The JPC Project is a Java virtual machine (think VMware or virtualBox) that emulates the x86 architecture and allows you to run anything you normally would on your PC, within the emulator.

The exciting part about it being written in Java is that it allows you to run this on any Midp J2me capable device with enough ram.

The enough ram being the rub, which is 64mb. 64mb of Ram on a mobile device is not that big a deal nowadays, but unless you bought your phone in the last year, and it was top notch then, you can forget about it. (think N95 level hardware)

Nokia’s N95 is one of the mobile devices this has been tested on, along with other architectures such as; PPC, ARM, SPARC and x86.

Currently JPC is running at about %20 of the native processors speed and the project is Open Source (Free), you can adjust the Jar files with our own disk images containing your choice of software and it is also able to run Linux.

Who says you says j2me is a waste of time! I don’t see a virtual machine for the iPhone yet. This neat little addition to the list of j2me software out there for your mobile will let you (theoretically) run all the wealth of software that has been written based on the x86 architecture, ie 95% of software written for the PC in the last 20 years or so. (Crysis milage may vary on mobile devices ) You can see the N95 running an MS-DOS version of Mario Bros VGA, so thats a start.

To get see a live demo of JPC running across the web through your browser (Its Java, remember) have a look here http://www-jpc.physics.ox.ac.uk/Demo.html and Here is an online demo of the virtual machine running Linux http://www-jpc.physics.ox.ac.uk/Demo4.html

Source: http://www-jpc.physics.ox.ac.uk

Professor Noel Sharkey of the University of Sheffield’s Department of Computer Science, has addressed the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) regarding his concerns of the immanent rise of the machines arms race.

Citing the Unmanned Systems Roadmap 2007-2013, showing the US DoD planning to spend $4 billion by 2010 and this figure expected to rise and a figure of over 4000 robots on the ground in the middle east.
Since his comments Hawthorne Army Depot has ordered 24 new drones to patrol the Depot in a pilot program. Called MDARS, or “Mobile Detection and Assessment and Response System run diesel and can trot around perimeters for 16 hours before needing to be refueled.

They use RFID to track locks and boundries, and will presumably swarm on any activity from these tags, and make your day particularly unpleasant.

At the moment the MDARS are running round with Tasers, but the still make the decision to fire them based on their own little thought patterns.

Considering they could swap these out for m249’s whenever they so desire, it is a little bit of a scary idea. I imagine that the first time one of these frags some drunk teenager in the wrong place, we will all wonder why no one listened to Noel?

Noel also talks about robots becoming a commonplace medium for terror attacks, and explains how a GPS guided drone with autopilot could be made for around $500AUS. This sounds rather expensive

I’m sure you could rig up something quite exciting for $500 but why bother exploding your GPS and iPhone? If you have a spot to hide, RC would just as effective, and would cost a damn side less.

I could just see one of the below racing around a building at you at 120km/hr (thats faster than a suicide bomber can run btw ) with a slow burn hand grenade duct taped to the top of it.

Source: Wired
Source: ScienceDaily

I have been listening to some of the Podcasts from BoingBoing lately, and came across a great blog for all thing DARPA,Technological and entirely geeky. Noah Shachtman is the editor of Danger Room which is an adjunct of Wired News. Here are some interesting Youtube posts courtesy of the Danger Room blog.

Be sure to check out some of the related videos as well.

Cheers,
John

My apologies about all the legitimate comments I been missing over the past while. I have been inundated with spam traceback comments (100’s a day) I have now (not before time) fixed this up somewhat and hopefully it will not be as much of a problem anymore, and all your feedback will not be lost in the endless sea of Viagra intoxicated Nigerian billionaires out there that are trying to improve the size of our manhood.

On a side note relating to this issue, check out this hilarious article courtesy of BoinBoing on persuading one of the above crazies into comedic antics to receive their large some of cash before they hand over their billions.

What a great concept! why set up a new bogus Yahoo or Gmail account every time you want to sign up for some for something on the internet you will probably use once or decide not to once you have given it a try. Temporary Inbox is a great service whereby you can hand over a bogus email address like 3246-sheep5lojhgf@d-luvgsg.com.nz and then when the site requires you to check your new inbox and send back verification (as is usually done) you can! and then once you are done with it, you don’t have to worry anymore about it. All this without a single sign on or click from the front page. Classy!

Now you can get rid of some of those email accounts you have lying round, which just get used for internet sign ups and receive 2.1 million spam emails a day on a range of subjects you would rather not plow through for your validation emails.

Div Share is a fairly new Web file storage site that has some great features for a freebie.

Like for example unlimited file storage and a large 200mb maximum file size for uploads. It also does not restrict downloads from it like some other popular web storage solutions like the famous Rapidshare.

One of the other cool attributes of Div Share is its ability to seamlessly integrate with Wordpress as well as Facebook. This means you can link directly from Facebook to large files you would like to share with your friends as well as through your blog if its using the Wordpress API.

That in itself is worth the price of admission, which is free did i mention and it takes only about 15 seconds to sign up and you are ready to roll.

Above is an example of the nice uncluttered interface which is Div Share. It also has a nice batch uploader where you can drag and drop your files 200mb at a time. You can have them sorted nicely into folders as well as by file types like audio visual documents images etc. which you can see in the screen shot above.

With such great features it is a bit of a wonder it is not used more widely and in preference to places like Rapidshare. Not to slag Rapid but those download limiters and timers are a real pain. I guess because of its market share it can afford to be the way it is, and startups like Div Share have to offer something a cut above the rest to get some interest.

In a word Div Share is great and I wish it got more usage. It certainly deserves it!

Opera Mini™ 4 beta 2

If you haven’t tried Opera on your mobile phone, you really cant say you have tried mobile browsing. This little midlet leaves your inbuilt browser in the dust. It will work on any J2ME compatible mobile phone and is pretty small at about 120kb in size.

One of the best features of Opera Mini is its ability to save you data costs with your mobile phone plan. Opera Mini will automatically down sample images and the webpage and make the page download a whole lot smaller than it would be through your everyday browser. This equates to a lot more mobile internet usage for the same data plan. Take a look at the figures below for data transfered per page and time taken to load.

You can if you want ask Opera Mini to download the original higher resolution images of anything you are particularly interested in on a page, so it is not as though you are stuck with the lower resolution images if you don’t want them.

They are just there to streamline your mobile browsing experience, and when you are on GPRS, it makes a big difference. I get by on a 50mb a month plan and use the internet on my phone about 2 hrs a day on the train.

One of the exciting new features that Opera Mini 4 is bringing is a more desktop like internet experience. Were as before mobile browsers were restricted to wrapping pages to fit their small screens and making every page look like a squashed RSS feed. Opera Mini 4 allows you to view a zoomed out overview of the page and scroll around it with a virtual mouse. you can then click on areas that you would like to read and the browser will instantly zoom you into that area of the page. From here you can read and continue to scroll around the page at the new readable zoom level. If you decide you want to have a quick look at the overview again, you can click back on your keypad and you are instantly at the overview again, to scroll around and pick another spot.

It sounds less that wonderful, but it is actually quite intuitive and a much nicer way of browsing pages that the Old Opera and your less than stellar inbuilt browser.

One of the helpful features Opera Mini 4 has that complements this scrolling around with the virtual mouse is its ability to snap to points of interest in the page. This makes it much easier to navigate around pages as the cursor will snap to buttons and navigation aids as well as images and links and even to different columns of text.

If you would like to try out Opera Mini 4 you can have a look at their simulator and get a feel for how it works. It is not an exact replication of what it is like on your phone. Some things like the virtual mouse and the zooming work a lot better on the phone.

It also has some of the more normal things you would expect from a browser, like a nice place to organize your bookmarks and a history list of sites you have visited. It keeps cookies, which means you can use things like remember my is a real pleasure not having to sign into places like Facebook and Gmail every time you visit.

It would be been nice to be able to download a file or image or JAR file without having to resort to sending these requests to the inbuilt browser. I think this may be a limitation of the phones operating system though and not an oversight by Opera

One aspect of the browser that I wish could be implemented is the ability to hi-light text and copy it. It seems like such a simple thing (probably isn’t) and there are countless places this is implemented in the phones operating system (my phone being a Nokia 6300) that you would think it would be a feature that would not have to wait till past version 4.0 to implement. Although that said my built in browser does not support this either, so perhaps it is harder than it seems.

Another aspect in the same vain as the above which I was wishing for in version 4.0 was the ability copy link URLs to a clipboard.

While I am wishing why not a small notepad where we could paste these bits and bobs for later viewing. It would allow you to do some mobile internet browsing without having to copy down anything interesting to follow up later on a scrap of paper, and forget about the links.

Wishes aside, this is a really great mobile browser and a big improvement on its previous iteration, I would highly recommend this to anyone who uses the net from their phone or has used the previous version of Opera.

So… dive right in and download Opera Mini 4 beta 2!

Point your phone browser to mini.opera.com/beta

Click “Download Opera Mini“

Follow the simple setup steps on your phone.

and you are good to go!

You can also check our a video about Opera Mini vs the iPhone and Also have a look at the Opera Mini FAQ for all the exciting things I didn’t talk about

Kudos to Opera for making such a neat piece of software available for free!

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Following on from my previous post on the wonderful MGMapps,
Shustrik from the MGMapps community has provided a really nice way to easily make offline maps for your mobile phone. Shustrik’s map creation utility, will let you draw a border around the area you would like a map of in the Google Maps API and then select options like from zoom level 0 down to zoom level 16 and in which format you would like (Maps, Satellite or Hybrid). It will then generate a file for you with the required map coordinates to be run through a script.

This is where the slightly more tricky part comes in.

1. You need to download and install ActivePerl. Then install it.
2. Download the MapCacher script from the MGMapps community (sign up and have a look around, it is a very useful resource)
3. Make a folder somewhere on you desktop for example MyMaps and put the MapCacher script in there.
4. Download and copy WGet to this same folder.
5. Download and unzip MapTileFE (Front End) to the same folder
6. Create a folder within your MyMaps folder called MGMapsCache
7. Create a notepad file inside this MGMapsCache Folder and call it cache.conf
8. Edit this notepad file and insert the lines..
   version=3
   tiles_per_file=1
9. Save the cache.conf file and exit (I recommend using one tile per file to save on phone memory)
10. Now run “perl MapTileFE.pl” from the MyMaps folder (alternatively you can associate .pl files with c:\perl\bin\perl.exe so they are opened by the Command Line Interpreter, and then you can just double any of them to start them)
11. This will prompt you to to the name of the file that was generated by Shustrik’s Webpage
12. Grab a coffee and watch as the maps come in.

I suggest you start out small and choose only a limited number of zoom levels. The maps can blow out exponentially if you start getting zoomed right in on large areas.

You can use the same map file to produce say a 0-3 zoom level map and then just edit the .map file and change the text 0-3 to say 4-4 and run it again and it will add to your 0-3 zoom level map and make it a 0-4 zoom level map.

You can even select a different region and different zoom levels and run the download process again and it will just continue adding to the MGMapsCache folder. The best bit being that it skips maps it has already downloaded!

Also if you decide to use the 1 tile per file method as i described above, I would suggest reformatting your phones storage card to a Cluster Size to 512Bytes, this will get you the most bang for buck space wise on your storage card.

There are of course alternatives MGMaps, like Googles own GMaps, but it is sorely lacking in features a notable one being offline usage.

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I have been using Firefox Portable now for about 2 years and it is a great web browser. One of the main features that keep me using it is it’s ability to be customized. You can pretty much make Firefox Portable (Firefox from now on, as the only difference is the portability) do whatever and look however you choose. The idea being, you create a web browser that fits you exactly. It is like a custom designed piece of software just for you, that does just what you want and does not clutter up the interface with things you don’t use or want. Firefox calls this extendability aptly extensions, and you can download them by the bucket load. They can do everything from tamper with website headers and inject your changes to write this blog which is through an extension I am using to integrate with EBay and add useful features EBay does not incorporate yet. The place to get these extensions is here I have linked to them sorted by popularity, which is a good place to stat, because it puts the best most polished and most useful extensions on the top and you can work your way down.

Here is an example of what Firefox looks like with a nice theme (Noia 2 Extreme)

It looks pretty crowded, but that is just my preference, and I find it gets more and more so as you get used to the icons you use frequently. But it can be as spartan as you please as well.

A nice extension which I have just started using is PicLens, it integrates seamlessly into Firefox and works with

• Flickr
• Facebook
• Google Images
• Yahoo Images
• Friendster
• Picasa Web Albums
• Any Media RSS (example)

What it does is display images from theses sites in a really unique and intuitive way. It behaves a bit like the Mac OS X doc widget. Have a look at the screen shots below to see what I mean.

It works very well with Facebook Albums

Anyhow, go to the Firefox Portable Download page and run the file that you save to your computer. It will ask you where you want to install Portable Firefox? Just point it to somewhere on your PC (I suggest somewhere on your USB, to make use of that Portability aspect ) and away you go. It is completely contained withing the directory you selected. All your cache and history and extensions and themes are all there, so you can move it around as you please and not worry about people sifting through your web history/cache.

Firefox Portable makes an already superb browser one step better, by allowing you to take it with you anywhere. It is the natural progression of a Browser that defines itself through its ability to mold itself to each user, that you can then take it and use it wherever you go.

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Facebook has just launched a new service which will allow users who are not registered on Facebook to search for people who are. This in itself is not all that bad, as I suppose it encourages new users to join if they can see they already have people they know on the system. The next part of the service, which I think goes a tad far is the ability for search engines to index these profiles. Minimalist as they may be, with just a name and photograph, I would rather people did not have the ability to pop my name into Google or another search engine and have a brief profile of me displayed courtesy of Facebook. Facebook users have about a month before this will become a reality and in that time you can edit your privacy settings to exclude unregistered users being able to search your profile and also to exclude indexers from indexing your public profile. Two interesting services which I ran across while reading about Facebook’s new changes are Rapleaf.com and Upscoop.com which will let you look up Social Networking accounts affiliated with an email address. Actions like Facebook’s no doubt have a negative impact on business for sites like these, because why bother joining if them if you can just search Google and get access to the public profiles of such a popular Social Networking site like Facebook?

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