It looks like Research in Motion has done it!  Break the 100k app mark for BB10, that is.

Last week, Research in Motion reported that during the two days the Blackberry 10 port-a-thon ran that there were 15,000 submissions.  Today, Alec Saunders, VP Developer Relations at Research In Motion announced that, over the last day and a half, developers have submitted yet another 19,000 apps (19,071 to be exact) for BB10′s pre-launch.  That brings the total to 34,000 from the port-a-thons alone, meaning there could be as many as 104,000 apps available by the January 30th launch date of the Blackberry 10 operating system.

A date for the new Blackberry Z10 phone has not been officially released yet, but dates as early as the end of February have been reported.

While I’m not a huge user of apps myself, this bodes well for RIM as they attempt to compete with Microsoft’s Windows Phone (by app count, BB is obliterating MS) for third position in the market behind iPhone and Android.  RIM has mostly focused on the business user, which they have done a very good job of, but they’ve lost a lot of ground over the last few years as their products have become stale.  From everything I’ve seen, BB10 is shaping up to be not only the greatest business phone operating system ever, especially for BYOD businesses, but with BB10′s Balance (basically two completely sand-boxed yet simultaneously-accessible BB10 instances on a single phone – 1 business and 1 personal), the consumer market is sure to take up the devices.

For the past few years many businesses, analysts, and consumers have written Blackberry off.  Especially with very little new being produced over the last year and a half.  It seems that all RIM’s time and effort has been put into BB10, which has been delayed quite some time; but for the better in my opinion.  Releasing a half-assed phone/OS would have certainly meant the demise of the Blackberry.  All the extra time and effort that they’ve put in to make things just right is really shaping up to have been the right move.

Personally I’ll be waiting for the QWERTY edition phone as I love having the physical feedback that a physical keyboard provides, but from all the videos I’ve seen of the touchscreen version, BB10′s on-screen keyboard looks like it’ll allow for faster typing than any other keyboard ever created.

In other news, I have surpassed the 1-year mark of developing my video game, Super Space Trooper.  Be sure to check that out.  I’m hoping to have it completed in five months and launched on the PlayStation Network another three months after that.  There’s no word yet on whether or not Unity3D’s gaming engine will be ported to BB10, but if they do port it you can be sure I’ll be releasing Super Space Trooper to that platform as well.

Just a quick note about PHP’s mysql_real_escape_string() function.  Basically the function will remove possibility of visitors throwing binary data or other exploits into your forms etc on your website.  I recently had a problem figuring out why my mysql_real_escape_string($variable) was null.  Silly me, I didn’t even think about the fact that the MySQL database connection must be made first, as in before the mysql_real_escape_string() function can be used.

So if your mysql_real_escape_string() is not receiving any data, make sure you’re connecting to the MySQL database first and then using the function.

Using Selective Breeding of Plants for Terraforming Planets

First, let me start off by saying that, to date, I have no formal scientific training so really this blog post is just an idea I’ve had.

Over the past while, I’ve been reading up on the process of evolution through natural selection.  Mostly I’ve been reading about human evolution but other life, such as dogs, bananas, rice and other random forms of life which have seen significant impacts made to them through human intervention using selective breeding.

I’m of the opinion that in order for the human species to survive, we’ll eventually have to branch out beyond not only our own planet but beyond our own solar system.  Certainly not now, not this century and likely not even this millenium, but eventually.  So what are some of the things we’ll need to do to make that happen?  Well, a major component of that is location or using a planet that we can survive on.  Humans obviously have very strict requirements for living – water, oxygen and food being three examples.  There’s the possibility of finding another planet out there somewhere that not only sits in the Goldilocks Zone but also has the elements we need, but I don’t think that we should expect to find that.  And even if we do to also expect to get there.

That said, I was pondering the idea of terraforming a planet to suit our needs.  Some of the fancier ideas out there suggest it could be done in as little as 50 years once the process has begun.  This sounds pretty optimistic and fairly improbable to me.  Getting back to selective breeding, I’m amazed by the variation in dogs which have been bred by humans over the past 10,000 or so years.  And that was without an organized effort and no specific end result in mind.  I read a recent National Geographic issue where a team of scientists in Siberia bred foxes over a few generations with the specific intent of domesticating them.  Within just a few generations they had foxes that acted just like dogs.  That’s surprisingly fast!  I then got thinking about the Great Oxygenation Event (GOE) which quite literally transformed the types of life we see on earth some 2.5 billion years ago.  It was a period in time when, primarily through plant life, the earth began to have huge amounts of oxygen, ultimately leading to the life forms we see now including homo sapiens.

So my idea and question here is: What if we were to use the process of evolution by selectively breeding plants for the purposes of terraforming another planet, forcing a similar situation to that of the GOE?  This is obviously not a quick process by any means.  For all I know it could take us a thousand, tens of thousands or many more years.  Even with a conserted ongoing effort with a specific final goal.  Certainly advances in science will help speed this process up.  Nonetheless, obviously with such a collosal long term effort, it would make sense to breed plants with as many varying end results as we can conceptualize, to increase our odds of developing different types of plant breeds for different planetary condition environment scenarios.

With the Kepler telescope significantly speeding up the discovery of extrasolar planets and new technologies being invented, sooner or later we’ll not only be able to know that neighbouring extrasolar planets are there but also be able to get an idea of their make-up.  Eventually we’ll be able to determine their atsmospheric composition.  Armed with those kinds of details, we could start breeding plants to live within those environments and produce the oxygen we need to survive.  It may take us a hundred, a thousand or ten thousand years, but I’m thinking long-term here.