Opera 9.5 Review

Pros:
I'm noticing a speed increase. This is a big bonus, as long as it's not delusional.
UPDATE It seems faster cause they turned caching on full blast.
Reading the Opera help forums, people are complaining because Opera doesn't work properly when people browse forums. (Caching is dumb because you need to see the lastest updates).
Nice programming trick Opera Programmers, but looks like it backfired. A little bit of testing would have determined that.


Cons:
Had to get mouse gestures working again.
go to Tools -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Shortcuts -> check the "enable mouse gestures".
They're the best thing since sliced bread.

Another bug is when I click 'edit' to edit a post in tv, an older version of the post is showing up.
It's a caching issue. Pressing F5 brings the most recently posted content.
This might help: go to Tools -> Preferences -> Advanced -> History -> "Check if cashed page is updated on server"
I changed it to update every 5 minutes.

I'm not a big fan of the new look of the tabs. Not as readable.
The skinning is too dark. I changed to the lighter skin look, it's more natural:
go to Tools -> Appearance -> Skin tab -> Windows Native.
You can revert back to the old 9.27 skin look if you want to also.

Watch videos in high quality on Youtube

Ok you all know that we have problems with youtube's poor quality of videos . Sometimes it's just annoying and it's getting on your nerves . It's so stupid when you upload something and youtube reduces it to poor quality.

Well those days are over , finaly something new on youtube. High quality videos!!!

Now you can watch your videos in good quality just by entering a simple code at the end of the URL of the video.
Just add this:

&fmt=18

or

&fmt=6

at the end of the URL.
You will notice the difference right away.
Note that the videos should load 2x slower , but who cares you get better quality!

Mac Osx leopard Server: 240 pages guide on security

Apple has just made available a reference guide on the Security of Mac OS X Server 10.5, aka Leopard Server.

Unix structure, access permissions, network management ... Everything is detailed. A reading recommended to everyone, even those who uses the desktop version of Mac OS X Leopard.


Get it here >> Leopard Server Security Guide

Throw your eggs at Steve Balmer

Remember the egg attack on steve balmer at the hungarian university?



Now it's your turn.....
If you have 5 minutes minutes to waste on a monday afternoon, have a swing at Steve Balmer with this free game.

Click here to test your skills....

Installing Torrentflux-b4rt on Ubuntu/Debian

Torrentflux is an excellent torrent creation, downloading, and seeding program that is used in Linux, and is especially helpful in a multi-user environment, as it maintains separate directories for everyone with an account. That being said, let's get started! In order to have a working install of torrentflux, you need a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) installation (I should note that lighttpd will work in place of Apache, but for this guide, we're going to use Apache). Let's start with that. (NOTE: if any commands come back with permission problems, simply add sudo to the front of the command, e.g. sudo apt-get rather than just apt-get).

Before doing anything, you should do this:


apt-get update
apt-get upgrade



This will bring your install up to date on all of the installed components (chances are, any box you've gotten from a provider is not up to date, so this is a necessary step).

Now, installing a LAMP.


apt-get install apache2 php5 php5-mysql mysql-server php5-cgi



Now that we've installed a LAMP, we need to set up MySQL. First, we create the root password for MySQL.


MYSQL_PWD=putapasswordhere (I strongly suggest not using your machine's root password)



To verify the entry of the password, we type:


echo "Your password for the root account of MySQL will be : '$MYSQL_PWD'."



What's echoed should be what you put in above. Next, we tell MySQL what password to use.


mysqladmin -u root password "$MYSQL_PWD"



Now that we have that all taken care of, we need to create a database for torrentflux to use. We do this by naming the database:


MYSQL_DB=putadatabasenamehere (I normally just use torrentflux as my database name, but you can choose whatever you want)



and then creating it:


echo "CREATE DATABASE IF NOT EXISTS $MYSQL_DB DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 DEFAULT COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci" \
| mysql --user=root --password



The password that it will ask for above will be the root password you defined in the first step of setting up MySQL.

Now, we need to actually create a user (and their subsequent password) to use the database. We do this by:


MYSQL_USERNAME=putausernamehere (up to you what to use, but remember what you put here)
MYSQL_USERPWD=putapasswordhere (again, I strongly suggest a different password than what's already in use)



To make sure the information you've put in is what you want, we'll ask the system to echo it back to us:


echo "The user account allowed to manage the '$MYSQL_DB' database is '$MYSQL_USERNAME' with password '$MYSQL_USERPWD'."



Now that we've created a user and password, we have to create that user in your new database.


echo "GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON $MYSQL_DB.*
TO $MYSQL_USERNAME@localhost
IDENTIFIED BY '$MYSQL_USERPWD';" | mysql --user=root --password



This will again prompt for that password we created when we first started setting up MySQL. Now, our work with MySQL is pretty much done. Now we move on to installing torrentflux itself.

First, we start off with installing its dependencies:


apt-get install bzip2 php5-gd php5-cli unrar-free grep python \
net-tools mawk wget unzip cksfv vlc-nox uudeview python-psyco python-crypto \
libxml-simple-perl libxml-dom-perl libdbd-mysql-perl libdigest-sha1-perl \
bittorrent bittornado



Once that's done, we can get to the nitty gritty install. First, we want to download torrentflux-b4rt:


cd /tmp/
wget http://download.berlios.de/tf-b4rt/torrentflux-b4rt_1.0-beta2.tar.bz2



Now, we need to extract it:


tar -xjf torrentflux-b4rt_1.0-beta2.tar.bz2 (alternatively, you can type torrent and press tab, and it should autocomplete the whole name of the file for you, assuming you don't have any other files in the /tmp/ directory with similar names



Now, we need to move torrentflux to its home:


mv torrentflux-b4rt_1.0-beta2 /opt/torrentflux



Now, we want to create a symbolic link from it's home to a place where the web front-end is visible and available to the HTTP server:


ln -s /opt/torrentflux/html /var/www/torrentflux



Now we need to make the configuration file writable by the webserver:


chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/torrentflux/inc/config/



Now we need to create the download folder for torrentflux. Some things should be considered before doing this:

1. Are you going to be running an FTP server on this box as well? If so, you should make the torrentflux download directory the root of that FTP server
2. Are you going to be using glftpd as your FTP server? If so, I strongly suggest using /glftpd/site/ as your download directory.

That being said, let's assume you're not using any FTP server at all.


mkdir /var/lib/torrentflux



Now, we need to make it writable by the HTTP server:


chown -R www-data:www-data /var/lib/torrentflux



Most of the work through PuTTY is done. Now, we need to go about configuring it.

Before we do that, we want to restart apache to make sure it has everything loaded that it needs to.


/etc/init.d/apache2 restart



Once that's done, go to your web browser and type:


http://ipofyourbox/torrentflux/



This should forward you directly to setup.php and you can begin there. If it doesn't, simply add setup.php at the end of the above url.

For the most part, the web interface is self explanatory:

When prompted for what type of database you're going to use, use MySQL.
When prompted for the database information for your MySQL database, remember what you named the database, the user you created for it, and the password you created for that user.
[1*]Uncheck the box for "Create new database"
When asked what the Download location will be, use the directory you specified above (this guide has /var/lib/torrentflux as that directory)
On the software dependencies screen, you may have an error for unrar. That's ok, as we'll just adjust that after torrentflux is running. On Debian, VLC may show an error as well..this is ok, as you likely won't be using VLC.
At the completion of the configuration, it will tell you that it could not delete setup.php. This is normal. We'll be doing that manually.

Now, we remove setup.php.


rm /var/www/torrentflux/setup.php



Then, we make it so that the HTTP server can no longer right to the config folder:


chown -R root:root /var/www/torrentflux/inc/config/



We're just about done! Go back to your browser and type:


http://ipofyourbox/torrentflux



This should autoforward to login.php. If it doesn't, simply put login.php at the end of the url.

The first account you'll create is the superadmin account. This account is the only one that has all the features in it. I suggest using admin as the username, and a strong password for the password.

Once logged in, there are a lot of things to play around with, and ultimately, it's up to you to adjust as you see fit. The first page you'll want to look at is the server page, and adjust the unrar dependency. Simply add -free to the end of it, and you'll be fine with that.

Secondly, you'll want to look at the transfer page, where you'll want to adjust the max bandwidth for your connection (e.g. 12500 for a 100Mb connection). Alternatively, you could just put 0 and let it use the max available bandwidth. The rest of the settings are really up to you (I also strongly suggest using bittornado as yoru default torrent client).

That pretty much sums up this guide for installing torrentflux-b4rt.

Thanks to Lone Wolf

Speed up downloads - increasing the half-open TCP limit in XP SP2 and Vista

Now if your new to BitTorrent, you might be new to downloading. If so you should know that Microsoft introducted a limit to stop many TCP connection attempts in XP SP2. This well-intentioned modification came as an attempt by Microsoft to limit the speed at which malicious worms (such as the infamous ‘Blaster’) could spread.

However, for software that relies on many connections such as bittorrent applications, this limit has the potential to cause slowdowns in certain situations. So what you want to do is change the half-open limit to a higher number.

For Windows XP SP2: http://www.lvllord.de/?lang=en&url=downloads
unzip it to your desktop and then run the .exe file. Follow the instructions and then change your limit to 75 or higher. Make sure you restart your computer immediately after it is finished--like it tells you.

For Windows Vista: http://www.yaronmaor.net/repair.htm
choose the right fix depending on your version of your tcpip.sys file.

There, now you will certainly increase your download speed, and possibly your upload speed as well.

The Future of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence is a term that has suffered from a lot of inflation the past years, with too many companies gladly and freely using the term for marketing to describe their (most definately not "AI") products. That probably has put many off.

This must be very frustrating for researchers in cognitive engineering and neuroscience because really massive steps forward are being made in understanding how the brain works thanks to their hard work.

Understanding how consciousness is formed is of course not the same as simulating it on a computer.
Still, thanks to this understanding expect many steps forward with adaptive / learning / evolving algorithms. These will find their way in the near future into robots, neural prosthetics, UAV's, image recognition, automonous vehicles, your washing machine and much more.
Look on the site of DARPA (always a good indicator) and you'll see the importance the US Army is placing on "intelligent" technologies.

So yes it is the future. But more in terms of a strategic direction than actual products.