Today I just wanted to share my experience of upgrading the RAM of my gaming laptop, the XPS M1710 from DELL.
I’ve been wondering if it would be worth changing my 2×1GB of RAM for 2×2GB. Would I run applications faster? Do I really need those extra 2GB of RAM? I searched the web for some signs of wisdom which could lead me to the right path. Well, it was very insightful and I got the idea that yes, it is worth it.

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Canon 5D Mark II is almost here. Don’t bother rushing to the stores yet (if you have the money for it), it will only be available this November.

This is a fantastic camera that will replace the already-becoming-old-but-still-great Canon 5D. The most amazing features for the Mark II are:

• 21.1MP full frame CMOS sensor
• DIGIC 4 processor
• ISO range expandable to 25600
• Full HD (1080, 30fps) movie recording
• High-res 3.0” VGA LCD with Live View
• 3.9fps JPEG shooting up to card capacity
• 9-point AF + 6 Assist AF points
• Magnesium alloy body

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 “The Large Hadron Collider is the largest and most complex scientific instrument ever built and the highest energy particle accelerator in the world. The accelerator is located 100 m underground and runs through both French and Swiss territory.”

The LHC is a huge (and I mean HUGE) machine built to be part of CERN’s scientific complex. The size of this particle accelerator is 26659 meters (circumference) with a total of 9300 magnets inside which will be pre-cooled to 80 Kelvin (-193.2 degrees Celsius) using more the 10 thousand tonnes of liquid nitrogen. These will also be filled with about 60 tonnes of liquid helium so that they can reach the temperature of 1.9 K (-271.3 degrees Celsius). That’s less than 2 degrees above absolute zero.

After 20 years of hard work LHC is ready to fire the first beam this Wednesday (10 September 2008) after passing the final test of its synchronization systems.You can watch this event online through http://webcast.cern.ch/.

For more information about the largest particle collision ever built you can visit CERN’s website.

. . . that the speed of sound is 343 m/s or 1235 km/h? Speeds higher than this are called supersonic and are usually referred by the unit Mach. Being Mach 2 two times the speed of sound (2470 km/h). Speeds after Mach 5 are usually called hypersonic speeds.

. . . that the speed of light is approximately 300,000 km/s (three hundred thousand kilometers per second)? To be more precise it is 299,792,458 m/s (meters per second).

. . . the distance from Earth to Sun is around 149,598,000 kilometers (almost 150 million kilometers)? To this distance we can call Astronomical Unit or AU.

. . . that with the above data we can say that light generated by the Sun will take roughly 500 seconds (8 minutes and 40 seconds) to reach us.

Paint.net 3.36 is still fresh. Get it from http://www.getpaint.net/download.html.

This is the new version of this amazing piece of imaging software. It’s free and it’s good. Here are the latest changes:

Improvements

• Effect rendering should be a little faster now.

Changes

• Implemented some changes to the “Add Noise” effect that were suggested by a forum member.
• The canvas background color is now always #c0c0c0.
• The auto-updater should now correctly detect .NET 3.5 and newer, which will help to save bandwidth when Paint.NET v4.0 is released (it will require .NET 3.5).

Fixes

• Paint.NET now works on a system that has the .NET 3.5 SP1 “Client Profile” installed.
• When zoomed in and the cursor is to the top-left of the image (negative coordinates), the ruler is now highlighted in the correct area.
• The effect rendering system no longer sets the “Tag” property on the configuration dialog.
• Some incorrectly authored plugins would cause a crash when loading their support details (author, copyright, etc.).
• There was a bug in the color wheel for IndirectUI that caused it to show the wrong values at initialization.
• There was a performance problem for effects that used the IndirectUI color wheel control.
• In some rare cases, Paint.NET would crash while shutting down.
• When using the “Fixed Ratio” feature of the Rectangle Selection tool, it would crash if 0 was specified for both the width and height.

If you have the need of a piece of SQL code to generate a password you can use this one:

declare @pw varchar(8)
declare @count int
declare @characterpool varchar(50)
set @characterpool = 'abcdefghijkmnpqrstuvwxyz0123456789'
set @count = 0
set @pw = ''
while @count <= 8
begin
set @pw = @pw + SUBSTRING(@characterpool,
CAST(ABS(CHECKSUM(NEWID()))*RAND(@count) as int)%LEN(@characterpool)+1,1)
set @count = @count + 1
end

This generates an eight digit password using the characters a-z and numbers. If you want you can change the length of the password by changing the ‘8′ to the desired number in the lines:

declare @pw varchar(8)
while @count <= 8

Hope you find this useful.

Thanks to GM for the code.

Last weekend I decided to clean up my computer. No, not the dust inside it (I did that 2 weeks ago). My Windows installation was a bit slow and it was time to do a full clean.

I decided to install Windows Vista and Ubuntu Linux. It’s time to jump to the new operating system, I was still using XP. With Service Pack 1 and software houses already optimizing their software for Vista I think it is now the time to install it. Regarding Linux, from all the distributions available, I think Ubuntu is the best one for me. Clean interface, easy to use and update/install new software and good enough to use as a multi purpose server.

So, after I installed Windows and Ubuntu all was running perfectly. I even started to use Ubuntu as my preferred OS to play music, movies and to download from torrents. If you haven’t tried Linux yet, Ubuntu is a very user friendly that “almost” replaces Windows. I say almost because Windows has much more software support. So if you’re a gamer you probably want to stick with Windows (or buy an Xbox 360 ). But of course it all depends on your field of expertise and what you enjoy using. Some say Linux is the way to go, some say Windows and I had a friend of mine saying that Solaris is the one :P. I chose Windows and Linux.

Today I ran Media Direct (included in DELL laptops) and had an error. Running for a second time was ok (weird). This has caused my Grub boot loader not to start and to give an Error 17. There are lots of information out there about it. I actually spent around 2 hours researching how to get rid of it and to have my boot menu back.

This is how I got rid of the Grub error 17:

1. Boot from Live CD
2. Open a terminal session
3. Run “sudo grub” - It runs Grub with root permissions
4. In Grub prompt type “find /boot/grub/stage1″ - this will tell you where Grub was installed so that we can fix the boot
5. Still on Grub prompt: “root (hd?,?)” - Replace the ‘?’ with the values from the point 4 result. First ‘?’ is the hard drive, the second is the partition. This tells Grub that its files are on that specific partition.
6. Type “setup (hd0)” to install Grub into the MBR (Master Boot Record)
7. “quit” to exit Grub
8. You can now reboot and check if this fixed your Error 17. You should be able to boot properly now.

This has fixed my specific issue. If it didn’t help you, try reading the following articles which helped me understand what was going on. All of these can be found using “grub error 17″ on Google.

• http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=224351 - The one I used to fix my issue
• http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=442945 - A nice forum discussion about Error 17
• http://users.bigpond.net.au/hermanzone/p15.htm - Useful information about the Grub loader
• http://users.bigpond.net.au/hermanzone/SuperGrubDiskPage.html - Supergrub application
• http://www.iknowkungfoo.com/blog/index.cfm/2008/6/16/Stupid-solution-for-Grub-error-17 - Quick fix for some Error 17 issues

It seems people (including scientists — they’re also people) are a bit skeptical about Kaminsky findings. There is some speculation regarding if this DNS/Internet bug story is really true. It seems that an almost identical bug was already found around three years ago. But, in the meantime, Kaminsky it getting all the attention from, at least, Internet security companies. And hey… Internet security seems ‘a bit’ related to his field of expertise. This last sentence could have two meanings…

Read the full article on Yahoo News.

 The Internet… That vast universe of bits and bytes (more like Terabytes now) have now a patch. That is a bit weird isn’t it? The Internet having a patch? It seems like I’m talking about some piece of software.

But it’s a fact. The Internet had a huge bug in the DNS protocol (Domain Name System) and was discovered by accident by Dan Kaminsky, which works with IOActive. He is also a former employee of Cisco Systems.

This bug seems to be quite bad, it would allow someone (a hacker?) to redirect all wanted traffic to a specific point. Imagine you are accessing your bank account through your bank’s online system and that someone forwards you to a clone of that site that does not belong to your bank. It would be possible to get all your bank account details and codes without you noticing, which would not be good news for you.

Hopefully this bug is now being fixed and the Internet will be healthy again.

Read the full article in Yahoo! News.

Scientists have developed robots that can climb a multitude of different surfaces. These tank-toy-shaped robots use electrostatic power to be able to stick to the wall.

“In some ways it is similar to rubbing a balloon and sticking it on the wall, except we carry our own power supply and are able to control the adhesion.”

The scientists are now trying to develop insect robots using the same technology. Well, another science fiction theme coming to life.

Read the full article on BBC NEWS.