Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Telling Your Oven to Start Cooking, With Your Mobile Phone!

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Recently, there was a news report about an oven being turned on, and started cooking at the highest setting on its own. Its trigger? Its none other than your mobile phone. All you need to do is to leave your mobile phone near the oven, and dial it.

Recall that you leave your phone too near a computer speaker, there is this “bee-boo-bee-boo” sound emitting from the speakers, or your monitor screen gets distorted when a call comes in. This is caused by “electromagnetic Interference (or EMI to Electronic Engineers). This is also the reason why you should NOT place your mobile phone near your chest if you are using a pacemaker. This is the probably why how the mobile phone could turn on the circuitry is the oven, and then trigger it to cook without any human intervention.

On the bright side, you can now leave your turkey in the oven and place a mobile phone beside it before you go to work on Thanksgiving Day. After you have lunch, all you need to do is to dial to your mobile phone!

You can read the news article on the link here. Most ovens are safe from this though, I assume.


Thursday, August 13, 2009

Win a iPhone 3GS or Western Digital Hard Disk?

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In conjunction with the 52nd Merdeka Celebration, Exabytes is giving prizes to lucky people who is participating in their contest. All you need to do is register and put their banner in your site / blog. Don’t worry, its a just a small button-size banner that would reside on the top right of your site. What are you waiting for? Just hop in my clicking the banner on the top right of my site or here . Oh yeah, you can put my email hongaun@gmail.com as your referral, otherwise you won’t be able to register =P. If you win, I’ll win too!

Merdeka Malaysia!


Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Super Mario AI Competition

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In association with the IEEE Consumer Electronics Society Games Innovation Conference 2009 (ICE-GIC) and IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG), a Super Mario AI competition is being organized. Those interested can still submit their codes as the deadline is August 18th (ICE-GIC) and Sept 3rd (CIG). Meaning you probably have to crank up the codes in the space of a month. The competition is based on a modified version of Infinite Mario Bros by Markus Persson, which was coded in Java,

Cash prizes are as follows:

ICE-GIC (Deadline: August 18th)

Prizes – USD 200,100 and 50 to respective winners

CIG (Deadline: September 3rd)

Prize – USD 500

For more information please check out the competition page at http://julian.togelius.com/mariocompetition2009/index.php

Current AI prototype clips available (not done by me!):

The one below tries to follow the mouse.

Good luck everyone! Programmers, open up your IDE!


Monday, August 3, 2009

New Commenting System

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I have integrated Disqus commenting system to replace the default blogger system. If there's any problem with it please let me know.

Only future posts will have the new commenting system implemented.