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Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Visual Studio 2010 Installation Problems, Random Stuff, and More

You'd think that this would be fairly easy considering the company that makes the IDE also makes the operating system. Unfortunately not.

As I (and others) have discovered there are times when you'll need to manually download and install sub-components from the Microsoft Download Centre (http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/default.aspx) because the installer is unable to do so by itself if there happens to be a problem with the ISO that you have downloaded.

Funnily enough, based on research into other people's problems, manual extraction and installation from the subsequent file has been a constant theme. Complete re-installs (of Windows) have been mentioned as well as removals and re-installs of some components.

Download problems seem to occur on a particularly regular basis with their http://www.dreamspark.com website. It seems the VS2010 download seems to have continual problems when being downloaded as a single whole file. Funny thing is that while the actual Microsoft website has the option to download as seperate large files that are later combined they don't seem to offer this option on the http://www.dreamspark.com website. Just like Windows 7 though there seems to be some evidence to suggest that it may be possible to convert from one version to another (including trial versions) using minimal modification of key files.


All this being said, once installed the program is actually quite good. On an mid-spec i3 laptop it was perfectly responsive and quite functional.

- as usual thanks to all of the individuals and groups who purchase and use my goods and services
http://sites.google.com/site/dtbnguyen/
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- "All history is contemporary history — the past serves the present, and at a time of war, and Australia has been at war for nearly 20 years, the past is conscripted to serve," he says.
"Myths provide comfort and justification … fostered and embraced by those who seek not truth, but reassurance, even if it is based on falsehood or exaggeration.
"Familiar, comforting stories are more welcome than headlines with no victory in sight."
- The study of religiosity and intelligence explores the link between religiosity and issues related to intelligence and educational level (by country and on the individual level). Religiosity and intelligence are both complex topics that include diverse variables, and the interactions among variables are not always well understood. For instance, intelligence is often defined differently by different researchers[1] and also all scores from intelligence tests are only estimates of intelligence because concrete measurements, like those of mass or distance, cannot be achieved given the abstract nature of the concept of "intelligence".[2] Religiosity is also complex in that it involves wide variations of interactions of religious beliefs, practices, behaviors, and affiliations in diverse cultures.[3]
A meta-analysis found a negative correlation between intelligence quotient (IQ) and religiosity for western societies. The correlation was suggested to be a result of nonconformity, more cognitive and less intuitive thinking styles among the less religious, and less of a need for religion as a coping mechanism.[4] Some studies have shown a correlation between national average IQ and levels of atheism in society,[5] although others have questioned whether any correlations are due to a complex range of social, economic and historical factors, which interact with religion and IQ in different ways.[6] Others argue that any differences in national IQ and levels of atheism are not necessarily due to levels of religiosity or nonreligiosity, but are correlated with economic, educational, environmental, and social factors.[7] Less developed and poorer countries tend to be more religious, perhaps because religions play a more active social, moral and cultural role in those countries.[8]
One study suggests that intuitive thinking may be one out of many sources that affect levels of religiosity and that analytical thinking may be one out of many sources that affect disbelief.[9] However, others who have reviewed studies on analytic thinking and nonbelievers suggest that analytical thinking does not imply better reflection on religious matters or disbelief.[10]
A global study found that Jews, Christians, religiously unaffiliated persons, and Buddhists have, on average, higher levels of education than the global average.[11] On the individual level, one study observed that education level is positively correlated with a belief in a god in African countries, and negatively correlated in western countries.
- The earliest historical records of herbs are found from the Sumerian civilisation, where hundreds of medicinal plants including opium are listed on clay tablets. The Ebers Papyrus from ancient Egypt describes over 850 plant medicines, while Dioscorides documented over 1000 recipes for medicines using over 600 medicinal plants in De materia medica, forming the basis of pharmacopoeias for some 1500 years. Drug research makes use of ethnobotany to search for pharmacologically active substances in nature, and has in this way discovered hundreds of useful compounds. These include the common drugs aspirin, digoxin, quinine, and opium. The compounds found in plants are of many kinds, but most are in four major biochemical classes: alkaloids, glycosides, polyphenols, and terpenes.
Medicinal plants are widely used in non-industrialized societies, mainly because they are readily available and cheaper than modern medicines. The annual global export value of 50,000 to 70,000 plants with suspected medicinal properties was estimated to be US$2.2 billion in 2012,[3] and in 2017, the potential global market for botanical extracts and medicines was estimated at several hundred billion dollars.[2] In many countries, there is little regulation of traditional medicine, but the World Health Organization coordinates a network to encourage safe and rational usage. Medicinal plants face both general threats, such as climate change and habitat destruction, and the specific threat of over-collection to meet market demand.[2]
- The Age of Enlightenment (also known as the Age of Reason or simply the Enlightenment)[1][2] was an intellectual and philosophical movement that dominated the world of ideas in Europe during the 18th century, the "Century of Philosophy".[3]
The Enlightenment emerged out of a European intellectual and scholarly movement known as Renaissance humanism. Some consider the publication of Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica (1687) as the first major enlightenment work. French historians traditionally date the Enlightenment from 1715 to 1789, from the beginning of the reign of Louis XV until the French Revolution. Most end it with the turn of the 19th century. Philosophers and scientists of the period widely circulated their ideas through meetings at scientific academies, Masonic lodges, literary salons, coffeehouses and in printed books, journals, and pamphlets. The ideas of the Enlightenment undermined the authority of the monarchy and the Church and paved the way for the political revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries. A variety of 19th-century movements, including liberalism and neoclassicism, trace their intellectual heritage to the Enlightenment.[4]
The Enlightenment included a range of ideas centered on reason as the primary source of knowledge and advanced ideals such as liberty, progress, toleration, fraternity, constitutional government and separation of church and state.[5][6] In France, the central doctrines of the Enlightenment philosophers were individual liberty and religious tolerance, in opposition to an absolute monarchy and the fixed dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church. The Enlightenment was marked by an emphasis on the scientific method and reductionism, along with increased questioning of religious orthodoxy—an attitude captured by the phrase Sapere aude (Dare to know).[7]
- During the Age of Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries, many critical thinkers saw religion as antithetical to reason. For them the Middle Ages, or "Age of Faith", was therefore the opposite of the Age of Reason.[28] Kant and Voltaire were vocal in attacking the Middle Ages as a period of social regress dominated by religion, while Gibbon in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire expressed contempt for the "rubbish of the Dark Ages".[29] Yet just as Petrarch, seeing himself at the cusp of a "new age", was criticising the centuries before his own time, so too were Enlightenment writers.
Consequently, an evolution had occurred in at least three ways. Petrarch's original metaphor of light versus dark has expanded over time, implicitly at least. Even if later humanists no longer saw themselves living in a dark age, their times were still not light enough for 18th-century writers who saw themselves as living in the real Age of Enlightenment, while the period to be condemned stretched to include what we now call Early Modern times. Additionally, Petrarch's metaphor of darkness, which he used mainly to deplore what he saw as a lack of secular achievement, was sharpened to take on a more explicitly anti-religious and anti-clerical meaning.
Nevertheless, the term 'Middle Ages', used by Biondo and other early humanists after Petrarch, was in general use before the 18th century to denote the period before the Renaissance. The earliest recorded use of the English word "medieval" was in 1827. The concept of the Dark Ages was also in use, but by the 18th century it tended to be confined to the earlier part of this period. The earliest entry for a capitalized "Dark Ages" in the Oxford English Dictionary is a reference in Henry Thomas Buckle's History of Civilization in England in 1857.[1] Starting and ending dates varied: the Dark Ages were considered by some to start in 410, by others in 476 when there was no longer an emperor in Rome, and to end about 800, at the time of the Carolingian Renaissance under Charlemagne, or alternatively to extend through to the end of the 1st millennium.
- In particle physics, a baryon is a type of composite subatomic particle which contains an odd number of valence quarks (at least 3).[1] Baryons belong to the hadron family of particles, which are the quark-based particles. They are also classified as fermions, i.e., they have half-integer spin.
The name "baryon" comes from the Greek word for "heavy" (βαρύς, barýs), because, at the time of their naming, most known elementary particles had lower masses than the baryons. Each baryon has a corresponding antiparticle (antibaryon) where their corresponding antiquarks replace quarks. For example, a proton is made of two up quarks and one down quark; and its corresponding antiparticle, the antiproton, is made of two up antiquarks and one down antiquark.
As quark-based particles, baryons participate in the strong interaction, which is mediated by particles known as gluons. The most familiar baryons are protons and neutrons, both of which contain three quarks, and for this reason these particles are sometimes described as triquarks. These particles make up most of the mass of the visible matter in the universe, as well as forming the components of the nucleus of every atom. Electrons (the other major component of the atom) are members of a different family of particles, known as leptons, which do not interact via the strong force. Exotic baryons containing five quarks (known as pentaquarks) have also been discovered and studied.
- In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state.[1]
The term, closely associated with the work of Edward Lorenz, is derived from the metaphorical example of the details of a tornado (the exact time of formation, the exact path taken) being influenced by minor perturbations such as the flapping of the wings of a distant butterfly several weeks earlier. Lorenz discovered the effect when he observed that runs of his weather model with initial condition data that was rounded in a seemingly inconsequential manner would fail to reproduce the results of runs with the unrounded initial condition data. A very small change in initial conditions had created a significantly different outcome.[2]
The idea that small causes may have large effects in general and in weather specifically was earlier recognized by French mathematician and engineer Henri Poincaré and American mathematician and philosopher Norbert Wiener. Edward Lorenz's work placed the concept of instability of the Earth's atmosphere onto a quantitative base and linked the concept of instability to the properties of large classes of dynamic systems which are undergoing nonlinear dynamics and deterministic chaos.[3]
The butterfly effect can also be demonstrated by very simple systems.
- Most Americans – regardless of whether they were once on the left or right – have become politically disempowered and economically insecure. Nowadays it’s the boardwalk versus private jets on their way to the Hamptons.
As Rahm Emmanuel, Barack Obama’s chief of staff and former mayor of Chicago, told the New York Times: “This is really the crack-up. Usually fights are Democrats versus Republicans, one end of Pennsylvania versus the other, or the left versus the right. Today’s squabbles are internal between the establishment versus the people that are storming the barricades.”
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- But at the heart of connection between bad boy folk hero Trump and his adulating base is a fundamental misunderstanding. Trump is not fighting the establishment. Trump is not using his powers to help his angry supporters. Trump is screwing them.
He attacks their health by eliminating rules which reduce corporate air and water pollution. He hasn’t stopped his repeated attempts to cut their health insurance by Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare. He is dismantling the bank and lending regulations overseen by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Nothing good will come to average Americans from the foreign members of Trump’s club. These are all assaults on the standard of living, present and future, of non-elite America.
The 2017 tax cuts are the best example of how Trump betrays his base. Poor and middle-income Americans got small tax cuts, but also inherit gigantic future deficits to pay for the enormous cuts in corporate and income taxes for the very wealthy.
Trump is good at what he does, but that is bad for everybody else, especially for those who cheer him on.
- Bartlet: Did you have a drink yesterday?
Leo: No, sir.
Bartlet: Do you plan to have a drink today?
Leo: No, sir.
Bartlet: That's all you ever have to say to me.
Leo: You know it's gonna make things very hard for a while.
Bartlet: You fought in a war, got me elected, and you run the country. I think we all owe you one, don't you?
- A ray of light being refracted in a plastic block.
In physics refraction is the change in direction of a wave passing from one medium to another or from a gradual change in the medium.[1] Refraction of light is the most commonly observed phenomenon, but other waves such as sound waves and water waves also experience refraction. How much a wave is refracted is determined by the change in wave speed and the initial direction of wave propagation relative to the direction of change in speed.
For light, refraction follows Snell's law, which states that, for a given pair of media, the ratio of the sines of the angle of incidence θ1 and angle of refraction θ2 is equal to the ratio of phase velocities (v1 / v2) in the two media, or equivalently, to the indices of refraction (n2 / n1) of the two media.[2]
{\displaystyle {\frac {\sin \theta _{1}}{\sin \theta _{2}}}={\frac {v_{1}}{v_{2}}}={\frac {n_{2}}{n_{1}}}} \frac{\sin\theta_1}{\sin\theta_2} = \frac{v_1}{v_2} = \frac{n_2}{n_1}
Refraction of light at the interface between two media of different refractive indices, with n2 > n1. Since the phase velocity is lower in the second medium (v2 < v1), the angle of refraction θ2 is less than the angle of incidence θ1; that is, the ray in the higher-index medium is closer to the normal.
Optical prisms and lenses utilize refraction to redirect light, as does the human eye. The refractive index of materials varies with the wavelength of light,[3] and thus the angle of the refraction also varies correspondingly. This is called dispersion and causes prisms and rainbows to divide white light into its constituent spectral colors.[4]
- Doppler blueshift is caused by movement of a source towards the observer. The term applies to any decrease in wavelength and increase in frequency caused by relative motion, even outside the visible spectrum. Only objects moving at near-relativistic speeds toward the observer are noticeably bluer to the naked eye, but the wavelength of any reflected or emitted photon or other particle is shortened in the direction of travel.[1]
Doppler blueshift is used in astronomy to determine relative motion:
The Andromeda Galaxy is moving toward our own Milky Way galaxy within the Local Group; thus, when observed from Earth, its light is undergoing a blueshift.
Components of a binary star system will be blueshifted when moving towards Earth
When observing spiral galaxies, the side spinning toward us will have a slight blueshift relative to the side spinning away from us (see Tully–Fisher relation).
Blazars are known to propel relativistic jets toward us, emitting synchrotron radiation and bremsstrahlung that appears blueshifted.
Nearby stars such as Barnard's Star are moving toward us, resulting in a very small blueshift.
Doppler blueshift of distant objects with a high z can be subtracted from the much larger cosmological redshift to determine relative motion in the expanding universe.[2]
- In cosmology, the cosmological constant (usually denoted by the Greek capital letter lambda: Λ) is the value of the energy density of the vacuum of space. It was originally introduced by Albert Einstein in 1917[1] as an addition to his theory of general relativity to "hold back gravity" and achieve a static universe, which was the accepted view at the time. Einstein abandoned the concept after Hubble's 1929 discovery that all galaxies outside the Local Group (the group that contains the Milky Way Galaxy) are moving away from each other, implying an overall expanding universe.
Since the 1990s, several developments in observational cosmology, especially the discovery of the accelerating universe from distant supernovas in 1998 (in addition to independent evidence from the cosmic microwave background and large galaxy redshift surveys), have shown that around 68% of the mass–energy density of the universe can be attributed to dark energy.[2] While dark energy is poorly understood at a fundamental level, the main required properties of dark energy are that it functions as a type of anti-gravity, it dilutes much more slowly than matter as the universe expands, and it clusters much more weakly than matter, or perhaps not at all. The cosmological constant is the simplest possible form of dark energy since it is constant in both space and time, and this leads to the current standard model of cosmology known as the Lambda-CDM model, which provides a good fit to many cosmological observations.

Friday, June 24, 2011

IT Cheat Sheets

Over time, I've found that shorter resources can be just as useful as having a reference book around you. To this end I've developed a list of short resources for this exact purpose. To make this list the reference must be short (one page is ideal), it must be clear, and it must provide shortcuts on commands and or aspects of a piece of a relevant piece of software that you would end up using. It will be updated over time.

Various, http://www.cheat-sheets.org/

- as usual thanks to all of the individuals and groups who purchase and use my goods and services
http://sites.google.com/site/dtbnguyen/
http://dtbnguyen.blogspot.com.au/

Thursday, June 23, 2011

Free and Open Source Desktop Programs

Over time, its become apparent that free and Open Source alternatives have made a free desktop a reality. Some of the following represent programs that you might like to use as an alternative to paid and proprietary software. This list will be updated over time.

Easeus Suite, http://www.easeus.com
Piriform Suite, http://www.piriform.com/
Paragon Suite, http://www.paragon-software.com

- as usual thanks to all of the individuals and groups who purchase and use my goods and services
http://sites.google.com/site/dtbnguyen/
http://dtbnguyen.blogspot.com.au/

Monday, June 20, 2011

Short Yet Useful IT Books

There are a number of different categories to allow you to show up on this list. The book needs to be about the same of your palm, it needs to be small and light enough to fit in your bag, and of course it needs to be useful. This list will be updated over time.

Building a Server With FreeBSD, http://nostarch.com/freebsdserver.htm
C# 4.0 How-To - Real Solutions for C# 4.0 Programmers, http://www.amazon.com/C-4-0-How-Ben-Watson/dp/0672330636
Java Puzzlers, http://www.javapuzzlers.com/

- as usual thanks to all of the individuals and groups who purchase and use my goods and services
http://sites.google.com/site/dtbnguyen/
http://dtbnguyen.blogspot.com.au/

Thursday, June 16, 2011

Cheap UTM Solutions

Once upon a time I worked at for a company with a limited budget for a new UTM device but desired all of its capabilities. The following represents an overview of the results of an evaluation of various pieces of software. Note that it was based on an evaluation of these pieces of software about a year ago.

Endian: Does simplistic QoS, VPN, does possess some functionality issues such as restrictions on hostname, limitation on password, some odd issues with particular users when using NTLM authentication, etc...
pfSense: BSD based. Does everything we need, is free, stable but handling of QoS is very difficult, http://www.pfsense.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=40&Item...
m0n0wall: a limited feature set. Basically nothing more than an embedded firewall/router that is able to be installed on a PC, http://m0n0.ch/wall/features.php
Vyatta: basically a Cisco copy. Does a lot but can be difficult to administer and has a non-intuitive interface, http://www.vyatta.com/downloads/index.php
IPCop: Like m0n0wall an limited feature set. Basically nothing more than an embedded firewall/router that is able to be installed on a PC, http://www.ipcop.org/
Astaro: Slick interface, does everything we need but is too expensive for our budget even with the software only version, http://www.astaro.com/our_products/product_overview
CheckPoint, NetGear ProSafe, D-Link NetDefend, WatchGuard appliances are sort of within our price range once you factor in hardware costs but are also subject to support/warranty issues.

- as usual thanks to all of the individuals and groups who purchase and use my goods and services
http://sites.google.com/site/dtbnguyen/
http://dtbnguyen.blogspot.com.au/

Monday, June 13, 2011

Imate 8502 Quirks

Once upon a time this device was considered state of the art. In fact, it was one of the first smart phones to be available from Telstra in Australia. However, it does have a quirk that seems to be also present on other Imate branded phones. Namely, over time a pin on the headphone socket seems to get permanently bent that is used to detect the presence of a headset. Eventually, you'll only be able to use the headset to be able to talk to people. Hence, you only have two choices. Use it only with a handset and/or fix it.


Note, there are four screws to open the device. One of them is under the area where the stylus is installed while another is underneath the a rubber stopper in the exact opposite corner. Once it is opened push down on the pin and put the phone back together and reboot it to see whether it detects the lack of presence of a headset. Still, you'll note that the problem does seem to recur. Hence, it may be worth your time investigating the possibility of changing the socket itself?

While Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional is installed on the device, it does seem somewhat slow. Moreover, based on existing information there does not seem to be any upgrades in the pipeline available for this device. If you desire a more modern operating system you'll probably have to rely on the Open Source/Linux world such as Ubuntu or Android.

Luckily, it uses the ARM based Qualcomm MSM7200-400 which is also used in other devices which means that hardware support is likely to be good although I will leave experimentation for a later time...





http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Booting_from_SD

- as usual thanks to all of the individuals and groups who purchase and use my goods and services
http://sites.google.com/site/dtbnguyen/
http://dtbnguyen.blogspot.com.au/

Automated Government and Getting Country Issues via AI/ML, What is Vabbing?, and More

Automated Government and Getting Country Issues via AI/ML: - I've been researching the possibility of Semi to Fully Automated gover...