Author Archives: Robin

European Battle Groups Evaluated

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The EU has had it’s own battlegroups since 2003. These are battalion sized (500/600 people) ground forces allowing the EU to project it’s power without outside help and reinforce its position as an international actor.
Allthough this is a great step forward for EU independent operations, the battlegroups are far from perfect.
This report was released which goes into the pros and cons of the current EU battlegroup structure – as well as explaining it – in detail. PDF link.

who killed bambi?

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who killed bambi? is a weblog of art images (so clothing, photography etc, all of a disturbing nature. Very disturbing.

#
The mission
A dangerous criminal gang is riding the net. They act in the dark, exploring the most sinister places, in search for the bloody heart of talent and creativity. Their favourite victims are banality, conformism, lack of humor and good will at any cost. Killing Bambi is a good metaphor for their mission. They are unarmed, actually, but they can still hurt.
So be careful…

These are some recent submissions

The Junk on New Build PCs

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If you buy a PC nowadays, it’ll come loaded with loads of crap you may or may not want: trial versions of software with nag screens after a period of time, the system builder’s own software, stuff that shows you ads, google desktop and toolbar etc etc etc.

PC World has a good article on this here.

To get rid of it there are a few clever freeware options:

PC Decrappifier is a good one for this

Dustbuster gets rid of temporary files and directories

There are more tools out there, mainly paid ones. Have a look here.

ASUS Eee PC

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It looks like ASUS is onto a winner here: it has all the hype on its side, it has weight and formfactor on its side and most of all it has price on its side. Running from around $300 – $ 400 this is a very cheap laptop with a 7″ screen and a Linux interface that allows any idiot to do the most rudimentary things you need to do. OK so at 900Mhz it’s slightly underpowered, but for the price you’re getting a seriously good deal. The market is undeveloped nations, but considering the size, I wonder how long it will be before it becomes an accessory for westerners who are finished pulling around huge laptops. All the components are solid state, so it’s also very reliable.

Forbes has a nice story on the history of this machine.

True Knowledge search engine

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This Cambridge based search engine doesn’t simply index websites, it links to databases and allows users to correct knowledge in the system in a wiki type style. This means it can intelligently answer questions instead of just looking at the relationships of words in the query related to websites it has indexed. Not only does the system answer your question, it also displays the logical steps it took to answer it.

USBmicro Controller

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USBmicro is a USB electrical device interface. It comes in two flavours: the U401 and the U421. The main difference is the form factor.


There’s quite a lot of documentation on the site how to program and install them

Kadtronix sells the unit with interface software, making the programming quite a bit easier

They also have a good tutorial, with instructions how to fit it to a motion detector

Home Domination has the controller and bundles it with several types of sensors, such as temperature sensors and it’s own software

But if you just want to buy the units themselves, they’re not expensive at around EUR. 28,- at dontronics

Army tests James Bond style tank that is ‘invisible’ | the Daily Mail

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I’ve covered a few of these pages before, but this one comes from the Daily Mail.

In principle, stealth cloaks are possible by using a camera on one side and a projector on the other. This story says it’s been done and demonstrated on a tank, and that they’re expecting to be able to do it without camera’s and projectors.

More invisible stuff around here

What society is watching

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The Economist has a good article on all the ways that society is watching and following you around nowadays.
An interesting point they make is that privacy has only been considered important since WW II. They fail to mention 2 reasons that this might be so:
1) The size of databases was only then becoming so huge that there was no way of destroying them before they came into Nazi hands. This lead to millions of Jews being targetted and killed because their ethnicity was explicity listed together with their adresses on paper (in the Netherlands they were particulary good at people registration).
2) The technology to build large databases to the point where they do invade privacy and become dangerous to it has only been around since WW II.

PHP development odds and ends

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The Eclipse framework is an open source development platform used mainly by Java and C developers. They do have a PHP Development Tools framework, which allows Eclipse to be used to develop PHP with. Version 1 was released 18/9/7 and there have been regular releases since 8/3/6.

Phalanger is a PHP compiler for the dot Net framework. What it does is compile PHP scripts and odds and ends into .net readable format, so you can run your PHP scripts directly from any .net compatible platform. Development has been quite rapid on this, but seems to be running out of steam with 121 issues still outstanding. The last nightly build was 21/9/7 and the last release on 20/5/7. Get going again, this one is great!

Roadsend PHP Compiler is a free open source native compiler for the PHP language. It compiles PHP source code to stand alone, native binaries which do not require an interpreter. Roadsend Compiler can build online web applications with Fast/CGI, offline web applications with an embedded web server (MicroServer), desktop GUI applications with PHP-GTK, and console applications. It is available on Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, and FreeBSD.

PHC-WIN is a windows application that allows one to create EXEs from PHP code. The PHP code is first converted to PHP bytecode using bcompiler, and then embedded into an EXE using embeder. Compiling the code into bytecode has two benefits: it speeds up load times since the PHP code doesn’t have to be interpreted, and it obfuscates the code so that it cannot be easily reverse engineered.

PHC-WIN itself is written in PHP and utilizes wbObjects, my object oriented layer for WinBinder to create windows controls.

Bambalam PHP EXE Compiler/Embedder is a free command line tool to convert PHP applications to standalone Windows .exe applications. The exe files produced are totally standalone, no need for php dlls etc. The php code is encoded using the Turck MMCache Encode library so it’s a perfect solution if you want to distribute your application while protecting your source code. The converter is also suitable for producing .exe files for windowed PHP applications (created using for example the WinBinder library). It’s also good for making stand-alone PHP Socket servers/clients (using the php_sockets.dll extension).