A recent update released by apple for the iMac has caused a bit of a problem: freezing. On Thursday, Apple acknowledges the problem. A small number of Mac users have had the problem, but the ones that have, are not happy about it, it requires them to manually restart their iMac. Apparently, the users that have had the problem have said that their computers have basically been unusable, forcing a hard restart in order to recover. Apple is currently investigating the problem and is still not sure exactly what is causing the problem. They will issue another software update later this month (hopefully) and should correct the bug.

Tags: apple, imac, freeze, blog, update, restart

Four new phones from Verizon hope to bring more business this holiday season.

All four models are planned to be going on sale before November. The first to be released, The Samsung Juke, should be on sale in about a week or so although they are still unsure of the pricing.

The Voyager features an HTML browser, can play music and supports Verizon’s VZ Navigator service. It has an SD Card slot for up to 8GB of storage and a 2-megapixel camera, as well as support for Bluetooth stereo.

The Samsung Juke, the first to be released, is the smallest of the new phones to be released. When it flips open, it swivels 180 Degrees and reveals a keypad. It has 2GB of internal storage space and holds up to 500 songs. This phone also has a Camera and is available in blue, red, or teal.

Verizon says that the LG Venus, a slider phone, is for “fashion forward customers.” The phone has two front screen, the lower of the two is navagated by touch screen. This phone comes in black or pink and is mainly a music phone.

Business people should be familiar with the BlackBerry Pearl 8130 from Verizon, which is being offered in silver. It includes an HTML browser, e-mail access, messaging and calendar functions, and a 2-megapixel camera. Built-in GPS will allow access to VZ Navigator, Verizon’s mapping and audible turn-by-turn navigation.

Tags: iphone, cell, phone, lg, verizon, apple, at&t

Carnegie Mellon University on Wednesday announced a $300 robot designed to easily enable people to create super-high-resolution panoramic pictures–and a Web site to let anyone in the world dive into them.The GigaPan robot, built by Charmed Labs, can accommodate most compact cameras and is designed to be relatively inexpensive, said Illah Nourbakhsh, a Carnegie Mellon associate professor of robotics. Images then are uploaded to the new GigaPan Web site. They also can be viewed through the Google Earth software.

The researchers’ project aspirations extend well beyond just flipping through snapshots of foreign lands. “What if you could do imagery that is so high-resolution that the act of looking at the image is an act of exploration?” asked Nourbakhsh in an interview.

The GigaPan project enables people to pan across and zoom into the high-resolution images, such as this one of the Harmandir Sahib, or Golden Temple, in India.

The GigaPan work is part of Carnegie Mellon’s Global Connection Project, which is designed to connect and inform citizens across the world. Sponsors include Unesco and Intel.

About 300 GigaPan robots will be built initially, with recipients carefully selected to provide good images of the globe, Nourbakhsh said.

Photography has been around for many decades, but a new era of almost obsessive-compulsive recording is arriving. I noticed it first with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, an astronomy project to capture detailed images of almost a quarter of the night sky, but now more terrestrial projects are under way. One notable participant is Google, which is photographing as well as mapping roads and which acquired an aerial photography company called ImageAmerica.

At the same time, others have been trying to capture detail–for example, Microsoft’s work to create 10-gigapixel images or the Gigapixl Project to capture (using digitally scanned film of all things) images between 1 and 4 gigapixels.

The GigaPan project aims for both breadth and depth: lots of photos and lots of detail.

To encourage broad adoption, Carnegie Mellon aimed to make the robot relatively cheap and designed it to work with inexpensive cameras. “We’re trying to democratize it,” Nourbakhsh said of the GigaPan project. Some comparable projects today require expensive equipment and time-consuming methods, he said.

The robot takes a series of images–ideally about 300 for each location. An actuator pushes the camera’s shutter release button, then the robot repositions for the next shot. The user sets up the robot in advance to figure out what field of view the camera can handle, and later where the upper left and lower right portions of the ultimate image should be. The camera then figures out where it needs to point.

The sub-images are stitched together with supplied software into a single view that’s then uploaded to the GigaPan site. Nourbakhsh said images have to be at least 50 megapixels in size.

To explore the image, the Web site uses a modified version of the Flash-based image viewer from the Flash Earth site. Users can zoom in and out with a mouse scroll wheel and can click and drag to pan.

So far, there are 468 images on the GigaPan site, and the researchers hope for fast growth. “We have a lot of disk space waiting for these panoramas,” Nourbakhsh said–between 5 and 10 terabytes, plus bandwidth to serve the images up over the Internet.

Tags: camera, digital, blog, robotic

Apparently, there is a bug with Now Playing in IRC. It dosent seem like a big problem, but I feel that people should know about it. The quote below can explain a lot better then I can.

In October 2006 I discovered many “now playing” scripts for various IRC clients allow an attacker to send commands to the IRC server on behalf of the user.

Details

Many scripts for various IRC clients that report the name of the currently playing song in a media player on IRC share the same security bug. They don’t sanitize the name of the song before sending it to the IRC server. When a user plays a song with a new line (LF or CR, which are both message separators in IRC) in the name of a song, and uses such a script, the text following the new line will be interpreted by the IRC server as another command.

Exploitation requires the attacker to trick a user into playing such a specially crafted song, and to then use his script while the song is playing. That makes it hard, but not impossible to exploit in practice. It results in the ability to execute IRC commands in the client of the victim. This could be abused, for example, to gain operator privileges on chat channels.

Because it requires so much user interaction to exploit, and the results are limited to sending commands to IRC, I’d call this a minor problem.

Affected

What makes this bug noteworthy in my opinion is that it is present in *all* scripts with this feature which were tested. They can all be exploited by the same malicious mp3. This includes:

• irssi: from here: ixmmsa.pl 0.3, l33tmusic.pl 2.00, mpg123.pl 0.01, ogg123.pl 0.01, xmms.pl 2.0, xmms2.pl 1.1.3, xmmsinfo.pl 1.1.1.1

• XChat: many from here: xmms-thing 1.0, XMMS Remote Control Script 1.07, Disrok 1.0, a2x 0.0.1, Another xmms-info script 1.0, XChat-XMMS 0.8.1, and more…
• weechat: from here: now-playing.rb, xmms.pl 1.1
• BitchX: from here: xmms.bx 1.0
• Konversation: included media script
• Many scripts for mIRC, and probably other clients too

Related bug

Similarly, but worse, some scripts/plugins made for mIRC don’t remove | characters, which is a command separator in mIRC. This allows arbitrary command execution (on the client, not just to the server), without needing more user interaction than just starting to play the file. For example, this has this problem. (That bug was reported years ago already though.)

Irssi

I now take off my reporter hat and put on my Irssi developer hat. :)

This has been fixed in all scripts on the irssi site, and irssi 0.8.11 prevents scripts for making this bug.

I’m not aware of other clients or scripts having released a fixed version.

Online version

Tags: mirc, irc, internet relay chat

FYI, you do not have to download software or anything for this. Only changing settings. First, start by opening the start menu and clicking on ‘run.’ When the window opens up, in the box type “msconfig”. You will see another window pop up. In this window, you will see some tabs towards the top of the window, click on the “BOOT.INI” tab. Under “boot options”, click on ‘Advanced Settings.’ Another window will pop up. You will need to check the box that says “/NUMPROC” if it is not checked. Then change the /numproc drop down menu to the number of cores you have, or the number that you want to have used during boot. Then click ‘ok.’ Then ‘apply’, you may be asked to restart, but even if it dosent, I would do it anyways. Changing these setting should also start-up programs to use multiple cores when started. I changed these settings and my restart time is now 43 seconds. A LOT faster then it was before. This is a great tip and I encourage anyone to use it. Anyone that comes by Chris Pirillo’s Live Chat, Just give a big thanks to SWAT. All the he asks for is that you pass it on. Thanks guys. If you stop by Chris’s chat, say hello sometime, I am in there quite a bit. Thanks again.

CamBlack

Tags: boot, restart, blog, speed, core

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First thing, Run a Disk Defrag. To do this, go to the “Start” menu, Next go to “programs” or “All Programs.” Next, Navigate to “Accessories,” Then to “System Tools” and finaly to “Disk Defragmenter.” Select drive “C:” Which should be your pirmary drive and then press the “Defrag” button. If you have more the one drive on your system, you would want to do the same on all drives.

Next, go back to the “System Tools” folder just like you did when you opened “Disk Defragmenter” but instead of opening that, open the “Disk Cleanup” utility. You may be asked which drive you want to clean up. You probably want to select your primary drive. It will calculate how much space you can free up. It will then show a dialog box and optios that you can select to clean up your computer. If there are any options in that window that you do NOT want to clear out, then you may un-check the boxes next to the text. You will be asked to confirm to delete the select options. The Disk Cleanup will then run on your PC, freeing up extra disk space.

Next, you will now check your hard disk for errors. To do this, go to the start menu, then click on “My Computer.” Next, right click on the primary drive and select “Proporties.” Then click on the “Tools” tab. Under the “Error Checking” section, click on the “Check Now” button. Under the Check Disk Options, select both of the check boxs and the press “Start.”

There are several other tips to optimize perforance, including: 1. Wallpapers slow down your system quite a bit, so if you are willing to do without, remove it and use just the “none” setting and select a color of your choice. 2. Update your drivers as often as possible.

Clear out cookies, temperary internet files, and internet history. To this, open up Internet Explorer, go to the “Tools” drop down menu, and click on Internet Options. Then, click on Delete Cookies, Delete Files (will ask if you want to delete offline files also, select that box) and Clear History.

I hope these things help some.

Check out my WyldRyde Chat at #CamBlackChat.

Thanks

Tags: speed, fast, slow, computer, cam