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Poo: love it or hate it, you’re sure to release it now and then. If you’re a big fan of poo you’re sure to enjoy Poo Warrior, the incredibly odd poo-themed Flash game. It’s arguably the best poo game on the ‘net, although Catch a Shit is a strong contender.
Some people have too much love for the brown stuff.
The PHP development team have officially announced that support for PHP4 will cease at the end of 2007. With PHP6 on the way this news is hardly surprising, but it’s a big deal for most sysadmins and PHP programmers given the adoption rate for PHP5 currently stands at less than 20%.
For those that haven’t upgraded already, take a look at the PHP4 to PHP5 migration guide.
I must confess, I’d never heard of UK car manufacturer Noble until this week. Given the sorry state of car manufacturing in the UK it’s little surprise. What is a surprise is that they’re designing some spectacular vehicles that really warrant more publicity (their awful website does them no justice).
The Noble M15 is a great looking car:
Of course, they’ve only gone and sold the design to an American company! After a few tweaks, a little remodelling and a rebadge, the beast that is the Rossion Q1 was born:
smbclient, a command-line client for accessing SMB/CIFS servers, is a great tool for shunting large quantities of data between servers on a local network. Unfortunately, the man page for smbclient is a bit of a chore – it doesn’t offer any useful examples, making it unnecessarily difficult for the first-time user to make any progress with the software.
To copy from one server to another, SSH into the destination box then make a connection with the following command:
smbclient //your_ip_address/name_of_share -U your_username
Upon connecting:
smb: \> recurse
smb: \> prompt
smb: \> mget *
The recurse command toggles directory recursion; prompt toggles confirmation prompts (you’ll want this off if you’re copying thousands of files!). The mget command will now copy recursively from the the target smb resource to the current directory of the destination machine. To change directory, simply CD as per usual; for a list of available commands type help.
After having his body sliced in two by a lorry over 10 years ago, Peng Shulin assumed he’d never walk again.
However, doctors in Beijing found out about Mr Peng’s plight late last year and devised a plan to get him up walking again. Following a rigorous exercise regime and the addition of some legs made of Meccano (or similar, I really have no idea), Mr Shulin is up and walking again.
Whilst I must commend the designers of his legs for having achieved the objective of getting him walking, I can’t help but think they missed a great opportunity to try out some new ideas. Would a giant spring have been better, like Zebedee from The Magic Roundabout? Perhaps two giant springs could have been embedded into his artificial legs, bestowing upon him the great leaping power of Inspector Gadget? I guess we’ll never know…
Following the appearance of thousands of Google Maps mashups, Google have introduced a new technology to encourage further user interaction. The “mapplets” (mini-webpages inside an IFrame) can be combined to create custom mashups: for example, you could display information on house prices, crime rates and cemeteries simultaneously, with built-in features such as driving directions thrown in for good measure.
The following YouTube video shows the system in use:
You can find out more about mapplets here:
http://www.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/mapplets/
More info on the Google Earth/Maps blog.
The service will be live to the public sometime today, following months of private beta.
Tom Dickson unleashes his mighty Blendtec blender yet again, and the results ain’t pretty.
PicFindr is a search engine aimed squarely at sourcing royalty free stock photography. It searches several stock image and photo community websites (including dreamstime and morgueFile) simultaneously, allowing users to find an image far quicker than trawling through several sites individually. The system is a bit buggy at the moment – it won’t play ball with Safari as well as I’d like – but still, it’s well worth a look.
Gratuitous gorilla picture included sourced via PicFinder!
The Chinwag Big Summer 2007 party held in South Kensington last night was far and away the worst new media industry event of all time. The queues were bigger than Andre the Giant, the free bar was free for about 2 hours (if you were lucky enough to get served), and, to add to the misery, the weather was appalling. Oh, and the inept DJ deserved a good face pummeling.
The appearance of a mysterious Chuck Norris look-a-like added some excitement. Chuck… who are you? Email us and we’ll send you some free pencils.
