The device itself, including the developer license or the research license is a bit expensive, but wouldn´t be great to develop some software using this device?? I think possibilities are endless…

I can see a couple of problems that are making me having second thoughts about the project… I can assume that the headset itself is not a toy, and measures correctly all the stuff it is supposed to measure. The real value however relies in the software API bundled with it. Emotiv seems to have translated successfully all the indicators associated with thoughts like “up”, “down”, or “push” into something detectable by their model.

However, let´s imagine for a minute that it just does not work. How do you prove it? How do you tell apart a software failure and a wrong “way of thinking”. It´s a delicate matter.

I´ll definitely keep an eye on it though!

If you have some spare time, it is quite fast to read. It made my day!

I’ve been using it for a week now, and I can’t live with it. I am still using the trial version, but I’ll buy it for sure when it ends. A personal license costs 39$, but it’s nothing compared to the power of the plugin: themes, customization, several useful options, regular expressions engine to match and group tabs, etc…. Just great!. A shame it is not open source:D

It corrects a rare bug using the alternate identification string sometimes triggered on *some* laptops like the asus V1S and some macbooks.

More details and downloads HERE.

More details and downloads HERE.

When I go to sleep, I start the Windows Media Player usually with a large playlist, or even the loop function activated. I do not want, however, the device playing all night long wasting my battery… Well, it’s the very definition of Sleep Timer, ain’t it?

I put together a couple of lines of code, and made this **extremely basic** sleep timer. I did something similar many years ago for the iPaq, and now I’ve don it again. I spent more time trying to make the cab installer that the code itself:D. The code is almost worthless to put here, but I’ll do it just in case someone wants to modify it to start a different process other than the Media Player.

The “Suspend the device” function, calls the SetSystemPowerState API which according to the MSDN its effect may vary on each device, as it relies on some OEM power management implementation. It will not be necessary in most of modern devices, but I included it just in case.

Sleep Timer Source Code ]]> http://somemorebytes.com/wp/index.php/2010/07/sleep-timer-for-windows-media-player-mobile/feed/ 0 http://somemorebytes.com/wp/index.php/2010/04/anatomy-of-a-null-derreference-in-the-kernel-linux/ http://somemorebytes.com/wp/index.php/2010/04/anatomy-of-a-null-derreference-in-the-kernel-linux/#comments Sun, 18 Apr 2010 11:41:12 +0000 somemorebytes http://somemorebytes.com/wp/?p=515 This week KSplice published in his blog the second part of a interesting article, explaining the effect of a dangerus NULL derreference in the Linux Kernel. In the last year many of those holes were fixed in the kernel, so finding a true exploit wouldn’t be easy. It is still nice to understand how this kind of exploit works.

Here the first and second parts of the article.

I’m using  a custom eclipse installation. The ubuntu repositories package is too old, so I always update my eclipse installation from the eclipse website. I install it to /opt/eclipse. If you’re using the default installation package, just look for yor install forlder, probably somewhere near /usr/share.

Now, I assume you installed the subclipse plugin, a nice SVN client. This client uses JavaHL libraries to communicate to the svn program istelf, and  unfortunately, this libraries installation is up to you. If you do not have them, subclipse will complain about missing libraries each time you need to do somthing svn-related. So, to fix if:

1. Install the javaHL libraries:
   sudo apt-get install libsvn-java
2. Tell eclipse where to look for them. Edit the file /opt/eclipse/eclipse.ini (or /your-eclipse-path/eclipse.ini), and locate the line:
   -vmargs
   Now just below this line, add the following one:
   -Djava.library.path=/usr/lib/jni
3. Happy coding!.

• “The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time.” – Tom Cargill
• “In order to understand recursion, one must first understand recursion.” – Author Unknown
• “I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone.” – Bjarne Stroustrup
• “A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any other invention in human history, with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila.” – Mitch Ratcliffe
• “There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.” -C.A.R. Hoare
• “The gap between theory and practice is not as wide in theory as it is in practice.” – Author Unknown
• “If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.” – Gerald Weinberg
• “If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.” – Edsger Dijkstra
• “Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.” – Bill Gates
• “Nine people can’t make a baby in a month.” – Fred Brooks
• “Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.” – Rich Cook
• “There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don’t believe this to be a coincidence.” – Jeremy S. Anderson
• “Before software can be reusable it first has to be usable.” – Ralph Johnson

It is not new that monospaced fonts make an overall better alignment, improving the scan speed while reading code. There are a lot of Monospaced fonts there. The one I’ve been using is called Consolas. Just google it and you’ll find a lot more. ProggyFonts, Pragmata and Inconsolata are great too. However, proportional fonts are in general a bit easier on the eye. I compensate this modifying the color scheme of my editors.

Color schemes can help you improve redability on the code while providing a more comfortable experience using less contrast between the background of the screen and the font. My personal solution for many years was just setting the background color of my code editors in a medium gray tone instead the default white. Just this small change already did a great good to my eyes.

Recently, I’ve been looking for real color schemes, with appropiate syxtax color styles. There’s a lot written about this. In my search I came up with Zenburn, a Vim color scheme, and I inmediately fell in love with it.

Using Zenburn with the Consolas font is in my opinion one of the best editor setups for coding during long hours, specially in the dark.

Here you have some links:

Zenburn For Visual Studio (Jeff Attwood)
Zenburn Remixed for Visual Studio (more relaxed highlight and command console). This is the one I’m using, just with a smaller font.
Zenburn for Notepad++ (better than the integrated one)
Zenburn for Vim
Zenburn (and more) for Eclipse and CDT

Gvim Zenburn