Author Archives: Marco Barnig

Mise à jour de la firmware PSP 1004

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last update : 3rd October 2010

Sony PSP

Aujourd’hui j’ai mis à jour la firmware de ma playstation portable (PSP) à la version 6.20. La procédure est la suivante:

  • Téléchargement du nouveau firmware : EBOOT.PBP
  • Connexion de la PSP au PC à l’aide du câble USB
  • Sélection du paramètre > [Connexion USB] dans le menu d’accueil
  • Appui sur la touche X pour activer le mode USB. Le PC reconnaît la PSP en tant que clé USB/disque dur externe
  • Ouverture du disque et installation du fichier EBOOT.PBP dans le dossier PSP/GAME/UPDATE
  • Déconnexion de la PSP du PC
  • Branchement du chargeur à la PSP
  • Appui sur la touche Cercle pour sortir du mode USB
  • Accès à Jeu > [Memory Stick]
  • Appui sur la touche Croix
  • Choix de la mise à jour puis validation avec la touche Croix
  • Suivi des instructions à l’écran pour terminer l’installation
  • Suppression du fichier EBOOT.PBP après la mise à jour

Note: si la batterie est faible, la mise à jour ne démarre pas, même si la console se trouve sur l’alimentation externe.

La mise à jour à la version 6.31 a été effectuée le 3 octobre 2010 avec succès par Internet sans passer par un PC.

PayPal Sandbox to test Express Checkout

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The PayPal Sandbox allows developers to test the integration of their PayPal payment solution before submitting transactions to the live PayPal environment. The Sandbox is a duplicate of the live PayPal site, except that no real money changes hands.

The PayPal sandbox offers following functions:

  • Test Accounts : create preconfigured or  manual buyer and seller accounts. Virtual credit card numbers and bank accounts are generated automatically in the case of preconfigured accounts. In the case of manual account creation, a credit card number generator is needed to obtain valid virtual card numbers.  The expiration date can be freely chosen, the CVV is always 000.
  • Test Email : access emails sent to all the test accounts.
  • API Credentials : manage API credentials for the test accounts. The credentials are the API username and password and a digital signature.
  • Test Tools : Instant Payment Notification (IPN) simulator to initiate transactions to test the  (IPN) feature.
  • Additional resources : documentation, support, forums, developer network.

A Business account is needed to implement the PayPal Express Checkout gateway. The configuration is done in the profile menu. The name of the merchant and his secure merchant account ID and the following profile informations are managed in this section:

Account Information :
* Email, * Street Address, * Password, * Notifications, * Language Preference, * Time Zone, * Manage User, * API Access, * Business Information, * Identification Preference, * Merchant Fees

Financial Information :
# Credit/Debit Cards, # Bank Accounts, # Currency Balances, # Gifts and Discounts, # Recurring payments dashboard, # My preapproved payments

Selling Preferences :

  • Regional Tax : to set up domestic or international sales tax rates (handled in ZenCart for my store)
  • Shipping Calculations : to set up costs for shipping (handled in ZenCart for my store)
  • My Saved Buttons : to create new buttons or to change characteristics of existing buttons (not needed for my store)
  • Payment Receiving Preferences : to set up payment parameters (configuration needed for my store)
  • Instant Payment Notification Preferences : to activate IPN (IPN not handled by my store for Express Checkout)
  • Reputation : to cap seller reputation number (no for my store)
  • Customer Service Message : message displayed to customers before they open a dispute in the Resolution Center (edition needed for my store)
  • Website Payment Preferences : to set up payment preferences (configuration needed for my store)
  • Encrypted Payment Settings : to use certificates and encryption (analysis needed for my store)
  • Custom Payment Pages : to customize payment page (customization needed for my store)
  • Invoice Templates : to use templates for invoices (analysis needed for my store)
  • Language Encoding : to select the language to use on the website (english and utf-8 for my store)

PayPal : Express Checkout or Website Payments Standard ?

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PayPal Standard

Customers checking out with PayPal Website Payments Standard (formerly referred to as “PayPal IPN”) will complete the order in the store and once coming to the choice of the payment method, they can select PayPal . There will be a large PayPal button for them to click, they are directed to a page that allows them to log into their PayPal account or to pay by credit card without having to sign up for a PayPal account. After the payment completion, customers are returned to the store.

Website Payments Standard is the fastest way to set up online payment on a website to accept credit cards, debit cards, bank transfers, and PayPal. The integration is easy (HTML based). In the case of ZenCart, if there is any problem in PayPal’s ability to communicate to the store server,  the order will not be passed to the store.

PayPal Express

PayPal Express Checkout gives the customer two options:  They can jump over to the PayPal site to login to their account before completing checkout on the store (which allows them to select their address information there and never have to re-type their address details on the store site, thus the “express” part of the transaction) and then choosing shipping choices and discounts/coupons etc before completing the order and confirm the payment.

The other possibility is to go to the PayPal site to login to their account after making shipping/payment/coupon selections on the store site (and creating an account on the store and typing their address info on the store), much like they do with PayPal Website Payments Standard.

One important benefit is that Express Checkout does not rely entirely on the IPN communications to the store in order to release the order. Instead, it stores the order immediately when payment is completed. It doesn’t have to rely on the PayPal server to talk to the store server in order to save the order. IPN updates are still useful in case of refunds or adjustments to the order and  are reflected in the store’s order history.

The integration of PayPal Express Checkout is more complex and is based on API’s.

Open Data

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Opte Project

A hall of fame of data visualization projects is presented at the digital-art section of Leslie’s Artgallery.

50 great examples of data visualization are presented by the Mass Media Group.

New Zealander Richard MacManus published the contribution “Where to Find Open Data on the Web” on his blog ReadWriteWeb, one of the most popular technology blogs in the world, known for offering insightful analysis about each day’s Internet industry news.

A list of useful links to open source data sets is given below:

HEXBUG® Micro Robotic Creatures

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Last update : May 24, 2013

Hexbug Original

HEXBUG® is a product line developed by Innovation First Inc. The company was founded on the belief that innovation very early in the design process is necessary to produce simple and elegant product designs. Innovation First began developing electronics for unmanned mobile ground robots and is now an industry leader in research and development for the hobby, competition, education and toy markets.

The following hexbug’s are available:

  • Original (the robotic creature that reacts to touch and sound)
  • Inchworm (the robotic creature that you control with a remote unit)
  • Crab (the robotic creature that reacts to light and sound)
  • Ant (the high-speed robotic creature that reacts to touch)
  • Nano (the robotic creature that behaves like a real  bug)

Find images that contain a certain color

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Imagekind Artshop

The Multicolr Search Lab tool created by Idée Inc. allows to find images that share specified colours. There are others who offer this option.

Jim Bumgardner (alias krazydad) developed in 2006 a widget to search flickr photos by color (Colr Pickr). Color Hunter offers a similar service.

Google Image Search  lets you restrict the results based on color. For now, the option is not available in the user interface, but you can tweak the search results URL to try it. More informations are available at the Google Operating System Blog which is not affiliated with Google.

The Imagekind artshop lets you choose artworks by specifying a dominant and four other colors.

Etsy, an online shop of handmade products, has developed color search for their own product database.

PicItUp is a visual image search engine that combines word-based with color based search.

A COLOURlovers community, made up of people from around the world and from all walks of life, are gathering together under the common love of color.

Matt Mueller based the final project for his Computational Photography class on the Idée Labs tool Piximilar.

Daniel Flück posted his tool Color Name & Hue on his website colblindor. He was inspired by the tool Name that color created by Chirag Mehta.

A server version (isk-daemon) and a desktop version (imgSeek) of an image database management system have been developed by  Ricardo Niederberger Cabral as open-source project (licensed under the GPL). Color analysis is also a topic in the ImageMagick discussion forum.

Thoughts on Flash by Steve Jobs : go to HTML5

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Recently, Steve Jobs published his thoughts on Flash on the Apple website.

Steve Jobs explains why Apple does not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads.

  1. open standards : Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary
  2. full web : most videos are available in a modern format, H.264, and viewable on iPhones, iPods and iPads
  3. reliability, security and performance
  4. battery life
  5. touch : Flash was created for PCs and mice, not for mobile devices with touch interface
  6. Apple wants to provide the most advanced and innovative platform to the developers

Steve Jobs recommends to use the open standards HTML5, CSS and JavaScript for mobile devices.

One on the first to follow this idea is the developer of the JW video player, Jeroen Wijering. Even if he thinks that there is still a lot of work to be done before HTML5 reaches the maturity level that Flash has for delivering video content to the users, he released the beta version of the HTML5 JW player two weeks ago.

Improve site page speed faster to load by removing extra loaded scripts

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The Google websearch team just announced that they will now consider the speed it takes for a website to load when ranking it in Google search results on google.com.

”Site speed is just one of over 200 signals Google uses to determine search ranking, and because it’s a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. In fact, less than 1% of all search queries on google.com are affected by the site speed signal”.

This factor may not play a major role now, but in future web consider this factor is going to have a great impact on web search results as it seems, so now it’s the time for all the webmasters our their to start thinking about their site page speed.

Google indicates the page performance in webmasters.google.com and recommends the open-source Firefox/Firebug Add-on Page Speed. Webmasters and web developers can use Page Speed to evaluate the performance of their web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them.

Page Speed performs several tests on a site’s web server configuration and front-end code. These tests are based on a set of best practices known to enhance web page performance. Webmasters who run Page Speed on their pages get a set of scores for each page, as well as helpful suggestions on how to improve its performance.

14 rules for faster-loading web sites are described on the companion website of Steve Souders. These rules hev been tested on some of the most popular sites on the Internet and have successfully reduced the response times of those pages by 25-50%.