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.

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;
                }
            }

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.
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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.

Configure your Drupal blog to use blogging firefox pluggin Scribefile.

1. You need administrator priviledges since you have to activate Blog and Blog API if you have not done so.
2. Go to Administration › Site building › Modules
3. Enable the Blog API module and if you like writing composing Blog posts also from your Drupal web pages enable also BLog module.
4. Go to Administration › Site configuration › Blog APIs
5. Check at least one content type that is considered a blog entry (typically story, blog entry) and press save.
6. User management › Permissions › blogapi module
7. Ensure the user group (authenticated user or the group user belongs) is checked for “administer content with blog api”. save.
8. UPDATE: If you like to post videos and images directly from your Scribefire account using the blog API, you shoulb make Full HTML input the default input setting for your site. To do so go to Site  configuration › Input Format tab and choose Full HTML as the default input type.
9. Open  ScribeFire and click on the add account wizard in the right side of the ScribeFire window.
10. In the Wizard: click “Manually Configure”, select “Custom Blog”,click “Next”, select “Drupal” blog system type, type in your domain. Enter domain name as(http://mysite.com/xmlrpc.php), click “Next”, enter your username, password, click “Next”, click “Done”.
11. That’s it you now can write post using your firefox pluggin and integrate them seamlessly to your blog.

In future article we will also cover the procedure on how to automatically blog on Google Readerliked or shared items using grasemonkey scripts.

References

1. Drupal Blog API

2. . Scribe Fire supporting Services

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.

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.

Image via CrunchBase

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

1. JRE Class White List A Java App Engine application’s access to the classes in the Java standard library (the Java Runtime Environment, or JRE) is limited to the classes displayed in that link.
2. Will it Play in App Engine. This google group post aggregates all known java technologies and frameworks with commenting on whether or not they are applicable to the appengine JVM runtime. As we have discussed before limitations to certain JEE classes will stop many of the well adopted frameworks to operate.
3. Web Services Connector. Due to limitations in the java.net core library many web services client frameworks fail to operate in appengine. Frameworks such as axis, axis2, JAX-WS do not have compatibility since they use not authorized classes. A simple and lightweight alternative is   WSC from people in salesforge.com that generates a simple jar client provided the wsdl document services definition. Another more nasty alternative is to implement the calls to the service by yourself and use JAXB or JIBX or even xmlnbeans to marshal/unmarshal the request/response documents.

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.

New features Layar 2.1 includes:  layer sharing and screenshots in social media is in my opinion the best business practice they could come up. Raimo has understand fully the special tricks of this market. Augmented reality browsers are many out there but no one with open API for content providers and such enhanced social integration.

Good marketing and business plan whatsoever.
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