Razr Maxx HD Frozen

So, I'm super new to smartphones... but, I have been using the HD Razr Maxx HD for a couple of months.

That said, the device has completely locked up on me about 4 times.  I have learned that you can force the device to reset by holding down the Power Button and the Volume Down button simultaneously for about 10-15 seconds.

Once you do this, you should be able to power the device back on, and everything should be back to normal.  In any case, this worked just fine for me in these situations.

Not even sure why I am writing this, but I guess I was bored.

Overwrite/Replace Mode in Eclipse for Mac

Cliff notes: I figured out how to enter overwrite/replace mode on Eclipse on a Mac (double-click the "Insert" info tab.

Preface: I'm a Mac newbie.  So, if this is something that's obvious, you can consider me an idiot.

Anyway, I wanted to make some rather mechanical changes to some code I had written.  Something like changing the following:

myArray[0] = value_abcd;
myArray[1] = value_efgh;

myArray[2] = value_ijkl;

myArray[3] = value_mnop;

myArray[4] = value_qrst;

to

myArray[0] = value_efgh;

myArray[1] = value_ijkl;

myArray[2] = value_mnop;

myArray[3] = value_qrst;


I figure I would just switch over to overwrite/replace mode and just quickly overwrite the values.  But, I don't have an f'ing insert key on my Mac.  So, I contemplated resigning myself to the extra keystroke per edit (pressing  delete to get rid of the existing value).


It might be that I suck at internet search, but I could not for the life of me find useful information on how to get into overwrite mode.  Some Internet folks went so far as to ask why anyone would ever want to be in a mode other than insert mode?  WTF?  Are you serious?


Anyway, at the bottom of your Eclipse window, you will see an info tab that reads "Insert" or "Smart Insert" -- double-click that and boom... you enter "Overwrite" mode and your cursor's appearance changes to indicate this.


Would have been easier to just edit the code in vi, but now I know.  Let's hear it for completely non-intuitive UI design -- and F you, Mac for not having an insert key.

Special Relativity and the Law

Just had a brief conversation with a friend involving time dilation, and on a complete tangent, I came up with a couple questions that seemed interesting. If ever in the future we are able to travel at ridiculous fast speeds such that time dilation becomes a real factor, then these questions might become relevant.

For those that are unfamiliar with time dilation, it is basically an effect of traveling very fast (we're talking about speeds like one-quarter the speed of light). The effect is that those traveling at the very high speed will age slowly as compared to those that aren't.

Say I hop into a super fast space shuttle and fly away from the Earth maintaining my high velocity for a year and return back to Earth. I've aged a year, but everything/everyone on Earth would have aged much more depending how fast I was going... they might end up aging 30 years, for example.

Anyway, enough of the basic background information. Here are two legal cases that I thought would be interesting for you philosophical and lawyer types.

1) A man, 40, has worked for about 20 years, paying enough in Social Security making him eligible for Old Age Social Security benefits when he is 67. He now hops into his special spaceship that allows him to travel very fast. He ages 6 months, but the Earth has aged 27 years. He is now 67 years old based on his birthdate. Should he be allowed to collect the Social Security benefits?

2) A male high school student, 15, is pursued by his high school teacher. They wind up having a secret relationship. She is much older than him, and thus any sexual relationship between them is clearly unlawful and she would be charged with statutory rape if their secret relationship were known to authorities. They both hop in their special spaceship and they each age 3 weeks, but the world around them has aged 3 years. To the world, he is now 18 (but, clearly he's only a 15 year-old kid). Should their relationship now be considered a legal one?

Don't Forget the Attachment

I accidentally ran into an automatic feature of Gmail the other day that I found useful, as it saved me from having to send a corrective e-mail. So, it turns out that if the body of your e-mail contains text that is indicative of your intent to attach a file, but you neglect to attach a file, then Gmail warns you of your potential omission.

After a little playing around, here are some phrases that trigger the warning:

"Attached is"
"Attached are"
"I've attached"
"Find the attached"
"See the attached"
"Attached file"

Here are some phrases that do not trigger the warning, but probably should:

"Attached a file"
"A file attached"
"Check out the attachment"
"File attachment"
"Attached document"
"Attached spreadsheet"

Possibly Good Idea for Satellite Radio

I subscribe to XM/Sirius satellite radio. I like it quite a bit, and I've been a listener for quite some time. In fact, I can't remember the last time that I listened to normal radio in my own car.

Here is one feature that I would personally use if they added it... a simple 'remember this song' button. Right now, as music is beamed down to my car radio, I can see the name and artist of the song being played on the display panel. And, often times, I really want to remember the song, because it's something new that I might want to hear more of. But, I clearly can't write anything down since I'm driving.

How nice it would be if I could just push a 'remember this song' button. And, based on my own preference, a compiled list will be sent to my e-mail once a week/twice a month/etc. The e-mail would not only include a list of the songs I've asked the system to remember, but it would also have some handy links that point me to where I could buy the songs or albums -- this feature would be something that XM/Sirius could monetize fairly easily.

It seems that when the radio is first turned on, it needs to make contact with the satellites to authorize. Why can't it simply send another buffer of data (songs to be remembered from my most recent trip) that was stored locally. Sure, we'd be lagging by a single trip, but that's better than nothing.

So, XM/Sirius people... get on this. But, remember not to charge extra for this feature, as few if any would find enough value in it to pay extra... just monetize by sending me links to purchase the music.

Permutation Generation in the Unix Shell

Okay, so I was chatting with a friend over lunch recently about generating permutations that could be used, say, as test inputs. If we have a known number of sets of elements, then simple nested loops would work just fine. However, if we don't know ahead of time how many sets we'd like to produce permutations for, then it becomes a bit more challenging to produce permutations. You could write some code to do this recursively, but who really wants to do that.

Coming to the rescue is the Unix Shell (works fine with Cygwin Bash Shell also). Check this out.

echo {a,b,c}{11,22,33}{zyx,wvut,srq}
a11zyx a11wvut a11srq a22zyx a22wvut a22srq a33zyx a33wvut a33srq b11zyx b11wvut b11srq b22zyx b22wvut b22srq b33zyx b33wvut b33srq c11zyx c11wvut c11srq c22zyx c22wvut c22srq c33zyx c33wvut c33srq
Altering the output format to suit your needs is simple as well.

echo \({a,b,c},{1,2,3}\) | sed 's/ /\n/g'

(a,1)
(a,2)
(a,3)
(b,1)
(b,2)
(b,3)
(c,1)
(c,2)
(c,3)
How cool is that? I wish I knew about this handy trick before today.

So Much For Brain Games

Nature published a study on brain training via computerized tests, such as those found in Brain Age or Brain Challenge, this week. Unfortunately, their conclusion was not what I would have hoped for; these games do not increase cognitive function. It's a shame, because I actually find those types of games entertaining.

The study shows that any skills obtained from training on one particular task does not transfer to other tasks even when the tasks are cognitively closely related! That's surprising to me.

Anyway, read the actual paper here: Putting brain training to the test.

Secret Messages Via HTTP Referrer

Here's how you can send me secret messages. Do an Advanced Google Search for "Adventures of BruteForce" and include your secret message in quotes where there is the unwanted words field. You can also use Yahoo! or other search engines in a similar manner.

Now click on any link that shows up that leads to any of this blog's pages.

Once you do that, I should be able to see the HTTP Referrer URL when I look at the blog's traffic logs. I sent myself a couple secret messages using this technique. Here they are.

February 2nd 2010	08:50:37 PM	www.google.com/search?hl=en&as_q=adventures of bruteforce&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=%22this is a secret message%22&num=10&lr=&as_filetype=&ft=i&as_sitesearch=&as_qdr=all&as_rights=&as_occt=any&cr=&as_nlo=&as_nhi=&safe=images
February 2nd 2010	08:52:15 PM	search.yahoo.com/search?p=adventures of brute force -%22another secret message%2C this time from yahoo%21%22&toggle=1&cop=mss&ei=UTF-8&fr=yfp-t-701

You can see the two messages clearly in the links above, or you can click them to see the exact referral page (resulting from my specific searches).

So, go ahead, send me whatever secret message you want.

I do wonder what would happen if you had a long conversation with your secret lover or whomever using this method. Would it eventually stop working due to the search engines modifying the Referrer URLs to stop the silliness? Who knows.

Collapsible Taskbar Buttons (Windows)

Those of you that use Windows XP will likely be familiar with the taskbar and its support for collapsible taskbar buttons when the taskbar gets a bit too crowded. Windows XP seems to do a pretty good job with collapsing like items, but there's a feature that I find useful but missing. Maybe there's a way to do it, so if you know how, please share.

Here's a screen capture of a Microsoft Outlook task with 6 open e-mail messages. Windows has appropriately collapsed them into a single button and reports that there are 7 tasks (1 for Outlook and 6 for the open messages).


Now, we know that the Outlook task is the parent, and the 6 open messages are children. What I want to do is close out all the children tasks, but keep the parent open. There is a Close Group option when you right click on the collapsed task group, but that closes everything including the parent.

Is there any easy way to get back to a single parent task open without having to resort to closing the group and then re-launching whatever is the parent application? I understand that sometimes Windows will group tasks where there isn't a parent... that's fine, as I don't expect that there's a mind reading OS that can figure out what subset I want closed. However, this seems like a nice feature that is lacking.

Anyway, help me if this is in fact possible and you know how to do it. Thanks.

Duke Nukem For Never

If any of you were gaming in the good ol' days of 3-D shooters, you'll definitely have remembered and played Duke Nukem 3-D. It was just a really fun game with cool weapons, fun maps, and just all around good multi-player gameplay. And, I'm sure those of you who played the game (and loved it) were at one point eagerly awaiting their sequel, Duke Nukem Forever.

We all know that it never did make it out to market and it was just an epic failure. But, what really happened? Just recently, Wired came out with an article that seeks to answer this very question.

Enjoy: Wired's Story -- Learn to Let Go: How Success Killed Duke Nukem

Kill A Watt and Electricity Usage

Last month, our electricity bill skyrocketed due to greatly increased air conditioning usage. As you all know, the marginal cost of the electricity increases the more you use. Now that I think about it, it seems a bit strange because in almost any other case, it's the other way around; the more you buy the lower the unit cost. Anyway, I digress.

This is how PG&E prices power in our area (for a 32 day billing cycle):

Baseline Usage 387.20000 kWh @ $0.11531
101-130% of Baseline @ $0.13109
131-200% of Baseline @ $0.25974
201-300% of Baseline @ $0.37866
Over 300% of Baseline @ $0.44098

As you can see once you get over 200% of the rather low baseline, you really get hurt with rates that are 3-4x the initial baseline rate.

Well, we ran a few experiments where we didn't use any AC and checked the meters, and we learned that we were still consuming a lot of power. For example, we consumed 10 kWh overnight (11pm to 9am) with no AC running. This figure is roughly the 12.1 kWh designated as daily baseline usage. In other words, we were being pretty dumb about our energy use, and it probably wasn't limited just to stuff running passively.

I went out and picked up Kill A Watt, which was only $15 at Fry's Electronics. This little device is pretty neat. You pretty much plug stuff into it, and it tells you how much electricity is being consumed. It also keeps running track of kWh over time, which is useful for those devices/appliances that have variable power consumption.

Some interesting things that I noticed and don't really understand...

1) Our mini-fridge (aka the beer fridge) uses 0 when it isn't actively trying to cool down. During its cool-down phase, it draws 75 W. This phase only happened 4 times over a 2 hour period or so. A total of 0.06 kWh were used after 2 hours in the evening. It probably uses more during the day as it's hotter.

2) A cell phone charger without charging anything draws 3 W. Computer charger without a computer plugged in draws around 4-5 W. A sub-woofer that is not in use draws 13 W.

3) Computers (not laptops/notebooks) use a crapload when not in standby. My computer setup with an external hard drive, LCD monitor, cable modem, router, and speakers draws 200-250 during normal use. It is only when the hard drives really start going that the 250 peak is reached.

When in standby mode with the monitor going into energy saving mode, the power draw drops to under 30 W, if I turn off the external hard drive and the speakers.

4) Halogen lamps are evil. I always knew that they used up a lot of power, but I have always used one in the office because of how much light they produced. Not any more. The halogen lamp draws a whopping 300 W. We swapped it out for a different torchiere lamp that uses only 25 W. It's not as bright, but there's no way it makes sense for us to use the halogen, especially since the office is used a lot with JC working from home.

5) Fish tank filter draws 11 W, and the fish tank light uses 17 W. This means that if you keep your light on all day (which I used to do a lot, because I'd forget to shut it off at night), then over 5% of the daily baseline is being consumed by the fish tank. So, now I'm trying to remember to turn off the fish tank light at night, which is probably better for them anyway.

I've got a lot more stuff to test, but at least now I feel that I've gotten a better handle of what devices and appliances are costing us what.

And, in case it's not obvious, I really do recommend the Kill A Watt product. It really does work as advertised. My only complaint is that it's a bit large so sometimes you'll have to unplug other things in order to test something.

XBox360 Back Online

Well, I'll be damned. The operation was successful... the X-Clamp fix worked. I spent about $15-20 or so to get everything I needed, and I have a good amount of random stuff left over. I did spend about 6-8 hours of my own time (mostly reading and going to get parts). Anyway, at this point the unit is completely working, and so now I'll just have to see if the fix sticks or not.

In any case, I'm pretty stoked. I was originally thinking it was maybe 3-to-1 against, but maybe I'm just a bad XBox360 repair handicapper. Anyway, I am going to have a celebratory beer now.

Edit:

Seeing as how my XBox is still working after over an hour of play, I figure I should put up the link to the repair instructions I followed. I did have to make some minor modifications (i.e. I did not follow the instructions 100%, but it was in areas where I used my best judgment given the parts I was able to find -- for example, I was unable to find 1mm thick nylon washers).

Llama's X-Clamp Fix

XBox 360 Dissection

Well, I learned today that the 3-year "Red Ring of Death" warranty on the XBox360 has expired. So, there wasn't any reason that I shouldn't at least try to fix the problem myself, if it was indeed repairable. I read up a bit on what the typical issues are that cause the problem, and it seems that it is almost always related to the the GPU. Either its overheating or there are some cold solder joints.

In any case, in order to fix the potential issues, you've got to open up the unit and do things to it. The fix that I am trying is the "X-Clamp" fix, where you end up replacing these X-clamp things that hold the heatsinks in place. Part way through the step-by-step repair instructions that I was reading, I realized that I needed some stuff that I didn't have. So, tomorrow I'm going to have to buy some washers, thermal paste, and thermal paste remover.

Here are a few pictures of the current state of my piece of crap XBox 360.

Sharp E05SH and E06SH

I'm still here at work waiting for a few tests to finish. Anyway, KDDI announced two new Sharp phones a week ago. These are the Sharp E05SH and E06SH. They were designed for the highly-rugged, highly-secure business phone market in Japan.

UberGizmo covered the phones briefly in this link.

As always, it's nice to see some of your work translate into something that ends up in a real product.Here are a couple images of the phones that I grabbed from the Japanese press release. The E06SH has a barcode scanner built in... that's what is shown in the bottom picture.

Image Processing in Mathematica

For anyone interested in image processing, this post on the Wolfram blog might be interesting. I think it's pretty neat, and it surely could simplify rapid testing of custom filters and image processing functions. It's often a pain to spend a lot of time coding up what you thought might be interesting only to learn that it wasn't so useful. And, I agree with what they say about Photoshop scripts... it's just not as nice as interfacing with a real API.

Of course, everything shown in that post can be done with your own image processing libraries and your own front-end, but if it's easy to do with what they've got, why not use it. I'd like to play with the new Mathematica some time, but unfortunately, that time isn't available now.

BSOD at a Gas Station

Not too long ago I found a gas station pump with the Blue Screen of Death. Luckily, I had my camera handy.

Neat Wario Land Ad

Even though I don't know anything about Wario Land and don't own a Wii, I thought this was a really cool marketing/advertisement idea. You'll know what I mean when you watch it. Check it out.

Wario Land: Shake It YouTube Ad

Domain Name Hot List

A friend of mine recently put up a website (HotNameList.com) that provides interesting, useful, and potentially lucrative domain names that are currently available. The list is updated daily and free to check out.

From Today's 'Hot Name' List, here are a few that I thought were pretty good:

SoHumble.com
AmazingHigh.com
WordLA.com
FuckingManual.com

Anyway, whether or not you are a collector of domain names, check it out.

Lenovo P960

Well, here's some more work-related news... Lenovo Mobile just launched its first biometrics-enabled mobile phone, the P960. As always, it's nice when some of the things that I've worked on makes its way into a product.

Here are a couple of pictures I snagged from some Asian website selling the units.

Binaural Recording

Okay, this is just freaking cool. You need headphones, and don't worry it's not some weird prank thing with loud noise to scare you. This is a special type of recording method called binaural recording that apparently dates back to the late 1800's.

Anyway, turn up your sound a little bit and put on headphones. Close your eyes when you listen to the recording. It really is amazing.

The algorithm used for this particular recording is called Cetera.

Here's the audio in YouTube video format. Remember, close your eyes and use headphones.


And, here's one that tries to demonstrate the difference between stereo and binaural.