A Break

I am going to take a one week break or vacation to get some inspiration, so I will not be posting any new stuff for one week or so....

Till then.

Walking on water

I've found a website on this crazy invention that allows one to walk or roll on water:

http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/gadgets/inflatable-human-beach-ball-138380.php

It is a gigantic inflatable ball thats fits one to two humans in it. To gain control of the steering of this ball, studs are placed on the surface of the ball (The studs are crucial if you do not want to be swept away by the ocean current) and all you have to do is just to roll the ball to move around - Genius. Now you can be Jesus and walk on water, although you still cannot turn water into wine. This invention is only available in Australia.

crainiarc

PageRank - The core of Google

In this entry, I will introduce PageRank (PR), and give a few tips on increasing your PR.

What is PR?

It is just Google's measure of your page with a scale from 0 to 10. Why do I call it the core of Google? It is because it determines which sites do display first when a keyword is being searched, unlike other search engines, where the ranking of a site in an query is determined by other means.

How PR works?

To calculate a site's PR, GoogleBot crawls the web to find links that point to your site. Each link is like a vote being casted to the target site. However, it does not mean that a site with many links will get a high PR. The importance of the site linking to the targeted site is also taken into consideration. For example, a site with 3 PR8 sites linking to it will definitely have higher PR then a site with 3 PR0 sites linking to it. I bet some of you readers will want to find some high PR site to link them now, but wait, relevance is also counted in PR. A site on flowers linking to a site on cars doesn't have an efficient vote cast.

So how do I increase my PR?

To increase your site's PR various tips can be taken:

1. Have a proper and established linking system to link within your site (Intra-site linking).
2. Do not link to link farms that appear to have high PR. Link farms are depreciated in PR calculations.
3. Submit your sites to various site directories and search engines with high PRs
4. Personally email webmasters for a link exchange, higher PR should be prefered.
5. Exchange links with sites with related topics.
6. Have quality content in your site.

That's all.

I might be wrong about the PR, so just pop in a comment to correct me.

28 Hour day concept

http://www.dbeat.com/28/ shows the concept of having or adopting a 28 hour day practices which can sort of increase productivity. For those of you who just don't want to go to the link a read the whole text, I will post a summarized version of of the text. (Mind you, I'm not using the Mac OSX summarize tool as I could not afford a Mac).

The time system we currently use is 24/7. That is, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This means in total, we have 168 hours a week. 24 hours only gives you 8 hours of sleep, 16 hours of work and play, over 5 days, and 48 hours of weekend. For most of us, or probably just me, its not enough. I personally need more than 8 hours of sleep and I always wanted a longer weekend. But it is impossible to slow down the time on weekends right? So how are we going to get longer weekends and longer sleep?

Now if you were to divide 168 hours by 6 days, you will get 28 hours a day. This gives you 9 hours of sleep, more time on work and exactly 56 hours of weekend due to some weekend extension drafted by the editor of the web page. But how is this even practical? In the past, we defined a 24 hour day system as it is vital that we have light, from the sun, to do our daily work, like hunting etc. However, now with technology, one can use artificial light to illuminate your day (or night).

And that's the concept of adopting a 28-hour day time system.

Folding@Home

I refer to the previous post at:

http://crainiarc.blogspot.com/2007/03/playsation-3-major-firmware-update_21.html

Where I mentioned that I would go in detail of Folding @ Home and here it is: Folding @ Home (FAH) is basically a computer project that simulates protein folding steps, to study the misfolding of proteins, which is the main causes for cancer and Alzheimer's disease, by using the relatively new distributed computing method. Unlike traditional methods of scientific computer simulations, where calculation programs are run on supercomputer with tons of processors, distributed computing uses ordinary computers to perform parts of the complex calculations, and linking them up with the use of the Internet. You might ask why would anyone donate their computational power to such projects. Statistics might be the answer. Donators can view how much they had contributed and work in teams, moreover, its for science....

About protein folding
This is a process where long protein chains starts to fold into various shapes to be used in the body. As long as there is one misfolding step in the process, the cells will mutate and start to behave differently. FAH calculate what actually happens before and after the misfolding step to study the causes of such diseases.

How to get FAH
To get FAH, one can download at this website:

http://folding.stanford.edu/

Or use a PlayStation 3 to compute. The good thing about PS3's version of FAH is that one can see real-time graphics on the current processes.

PS: If you are intersted to join my FAH team, you can easily join to through the program. my team number is 41362.

For Science!

Playsation 3 major firmware update

Scheduled to be released on the 22nd of March, 2007, there will be more new features added to the all new PS3:

Folding @ Home participation

You can now participate the distributed computing simulation on protein folding using a PS3 instead of a computer. Not only is the a cool comtribution to humanity, it also enables the real-time generation of the simulation graphics that computer version of the software is unable to do. I will cover more on this topic in future posts.

Internet Browser Pinpoint Zoom and Resolution Settings

You can now choose to zoom into a portion of a website with the PS3's integrated web browser. This enables more advanced web browsing with a better user experience.

Full size on-screen keyboard

Although PS3 allows you to connect a usb keyboard to one of its four usb ports, a full on-screen keyboard will be useful for those who just do not want to buy another keyboard, making its messenging and web browsing ffeatures easier to use.

Background Downloading from the PlayStation Store

If you don't know, you can download demos and games that you bought form the PlayStaion Store directly to you pS3's harddrive. However, you are unable to do anything else with it while its downloading which is really a pain in the arse. With the update, one can now download stuff from the store while doing something else with the PS3.

Of course

There are more features that comes with the update that I will not mention.

That makes me want a PS3 even more...

Do you know who I am?

Excuse me, do you know who I am? A funny and creative method to get away when you hand in your exam papers late, as shown in this video:

Before I go...

I found a website thats contains scans of essays from this student who think that he is funny, quite hilarious is you read it, while in your mind, you know that he is just ruining his life.

http://stupidessays.googlepages.com/home

Essays could be faked though..