Theres an interesting buzz at the moment on a new BMW concept car which has a shell made of some sort of rubber fabric.
Theres a short articlt on Top Gear
And theres a wonderful video on Youtube
Archive for the 'Technology' Category
I use the k2 theme for this wordpress blog. I used to write my own, but k2 is much, much neater. I also use the openid plugin for wordpress. (I wrote about openid’s before)
To get the two to play together, you need to turn off live commenting.
In my case, as my blog is also my openid url (see this tutorial in delegating your open id if you want to use your blog or website as your openid url, and any provider), I had to add some code the the k2 style’s functions.php
add_action('wp_head', 'custom_header');
function custom_header () {
?>
<link rel="openid.server" href="...openid provider url..."/>
<link rel="openid.delegate" href="...openid provider url..."/>
<?php
}
Now you have your own blog as your openid url, and your blog accepts openid’s for comments with the k2 theme 
A while ago I bought a PICkit2 programmer, including 16f690 PIC. I installed piklab and sdcc (in Debian repositories) and got it working pretty easily. I did play with the programmer that came with it (mplab, windows only), which upgraded my firmware. piklab cannot use the new firmware, so if you need to get an old firmware, then try the old firmware downloads page
There is quite a difference in programming between mplab and piklab. Although there is support for a large number of chips in piklab, they are not supported as well as mplab. The big problem is that in mplab most special bits (i.e. each bit for an output port, one per pin) have a defined name so you can set them on or off individually. Piklab on the other hand has support for only a few of these, so if you want to turn on a pin, you have to set a value on the whole port (byte). Saying that, I prefer the piklab editor as it seems to do a better job with syntax highlighting etc.
Below is some code examples to help you get started if you are finding the learning curve steep
Turns out I’m not the only one fed up with Windows
Linux.com :: Software patents underlie a novel open source business model (video)
“Software patents are evil.” Ask almost any free or open source software advocate, and they’ll tell you that software patents kill creativity and keep computer science from advancing as rapidly as it would if everyone shared their basic work with everyone else, unencumbered by patents or other restrictions. But computer science professor Fred Popowich of Simon Fraser University says this is not necessarily true. So does attorney Larry Rosen, who spent many years as legal counsel for the Open Source Initiative starting (literally) before it had a name.
They have basically started a company that produces OpenSource software, and patents parts of it. They say their motto is “Free for Open Source, everyone else pays”. Not a particularly new idea, but I think it is the first time it is actually being attempted commercially
