Angus Thinks

Author: AngusThinks

  • IP PBX delivered on an iPod?

    “We have put our complete IP PBX on it [the iPod Shuffle]”, says Dr. Harry Behrens, Managing Director of 4S newcom. “It is so compact that even on the smallest iPod Shuffle (512 MB) enough room is left for 4 full hours of music.”

    [link]

  • SQLEditor 1.3b9 Released

    I just made the latest version of SQLEditor (1.3b9) available on the website for download [2.8MB dmg].

    The new version has a collection of improvements. Particularly in stability. Chris submitted a test case which broke the parser and the save file functionality in really interesting ways, which are now fixed; SQLite support is a bit better, with a new user interface in the JDBC panel and there is better handling of the display preferences (including a new preference pane so you can set defaults).

    I also fixed some user interface bugs, like a really stupid one involving import and progress bars. The progress bar would display if you used file->import, but not if you dragged an sql file directly to the application icon. The reason was that there were two different paths depending on which action you took. This got refactored, which means that they both now show progress bars.

    I also have started to look at the file loading performance. Too much time is being taken up loading files. I’ve been working on some ideas for optimization and I’m hopeful for the next release.

    Unfortunately this isn’t the final candidate that I was hoping to release. But I think the improvements are definitely worth delaying the final build.

    Hopefully if there aren’t any reported bugs then the release version will be out within the next few weeks.

  • MalcolmHardie Solutions Weblog

    About the new MalcolmHardie Solutions weblog.

    The new weblog will contain posts about SQLEditor and other products.

    If you already reading Angus Thinks you probably don’t need to read the MalcolmHardie weblog as well because all the posts on the MalcolmHardie Solutions weblog will appear on Angus Thinks.

    This mirroring is done using the xmlrpc api and code from the blogger api plugin for wordpress

  • static link library to replace dylib in mac os x

    This post on the xcode-users list explains a neat trick on how to get xcode to link a static library instead of a dynamic library.

    Imagine the circumstance: you want to use a particular non-standard version of a native library which is already part of the system; perhaps you want to use an old version with better compatibility, or a newer version with more features. The obvious thing to do is to take a static build of the library and add it your xcode project.

    However this typically won’t work. The linker will choose the system version instead because by default it looks in all possible locations for a dynamic library first before looking through the same list of locations for a static library. If there is a dynamic library in any of the search locations it will always get chosen. There are some good reasons for this, but what if you really want to include your own statically linked version?

    The answer is to add the -Wl,-search_paths_first flag to the other link flags option (under linking in target settings).

    When this is set each possible location for a library is inspected first for a dynamic library and then for a static library. This means that the static library will get linked correctly.

    It’s not exactly something that will be needed frequently though.

    Edit: Apple have a technical Q&A article (1393) on this very subject which appeared a couple of days back and which I somehow missed.
    It offers this exact method. [Link]

  • New Bujold book

    The Sharing Knife by Lois McMaster Bujold [Amazon] is coming out this week hopefully. (My order’s already in with Amazon)

    The good news is that there are now some sample chapters up.

    Bujold of course is better known for the Vorkosigan series of booksand the Chalion series.

  • Cocaine Production

    Interesting video that I found via [Magistrate’s Blog] showing cocaine processing in Columbia.

    The quantity of different (mostly toxic) chemicals going into the product was the most interesting thing, although I was also interested by the running chemistry lesson from the people doing the processing.

    It would probably be worth showing this as a anti-drug film in schools, it would probably do more to discourage people than many other strategies. 🙂

    [How Cocaine is Made (YouTube)]

    [Edit:to add the actual link I was talking about]

  • Weighing electronics at airports?

    I was looking at a BBC news article about the recent security alerts at airports when a thought occurred to me. One of the big challenges with electronic items is to ensure that they have not been modified to contain explosives. My thought is that explosives must add weight to a unit. If a list of known weights for particular devices could be published then equipment presented at airports could be weighed and the weight matched against a list provided by manufacturers.

    If the weight didn’t match a known weight (within some margin of error) the device could be selected for further screening. Proof that the unit was operational would also be required obviously to prevent hollowing out the insides and replacing with explosives. However assuming a device worked and the weight hadn’t increased noticably above the standard set, then it would go some way to suggesting the item wasn’t harmful.

    There are obviously some issues that this doesn’t cover, but it might be a useful and simple tool as part of a security screening procedure.

  • Britain, America and WW2

    The Guardian has an interesting article detailing apparent attempts by the British government to get America to join WW2.

    These apparently included an astrologer who made dire predictions about Hitler, a fake radio station and a campaign against Nazi groups in the US.

    [link]

  • Abolish the “Three Rs”

    Why is it that whenever anyone seems to talk about education they always seem to use the phrase “Three Rs”. This particuarly stupid phrase seems to appear in every article about basic education.

    I think the very stupidity of this phrase affects education as a whole. If commentary and discussion on the topic of literacy is illiterate, what hope do those trying to achieve literacy have?

  • Sony Batteries

    It looks like at least 4 million Dell notebook batteries are being recalled, all of which appear to be made by Sony. Worse news though, Sony also supply batteries to other companies thought to include Apple, Lenovo and HP.

    If all of these batteries end up being recalled too, then the cost to Sony would be enormous, their reputation for batteries might never recover. More seriously could this affect Sony as a company? Given the increasing development costs of the PS3, probably a long fight for dominance in the Blue Ray Vs HD-DVD mess and problems in other areas, how much more can Sony as a company take?

    I don’t think a financial collapse is very likely, the company is, after all, huge and has substantial revenues from its different divisions. Instead think about a loss of confidence in the company as a single unit. Normally companies should form a grouping that is most financially efficient, this holds as long as investors are confident of the efficiency of the structure of the company. If they loose confidence or people start crunching numbers and find that the parts are worth more than the whole, then questions start getting asked. I think Sony is getting to that point, there seem to be increasing problems with internal disagreements and communication seems to be an issue. This suggests that the company may be too large and too diverse. If it had not been a Japanese company I would have expected a de-merger long since, but Japanese investors behave in different ways so this cannot be certain to happen.

    However the advantages are clear. For example, there appears to be substantial tension between the media side of the company (Sony Pictures, Sony BMG) and the electronics side. On the one hand offering devices to play and share music, on the other selling music but discouraging this sharing. This tension is probably one of the reasons that Apple was able to win in the portable music player market. There were other reasons too of course, but the fact that you could easily copy music to the ipod and it was really hard with the Sony device cannot have helped Sony to sell players. In this case it appears that the supposed advantages of integration are actually disadvantages.

    Markets reward efficiently run enterprises, in this case it appears that the company is less than efficient, so I expect something will happen. What form this takes is difficult to say, but I intend to watch carefully; It will be interesting to see what happens.