The Full Enchilada

The latest problem with TSA’s grope-gate is that now they have been challenged if their security is doing anything but annoy travelers. After all, authorities at the Israeli airports, which are known to have the best security in the world have spoken plainly about the reasons they do not use such invasive and random screening methods at their Airports. And what Airports face more danger from would be suicide bombers and terrorists than Israeli aiports?

So why don’t the Israelis use TSA milliwave or X-ray body scanners? According to them, its because it doesn’t really work. They quickly point out that the best security measure is having properly trained airport security screeners who know what they’re doing. They even point out why we’ve opted against this common sense approach in the US, its because its so politically incorrect to “profile” people in the US. They on the other hand have no problem acknowledging that their security methods are based on specialized profiling. Israeli airport security scanners are very well trained to spot anything unusual, instead of blindly wasting time randomly strip searching 5 to 7 year old kids as in the United States (see other articles about parents decrying their children’s ‘thorough’ screening), they don’t just send every 10th traveler to be groped all over, they are very selective.

But if we are unable to accept that ‘profiling’ is very efficient then perhaps we should be willing to suffer the inconvenience of seemingly retarded practices. Many have now spoken out challenging the TSA to show some proof that their invasive body scanning or groping have done anything to help national security. Careless searching of some travelers have left some drenched in their own urine and humiliation. But again perhaps this is the price we have chosen to play by our politically correct stance on various profiling techniques that had always proven most efficient in the past.

We used to have that saying that if it smells like a frog, looks like a frog, jumps like a frog, then perhaps it IS a frog! Replace frog with anything you like from schmuck to terrorist…It seems we like to use statistical analysis ‘everywhere’ except for National Security.

Solutions to this mess are obvious, just as there is a no-fly watch list, there should be some flying ‘white-list’ and perhaps there is but only for dignitaries and the rich and wealthy and the big politicians which only needs to be expanded to include some of the patriotic little guys like us also…Let’s face it no one enjoys being groped or having someone look at naked pictures of them at the airport. Guys don’t want some other guy groping around their lower half and neither do women and the alternative though it may end up being more unsafe may be the less humiliating path. Its funny that you no longer have to worry about peeping toms with their IR camera filters trying to take naked pictures of you at the beach, now you’re supposed to cooperate with the TSA to have such nude body scans taken and apparently ’stored’ and viewed by who knows how many people in the name of national security. And though we’re told these x-rays are so weak that they shouldn’t pose a cancer risk, what about frequent flyers and their compounded risks taking in consideration also their additional bombardment from cosmic rays while flying at such high altitudes?

For a long time we were told x-rays from CT scans were completely safe, now we hear that CT scans have caused cancers, this has been proven. There is now an admitted risk for cancer from full body CT scans. How long till we start hearing similar health risks from TSA airport body scanners?

There seems to be a lot of confusion about the new KINECTS motion controllers released by Microsoft.

KINECTS are revolutionizing the gaming industry. KINECTS enabled games, sometimes called KINECTIC Games or Kinetics Games if they are not just specifically for Microsoft KINECTS controllers only.

KINETICS is a physics term of the motion of bodies, so Nintendo Wii games are “KINETICS games” because they utilize KINETICS, the motion of ‘your’ body!

Playstation Eye games are also Kinetics Games. Playstation PS3 Eye enabled games can also be called KINETICS games. Playstation MOVE system has some exciting KINETICS games.

KINETICS GAMES are games you control with the motion of your body instead of using joysticks or keyboards/keypads. There are quite a few KINETICS Games out there, most are for Wii and Playstation Eye/Eyetoy/MOVE but now new Microsoft KINECTS enabled games are coming out.

So “KINECTS Games” are a type of Kinetics games for the Microsoft XBOX 360.

What’s your favorite Kinetics Game on the Xbox 360, the Playstation, or the Nintendo Wii?
(there’s many out there from Pilates sport exercise games to fighting games to stretching and yoga games and do you think you can dance games…)

In my previous post I talked about trying out native mysql .net connector instead of odbc…well it turns out that the ODBC connector route gives better performance….

The same file doing some simple select NickName, Email from users table and printing out results…

Mysql .net connector (using linux ‘time’ measurement)
real 0m0.270s
user 0m0.238s
sys 0m0.011s

The same thing using ODBC connector (via unixODBC and Mysql ODBC connector driver version 5.1 /myodbc from Mysql AB/oracle/sun website)
real 0m0.079s
user 0m0.068s
sys 0m0.012s

So it seems the ODBC connector is considerably faster! I was actually surprised, I was thinking I would get better performance with the MYSQL specific method using System.Data and MySql.Data.MySqlClient… but seems I was wrong.

Guess will have to figure out how to speedup my mono .net webservice some other way…maybe its a SOAP issue…

I had ODBC working fine with unixODBC and the myODBC connector from mysql AB…the 5.1 version odbc and it was working fine but i wanted to try the native mysql .net connector instead.

I was getting errors compiling and had to switch from mcs to gmcs compiler but then i was getting
could not be loaded:
Assembly: MySql.Data (assemblyref_index=1)
Version: 6.3.5.0
Public Key: c5687fc88969c44d
The assembly was not found in the Global Assembly Cache, a path listed in the MONO_PATH environment variable, or in the location of the executing assembly

which was annoying because I had done the export MONO_PATH=/path/to/mysql.data.dll but still had same error…. (sometimes you might get error CS0006: cannot find metadata file `MySql.Data on compilation)

Anyway, the trick to fix these problems are two things. One is to make sure your MONO_PATH includes the full path to /mono/lib/mono/2.0 which should contain a bunch of files/assemblies and dirs….and to make a symbolic link from where gacutil -i system.data.dll installed into…which is usually in /mono/lib/mono/gac/MySql.Data/longversion_infodirectory/MySql.Data.dll

Once that’s done mono should be able to run it ok without anymore errors…

Do you want free calling? Do you want free text messaging? Do you want a new “extra” phone number? Do you want advanced incoming calls management? Do you want to set the order in which your various phones will ring depending on where you are or who is calling you?

Google Voice offers all that and more.

If you’re in a place with bad phone reception whether you’re using Verizon or T-mobile or AT&T(ATT) there’s always a place where the signal won’t work. Well, with Google Voice, if you have Wifi you can still make your calls! Google Voice does not require WIFI to work, you can still use Google Voice from just your PHONE, all you need to do is call your Google Voice phone number that you chose (many area codes are available you can even try to make one with letters that say something ie usual 1800 adverts) and put in your password and then the number you’d like to call. Your call will then not use your phone provider minutes! It will be a FREE call! Same thing with text messaging! I guess you must be crazy not to use it??

The other great thing, is great logging inside the online google voice interface and even SPEECH recognition and transcribing of your voicemails which are forwarded to your phone as text messages (FREE texts that is). You can even easily record phone calls for when you need to record that lying…..

And now that Google Voice is open to everyone you better sign up for it QUICK and reserve your favorite Google Voice phone number!

I had some issues with a .Net webservice that I ported to run on Mono, it kept on giving error that database.Table does not exist….and when i changed the “Table” name in the .cs c# code to reflect a lower case ‘table’ name and renamed the mysql database Table to “table”…it would then still give me an error that database.Table does not exist…anyway, the quick fix was to edit my mysql server config file, could be my.cnf in my case was my.ini or mysql.ini and i added lower_case_table_names=1 depending on mysql server version you might have to use lower_case_sensitive = 1 and put it in your [mysqld] section of your config file. It will then assume all table names as lowercase….under Windows I think that’s the default behaviour anyway since from what I know it doesn’t support case sensitivity….

In case it helps anyone out, if your having problems with install or startup of your mysql server and get errors indicating it can’t write to /usr/local/mysql/data or that it can’t find my_print_defaults or “mysqld_safe The file /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqld
does not exist or is not executable” it could be a very simple solution of just adding the mysql bin directory path to your environment PATH variable…on linux of course this is a simple “export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/mysql/bin”
and of course change that to your own actual path to the mysql bin directory….

After adding the bin dir path to your $PATH environment variable mysql server mysqld_safe should startup without any problems….

The arrival of the Kinect has spurred the explosion of related websites coinciding with its November 4th release. The Kinect is the final product of what we had come to know as the Natal Project from Microsoft.
Here are some Kinect websites to demonstrate this point:

Tennis Games
TENNIS KINECT
Fight Games
Fight Kinect
Kinect Fight
Kinect Fight Game
Kinect Fight Games
Exercise Games
kinect exercise game
kinect exercise games
Game Reviews
Kinect Game Review
Kinect Games Reviewed
Kinect Games Reviews
Kinect Enabled Games
Kinectic Game
Kinectic Games
Kinects Game
Kinects Games
Best Games
The Best Kinect Game
The Best Kinect Games
Sport Game
Kinect Sport Game
Kinetic Games
Kinetics Game
Kinetics Games

The new Microsoft KINECT is a revolutionary gaming controller even though it builds upon the advances made by the Nintendo Wii, Playstation EyeToy, PS3 Eye, and recent PlayStation Move.

KINECT Sensor Specs:

The KINECT technology comes mainly from an Israeli Defense firm called 3DV Systems which for some time had made Z-depth cameras capable of capturing information for the depth or distance of each pixel in an image from the camera sensor. Later PrimeSense company was involved and most recently it seems Microsoft has acquired Canesta perhaps to avoid any patent infringement problems over the Kinect. The Kinect sports a regular RGB camera along with two 3D-Depth sensors and mechanized tilt along with a multi-array microphone useful for audio localization which could be used to orient the cameras using the tilt motor.