News: Laser light switch toggles beam up to 100 billion times a second

clipped from www.nytimes.com Engineers Make Leap in Optical Networks Published: October 27, 2005 SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 26 - A team of Stanford electrical engineers has discovered how to switch a beam of laser light on and off up to 100 billion times a second with materials that are widely used in the semiconductor industry. The group used a standard chip-making process to design a central component of optical networking gear that is potentially more than 10 times as fast as the highest-performance commercial products available today. The communications industry now uses costly equipment to transmit data over optical fibers at up to 10 billion bits a second. Researchers, however, are already experimenting with optically linked computers in which components may be located on different sides of the globe. Cheap optical switches would also make it possible to create data superhighways inside computers and reorganize them for better performance.

Tech: Removing Knight.exe

I bought a new flash drive from OCZ a beautiful 16GB flash drive. I connected it to a foreign machine and when I put it back into my computer, virus. No big deal AVG detected the virus and I selected remove. At first I thought it a bit odd cause the other machine didn't have access to any network or internet. I should have known better. The next thing I knew the flash drive stopped working. When I plugged in the drive I received a "mixed content" popup. The normal choices to open in folder view or to open selected files with a video player had dissapeared. I tried accesing the drive from my computer but it simply asked me to choose a program to open the "whole drive" with, as if it was an application. I stumbled across the directions below to remove "knight.exe" which still didn't give me access to the drive, and since I didn't have access to the drive I couldn't do one of the steps (Step 3b). I realized I might be able to access the drive another way. I opened the drive using izarc as if it were a zip file. I needed to open it directly through izarc's menu. Nothing shows up initially but if you choose, file type>all, you'll see the file autorun.inf. Delete that and you'll be done. I recommend you follow the instructions bellow in their given order until you get to that step. Paste a comment if this helps.

Note: You may be able to use any program to access the drive through the program's "Open" Dialogue, as long as the program has a "show all files" option. To delete simply right mouse click and select delete.

These instructions courtesy Precise Security:
1. Temporarily Disable USB Drive to autorun (Windows XP):

a. Open Windows Explorer or press the Windows + “e” key.
b. Right-click the drive of the USB Drive. Then select Properties. Drive Properties will appear.
c. Select the AutoPlay tab.
d. Choose Select an Action to Perform
e. At the bottom of the selection, click Take no Action, then click Apply.
f. Click OK to exit Drive Properties.

2. Show Hidden Files
a. Open Windows Explorer
b. Go to Tools > Options
c. On View tab, mark Checked the “Show Hidden Files and Folders and “Hide Protected OPerating System Files” Unchecked.

3. Delete the files manually
a. Go the USB Drive and delete autorun.inf
b. Go to C: Drive and delete autorun.inf
c. Go to C:\Windows and delete Disk Knight.exe

4. Modify Windows Registry
a. Go to Start > Run then type regedit
b. On Registry Editor, go to Edit > Find and type “knight”
c. Delete all entries it found.

5. Connect to Internet and update your AntiVirus

6. Reboot your computer in SafeMode
a. During BootUp process Press F8 continuously until selection appears
b. Use Arrow Up+Down to select SafeMode on the selections menu.
c. Hit Enter to proceed.

7. Scan your computer with an updated AntiVirus and delete all infections it founds.

Note: You may enable autorun of the USB Drive by reversing the process in Step 1.

Tips: Geotagging Photos with Picasa

Every digital image is encoded with digital information, EXIF, aside from the actual picture. That information holds interesting data: When the picture was taken, if it was modified and when it was last modified, Camera information, focal length, Camera make and model among other information.

We'll be focusing on one of the little known and little used fields called a geotag. A geotag allows you to identify the location where the image was taken using longitude and latidude based coordinates. This can be determined from the camera, external GPS device or embedded later. This gives you a new way to sort and search through your photo.

Another option is to wait until you've finished taking photos and add all the location details once you've downloaded the images to your PC. There are a variety of ways to do this, but one of the most straightforward uses a combination of Google's Picasa software and the company's Google Earth application.

This Excerpt is courtesy of Cnet (Click title for full article)

After downloading your photos into Picasa, it's simply a matter of clicking on the tools tab and selecting the 'Geotag with Google Earth' option. This opens the mapping application in which you navigate to the place where the photo was taken. A single click then embeds the relevant latitude and longitude details into the photo's EXIF metadata file.

Grammar: NEVER end a sentence in a preposition or not

We're told in school to never end a sentence using a preposition.. why? I ran into the answer.

It was John Dryden who first promulgated the doctrine that a preposition may not be used at the end of a sentence, probably on the basis of a specious analogy to Latin. Grammarians in the 18th century refined the doctrine, and the rule has since become one of the most venerated maxims of schoolroom grammar. But sentences ending with prepositions can be found in the works of most of the great writers since the Renaissance. English syntax does allow for final placement of the preposition, as in We have much to be thankful for or I asked her which course she had signed up for. Efforts to rewrite such sentences to place the preposition elsewhere can have stilted and even comical results, as Winston Churchill demonstrated when he objected to the doctrine by saying "This is the sort of English up with which I cannot put."·Sometimes sentences that end with adverbs, such as I don't know where she will end up or It's the most curious book I've ever run across, are mistakenly thought to end in prepositions. One can tell that up and across are adverbs here, not prepositions, by the ungrammaticality of I don't know up where she will end and It's the most curious book across which I have ever run. It has never been suggested that it is incorrect to end a sentence with an adverb.

Source: TheFreeDictionary.com (click title for page)

Firefox Addons: Clipmarks

What can I do with Clipmarks? Save your clips on clipmarks.com. You can save clips publicly for others to see, post them to Facebook, or embed a widget of them on your own site. You can also save clips privately for your own viewing later. Your clip collection is searchable from any computer with an internet connection (including your iPhone, Blackberry, etc). Post anything you clip directly to your blog. It's by far the quickest way to update your blog with compelling things you find on the web. Supports Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad, LiveJournal and more. Email anything from a web page without ever leaving the page. Import your contacts to instantly email friends and family interesting things from the web. The content you clip and a link to the page is automatically included with each email. Print just the parts of the page you really need. Save paper, save money, save trees.

Emails: 2 Tough Questions: Modified

Starting a new section of useful email based info I've received. Useful for any reason, it may be spiritual, inspirational or educational.

It is time to elect a new world leader, and only your vote counts.
Here are the facts about the three candidates.. Who would you vote for?


Candidate A
Associates with crooked politicians, and consults
with astrologist
He's had two mistresses. He also chain smokes and
drinks 8 to 10 martinis a
day.


Candidate B
He was kicked out of office twice, sleeps until
noon, used opium in
college and drinks a quart of whiskey every evening.


Candidate C
He is a decorated war hero. He's a vegetarian,
doesn't smoke, drinks an occasional beer and never cheated on his wife.





Candidate A is Franklin D. Roosevelt
Candidate B is Winston Churchill
Candidate C is Adolph Hitler

Tips: Gas Tips

At the price of gas nowadays we can always use a little info on how to stretch the galon to get more bang for out buck. Below is an email I received from a friend. If anybody can give me verifiable citations I will gladly add it to the article. As it stands these tips really don't hurt to try.

Here at the Kinder Morgan Pipeline where I work in San Jose, CA we deliver about 4 million gallons in a 24-hour period thru the pipeline. One day is diesel the next day is jet fuel, and gasoline, regular and premium grades. We have 34-storage tanks here with a total capacity of 16,800,000 gallons.


* Only buy or fill up your car or truck in the early morning when the ground temperature is still cold. Remember that all service stations have their storage tanks buried below ground. The colder the ground the more dense the gasoline, when it gets warmer gasoline expands, so buying in the afternoon or in the evening....your gallon is not exactly a gallon. In the petroleum business, the specific gravity and the temperature of the gasoline, diesel and jet fuel, ethanol and other petroleum products plays an important role. A 1-degree rise in temperature is a big deal for this business. But the service stations do not have temperature compensation at the pumps.


* When you're filling up do not squeeze the trigger of the nozzle to a fast mode. If you look you will see that the trigger has three (3) stages: low, middle, and high. In slow mode you should be pumping on low speed, thereby minimizing the vapors that are created while you are pumping. All hoses at the pump have a vapor return. If you are pumping on the fast rate, some of the liquid that goes to your tank becomes vapor. Those vapors are being sucked up and back into the underground storage tank so you're getting less worth for your money.


* One of the most important tips is to fill up when your gas tank is HALF FULL. The reason for this is, the more gas you have in your tank the less air occupying its empty space. Gasoline evaporates faster than you can imagine. Gasoline storage tanks have an internal floating roof. This roof serves as zero clearance between the gas and the atmosphere, so it minimizes the evaporation. Un ike service stations, here where I work, every truck that we load is temperature compensated so that every gallon is actually the exact amount.


* Another reminder, if there is a gasoline truck pumping into the storage tanks when you stop to buy gas, DO NOT fill up -- most likely the gasoline is being stirred up as the gas is being delivered, and you might pick up some of the dirt that normally settles on the bottom.

News: Content sensitive image resizing

This one's is pretty impressive. A group of scientist came up with an algorithm for resizing an image. The idea is to stretch or shrink the image while maintaining the image's main focus. Unlike standard non-uniform stretching or contracting, which leads to distortion, this method allows the subject to stay uniform while modifying the contents of an image. The image is treated a lot like an MP3. What MP3 does for compression is it removes sounds that people cannot ordinarily hear and thereby makes the file size significantly smaller. Click heading for video. I've also added a link to the internet resources section, on the right, to a web based application based on this algorithm.

News: 10 Times Longer Battery Life

Stanford materials scientist Yi Cui has found a way to create a silicone anode. Scientists knew that this material would create, at least theoretically, an enormous 10 fold increase in charge capacity but they were never able to achieve it. The problem was the silicone anode would crack or degrade due to extreme expansion. That was overcome by creating a an anode out of silicone nanowires. The space between the nanowires would allow for the expansion to take place without the anode cracking. (See picture above) As always, click heading for full article.