Thin client hacking
For the past few weeks I have thought about setting up a thin client pc for my kids, over the weekend a fried decided to give me an unused compaq T20. These are tiny devices with no hard drive and a minimal operating system , they are pretty gutless but are designed to access other terminal servers.
Any way the one one I got was still provisioned to another company so i set about re-flashing the firmware back to factory settings. on the HP web site you can get a utility called netxfer which is a bootp/tftp server to deploy the new firmware , unfortunately after trying to set it up on 3 computers all i could get was
"Unable to start the application--the Java Virtual Machine cannot be loaded.
Class not registered"
So I gave up on that idea and set about hacking back some admin rights. This machine came out of a business enviroment so was locked down but not compleatly untouchable. By defualt when it was turned on it booted into a session and automatically started an ica client. all other apps were removed from the start menu , right click disabled , run command killed, browsing in explorer disabled. So what to do ? well my first goal was to get a command shell opened , from there I at least had something to work with.
First I opened the control panel , this was locked down with very few tool available but the address bar was showing so I typed in a url, when the site opened I selected view , source, this open in notepad. Then I deleated all the contents and replaed it with , cmd.exe , then I selected to save this to the desktop as a batch file. At first this failed, only flashing up then closing, so i edited the file wo be cmd.exe pause cmd.exe. Saved , now this work I have command prompt.
Offline Gmail now available
Finally a google gears app. The concept is great,this is going to bridge the gap in cloud computing . now waiting for offline google docs ...
Media center options
Over the holidays I have been looking at rebuilding my media center system. What I really want is a back end system that can look at network drives and transcode that to front end systems like ps3, xbox, psp and windows media center.
Here's what I found
Neuros osd
http://www.neurostechnology.com/
This is the most promising system , would love to get my hands on one..
This is more of a media managment system that allows you to organise your downloading of videos but is not much of a media center as such.
Boxee
http://boxee.tv/
This is social media center app that recomends videos. Pretty cool but lacks the abailty to stream to psp and ps3.
There are plenty of other systems out there but these are two that really suprised me.
Windows 7 beta download link
Product keys from here ( when its back up )
But untill then apperantly the slmgr -rearm command will give you 120 days grace
OLED flexiable screens comming soon to a home near you.
An Organic Light Emitting Diode (OLED), also Light Emitting Polymer (LEP) and Organic Electro Luminescence (OEL), is any Light Emitting Diode (LED) whose emissive electroluminescent layer is composed of a film of organic compounds. The layer usually contains a polymer substance that allows suitable organic compounds to be deposited. They are deposited in rows and columns onto a flat carrier by a simple "printing" process. The resulting matrix of pixels can emit light of different colors.
looks pretty cool , would imagine the price of laptops falling more , batterys lasting longer and maybe even stronger
Gmail themes
Just noticed today gmail now has a themes option under settings, themes. now its only a matter od time to plot a way to get a outlook theme and work productivity will be out the window 
Open Pandora
[youtube 1WOMFrOCti4]
- ARM® Cortex™-A8 600Mhz+ CPU running Linux
- 430-MHz TMS320C64x+™ DSP Core
- PowerVR SGX OpenGL 2.0 ES compliant 3D hardware
- 800x480 4.3" 16.7 million colours touchscreen LCD
- Wifi 802.11b/g, Bluetooth & High Speed USB 2.0 Host
- Dual SDHC card slots & SVideo TV output
- Dual Analogue and Digital gaming controls
- 43 button QWERTY and numeric keypad
- Around 10+ Hours battery life
MMmmmmm
Change managment ?
Work in a place that has a change managment team that has the functioal proceses of a hord of zombies? then this is for you ...
http://www.zapproved.com/Welcome
I really love the way online apps are going at the moment , now I think if some one put together a web based system that of couse was itil alinged and modular it would probally dominate the market. Include componets like project managment , incident and change.
You could then sell the system in two ways, hosted or appliance based , giving the customer the chance to purchase a 1u web server and intergrating with AD or another directory service. I know what you are thinking " what about company harware policeis and support ? " the truth is be flexiable. if a customer wants to supplt the hardware, thats fine just ensure its speced accordingly so booth parties dont have bad experiances.
Who is Hubert Chang ?
[youtube d1Yx8eo0fzY]
Ok so who is he ?
He is the latest guy to come along saying he had massive involvmnt with google in the early days.
What's be been up to ?
well he has been pretty busy talking to people giving them great ideas for massive technolgy like ,
"Java on mobile phone Seeing Sun is slow at appliance Java suggestion, I said well, they could put the Java in to the mobile phone ( I was thinking about O.S. ) Within one year, DoCoMo decides to put Java into their i-mode phone. It was throwing a stone at one bird and kill the other."
and
"DHTML: in 1995, I suggestted in W3 mailing list that HTML 3+ should have some object functionality. One year later, Netscape come up with Javascript and equip the HTML with programming ability."
Oh and this was was really good
"Star Office: I told Scott McNealy that there should be a company producing compatible software with Microsoft's Office. If there isn't, then just write one and distribute freely to break into Microsoft's office market. A year later, Sun bought a German company that produces Star Office."
I really think this thing is going to out to be a massive joke
