I felt I needed to repost this

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Sometimes you can see something in the shape of an animal’s spots, but have you ever seen a cat shape on the back of a cat? Link -via The Daily What

When I first saw the title on this, I wasn't sure I wanted to open it. There are so many ways to interpret the name ;-D

I finally decided to open it (curiosity killed the cat and all that), and this was so unusual I figured it was worth sharing. This may not be in the league of the image of the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich, but for me it brought to mind medical oddities like a twin that doesn't survive pregnancy and is absorbed into the body of the remaining fetus. Well, perhaps this cat had a black cat as a twin and it was so effectively absorbed that all that remained was a black outline on his brothers back.

Ahhh, I'm sure it is just a coincidence...

Defending the Mac

Posted by: Kevin Whipps on Dec 4, 2009 |

A few years back, an ex-girlfriend of mine asked me for help buying a new computer. She wanted to check e-mail, surf the web, and have a place to put her hundreds of pictures. At the time, I was a PC user, but was heavily considering moving to a Mac for my photography business, and was thinking about switching. So being the good friend that I am – as well as the guy who doesn’t want to deal with support after the fact – I took my ex out to buy a new iMac.

At the time, Apple hadn’t introduced the Intel chipset, Leopard was a year out and the iPhone was a fanboy pipe dream. And since there was only one Apple store in town and it was far, we picked up a brand new 17-inch iMac, a Netgear router and headed towards her apartment to set things up. An hour or so later, the computer was running fine and I told her to call me if she ever had any problems.

She called me yesterday, almost four years later, with her first problem. A few days prior, one of her friends came by the house and couldn’t connect his PC to her wireless network. He stomped around the place, blaming the “stupid Mac” and switched around a few cables until he finally gave up. After he left, she contacted me to fix the problem. “All my friends are telling me the problem is with my Mac, and that you’re an idiot for getting it for me,” she said.

We troubleshooted the problem for a bit and as I suspected, it was all router related, so we had it fixed in a few minutes and a call to the ISP later. But after hearing her friend’s comments, it started me thinking.

It’s 2009, almost 2010. I walk down the street and see people talking on their iPhones all the time. I never hear anyone referring to their Zune or iRiver, everyone has an iPod and they all love them. Mac commercials are now on TV all the time, and the OS is gaining in popularity. Hell, my tattoo artist has a Mac, and he doesn’t exactly fit the demographic. I guess I just didn’t figure that I had to defend the Mac anymore. After all, everyone knows about Apple nowadays, and you no longer feel like a pariah walking into a Best Buy and asking for Mac software.

For me though, the answer came when I asked my ex about the status of her computer. After all, a 4-year old iMac could be on its last legs, struggling to perform on a daily basis. “It’s great. No problems at all. I can play my music in the apartment, all my pictures download easily, and I’ve never had a problem.”

Which ultimately, is the point. People use Macs because they’re easy and headache free  - and there’s nothing wrong with that.

As if our photos weren't amusing/disheartening enough...

By Ethan Trex

(Mental Floss) -- Some companies find their niche and stick to it. Others, though, have to adapt to changing markets in order to thrive. Here's a look at some companies that switched industries at some point in their histories, usually for the better.

Tiffany's may know how to prettily wrap jewelry because the company began in the paper business.

1. Avon

David H. McConnell started Avon in 1886 without really meaning to. McConnell sold books door-to-door, but to lure in female customers he offered little gifts of perfume. Before long, the perfume McConnell was giving away had become more popular than the books he was selling, so he shifted focus and founded the California Perfume Company, which later became Avon.

2. Nokia

The telecom giant got its start in Finland in 1865, when Fredrik Idestam opened a pulp mill and started making paper on the banks of Tammerkoski. The company later bounced around a number of industries before getting serious about phones in the 1960s.

3. 3M

When the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company's founders opened their business in Two Harbors, Minnesota, in 1902, they weren't selling Post-It Notes. The partners originally planned to sell the mineral corundum, an important ingredient in building grinding wheels, directly to manufacturers.

4. Berkshire Hathaway

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The sprawling holding company helmed by Warren Buffett was originally a textile manufacturer that took off in 1839. Buffett took control in 1962, though, and by 1967 he started to move outside of textiles into insurance and other sectors. Mental Floss: Ginsu Knives, Dairy Queen and what else Warren Buffett owns

5. Wrigley

Like Avon, the chewing gum company got its start with a popular freebie. William Wrigley, Jr. founded the company in 1891 with the goal of selling soap and baking powder. He offered chewing gum as an enticement to his customers, and eventually the customers didn't care about the baking powder; they only wanted the gum.

6. Tiffany & Co.

The jewelry and silverware hot bed was originally a stationer called Tiffany, Young, and Ellis when it started in 1837. In 1853 Tiffany switched its core business and began focusing on jewelry.

7. Coleco

The defunct electronics corporation actually began as a leather goods company in Connecticut in 1932. In the early days it was known as the Connecticut Leather Company, which was later shortened to "Coleco."

8. Hasbro

The company behind Transformers and G.I. Joes began in 1923 as Hassenfeld Brothers. The titular brothers didn't make toys, though; they sold textile remnants. Their business gradually shifted into school supplies before making the leap to toys after the 1952 introduction of Mr. Potato Head. Mental Floss: How 10 classic toys were invented

9. Raytheon

The defense contractor started up in 1922 as the American Appliance Company, which worked on refrigeration technology. Eventually the company branched out into other areas of electronics and became Raytheon in 1925.

10. Colgate

The hygienic products company got its start in 1806, but it didn't make its first toothpaste until 1873. Founder William Colgate initially manufactured soap, candles, and starch.

11. Xerox

When Xerox got off the ground in 1906, it was as a maker of photographic paper and photography equipment called the Haloid Company. The company didn't introduce what we would think of as a copier until the Xerox 914 made its debut in 1959.

12. John Deere

The man behind the giant fleet of green tractors got his start as a blacksmith in Grand Detour, Illinois. After struggling to make plows that could cut through the area's tough clay, Deere hit on the idea of building plows out of cast steel, and his blacksmith gig gave way to a booming farm-supply business.

13. Reading Entertainment

Remember the Reading Railroad from the last time you played Monopoly? The company still (sort of) exists! The Reading Company got out of the railroad business in 1976 but was reborn as Reading Entertainment, which operates movie theaters mainly in Australia, New Zealand, and the U.S. Mental Floss: 11 things Wal-Mart has banned

14. Abercrombie & Fitch

When David Abercrombie founded the clothing store in 1892 in New York City, he wasn't dreaming of clothing high school and college students everywhere. The store was originally a sporting goods shop and outfitter; Abercrombie even outfitted Charles Lindbergh for his famous flight across the Atlantic. The version Abercrombie & Fitch you see in your local mall started to come about after Limited Brands bought the company in 1988.

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Over the last few years, the Nobel Prize in Physics has been all over the map. 2006 saw a pair of observational cosmologists honored, while 2007 went to the people who discovered giant magnetoresistance, a phenomenon that is currently key to keeping hard drive capacities growing. Perhaps worried that they were getting too practical, the 2008 Prize was awarded to theoreticians who delved into symmetry breaking, a phenomenon that helps explain why our universe has more matter than antimatter. This year's prize is a complete reversal, honoring scientists that took theoretical ideas that had been kicking around for decades and brought them to the brink of commercialization in the form of CCD imaging and fiber optic communications.

Half the Prize is going to Charles K. Kao, who worked at the UK's Standard Telecommunication Laboratories, for his key contribution to the development of fiber optics. The basic concept behind fiber optics is simple: light traveling down a medium can be propagated indefinitely if it's surrounded by a material that has a slightly lower refractive index, allowing it to be reflected internally. The material that describes the award notes that scientists were demonstrating that light could be guided down water jets back in the 1850s, and glass-based devices were on the market roughly a century later.

The problem was that the losses were too large for applications that transmitted light more than a few meters. The first glass fibers had lost 99 percent of the initial light within 20 meters, ruling them out as a medium for long distance communications. As the development of lasers made optical communications look inevitable, a variety of ways to improve the performance of transmission media were being explored.

The Nobel cites Kao for avoiding the approach taken by others in the field, which involved looking at ways to improve the reflectance of the light. Instead, Kao focused on the material properties of the glass itself, figuring out why the light was actually being lost in the first place. Kao identified the impurities in glass that were causing problems, and calculated that, if they were eliminated, there would be a sweet spot of wavelengths between absorption in the infrared and Rayleigh scattering at shorter wavelengths. The right combination of materials and wavelength should drop the losses more than a thousand-fold compared to the current state of the art.

By 1969, Kao and his coworkers had identified a material called fused silica as the best choice for an optical medium and, four years later, Corning Glass had figured out how to create fused silica fibers by chemical vapor deposition. Things have obviously gone pretty well since then, given that it's a near certainty that the bits that brought this article to you have almost certainly spent time on optical fibers at one point or another.

The other half of the prize goes to the development of charge-coupled devices, or CCDs, for digital image capture. The honorees are Willard Boyle and George Smith, both of whom did their work at Bell Labs. According to the Nobel citation, the two were working on developing imaging technology when a corporate decision was made to focus research on a memory technology that was termed magnetic bubble. Faced with a reallocation of their research funding, the duo repurposed some of their ideas so that they could be used for memory storage, creating a capacitor-based "charge bubble" memory.

Their device used standard MOS (Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor) techniques to deposit a metal on top of an insulating oxide layer, which formed a capacitor that stored charge in the underlying semiconductor. It didn't go far as a memory technology, but the duo were well aware that the metal could pick up charges from incident photons (a phenomenon that got Einstein a Nobel Prize in 1921). The more photons that struck a given patch of metal, the higher the charge that would be stored in the capacitor. An array of these devices could be exposed to light briefly, then the charge read out and converted to a numerical value: digital imaging got its start

Boyle and Smith laid out the concepts in a single, hour-long meeting in late 1969, and were publishing descriptions of CCDs in the Bell Systems Technical Journal by 1970; Kodak was already marketing a CCD by 1975. Various improvements in the device eventually brought it down to consumer devices, but it has since been supplanted by less power-hungry CMOS devices. Still, the CCD remains superior when it comes to image noise, which has allowed it to retain a market for high-end imaging devices where power is not a concern, like scientific imaging. Many microscopes and telescopes are still hooked up to CCD devices, and the Hubble Space Telescope carries several of them.

Overall, it's tempting to lump the two halves of this year's prize under the category optics, but that would probably be missing the more significant underlying theme. In both cases, the honorees took theoretical principles that had been circulating for decades and merged them with some half-practical steps that had been taken towards applications. By the time they were done, commercial devices that literally have changed the world were just a few years away.

Twitter is a popular social networking site on internet with millions of users. As something gets popular over internet naturally several new applications come up based on that service. To make life easy for developers Twitter as released its API to use in applications. Most of them use Twitter image icon as primary avatar in their application, which poses a problem. If the user changes his image on Twitter with different file name then the image link in the application fails to load avatar. To solve this problem Digg PHP guru has created this Tweetimag.es which always loads correct Twitter avatar of the user.

How does it work?

- Twitter API sends a request to Amazon’s S3 service to retrieve Twitter avatar of a user.

- Something like this-

- So when a user changes his image on Twitter with different file name Twitter API request will be failed and broken avatar appears.

Solution

- If you are developing a new Twitter application then you can replace something like above with

http://img.tweetimag.es url/i/{username}_{size}

- Replace username in the above URL with the Twitter username and size with any one following letter m, n, b or o.

- These letters allow you to control the size of the thumbnail, insert “m” for a 24×24, “n” for 48×48, “b” for 73×73 or “o” for original size thumbnail.

This will always bring right Twitter image of user, because image is cached gives 0% chance of displaying broken avatar.

Applications which already use tweetimag.es  service are wefollow, pixly and Tweetforboobs.

You might also like:

What is Twitter, How Twitter works, Why is Twitter built?

World of Twitter – Mosaic Twitter Wallpapers

Tips for writing iPhone Applications

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Coming Soon: Internet Apps that Heal Themselves

Written by Sarah Perez / September 30, 2009 6:00 AM / 0 Comments

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European researchers have been working for years on a system that allows developers to create internet applications that can manage and fix themselves. Called SELFMAN, the project aims to address the challenges inherent in large scale applications. According to Peter Van Roy, project coordinator, "The central challenge when you build big internet applications is how to keep them running without having to tweak and manage them all the time. We wanted to make big internet applications easy, so that all the management problems you normally have are handled by the system itself. It will take the internet to the next level."

Indeed it will.

How it Works

Within the SELFMAN project, there are four key areas determined to be vital in order for a distributed application to have the ability to manage itself: self-configuring, self-tuning, self-healing, and self-protecting.

To configure itself, an application needs to track all of its components, update them when needed, and make sure that all the different pieces are able to communicate with each other. Within the SELFMAN system, an individual component can be queried for this information, such as its version number and which other components it interacts with. If the version number is out-of-date, it would be automatically updated.

The self-tuning piece of the system involves having the application automatically adjust to changing loads as well as changes taking place among the various nodes on the network. To do so, it uses a load-balancing algorithm that detects overloads, node crashes, and other disruptions.

What was more challenging for the researchers was the self defense aspect of the SELFMAN system. They discovered that the safest systems were not those in which nodes are directly linked, but those in which nodes can communicate with other nodes in just a few steps. Within these sorts of networks, dubbed "small world" networks, the SELFMAN security service can automatically detect abnormal behavior and eject bad nodes as needed.

Results So Far

Already the team has had promising results. For example, Scalaris, an open-source scalable transactional storage for Web 2.0 services won first prize in the IEEE International Scalable Computing Challenge 2008. Peer-to-peer video streaming application PeerTV uses SELFMAN to quickly test an evaluate new P2P components. There's also a demo of a distributed Wikipedia that can handle more queries than the current version and a graphics program that lets multiple users collaborate on a design.

Van Roy believes that SELFMAN represents the first step towards an internet filled with "unbreakable" applications. "Right now we're just scratching the surface," he says.

For more information about these applications, stay tuned to ICT Results, a European research tracking firm, which will soon highlight the various applications in more detail.

Image credit: Unlisted Sightings

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