Boundaries between cyclic universes

This morning my 6 year old son asked me 2 questions, seemingly unrelated.

1. Why does space never end
2. What is a black hole

Being familiar with only very basic and somewhat incorrect quantum theory with extensive patches of unknowns in my understanding, I explained as best I could (with some bad assumptions that would get me shot in any reputable university) - space never ends because its boundaries are defined by dimensions higher than the 3rd - in effect, moving through space in a loop, with a cyclic 4th dimension. Much like traveling around the surface of the earth (2 dimensions) will end up moving in circles because the earth exists in 3 dimensions (cyclic 3rd dimension). And a black hole is the area that light fails to escape where the gravitational pull of a singularity is greater than the speed of light. This led on to explaining a singularity - a single point in space (almost no volume) with an enormous mass.

Feel free to shoot now - the assumptions and deductions are about to begin.

The mass of a singularity is so great that time is bent back on itself in a tiny area - creating a cyclic time-based entity. So the singularity of 1 universe's black hole IS a universe. Any matter falling into the singularity would have enormous gravitational forces applied to it. Possibly enough to collapse the energy of the matter? In effect, the 3 atomic forces (strong nuclear, weak nuclear and electro magnetic forces) would be overcome by a huge gravitional force. If an atom were to be exposed to sufficient gravitional force (huge mass, tiny volume), could the atom be collapsed? The electrons merged with the nucleus (protons & neutrons), surely the energy would be reduced and in effect undergo a universe jump - from 1 universe to another parallel one.
 The subatomic particles, having had energy reduced / cancelled would become matter in the universe defined by the singularity.

What a great concept to come up with, right? Well, it's actually a concept thats been floating around for a bit - http://endlessuniverse.net/. After some research, I eventually came across an interesting blog post - http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=563. which discusses the endless universe and these connections

 Well hopefully someone who has a better understanding could clarify: could it be possible that singularities are the bridge into the parallel universes, through the collapsing of energy? How would this affect the growth of the universe within the singularity, and the increase in mass of the universe? The "Big Bang" event of a universe would effectively be point in time at which sufficient matter in 1 universe has enough gravity to cause a collapse, thus creating the singularity (and the universe). It would also address the "Big Crush" theory, where sufficient energy is collapsed into the singularity so that the singularity explodes, releasing matter (while on the universe, matter collects together and forms a singularity that "swallows the universe")...

I'll post an update when I understand the quantum mechanics of it a bit better, check back in 10 to 15 years.

Your free corner just got reposessed

Ok - so that method is not quite free any more, since Dyn acquired everydns.net

But there are other free dns providers

Your own free corner of the intraweb

Every now and then you receive an email from a really cool domain (the part after the @), and might wonder how you could get your own. Lots of technical knowledge required, right? High costs and service providers throwing jargon at you, right? Wrong. It's easy, and here's how:

Registering your own domain for email / a web-site has 3 components:

1. The domain name - mine is "cave.za.net"
2. The nameservers - in order for people and emails to know how / where to find you (without getting too technical), a registry of servers is needed. It's sort of like the equivalent of an address book for your domain.
3. The service provider - someone to give you the space where your email gets delivered to or where you can stick a web page.

Ok - a little jargonish. But here's the practical way of setting it up for free:

1. Find a domain name. http://www.za.net offers free (no catches) domain registrations, so head on there, click on "whois" and type yourname.za.net to make sure its available. www.za.net only offers domains ending in "za.net" and "za.org", so you are limited to these. No .com's, sorry. Once you have found your dream domain, you'll need to set up nameservers before registering.
2. Nameservers - the address books of the internet. http://www.everydns.net offers free DNS hosting. Create an account. Add new domain (basic).
3. Ok, back to step one. Now that the nameservers are configured, go to the registration form at http://www.za.net/register.html, fill in the domain name and your information. It's probably a good idea to not publish your home address as this information is published publically. The technical part requires 3 name servers. When using everydns.net, nameservers should be set to ns1.everydns.net, ns2.everydns.net and ns3.everydns.net. This info is given to you when you click on your domain name that was created above in the everydns.net control panel.  The IP's can stay blank, za.net will figure them out for you. The actual registration might take a few weeks (I've waited up to 4), but its free, and this is the only waiting period you should have.
4. Lastly, service provider. There's this awesome company called Google that provides free domain mail and web hosting, so mosey on over to http://www.google.com/a, click on Solutions -> Google Apps (Free) and hit the "Get Started" button. Or just click https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/domain/new to get you right there. The setup of the hosting is probably the most complicated part, but Google gives you all the instructions you need. It will ask you to set up some settings with your domain, which can be done via the everydns.net control panel - adding a txt record, updating the A records (for the website) and setting MX records (for email delivery). Then create accounts (to receive email on) and maybe configure a site.

Welcome to your first semi-privately owned space on the net. It might not be a https://www.jemstep.com, but it's yours. Have fun.

Gradle: execute a task and write output to a file

i searched for a while to get this working as expected. The solution is really simple and straightforward.

task writeOutputToFile << { new FileOutputStream(new File("$outdir/$outfile")).withStream { os ->
def res = exec {
executable = "/bin/echo"
args = ["param1","param2"]
standardOutput = os
}
}
}

I was initially using Process to write, but groovy has a bug where the main process exits when it finishes, causing the thread to exit before it finishes writing (using a FileWriter).

expressive error message

Don't often find strange / funny error messages that often, just came across this one in a new testing framework...

I'm pretty sure this one won't stay as-is for long.

Error Message
org.jboss.arquillian.spi.LifecycleException: Bad shit happened