Adrian Monk and the case of the crippled DVD driver
Filed under: Aruba, Personal stuff, software | Tags: anchorfree, computer problems, drivers, hotspot shield, tcp/ip
Leave a Comment Finally solved all computer problems, where nobody else could. After having Infoman have a look at my PC they said it was a virus, and it was repaired, but the problem (sudden reboots) kept occurring. In addition, my DVD player didn’t work anymore. I opened the case and found a dangling cable end, almost touching the motherboard. I think when the fan started blowing, it would sometimes short-circuit the MOBO (it’s a guess still). Anyway I secured it and the problem is now gone. 2 weeks, no reboot.
The broken CD player was a problem with an application named ‘HotSpot Shield’. Actually a pretty good app that enables you to access all kinds of sites that are blocked in your country (e.g. Veoh, Hulu, some YouTube vids). But, the thing came with very annoying ads so I uninstalled it. A couple of days ago I bought a wireless router and setup a network. All went well, but the connection dropped suddenly. I checked the TCP/IP stack and saw ‘Hotspot Shield’ as a layer in there. Damn! I said: “He’s the guy”.
Adrian Monk : "here's what happened"
Here’s what happened (Adrian Monk style): “At first we thought it was maybe a virus causing this, but cleaning with plenty of scanners didn’t resolve it. The next suspect was the hard disk, but even chckdsk /r didn’t solve the problems. Then we suspected the drivers themselves and reinstalled and updated all drivers. That didn’t work. But then we found HotSpot leaving a trace in network settings. Hotspot Shield needed to intercept all traffic in order to make sure it looked like it was coming from the US. So it put itself not only in Program Files, but also as an add-on in browsers, and as a layer in TCP/IP. That interfered with the built-in modem driver, which then failed. The modem driver looked for another resource and used one that conflicted with the DVD drive. After removing HotSpot from all network settings and uninstalling the DVD driver, it came back automatically and started responding again. Patient saved, and HotSpot put away.”
The Real Sixth Sense – digital meets real life
Filed under: Science and Philosophy, software | Tags: computer, MIT, sixth sense
Leave a Comment While Microsoft is playing with their $10,000 surface table, MIT creates a $300 alternative that does more. It’s a wearable device aptly named Sixth Sense that lets you interact with the digital world, in awesome ways. Just watch…
How to save the planet
Actually, according to Marvin Minksy, the co-founder of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Artificial Intelligence lab, who is according to some people ‘the smartest guy we know’, it won’t be too hard at all. All we have to do is wait 16 more years, after which solar technology will be so advanced and cheap that we can easily use all that solar energy to power the world.
Of course it doesn’t hurt to start now, but according to Marvin solar energy advances follow the law of Moore (not More, Moore). Moore says every 2 years computers will be twice as fast and twice as powerful. So far that has been true for over 30 years.
The video below is hilarious but at the end gets a little more serious…
(This is a Blog Action Day post)
A dead simple, lightweight javascript calendar
Filed under: JavaScript, Programming | Tags: JavaScript, light weight, Programming, web development
Comments (4) 
I recently needed a good light weight javascript calendar but couldn’t find it. The problem is that online I could find many calendars, but they all suffered from one of two problems: they were either too heavy, or they were badly written (aka coding like it’s 1999).
I hereby present a very lightweight javascript calendar object. It can be used anywhere where you need to select a date.
It features the following:
- no library. That’s right, it does NOT use mootools, it does NOT use jQuery.
- clean code. Yes it can be improved, but that would make it a heavy calendar again.
- it does not do Date magic. If you want date magic I can recommend date.js. (oh, and that means things like ‘3 days ago’ etc.)
- it’s lightweight, mainly because it doesn’t do magic and it doesn’t have a library. It’s 2K uncompressed, 1.5K using dean edwards packer.
- no popup windows. All
Download
Usage
var cal = new MBCalendar('inp', 'btn', 'click');
Where
- inp is the id of the input that will be retrieving the calendar, and
- btn is the id of the element that will trigger the calendar to show, and
- click is the name of the event that will trigger the calendar
- in the onload script, in this example ‘out’ is the id of the element that will hold the calendar.
This way it can be used as a date picker, but it can also be used as a visible calendar with navigation (static). Basically the output is simply the HTML, so you can use it anywhere.
All dates van be individually styled, since they all get a unique id. Also all dates get class names so you can style either a certain year, month, or day of the month. E.g. ‘.y2009′ will style every date in 2009, ‘.m3′ will style every march, and ‘.y2009.m3′ will style every day in March, 2009.
Source code
Now for the code
/*(c) Michiel van der Blonk 2009 - license: http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php*/
function MBCalendar(m, y)
{
this.m = m;
this.y = y;
this.weekDays = ['Sunday', 'Monday', 'Tuesday', 'Wednesday', 'Thursday', 'Friday', 'Saturday'];
}
MBCalendar.prototype.$ = function(s) {return document.getElementById(s)};
// export as array
MBCalendar.prototype.toArray = function() {
var d;
var dates = [];
for (var i=1;i<32;i++)
{
d = new Date(this.y,this.m-1, i);
if (d.getMonth() == this.m-1)
dates.push(d);
}
return dates;
};
// export as html
MBCalendar.prototype.toHTML = function() {
var i;
var ret, dayId, dayClass;
ret = dayId = dayClass = '';
var dates = this.toArray();
ret += '
<table class="cal">' + '
<tr>';
for (i in [0,1,2,3,4,5,6])
ret += '
<th>' + this.weekDays[parseInt(dates[i].getDay())].substr(0,1) + '</th>
';
ret += '</tr>
<tr>';
for (i in dates)
{
var d = dates[i];
if ((parseInt(i) % 7) == 0)
ret += '</tr>
';
if ((parseInt(i)+1 % 7==0) && i<dates .length)
ret += '
<tr>';
dayClass = 'y'+d.getFullYear() + ' m' +(d.getMonth()+1) + ' d' + d.getDate();
dayId = 'day-' + parseInt(d.getTime()/86400000);
ret += '
<td id="' + dayId + '" class="' + dayClass +'">' + dates[i].getDate() + '</td>
';
}
ret = ret + '</dates></table>
';
return ret;
};
window.onload = function() {
var $ = function(s) {return document.getElementById(s)};
var c;
$('showCal').onclick = function() {
var y = $('year').value;
var m = $('month').value;
c = new MBCalendar(m, y);
$('out').innerHTML = c.toHTML();
};
$('prev').onclick = function() {
var d = new Date(c.y,c.m-2,1);
c = new MBCalendar(d.getMonth()+1, d.getFullYear());
$('out').innerHTML = c.toHTML();
}
$('next').onclick = function() {
var d = new Date(c.y,c.m,1);
c = new MBCalendar(d.getMonth()+1, d.getFullYear());
$('out').innerHTML = c.toHTML();
}
};
If you like you can integrate the prev, next and show methods in the Calendar object itself of course. I invite all javascript experts to crunch the code even more, without making it unreadable!
If you don’t integrate that code, you will need to add some standard HTML in a page to get a functional Calendar demonstration:
<input type="text" id="year" value="" /> <input type="text" id="month" value="" /> <button type="button" id="showCal">Show Calendar</button> <button type="button" id="prev">prev</button> <button type="button" id="next">next</button>
Some alternative calendars you might like:
- Aeron’s Mootools calendar. Check the 1.2 modified version.
- The Vista Like Ajax calendar (vla). The only problem I have with this one is it doesn’t work properly in IE8
update: there was still some debug code in there, it’s removed now. Also it seems wordpress messes up the code when I paste it. Change line 16 to have the ‘<’ char instead of <
Awesome list of mootools resources
Filed under: JavaScript, Programming | Tags: JavaScript, mootools
Leave a Comment Check that out, if ever I need anything mootools I will find it here.
http://www.w3avenue.com/2009/07/28/list-of-really-useful-plugins-and-resources-for-mootools/
Orion graduated
Now all he needs to learn is to listen to Mom and Dad. For the rest all is going fine. Too bad he can’t do his acrobatic stunts at school (they say it’s too dangerous).
We didn’t bring a camera, I forgot it while rushing out. Stupid. But we may get some pics from the other parents.
The teacher gets an F for spelling (Orion v/d Blok?)
The accomplishment:
