Linux and Android in space with STRaND-1

Posted by on February 26, 2013 No comments

The UK’s nano satellite STRaND-1 has taken an Android smart-phone (Nexus One) where no other smart-phone has gone before, space!  The satellite also contains a small computer running Linux in its payload.

During the summer of 2011, the STRaND team ran a competition to find apps to be loaded onto the phone. There selected winners were:

iTesa  – will record the magnitude of the magnetic field around the phone during orbit.

The STRAND Data app -  will show satellite telemetry on the smartphone’s display which can be imaged by an additional camera on-board.

The 360 app  – will take images using the smartphone’s camera and use the technology onboard the spacecraft to establish STRaND-1′s position.

The Scream in Space app – will make full use of the smartphone’s speakers. Testing the theory ‘in space no-one can hear you scream, made popular in the 1979 film ‘Alien’.

The anatomy of STRaND-1

 

 

Stop Salesforce web-to-lead spam

Posted by on January 23, 2013 No comments

Salesforce web to lead form is a great way of collecting leads straight from your website into Salesforce CRM. The biggest problem is that Salesforce has not put in place a SPAM filtre for this, so once your form is out there anyone can cache it and send SPAM to your CRM as a new lead.

What about CAPTCHA

CAPTCHA alone won’t help. Since the form can be submitted from any server, once they get hold of your web to lead OID, they can cache your form, remove the CAPTCHA and continue to SPAM you.

At the moment I am using the following solution posted by Scott Hemmeter on his blog post “Stopping web to lead SPAM“. This solution is to setup a Validation Rule in Salesforce in order to avoid SPAM leads being created.

Let’s hope Salesforce will come up with a way of checking and stopping web to lead SPAM.

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Fix associate-o-matic images not showing

Posted by on August 29, 2012 No comments

After moving a clients Associate-o-matic store to a new hosting, images have stopped showing. If we attempted to view the image the following error would appear:

Warning: file_get_contents() [function.file-get-contents]:… File(/aom/img.php) is not within the allowed path(s)

Even after updating to the new version of AOM I could not get it  to work. The work around I found is to use cURL intead of file_get_contents();  To do this I followed these simple steps.

  1. Download and open file /aom/img.php
  2. copy the function CURL replacement for file_get_contents to the end of the file before ?>
  3. comment out the line echo file_get_contents($img); (just add # at the start of the line, do this for both instances of the line)
  4. add echo file_get_contents_curl($img); under both lines you have just commented out.
  5. Save and upload the file.

 

 

 

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New crowdsourcing place for inventors

Posted by on August 22, 2012 No comments

If you like finding use for new ideas or are just into checking out neat innovations. Well this may be just for you. Marblar.com is a new crowd-sourcing service to connect inventors and people who like finding homes for inventions.

“There are a lot of dormant inventions just gathering dust in research universities,” says Daniel Perez, Marblar’s CEO

The team, formed by three UK-based PhD students (one American, one German and one British) is planning to launch their beta near September.

Is Marblar for you?

(Extracted from Marblar.com )

So who are you? You might be a current scientist, a recovering scientist, a revolutionary, or just really into checking out neat innovations. Well, Marblar’s a right-brained buffet – and we’re about to open the kitchen.

Who says finding homes for inventions can´t be fun? Who says the process has to be closed to just a select few? Marblar.com is a democratic playground for creativity. You´ve got great ideas and we´ve got great inventions. As a Marblar you´ll be part of an artistic community and earn marbles for flexing your imagination in the service of science.

So there you have it. You´re a creative beast. The left brains sure aren´t starting the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

You are. – Join today.

 

 

 

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MSL Curiosity successful landing

Posted by on August 6, 2012 No comments

Curiosity roverThe Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) spacecraft that carried Curiosity succeeded in every step of the most complex landing ever attempted on Mars.

The descent stage used rocket engines to reduce its speed and finally at about 35 meters (115 feet) above the surface, the Sky Crane system lowered Curiosity, wheels-down, toward the ground. It landed at the gentle speed of 0.6mph. Soon after landing the rover sent its first set of images of the red planet.

You can see the excitement of NASA engineers as Curiosity’s landing was confirmed.

 

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