Monday 30 September 2013

TheNotebookStore pilot project

I'm trying out a pilot to sell Notebooks at TheNotebookStore (The Notebook Store). You can buy them on eBay here; eBay sellers page.

As a pilot I'm trying to see the popularity, selling process and margin that can be made, I welcome feedback on this project.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Thursday 26 September 2013

Practical Study of Parallel Algorithms - by Kevin Gordon

This is the paper I wrote for my final year project at the University of Warwick. I include it here for personal reference, and also in the hope that someone else will also find this useful.

http://www.kevingordon.org.uk/projects/bsp/experimental-parlallel-computing-final-report.pdf


Abstract

This project gives an introduction to the field of parallel computing and the parallel computing model: BSP (Bulk Synchronous Parallelism). The aim of this project was to carry out the implementation and analysis of two BSP problems. The parallel broadcast problem and parallel matrix multiplication were implemented, several experiments were run, and the results were analysed. Analysis of the results revealed that the experimental results didn’t always match what the BSP model predicted, and this was highly dependent on both the type of architecture running the code and the optimisation of the code.

Where is the missing search feature in iOS 7?

Some people have asked me how you can search in iOS 7, because you can no longer swipe all the way to the left to search.

Well all you need to do is on any of the home pages, swipe down anywhere in the middle region of the screen and the new search feature will appear.

Voila, done!


iOS 7 some of what I like about it

The lock screen now looks great, and really awesomeness you can access the notification centre and control centre right from the lock screen.


Slide across and you get the much more attractive unlock keyboard;


The new home screen looks fantastic, it took a little while to get used to, but it actually looks a lot better than it used to look.


Swipe down from the top and you get the notification centre;


Swipe across to get Today view, which although doesn't give the graphic weather output, it actually gives something much more useful - that is a current weather forecast and outlook in text, which I actually use, whereas the old weather widget for me just looked pretty.

It's really good to have the calendar accessible via notification centre and the lock screen, fab. And you get a list of how many events you have tomorrow - would have been better if it listed what those events were but, it's still very good. Also would be good if you could swipe to get the whole of the day's calendar view, not just the next few hours.


Swipe up for the control centre, this is very good - gives you control of music player, airplay, and allows you to quickly turn on/off Airplane mode, Wifi, Bluetooth, Do not Disturb, and the orientation lock. You can also control the brightness, and quickly open the flashlight, clock, calculator and camera, friggin great!


And the icing on the cake is the new multitasking view, by double clicking the home button, which brings up a window of the apps, and allows you to swipe up to close, very Touchpad/WebOS inspired, and I really like it, and it is useful, and much more fun to swap to different apps this way.


And the notification banners that appear are now much more pretty, and integrated better. Overall I'm very happy with the new iOS 7.

Getting iCloud calendar to sync with HP Touchpad

So you want to display your iCloud calendar from your iOS device on your HP Touchpad (webos).

Well there is an easy way.

In the calendar on your Mac - right click on the calendar and share the calendar / make it public, and copy the url.

Paste the url into this website;

https://icaltogcal.com

Then click continue, and copy the new share url.

Add this to your google calendar;

https://support.google.com/a/users/answer/178357?hl=en - How to add the calendar to google


Sign in to your Google Apps account in a web browser and open your GoogleCalendar.


In the left sidebar under Other Calendars, click the Add menu. Then choose one of the following:


Add by URL: Adds a team or company calendar someone created. Enter the calendar's address (ends in .ics).


Now it should process the url and add the calendar. It takes a few hours to start syncing, so it will be blank for a while, but after a few hours (I left it for 24 hours) it will start syncing.


Then on the Touchpad add your Google account to the calendar, and voila the calendar will appear on your Touchpad. 


Done.


Not seeing correct character encoding in SQL developer

So you're seeing characters from different languages or "special characters" not displaying correctly in SQL developer but you know they are definitely correct in the database, you are sure? Well go to Tools > Preferences and make sure the character encoding is UTF-8, that should fix it and you should then be able to see the correct characters. If the characters are still wrong there is a good chance that the characters are corrupted in you database.

Listing the unique file ids of files

I'm looking to link a set of files to a set of meta information, and I want to uniquely identify the files - and have some perl do processing to combine the files with meta data - so I can cross reference them with a unique id.

So I found that if you type "ls -i" it gives the unique file ids for the files - on OS X in the terminal.

Very useful, I'll remember that.

Use of Siri in iOS 7

I'm happy with Siri, and iOS 7, what I particular like using Siri for is when I am travelling in the car and I use it mainly for i) Setting reminders; ii) Reading notifications; iii) Responding to text messages; iv) making phone calls; v) Playing music.

It comes with certain issues the main issues are;

a) Occasionally, and actually quite often I get the message "Sorry I can't take any requests right now" or "I'm currently having a problem" or something to that effect. Normally it goes away after a few seconds, today it continued for 10+ minutes, it would be good to have a way to know whether Siri is working or not.

b) When I set a reminder I can set it to remind when I arrive "at home" or "at work" but when I say at a place such as "arriving at Basildon" it doesn't understand what I'm saying and makes that part of the reminder description. The same thing happens when I set it to remind me at a time, it sometimes gets confused and includes the time as part of the task description. Now when I want it to remind me I say "remind me at 1.30pm" and then it says "what would you like me to remind you about" and then I say "remember to feed the fish" or something, and then it allows me to create the reminder at 1.30pm.

c) Notifications sometimes gets confused when I'm trying to get it to playback my voice mail. So I think saying something like call voicemail, or listen to phone voicemail does the trick most of the time.

d) Playing music doesn't seem to understand when I say an album name and artist together .e.g. "play Counting Crows" works, and "play Recovering satellites" works, but not "play counting crows recovering satellites). Also at the moment I've got a bug where playing certain music, it says "playing xxx..." but then nothing plays, which is a bit annoying.

It's getting better though, and it's really useful. Especially replying to text messages is great.

Changing to a network disk on the mac in terminal

Changing to a network disk on the mac in terminal - e.g. if you've got a windows PC on your network, that you share disks on. Then open the network location in Finder, and then double click to open the disk.

Then in the terminal type "df -h" and it will list the location in which the drive is mounted.

e.g. //xxxx@xxxxxwin7pc/H  931Gi  611Gi  320Gi    66%        0 18446744073709551615    0%   /Volumes/H

Then all you need to do is type "cd /Volumes/H" to change to the disk.

Voila, done.

Sunday 22 September 2013

iMessage and multiple Apple Ids

I had an issue that my iPhone was sending receiving iMessages, that my other Apple devices weren't getting, and visa versa.

What I found is that on the iPhone iOS 7 I was signed into the other Apple Id I have, and no matter trying to add the first Id would seem to fix it - as it was asking to verify my first email address, but I couldn't get it to send a verification email.

What I then did was log out of iMessage and log back in with my first apple Id. Enabled a second email address and my phone number, and set all new messages to come from my phone number. And made sure could receive from both email addresses.

In doing so I got pop ups on my other apple devices, which I okayed.

Eventually the first apple id / email address now gave me extra options on my MacBook Pro, and I could set it to the phone number, and enable all my email addresses to associate with it. Same thing on my other apple devices. Problem resolved.

Spotify not working on MacBook Pro Retina

Spotify stopped working, first I was getting the error regarding "Missing framework", then it wouldn't even start. This is on the MacBook Pro Retina, Mac OS X.

To rectify the situation do the following;

1. Close spotify
2. Delete spotify app, and empty trash
3. Hold down the "option" key and click "Go" in the menu, Library will now appear.
4. Find the caches folder, and delete anything with "spotify" in it and empty trash.
5. Now reinstall spotify
6. Should work.

Cloning a Raspberry Pi SD card on a Mac

This really is actually quite simple;

1. Enter source SD card into Mac (make sure you have set it to locked before hand)
2. At the terminal type "df -h", the output will list the inserted disk as something like;

/dev/disk1s1    69Mi  9.1Mi   60Mi    14%        0        0  100%   /Volumes/Untitled
3. Now take a backup of the disk by typing the following;
sudo dd if=/dev/rdisk1 of=/Users/kevingordon/Dropbox/kevscode/RPi-backup/raspbmc-backup.img

Where rdisk1 - the 1 is from the /dev/disk1s1 above. And the of will be the path with the image filename on your hard drive where you want to put the disk image.

4. It will ask your password, and then will take 1/2 hour or so to process. Note you can monitor the activity by opening System monitor and searching for the "dd" process - you will see that it is active. Once it is finished it will return some information like the following;

7744512+0 records in
7744512+0 records out
3965190144 bytes transferred in 4078.160970 secs (972299 bytes/sec)

5. Now eject the disk as normal.
6. Now copy this to the new disk, make sure the disk is unlocked, and enter the SD card
7. In disk utility, unmount the disk, an it should be replaced with something like disk1s1, and disappear from your desktop.
8. At the terminal type the following; 

sudo dd if=/Users/kevingordon/Dropbox/kevscode/RPi-backup/raspbmc-backup.img of=/dev/rdisk1 bs=1m

This may or may not ask for your password. Note the if directory is the location where you put the image file above. Then the of will be the same as the if that you used previously - confirm this information using df -h again.
9. Once the command above is running, it will take 1/2 hour or so, and you can monitor using the System Monitor and searching for the dd process.
10. Once complete it will give you the following (something like);

3781+1 records in
3781+1 records out
3965190144 bytes transferred in 792.939957 secs (5000618 bytes/sec)

11. Eject the disk using disk utility.
12. That's it! - You can now use this in your Raspberry Pi - a fresh clone of whatever you were running previously, awesome!

Saturday 21 September 2013

iOS 7 first impressions

What I like about it;
- Lock screen with access to camera, notifications and control centre is excellent
- New control centre, is fab way of accessing quickly some certain commands e.g. turning on/off wifi, airport mode, discrete mode
- Notifications is awesome, works much better, the notification alerts/bars look much better, and it's better integrated. Only downside is the post to twitter and Facebook share widget has gone, which is annoying.
- Calendar app is really good, as is the new camera app and photos app
- The email app is improved, looks good, and has now got some (limited) smart inboxes
- The look of the new iOS is fresh and new and the animations are cool
- The apps that have been re-engineered for iOS 7 look really good

What I don't like so much / or problems I've had;
- Siri's voice - Siri now sounds very strange
- Weather not appearing in notification centre - this was fixed by turning location services on, from within restrictions
- Post to twitter and FB has been removed
- Search from siri is unfortunately going to Bing rather than Google, and it doesn't appear to be fixable at the moment
- Loading/updating apps very confusing - initially the icons were very confusing, but I now understand how this works
- Where have events gone in photos - thought I like the way photos are grouped together
- All day events not appearing under notification centre - haven't been able to figure this out yet