Monday, January 28, 2008

Go Rate Cut!


Stocks Rise on Rate Cut Hopes: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance
"Anticipation of another Fed rate cut is the main magnet in the market today," said Alfred E. Goldman, chief market strategist at A.G. Edwards & Sons Inc.

He was skeptical the gains would stick -- anything the Fed decides after its two-day meeting lets out Wednesday could be met with disappointment. If the rate cut is small or nonexistent, the market will likely be unsatisfied; if the cut is wide, the market may worry the economy is worse than it thought.

"If we do rally into a Fed rate cut, we have a lose-lose situation," Goldman said.

And traders who bet on the Fed's next move were pricing in a more than 80 percent chance of a half-point cut.

Living in the great depression

Shesh. reading all these articles sure puts things in perspective!

Money tales from the Great Depression

 

"FDR declared a bank holiday after he first became president. When it was over, the bank that my parents had some savings in failed Ñ it was gone. They lost all their savings Ñ about $1,000. Even as a young kid, I could understand this was a serious thing.

"Then my parents started having trouble paying their mortgage. Congress had passed a law setting up the HOLC (the Home Owners' Loan Corporation). You had to apply to them, and I remember my mother going down every day to the office of the HOLC to try to get them to give us relief Ñ to lower the payments on the mortgage Ñ similar to what they're talking about today, but for different reasons. One day my mother came home and said, 'They approved our application.' She broke down and said, 'We're not going to lose our house.' That was 1934; I'm going on 87. I was a young kid then, but I can still remember it clearly.

Great Depression



Money tales from the Great Depression
"FDR declared a bank holiday after he first became president. When it was over, the bank that my parents had some savings in failed — it was gone. They lost all their savings — about $1,000. Even as a young kid, I could understand this was a serious thing.

"Then my parents started having trouble paying their mortgage. Congress had passed a law setting up the HOLC (the Home Owners' Loan Corporation). You had to apply to them, and I remember my mother going down every day to the office of the HOLC to try to get them to give us relief — to lower the payments on the mortgage — similar to what they're talking about today, but for different reasons. One day my mother came home and said, 'They approved our application.' She broke down and said, 'We're not going to lose our house.' That was 1934; I'm going on 87. I was a young kid then, but I can still remember it clearly.

Monday, January 21, 2008

video game testing....



News: Testing Video Games Can't Possibly Be Harder Than an Afternoon With Xbox, Right? (Seattle Weekly)
The end of my first full day of testing is also the end of the first time I've played video games for eight straight hours, by far my longest-ever stretch. The last two hours, I feel nauseous. Severely so. When I get up to leave, I nearly fall over from dizziness and a massive headache. Was it the recycled air? The Mountain Dew fumes? I get up and use the women's rest room, which is empty and spotless. Later that night, I diagnose my condition as simulator sickness—the clear sign of a rookie.

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

macbook air


The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)
Apple stunned a nation, or at least those who haven't been paying attention to the rumors, today with the unveiling of a very thin new MacBook called the MacBook Air. 'The world's thinnest notebooks' starts at $1799 and comes with a 13.3 inch display (LED), a full keyboard, built-in 802.11n WiFi, Bluetooth, built-in iSight, and a multitouch trackpad that lets you use gestures to control a number of actions on the MacBook Air. Some other stats include:

* 1.6 GHz or 1.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 4MB L2 cache
* 2GB of RAM
* 80GB 1.8-inch hard drive (with optional 64 gig solid state drive
* 1 USB 2.0 port

Friday, January 11, 2008

How to Stream Divx and Mpeg4 to PS3 and Xbox 360

Taken from this thread this link.

0. Make sure you install windows media 11 first for XP.

1. Click on the arrow under the Library ( from Windows media Player)
2. Click More Options
3. Library
4. Configure Sharing
5. Check Share my Media
6. You should see under share my media an icon ( Unknow device) that's your PS3
7. Click on it and allow.
then click ok.
that's all
By LoveBeers7

1) Download the Combined Community Codec Pack
http://www.cccp-project.net/download.php?type=cccp

2) Download the proper WMP11 .mp4 registry key
http://www.sendspace.com/file/ud5r3f
unzip and double click to install

3) In WMP11 Library add your .mp4 folder or Dix Folder

I did this for my ps3! It works great! I now get divx shows straight off bittorrent and watch them on my ps3.

Mobile Google Docs Review On Blackberry 8830

This is a terrible application, I don't know why they even included it as part of the google apps for the blackberry 8830. I was expecting a actual mobile application that displays your current google documents, instead it launches the WAP browser which takes you to the mobile site. The mobile site shows wap versons of your documents, but you lose all your formatting. You might as well email the document to yourself instead.

Thursday, January 10, 2008

Trent Reznor: Why won't people pay $5? | Tech news blog - CNET News.com

Cheap Bastards!

Trent Reznor: Why won't people pay $5? | Tech news blog - CNET News.com: "If I think of it a month later walking through Amoeba (record store), hmm...do I want to just buy a piece of plastic and give most of the money to the record labels, who have to be thieves because my experience with them has always been that? And you have a lot of reasons why you didn't do it. So I thought if you take all those away and here's the record in as great a quality as you could ever want, it's available now and it's offered for an insulting low price, which I consider $5 to be, I thought that it would appeal to more people than it did. That's where my sense of disappointment is in general, that the idea was wrong in my head and for once I've given people too much credit.

Saul and I went at this thing with the right intentions. We wanted to put out the music that we believe in. We want to do it as unencumbered and as un-revenue-ad-generated and un-corporate-affiliated as possible. We wanted it without a string attached, without the hassle, without the bait and switch, or the 'Now you can buy the s**** version if you buy...' No, no, we said: 'Here it is. At the same time, it'd be nice if we can cover the costs and perhaps make a living doing it.'"


Free MP3s!

Free mp3s


Valleywag, Silicon Valley's Tech Gossip Rag
Trent Reznor: Why won't people pay $5? | Tech news blog - CNET News.com
If I think of it a month later walking through Amoeba (record store), hmm...do I want to just buy a piece of plastic and give most of the money to the record labels, who have to be thieves because my experience with them has always been that? And you have a lot of reasons why you didn't do it. So I thought if you take all those away and here's the record in as great a quality as you could ever want, it's available now and it's offered for an insulting low price, which I consider $5 to be, I thought that it would appeal to more people than it did. That's where my sense of disappointment is in general, that the idea was wrong in my head and for once I've given people too much credit.



All the suckers want music for free!

Tuesday, January 08, 2008

Yahoo Mobile Widgets


Valleywag, Silicon Valley's Tech Gossip Rag
mocoNews.net - Unhealthily Obsessed with Mobile Content - @ CES: Yahoo Opens Up Go App To Third-Party Widgets; Single Widget Runs In App And On Mobile Web
Yahoo has turned its Go mobile application into a widget platform, the company’s VP of Connected Life, Marco Boerries, announced today at CES. The Yahoo Go application has been revamped, and version 3.0, which will be released in beta later Monday, features a new carousel-based UI. But more important is the ability for users to add new widgets to the Go application, and the developer platform that powers them.

Third-party publishers can now build widgets for their content and services that can run inside Go, using an XML-based language called Blueprint. But in addition to running in Go, the widgets will also work over the mobile web. This means that developers can create a single widget with Blueprint, and it’s available not just to users of Go-compatible handsets, but to any mobile device with an HTML or XHTML browser.


2008 is going to be an interesting year :)

Saturday, January 05, 2008

hot wings in the world


Snacking on a wing and a prayer | Oddly Enough | Reuters.com
CHICAGO (Reuters) - A Chicago tavern said on Thursday it will begin selling chicken wings coated in one of the world's hottest peppers -- a dish so hot that patrons first have to sign a waiver agreeing not to sue for injuries.

Jake Melnick's Corner Tap said the wings made with Red Savina pepper will be served with an alarm bell for patrons to summon waiters with sour cream, milk sugar and white bread if things get out of hand.

Levy Restaurants, which owns the tavern, said its chef d'Cuisine Robin Rosenberg had been working on the concept for years but was never sure he'd be able to serve it.

"This isn't the right sauce for everyone, but for someone out there, this is going to be absolute heaven. Of course, for a handful of people, it's going to be hell," he said.

Friday, January 04, 2008

100 dollar oil!


Valleywag, Silicon Valley's Tech Gossip Rag
Lone trader caused 100 dollar price for oil - Yahoo! News
"The magic figure was hit apparently on the back of a single trade, rumoured to be a local intent on fame," Sucden analysts wrote in a commentary Thursday on the record breaking deal.

Arens offered 100,000 dollars on the New York market on Wednesday for 1,000 barrels of oil, producing the much talked of 100 dollars per barrel which sparked anguish across the financial markets.

He later sold on the contract for slightly below 100 dollars, taking a 600 dollar loss.



Thursday, January 03, 2008

maven with on the fly editing for java webapps


Valleywag, Silicon Valley's Tech Gossip Rag
Balaji's blog - Inplace or On-the-fly editing of Java webapp’s
Inplace or On-the-fly editing of Java webapp’s

While developing and testing the Java EE web applications, people often needs a way to immediately web-view the changes that they have made in their JSP or HTML or Javascript.

For people who are using Eclipse or intelliJ as their IDE might also like to see their changes in serverside Java files applied over the deployed webapp's immediately.

Lets see how this can be done using Maven
In general, to view the changes immediately, people will edit those files on the exploded directory under webapp. Later, they have to manually copy the changes
to their original workspace. This is a pain for projects which has version control enabled.

Maven comes for resque:)

Some of the common goals used in Maven based build process includes test, clean, package, install. Apart from this maven provides excellent plugin capability.
One of such plugin allows you to directly deploy your webapp on your java application server like Tomcat/Jetty/Websphere etc.,
Lets see how we can make use of that plugin for inplace or on-the-fly editing and still be on hold with version control system.


Wednesday, January 02, 2008

fat people eat too much


Valleywag, Silicon Valley's Tech Gossip Rag
'Hearty Eater' Says Buffet Banned Him
Ricky Labit, a disabled offshore worker, said he had been a regular for eight months at the Manchuria Restaurant in Houma, eating there as often as three times a week.

On his most recent visit, he said, a waitress gave him and his wife's cousin, 44-year-old Michael Borrelli, a bill for $46.40, roughly double the buffet price for two adults.

"She says, 'Y'all fat, and y'all eat too much,'" Labit said.

Labit and Borrelli said they felt discriminated against because of their size. "I was stunned, that somebody would say something like that. I ain't that fat, I only weigh 277," Borrelli said, adding that a waitress told him he looked like he a had a "baby in the belly."

Houma accountant Thomas Campo said the men were charged an extra $10 each on Dec. 21 because they made a habit of dining exclusively on the more expensive seafood dishes, including crab legs and frog legs.

"We have a lot of big people there," said Campo, who spoke for owner Li Shang, whose English is limited. "We don't discriminate."