If I get one of these a month, then it will be monthly. If I don’t then it will be just a one off. But here is your Riddle of the Month… Infinity

If Infinity = Infinity
and Infinity+1 = Infinity
and 0-Infinity = -Infinity
What is Infinity-Infinity?

Answers in the comments please.

This is a shell script that will pull 5 random characters from /dev/random and print them out to standard output. It was created as the input component for a random password generator that I am currently writing.

Note on using /dev/random: as usual, using this source for entropy will give you pure randomness, though due to the nature of the random source (see Wikipedia entry on /dev/random) the script may sometimes lock up and fail to generate a complete output, as it has run out of randomness. If you are intending to use this alot, then it is advised to use /dev/urandom that doesn’t block, although that comes at the cost of a small bit of entropy.

#!/bin/bash
# Script for pulling x characters from a random source
#   and prints them out to stdout
# Version 1.0.0
# By Simon Cook (http://simoncook.org)
 
# Fill in the two variables below
#  "entropy" is the source of randomness
#  "chars" is the number of chars we want
entropy=/dev/random
chars=5
 
# Pull x characters from source
i=0
while read -r -n1 char
do
    echo -n "$char"
    (( i++ ))
if [ "$i" -eq "$chars" ]; then
   echo ""
   exit 0
fi
done < "$entropy"

Licensing: This small script is released under the CC-GNU GPL licence.

.

Right, well this will only be of interest to a few you, and even a smaller set of those will know what this is all about. Some time ago I created tchs.eu, a small URL shortener just like any other. Think of it as a Techious branded tinyurl.com. And for a while things were good. But, as is the way with all good things in the tech world, good is not good enough. Things always need to be better than they currently are.

Then came along bitly.Pro, and all was better. It has more sophisticated tracking, allowed us to use it basically anywhere in any application. However there have been a few downsides to this. bitly.Pro accounts (from what I can tell) act just like any bit.ly account so http://bit.ly/mylink and http://tchs.eu/mylink go to the same place. This does however mean that all previous tchs.eu links are now null and void. Sorry about that, that’s the cost for progress, but I’m about 99% sure that we’ll never have to do something like that again. Unless bit.ly goes bust or something, but I doubt that would happen.

Also, this currently means that only I have the power to create tchs.eu links. The way bitly.Pro accounts work is that a custom domain can be used by only one user account, any links I create automatically become tchs.eu links, but only I can create them. Though there is a fix to that, which you will be able to see soon. Thanks to the power of the bit.ly API (well any API really), I can create a nice little wrapper that gives any user (I decide) on the SpcookCMS platform access to create links without giving them my username and password. Woot!

So that’s the story about everything that’s happened to tchs.eu lately. But rest assured, any links created since Feb 1st 2010 will still work, and should still work for the forseeable future. Oh yeah, have a screenshot

bitly.Pro Dashboard

Note: For those interested, the tchs.eu link for this blog post is http://tchs.eu/ddyB23 xD

I came across this originally walking around Town, and thought “WTF is that Tiberium!?” and thought that maybe people here would be interested to see what looks like Tiberium in the real world. If you don’t know what Tiberium is, then I’m guessing you haven’t played any of the main Command & Conquer games.

Is this Tiberium at the bottom of the image?

Note: Sorry to the people at Sure, I don’t mean to pull your products apart

Edit: Here’s a link about Tiberium on Wikipedia for those who don’t know. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiberium

As promised in my previous thread… I was going to upload some pictures that I took with my dads SLR with its telephoto lens on. On here are only 800px resizes, but I think you can view bigger versions on my Flickr feed, or at the very least when I get my gallery back up and running you will see some nice images.

Comments either here or on the pics

Now, living in the UK, along with a lot of people, there was a bit of snow here. Apparently, it is the most in over 40 years. I say is, I mean it’s still going on. I think it’s quite fun, how a bit of snow causes so much havoc and problems for 99% of people here. 3mm I believe is all it takes to cause mayhem, so when over a foot falls overnight, hell most certainly breaks.

However, I have a few photos to share of the snow. I will categorise them based on the date I took them. Better versions are ok Flickr, and once I port my gallery here, they will also feature there, so hopefully it works out well.

Gallery for: UKSnow – 5 Jan 2010 -> 12 Jan 2010

I’ve also got some other pictures, but they are going in another post.

Returning soon…

Jumping on the ChromiumOS Downloads, I have built and compiled a version of ChromiumOS, the URL for viewing builds and downloading is available at http://www.spcook.co.uk/chromiumos

Well, the pre-cursor to an update. Just to let people know that watch this space, some cool stuff is coming

No peeking now

—
This is part 1 of a post that I will continue with when I have tested more
—

Well, as you may or not be aware, I recently bought a new laptop, a HP Pavilion tx2530. It doesn’t have multi-touch or any of the other naff that the latest TouchSmart tx2 series has, but who uses multi-touch after two days of use anyway? It does however have single touch and pen input, as Windows keeps reminding me. It also has a Windows Experience Rating of 4.3, which isn’t bad for a laptop I reckon.

The laptop came with Windows Vista Home Premium, but hey there’s a release candidate of Windows 7 floating around here, so why don’t I install it? So that’s just what I did, and now I will discuss what works and what doesn’t.

Installation

First step of any system, installing the operating system. In case things went south, I decided to keep Windows Vista installed as well. This would allow me to at least have a working system if things went wrong. So the first thing I did was to take an 80GB chunk of the main hard drive and called it my Windows 7 install, as you can see in the image of Computer.

Now that has been installed, it’s time for some driver installs. But wait, Windows 7 isn’t released as RTM yet, so what drivers to go for? Well, Microsoft claim to have 100% compatibility with Vista drivers, so a nice trip to the HP Driver Download site to get some drivers. Looking down the list, I grabbed everything, apart from the ATI graphics drivers which were very out of date, so I grabbed some dedicated Windows 7 drivers from the AMD site. Good hour of installing, and only one catch, the drivers for the sound chipset wouldn’t install because I’m running an “old” version of Windows. Thankfully Windows Update is a dream so that just fixed that problem.  Now that everything’s installed, lets see if it works.

Testing Previous Features

Now, the first thing that I need to make sure of, is that I have not lost any functionality by this move, but have indeed gained functionality, so I will test original features.

1. Sound buttons
   Now, as you may or may not be aware, the tx2530 has backlit buttons that are blue by default, but the mute button turns orange when the sound is muted. Before installing drivers, muting the sound did not cause the colour to change. After all the driver installs, this appears to work perfectly. Orange to blue and blue to orange, button or mute via windows, it all works. Not a stopper if it didn’t but nice that it does.
2. Tablet and touch
   The main point of the laptop, the touch screen and (more importantly) the tablet. After testing in Windows Journal, the pressure sensitivity from the pen, the rubber on the pen, right click, having touch enabled, all works perfectly. However I have one problem with it, and that is pen flicks. Basically you use gestures, throw up and down to scroll up and down, left to go back, and right to go forward. But wait… in Windows 7, left is forward and right is back. Sorry that doesn’t make any sense at all!?!?!? This is easily fixed however by enabling the 8 directional pen flicks and changing them manually, but that is just weird how it is in reverse by default.
3. Multimedia Remote
   This laptop comes with a tiny remote (that is almost guaranteed to be lost). Before the upgrade it used to control everything perfectly, it controls Windows Media Centre and also the QuickPlay software. After the new install, and mashing of every button on the remote, this still works perfectly, which is good.
4. Screen Image Auto-rotate
   A feature that at times has been a pain when I haven’t wanted it to automatically rotate the screen around. But heck, its still useful if you want to switch to tablet mode and not want to rotate the laptop. Shutting the screen here causes the same correct effect to happen which is good.
5. Other Features
   I have tested other features, but they are not worth of a full note, and all work perfectly. The SD Card, the monitor connection, TV out, network all work. I haven’t tested if the modem works, but then again I don’t use dialup or a modem for anything, so this really doesn’t need a test for me.

Now that these have been checked, let’s see what’s new.

New Items

The first item is quite useful, the new tablet pc input screen. Firstly, the on screen keyboard has some nice effects, firstly the buttons look nicer, and they now have a nice effect when you press them, which makes it easier to tell if you have hit the wrong button.

The pen input differs from Vista as well by as you write it does text recognition on the words and shows it where your writing once was. There are new gestures to split and merge words, and the best feature (in my opinion is if you click on a word you can view it in character mode and change letters as you go.

Summary of Part 1

Is Windows 7 worth it on my laptop? I would say definitely. Installing this has been very good so far, and in Part 2 I will be comparing battery performance as well as other features in Windows that should hopefully make it worth the switch from Vista to 7.

—
This is the end of part one of this post and I will get back to this. But for now there is more Windows 7 testing to do on my laptop.