cups

Sea Otter Stacks Cups

Here’s a sea otter stacking cups. I didn’t realize they were so intelligent.

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In The News

Someone’s Got A Case Of The Mondays

According to scientists, the idea that people hate Mondays more than any other day of the week is partially unfounded. People hate Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday as well.

Not terribly shocking. If I had to guess I’d ponder it would graph something like this:

Happyness Day Of Week

Peaks on Saturday, wanes on Sunday in anticipation of the ending weekend, rock bottom on Tuesday since the “freshness” of the new week is over yet the bulk of it remains. Wed/Thurs climbs as “hump day” passes and the end is in sight. Friday kicks of the weekend. That’s my theory at least.

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Open Source

MySQL Going Closed Source

I was a little concerned when MySQL AB was purchased by Sun, however Sun had a pretty long history with open source and mostly seemed to know how to balance things. When Sun was purchased by Oracle, I was quite uneasy knowing Oracle has a way of killing everything that isn’t Oracle. Seems like that time has finally come. Thankfully there are some forks of MySQL already. It might be time to start reading up and making sense of them.

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Apple

How To Stop CalendarAgent From Eating CPU

Recently ran into an issue with Calendar causing a huge CPU spike. Checking the system.log I noticed the following repeatedly in my log:

CalendarAgent[379] Unexpected EOF, returning last token as fallback

CalendarAgent is essentially Calendar’s backend (that’s how it’s also able to power the notification center). The best resolution I’ve found is to completely clear out the calendar and recreate it. Process I used was as follows:

  1. Remove the Calendar from “Mail, Contacts & Calendars” pref panel (just uncheck from the account). Then go into Calendar and make sure the account is removed. If it’s not, remove it.
  2. Delete ~/Library/Calendars/
  3. Delete ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iCal.plist
  4. Go back into the “Mail, Contacts & Calendars” pref panel, put the calendar back. Give it some time to download.

That seems to have worked for me.

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Hardware

Microsoft Surface Pricing

Microsoft is apparently trying to quietly reinvent itself as an expensive software company to undercutting the competition. First it announced it will be making Windows 8 painless and affordable to upgrade to. Now apparently Microsoft is looking to make its tablet ultra affordable.

According to Engadget, Microsoft is looking at making its tablet $199, which would be a major shakeup to the tablet market. At that price even hardware partners can’t compete. Priced the same as the Kindle Fire it would run Windows RT. It looks pretty polished, more so than anything else in that price range.

Clearly Microsoft is trying a different route than it has in recent years. Given how late they are to the market, this is pretty much a requirement if they want to have a chance.

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Space

More On Mars Curiosity’s Processor

Interesting IAmA on reddit with the Mars Curiosity team. Lots of great stuff but being a programmer this caught my eye:

You are right that the processor does feel acient. Our current smarthphones are more powerful. The reasoning for this is three-fold. First of all, the computer was selected about 8 years ago, so we have the latest and greated space certified parts that existed then. Second of all, it was the most rubost and proven space grade processor at that time. Thirdly, in order to make a processor radiation hardened it requires lots of tricks on the silicon that is not conducive to making it fast. Given that, it does not run any GUIs and can just focus on raw programming, and actually gets a lot done. All of the programming is done in C, and our toolchain is very similar to programming on any platform.

-JG (presumably Jonny Grinblat aka “Pre-celebration Guy” – Avionics System Engineer)

I did mention a few days ago specifically about the CPU and how it’s really similar to the Power Mac G3’s of the late 90’s.

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Around The Web In The News

Operation: Let’s Build a Goddamn Tesla Museum

Operation: Let's Build a Goddamn Tesla Museum

Matthew Inman, aka The Oatmeal started a campaign to raise money to purchase Wardenclyffe, perhaps the most iconic thing Nicola Tesla worked on aside from the Tesla coil itself. The building, built by no other than Stanford White, of Washington Square Arch fame.

Like Inman, I’d argue Nicola Tesla is one of the greatest geniuses to ever walk this earth. Given he spent the majority of his life and his career in the US, it seems fitting this last remaining facility (the NYC labs are long gone) be made into a museum. I first mentioned the sale on this blog back in 2009.

I’m actually currently reading Tesla: Man Out of Time, so this ironically works out quite well.

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Apple Security

iPhone Too Secure From Law Enforcement?

According to the US Department of Justice (DOJ) the iPhone is largely uncrackable at this point:

“I can tell you from the Department of Justice perspective, if that drive is encrypted, you’re done,” Ovie Carroll, director of the cyber-crime lab for the CCIPS division of the Department of Justice, said earlier this month during his presentation at DFRWS. “When conducting criminal investigations, if you pull the power on a drive that is whole-disk encrypted you have lost any chance of recovering that data.”

Of course there are a fair number of tools out there for iOS 4 and below including UFED Ultimate and XRY. There is a lack of iOS 5 tools, at least that are being publicly advertised.

However, there’s arguably little need for such a tool anymore. As users put data on in “the cloud”, law enforcement doesn’t even need the physical phone, they can just send a request to Apple (or Google) for the data they want. I suspect this is at least part of what Steve Wozniak was talking about when he mentioned “horrible problems” in the next five years. It’s worth noting Apple has almost zero transparency regarding law enforcement requests and how they are vetted. It’s not even clear a warrant is necessary to request data. The law certainly isn’t clear in that regard.

If anything, I think it’s becoming easier for law enforcement, not harder.

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Space

Mars Sunset

Mars Sunset

I keep seeing this picture going around the past few days being described as a sunrise on Mars as seen by Curiosity. It’s not. This photo was taken in 2005 by Spirit and it’s of a sunset on Mars. That’s coming strait from NASA. It’s a beautiful picture, but that’s what it really is. Also, it reminds me of Tatooine.

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Tech (General)

Automated Construction

TEDx

It may take some time, but eventually construction will be largely automated. So far it’s one of the biggest holdouts in our society, and a huge waste of resources. 3D printing may or may not be the solution, however I suspect it will play a key role.

3D Printing will eventually change the world. This presentation is fascinating.