newvibes

This is rediculous. There is now a port of Quake 3 that will let you play it on your Nokia n95 8GB, N82 and E90. The port also allows you to host your own game server ON PHONE and comes with Bluetooth support so you can pwn n00bs with a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard. Although the peripherals are hardly the most convenient things to carry with you on the train it’s still a cool concept. I wonder how it plays with the Nokia controls.

I used to be a huge fan of the Quake series and fondly remember network gaming sessions at lunch times in uni. Ah, those were the days.

I find this quite saddening. I remember as a child Woolworths was the first place you wanted to go to and have a look at the toy section. I’d spend an hour or two in there dragging my parents around looking for potential Christmas presents (who said ethnic minorities don’t integrate) and playing with the demo toys at the toy counter.

As I grew older I moved from the toy department to the music department, the album and singles charts and then the games section, looking for something to spend my paper round money on. As I grew older still Woolworths became the place where you’d go for completely random combinations of things. You could walk in looking for celotape and walk out again with £8 worth of pick’n'mix, a magazine and some pencils, minus what you went in for.

Then when I was at university the first place that I got a job to support my studies was Woolworths in the Wellgate centre in Dundee, where I met some friends that I still keep in touch with now. I learned stock control, merchandising, product rotation and how the music desk worked!

Then Woolworths launched Woolworths Direct where you could buy online (they were a bit slow with that) and the huge Big W stores around the UK.

Now thousands of jobs are at risk and Woolworths have now called in the administrators. I remember feeling sad when John Menzies closed its doors (the death of Subbuteo in Dundee in my opinion) but this is kind of different. I think I spent 3 years at Woolies before leaving after graduation.

I hope things work out for them, it’s a really rough time right now as we all know, and hopefully someone will come along and rescue the company. Around since 1909 Woolies is in danger of disappearing forever.

Spotted this on greyscalegorilla. Stop motion animation is one thing, but taking it to a new level by creating each from on different times on different days is another. Brilliantly executed but I can’t even begin to imagine just how much time this would have taken.

If you’re using MAMP for your database driven projects you’ll probably be using phpMyAdmin to administer your MySQL database if you’ve decided to go down that route. If you’re creating a database you might be wondering how to create relationships and foriegn keys for your tables.

Firstly you need to check that you have access to the Relation view. To do this open phpMyAdmin and select a database. You need to make sure your tables’ storage engine is set to use InnoDB. Click on a table within your database and choose the Operations tab. Make sure that the storage engine is set to use InnoDB and save your changes.

Now, go back to your table view and click the Structure tab. Depending on your version of phpMyAdmin you should see a link titled Relation view below the table structure. If you can see it you’re good to go. If you can’t you’ll need to follow the steps below to set phpMyAdmin to enable Relations view.

1. Find /Applications/MAMP/bin/phpMyAdmin/scripts/create_tables.sql
2. I left this file default but you can change the table name to anything you want. I left mine phpMyAdmin
3. Open phpMyAdmin and go to the Import tab.
4. Click the browse button and find the create_tables.sql file and then click Go.
5. The tables required for Relation view will be added to the database you specified.
6. Open /Applications/MAMP/bin/phpMyAdmin/config.inc.php
7. Find the Server(s) configuration code block and replace/uncomment the following code and fill in the values. If you left everything default in the create_tables.sql file then you should just cut and paste the lines below.
   ————-
   $cfg['Servers'][$i]['pmadb'] = ‘phpmyadmin’;
   $cfg['Servers'][$i]['bookmarktable'] = ‘pma_bookmark’;
   $cfg['Servers'][$i]['relation'] = ‘pma_relation’;
   $cfg['Servers'][$i]['table_info'] = ‘pma_table_info’;
   $cfg['Servers'][$i]['table_coords'] = ‘pma_table_coords’;
   $cfg['Servers'][$i]['pdf_pages'] = ‘pma_pdf_pages’;
   $cfg['Servers'][$i]['column_info'] = ‘pma_column_info’;
   $cfg['Servers'][$i]['history'] = ‘pma_history’;
   ————-
8. Save the file and restart MAMP and refresh your phpMyAdmin console.
9. Go to your database and view one of your tables in Structure mode. You should now see the Relation view link.

Google have completed another mission by making a huge archive of Life Magazine’s photography available on Google Image Search. This is fantastic news. But this isn’t the first time something like this has been done. Flickr launched a pilot project in January of this year by indexing The Library of Congress‘ photographic archives on Flickr. There’s not millions of images like the Life library, but it’s still an extremely valuable resource. The project that this formed part of is called The Commons.

I could spend hours looking through both libraries. Fantastic.

I missed this story while in India. Google are shutting down their virtual world project Lively. Well, I can’t say this was unexpected. We tried to use Lively in the office a couple of times and just gave up, simply because nothing worked, and when we did finally get into a room there was no one in it despite the application telling us the place was packed. It’s a shame too but I guess it’s a lesson learned. Fair play to Google though for acknowledging that this time they’d made a mistake. But the way I look at it, they’ve probably learned a lot of valuable lessons from this.

I can see why Google want to diversify in the technology that they invest in but sometimes it’s better to focus on your core technology, the one that made Google… search and advertising. At the same time though it’s great to see them trying to inovate. After all Google Maps and Google Earth are overwhelming successes.

US mobile network Sprint has created a new website called Sprint Now. Both confusing and cool at the same time it’s a dashboard of internet information organised using widgets tiled in the browser window. It’s quite futuristic looking. I’m fond of the colour scheme.

Wow. I just got sent this and it looks fantastic, even if it is just a leaked video with a few rendered clips. If true then this is potentially massive. LiveSpace, a photorealistic virtual world that doesn’t suck as much as SecondLife and Lively when it comes to presentiation and actual usability, and population respectively.

So I’ve been getting to grips with Flex recently and a came across an issue when trying to connect to a MySQL database on a PHP server within the Flex Builder. Because MAMP uses non-default port numbers you’ll encounter a problem when trying to create a new connection profile in Flex Builder. I repeatedly got error messages saying Unable to Connect to the database.

There are a number of steps that you should undertake in order to get this working.

1. In MAMP make sure your hostname is set up correctly and that you know the port number MySQL is listening on. 8889 as the default on MAMP / MAMP PRO.
2. Ensure that you have a database and that MySQL server is running. MAMP will show you whether or not your MySQL server is running.
3. In the MySQL tab make sure that Allow local access only is unchecked.
4. Create a user in phpMyAdmin and ensure all the privileges are set for that user on the database.
5. In Flex Builder go to Data > Create Application from Database
6. Click the New button next to Connection.
7. Give your connection profile a name. You don’t need to fill in the description box. Click Next.
8. For the Host URL enter localhost:8889
9. Then enter your database name, username and password. You can use the default MAMP PRO user for this; username: root, password: root.
10. Click Test Connection, and you should see that the connection is a success. You’ll then be able to go ahead and choose your tables that you want to connect to.

Note, when making any changes to the MAMP setup it’s always a good idea to completely restart MAMP instead of doing just a server restart within MAMP… just to be safe.

I also find that it is more reliable if you use the default MAMP htdocs folder (/Applications/MAMP/htdocs/) as the root of your server and place your projects in there.