Posted by: doxaras on: November 5, 2009
OK most of you are aware that I am in the proposal writing industry (yiap, innovation and project writing defines a multibillion industry) and I ahve to admit there is no tool as inspiring as google RSS reader. My feeds span all the ne and emerging technology fields, so I digest more that 2000 feeds per day on many interdisciplinary areas. The inspiration mechanism works as follows in a rather GTD compliant way I might add, each good and possible product-creation idea I find, I share and star with the appropriate tagging for easily retrieval. Some times I send it immediately to friends and colleagues more relevant to the subject or that I know they are on something similar at that time. Ideas also are parsed from my rss and taxonomized in a managed news drupal installation, facilitating all nice features feeds API provides. Therefore when a new call is launched the only thing I have to do is feed my neurons with quality input and let synapses fire their best to come up with something innovative at the edge of scientific research both applied and principal. Cool documented and repeatable process that always has results. In addition, always ask why and always book some time for brainstorming with colleagues since this is when real thing are getting done in the idea formation perspective.
My motivation to write all these things down was an idea we came up for an energy governance home device that attaches on your household’s electrical board inspired from here, provided and implemented from eiqenergy.

Posted by: doxaras on: November 5, 2009
Some ie6 bug prevent from properly clearing the options of a select html element. This is an issue the actual length that myselect.options.length statement returns. The smart way to do this is with a while loop.
function removeSelects(elementId){
var myselect = document.getElementById(elementId);
for(var i=0; i<myselect.options.length; i++){
myselect.options[i] = null;
}
while (myselect.options.length > 0) {
myselect.options[0] = null;
}
}

Posted by: doxaras on: November 5, 2009

Multitasking was warhiped in the
Multitaskers are suckers for irrelevancy. Everything distracts them.
The irony is that even this partivcualr blog post is a product of multitasking in the irrelevancy playground.
[via]

Posted by: doxaras on: November 5, 2009
Sometimes a universal conjunction happens and you appear to be in the middle. Yesterday my S3Fox FF pluggin was denying me the privilege to create a bucket located in Amazon’s Europe datacenter. Seemed to be a mallformed encoding issue on the url post of my secter key from the client. I figured what the hell, different server locations different locals or somenhting and blamed Amazon. Apparently, though this was ridiculous, took me much to figure out. Story goes as follows, after 30 minutes of coping with the problem I did a firefox restart due to memory being up to 1GB. Right after ff restart, I saw an S3Fox update that completely solved the problem. Astonishing how this coincidence worked out things. I wonder when will be the time where software will be build automatically and bugs will also treated by robots “in client presence”. Now that I reconsider it though, there will be no more bugs on software, but only features so proving truth to the old IT saying about bugs and features.
Posted by: doxaras on: October 31, 2009
Configure your Drupal blog to use blogging firefox pluggin Scribefile.
In future article we will also cover the procedure on how to automatically blog on Google Readerliked or shared items using grasemonkey scripts.
References
Posted by: doxaras on: October 31, 2009

The way terahertz waves are absorbed and emitted is often used to determine the chemical composition of a material. the have a small skin depth so they don’t travel far inside the body, but lately they are often used breast tumours spotting as well as non invasive inspections.
Moreover, terahertz photons are not energetic enough to break chemical bonds or ionise atoms or molecules, the chief reasons why higher energy photons such as x-rays and UV rays are so bad for us. But could there be another mechanism at work?
Technology review says that
The evidence that terahertz radiation damages biological systems is mixed. “Some studies reported significant genetic damage while others, although similar, showed none,” say Boian Alexandrov at the Center for Nonlinear Studies at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and a few buddies. Now these guys think they know why.
Alexandrov and co have created a model to investigate how THz fields interact with double-stranded DNA and what they’ve found is remarkable. They say that although the forces generated are tiny, resonant effects allow THz waves to unzip double-stranded DNA, creating bubbles in the double strand that could significantly interfere with processes such as gene expression and DNA replication. That’s a jaw dropping conclusion.
And it also explains why the evidence has been so hard to garner. Ordinary resonant effects are not powerful enough to do do this kind of damage but nonlinear resonances can. These nonlinear instabilities are much less likely to form which explains why the character of THz genotoxic
effects are probabilistic rather than deterministic, say the team.This should set the cat among the pigeons. Of course, terahertz waves are a natural part of environment, just like visible and infrared light. But a new generation of cameras are set to appear that not only record terahertz waves but also bombard us with them. And if our exposure is set to increase, the question that urgently needs answering is what level of terahertz exposure is safe.
Full paper from Cornell here arxiv.org/abs/0910.5294.
Posted by: doxaras on: October 26, 2009

I discovered a service in Capirtal.gr, one of the most emerging Greek information portals, that provides real time stock prices in smart mobile html area. The page is plain html/js so viewable by most browsers. The only pitfall is that to refresh your results you need to do it manually clicking on the refresh button. Check it your here.
One cool and one line js modification would be when all result table finishes to issue an automatic page refresh.
Since you have the data you people there in Capital.gr it will only take use a weekend here in Niobium Labs to make a cool Android and iPhone client you could distribute, with adds on top. This is actually a screen shot from my android browser.
Posted by: doxaras on: October 22, 2009
I have readopted JDO recently. The cause ? Google App Engine’s big table storage model that makes JDO, a storage agnostic framework for persistence, ideal for such implementations.
Some very useful links related to Java on the GAE are following
Posted by: doxaras on: October 19, 2009
Today I have been experiencing amazing speeds accessing my data mining featrured AMI. I am doing some maintenence jobs updating Oracle Database to 11g Release 1 Linux 64 bit on an Ubuntu 9.04 environment and I got shocked from image uploading speeds.
