watch out for the little babies

Karolyis' sour grapes makes bad whine - Olympics - Yahoo! Sports

This was a nightmare for Marta. She had to watch Sacramone, a 20-year-old woman, crumble under the pressure and stumble off a beam. Meanwhile, the Chinese kept sticking their landings.

“Little babies,” she barked.

It was too much to bear. The little babies had gotten her. The little babies were driving her and her husband nuts.

The little babies were winning gold.

hmm.....

How To Concentrate

Concentration is the Most Important Intellectual Habit of Man."

Not one person in ten thousand can really concentrate. Some realize that they do not know how—others drift along the line of least resistance and let their minds vegetate, apparently never suspecting their weakness or realizing that they are an utter failure at concentration. To Cori-centre—bringing all your mental force and faculties to bear steadily on a given center with-out deviation from that exact point—whipping into line all wandering fancies—stray ideas or thoughts that go off on a tangent—to hold steadily all your power on the central thing under consideration without an instant of wavering—that is Concentration.

how to type mandarin on mac

Thomas Kho’s Blog » Learning Mandarin Chinese with Mac OS X

Learning Mandarin Chinese with Mac OS X

April 19, 2008 at 9:09 pm · Filed under Computers, General, OS X

I use a Mac probably 90% of the time, so I wanted to share some tips for OS X I picked up that (I hope) are really helpful to the Mandarin Chinese learner.

As a bit of background, let me tell you where I’m coming from: I went to Chinese school for years as a kid and didn’t really learn much of anything. I was never fluent, never really learned enough characters to sufficiently read (let alone write), and then I just stopped caring for some amount of time. Now, I’m back for more learning.

So, here are the tips:

* ITABC Input Method

I haven’t really used Windows in years, but last time I tried, I don’t think it had the pervasive Unicode support to even display Chinese characters in most apps. That said, I was nicely surprised when I found OS X 10.5 comes with a slew of Traditional and Simplified Chinese Input Methods built in. The one I use, ITABC, is dead simple. You just enter pinyin without tones and choose from candidate matches. There are plenty of places online (here’s one at Yale) that can walk you through setting it up.
* CEDICT for Apple Dictionary

Apple includes a dictionary application in OS X. No big deal, right? Well, it’s actually pretty cool, because you can add your own custom dictionaries that integrate as seamlessly as the built-in dictionaries. CEDICT is a Chinese-English dictionary project (here’s an online dictionary based on CEDICT) that’s available as a user dictionary for Dictionary.app. Even better, it also has pronunciations (little sound bites you can play) embedded in dictionary entries.

Here’s CEDICT for Apple Dictionary at Apple Downloads. Just download it and drop it into your /Library/Dictionaries (or ~/Library/Dictionaries).
* Dictionary.app integration throughout OS X

I mentioned seamless integration in that last bullet point. Well, in the Apple way, the dictionary is integrated throughout the system. Hover over some text, hit a hotkey (defaults to Cmd-Ctrl-D, but might I suggest F1), and a little panel pop up (inline, in your application) with the definition.

This hint at Mac OS X Hints reminds us that we can hold down the dictionary hotkey to continuously get the definition of whatever word is currently under the cursor. Say you’re scanning news.google.cn and there are a handful of words you don’t know. Just hit that hotkey, the dictionary entry panel pops up in Safari, and it moves with you as you move the cursor across the sentence.

If the default popup panel is too small for your tastes, this post has a link to a modified DictionaryPanel.app (drop it in /Applications/Dictionary.app/Contents/SharedSupport) that enlarges the popup panel window. Alternatively, you can open up DictionaryPanel.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/PopupWindow.nib in Interface Builder and just need to change the size of both the popup window and its content. Be sure to make a backup first!
* ChinesePod on iTunes

Alright, so this last one might be a strech, but I found out about ChinesePod, which is a podcast with lessons in spoken Mandarin. It helps that the podcasters are pretty amusing. How does this tie in? Well, iTunes is setup to scrape the newest lessons and syncs them automatically with my iPod, so I can listen on my way to work. Zero effort necessary!

Alright. That’s it for now. If you know of any other tips, please do share!

Note: This might seem like one big rave for OS X, but I tried really hard to keep that to a minimum. Apple’s just too cool :)

jay chou love me don't go!

Chinese Music Forum / [Completed] ~Translation~ Jay Chou- 爱我别走

I just heard one of Jay's song in his 2005 concert..
and it's quite a nice song..Check it out!!

周杰伦- 爱我别走
Jay Chou- Love me, don’t go

我到了这个时候还是一样
Wo dao le zhe ke shi jian hai shi yi yang
Having arrived at this moment, I’m still the same

夜里的寂寞容易叫人悲伤
Ye li de ji mo rong yi jiao ren bei shang
Loneliness of the night easily makes people hurt

我不敢想的太多
Wo bu gan xiang de tai duo
I don’t dare to think too much

因为我一个人
Ying wei wo yi ke ren
Because I’m all by myself

迎面而光的月光拉长身影
Ying mian er guang de ye guang la chang shen ying
Facing moonlight, it draws out the silhouette

走在漫无目的的街
Zou zai man wu mu di de jie
Walking by the boundless and endless street

我没有你的消息
Wo mei you ni de xiao xi
I don’t hear your news

因为我在想你
Yin wei wo zai xiang ni
Because I’m thinking of you

Chorus:

爱我别走
Ai wo bie zou
Love me, don’t go

如果你说你不爱我
Ru guo ni shuo ni bu ai wo
If you say you don’t love me

不要听见你真的说出口
Bu yao ding jian ni zhen de shuo chu kou
I don’t want to hear you really said it

再给我一点温柔
Cai gei wo yi dian wen rou
Give me a bit warmth again

--------------------------------------------------

就在今晚抹去对方的肯定
Jiu zai jin wan mo qu dui fang de ken ding
And at this night, erasing the other is for sure

夜里的寂寞容易叫人悲伤
Ye li de ji mo rong yi jiao ren bei shang
Loneliness of the night easily makes people hurt

我没有你的消息
Wo mei you ni de xiao xi
I don’t hear your news

因为我一个人
Ying wei wo yi ke ren
Because I’m all by myself

迎面而光的月光拉长身影
Ying mian er guang de ye guang la chang shen ying
Facing moonlight, it draws out the silhouette

一个人走在漫无目的的街
Yi ke ren zou zai man wu mu di de jie
A person walking by the boundless and endless street

我没有你的消息
Wo mei you ni de xiao xi
I don’t hear your news

因为我在想你
Yin wei wo zai xiang ni
Because I’m thinking of you

爱我别走
Ai wo bie zou
Love me, don’t go

如果你说你不爱我
Ru guo ni shuo ni bu ai wo
If you say you don’t love me

不要听见你真的说出口
Bu yao ding jian ni zhen de shuo chu kou
I don’t want to hear you really said it

再给我一点温柔
Cai gei wo yi dian wen rou
Give me a bit warmth again

drink some eel!

Eel Drink Goes On Sale For Japan's Hot Summer, `Energy Boosting' Eel Drink Goes On Sale For Japan's Hot Summer - CBS News

A canned drink called "Unagi Nobori," or "Surging Eel," made by Japan Tobacco Inc., hit the nation's stores this month just ahead of Japan's annual eel-eating season, company spokesman Kazunori Hayashi said Monday.

"It's mainly for men who are exhausted by the summer's heat," Hayashi said of the beverage, believed to be the first mass-produced eel drink in Japan.

Many Japanese believe eating eel boosts stamina in hot weather.

The fizzy, yellow-colored drink contains extracts from the head and bones of eel and five vitamins _ A, B1, B2, D and E _ contained in the fish.

how to clean blackberry trackball

How to clean your BlackBerry’s Trackball | BlackBerryInsight

Today it was enough! The problem is, I cannot afford to loose that phone for maybe several weeks while it will be repaired. So I searched forums, googled (even yahooed) and found a lot of stuff which had not really an answer to my question. I remembered an article some months ago which mentioned the coloring the of the Pearl’s trackball by coloring the LED beneath the trackball. Finally I realized that removing the pearl’s cover would the best way to get access to its sensor and clean it. By the way, this should work for all BlackBerry devices that carry a trackball around like BlackBerry Pearl, Curve, 8800 and 8830.

The silver ring which covers the trackball can easily be removed if you use a small screwdriver to lift it at the outer side of the ring. Be careful here! Like you should be during the whole process as all parts have very small plastic nipple which can break very easy. When the silver plastic ring is removed you will see the inner trackball component which can be removed completely. Before doing this you should carefully remove the silver metal ring that holds the trackball component in its position. The trackball component itself can also be carved. For every direction the ball can roll to you’ll find a sensor wheel. Those wheels are mostly carrying some gunk you should clean them from. Once this is done put everything back together to the place the pieces came from and secure the trackball with the silver plastic ring you removed in the first step. Your BlackBerry’s trackball should be back working now.

food that are good for you

The 11 Best Foods You Arent Eating - Well - Tara Parker-Pope - Health - New York Times Blog

# Beets: Think of beets as red spinach, Dr. Bowden said, because they are a rich source of folate as well as natural red pigments that may be cancer fighters.
How to eat: Fresh, raw and grated to make a salad. Heating decreases the antioxidant power.
# Cabbage: Loaded with nutrients like sulforaphane, a chemical said to boost cancer-fighting enzymes.
How to eat: Asian-style slaw or as a crunchy topping on burgers and sandwiches.
# Swiss chard: A leafy green vegetable packed with carotenoids that protect aging eyes.
How to eat it: Chop and saute in olive oil.
# Cinnamon: May help control blood sugar and cholesterol.
How to eat it: Sprinkle on coffee or oatmeal.
# Pomegranate juice: Appears to lower blood pressure and loaded with antioxidants.
How to eat: Just drink it.

serialversionUID generator for intellij

IntelliJ IDEA « Just Five Minutes

Cleaning up code I launched serialver to create serialVersionUIDs for some serializable classes. Wondering why IntelliJ IDEA did not seem to provide a generator for UIDs, I browsed the code inspection settings and it turns out that there actually is one - but it is disabled by default. To use it, go to

Settings -> Errors -> Serialization issues -> Serializable class without ’serialVersionUID’

When editing a Serializable class without a serialVersionUID field set, IDEA now displays a warning and provides a Quickfix (Alt+Enter) to generate one.

props to this guy!

chinese is the new black

China Journal : In South Africa, Chinese is the New Black

In South Africa, Chinese is the New Black

A high court in South Africa ruled on Wednesday that Chinese-South Africans will be reclassified as “black,” a term that includes black Africans, Indians and others who were subject to discrimination under apartheid. As a result of this ruling, ethnically Chinese citizens will be able to benefit from government affirmative action policies aimed at undoing the effects of apartheid.

In 2006, the Chinese Association of South Africa sued the government, claiming that its members were being discriminated against because they were being treated as whites and thus failed to qualify for business contracts and job promotions reserved for victims of apartheid. The association successfully argued that, since Chinese-South Africans had been treated unequally under apartheid, they should be reclassified in order to redress wrongs of the past.

how to control your anger

Soccer Parents: Why They Rage

Jay Goldstein’s tips for not becoming one of those parents

When you feel your anger rising at something you see on the field:

* Controlled deep breathing exercises (inhale for 4 seconds and exhale for 8 seconds)
* Suck on a lollipop (Occupies your mouth and reminds you that you’re there for your child.)
* Visualize a relaxing experience like floating on water.
* Repeat a calm word or phrase.
* Do yoga-like muscle stretches.
* Replace angry thoughts with rational ones, such as “This is my child’s game, not mine,” or “Mistakes are opportunities to learn.”
* Don’t say the first thing that comes into your head. Count to 10 and think about possible responses.
* If you did not see the game, first ask your child “How did you play?” rather than “Did you win?”
* Praise your child’s effort, then, maybe, comment on the results.
* Use humor, but avoid harsh or sarcastic humor. Picture the referee wearing Elton John glasses.

who is the mommy!

Cover Story - When Mom and Dad Share It All - Adventures in Equal Parenting - Lisa Belkin - NYTimes.com

Harlyn Aizley, mother of a 6-year-old daughter, describes the moment that her then-partner, Faith Soloway, first took their newborn in her arms in the delivery room. “Just moments after I gave birth,” Aizley writes in the anthology “Confessions of the Other Mother: Nonbiological Lesbian Moms Tell All,” “Faith scooped up the baby, cooed into her squishy newborn face and said: ‘Hello there. I’m your mommy.’ I wanted to kill her. Faith, that is. I wanted to be Mommy, the only Mommy.”

pick up your pooo

Scoop It Up or Pay - On Patrol With Enforcers of the Dog Law - NYTimes.com

He could see all the telltale signs of negligent intent: the irritated expression, the hurried pace, the absence of a plastic bag in the pocket. “People who pick up have time,” he said earlier. “You can look at some people right away and say, ‘This person is not going to pick up after their dog.’ ”

When upgrading Wordpress from 2.3 to 2.5 make sure you change your permalink.

My Life and Times › Permalink Settings — WordPress

Customize Permalink Structure

By default WordPress uses web URLs which have question marks and lots of numbers in them, however WordPress offers you the ability to create a custom URL structure for your permalinks and archives. This can improve the aesthetics, usability, and forward-compatibility of your links. A number of tags are available, and here are some examples to get you started.

External Drive NTFS for Macs!

How-to: Read and Write NTFS Windows Partition on Mac OS X - Stepcase Lifehack

How-to: Read and Write NTFS Windows Partition on Mac OS X

Updated: from MacFuse 0.1.0 Beta 6 to 0.1.7

Users running Mac OS X with Bootcamp Windows may struggle to modify or update your documents and files in the Windows partition - usually it is in NTFS File System format which you can read the drive natively in Mac OS X but not write onto it.

Recently Amit Singh, a Google employee, releases a implementation called MacFUSE which makes it possible to use any FUSE (File-system in USErspace) file systems in Mac. And the most useful FUSE is the NTFS-3G Read/Write Driver, which ables system to load NTFS with read and write capability. This is truly the greatest news for dual booting Mac OS X and Windows XP or Vista.

Without going into great deal of technical details and compilation of the source code, I found out users around Internet already came up with binary version (in DMG) of MacFUSE and ntfs-3g, ready to install (credit to ShadowOfGed at AppleNova). Here are the instructions on how to use MacFUSE and NTFS-3G. It does require a little of administration skills as it involves running commands in the Terminal.

MacFUSE/NTFS-3G works for me, but as this is an experimental software, so back up your data, and try it at your own risk.

* Download and Install MacFuse 0.1.7 DMG

This works great! I use it for my laptop to connect to my image drive!

How to scale twitter

Scaling Twitter redux--the ESB should be your best friend | Negative Approach - CNET News.com

Scaling Twitter redux--the ESB should be your best friend
Posted by Dave Rosenberg 1 comment

As we Twitt-iots sit around bemoaning the fact that we can't send each other useless junk on a flaky service, I thought I would take this chance to address the notion that this message-scaling problem is new.

It's not. It's very common, and it can be solved.

Scaling a messaging platform is why IBM sells a boatload of MQ series, why the AMQP protocol was developed, and why JMS is nearly ubiquitous. Pretty much every large enterprise has similar scale issues related to messaging, especially in financial services. But they don't have downtime, and if they did as frequently as Twitter, the people behind them would all get fired.

This is a topic I actually know something about. (Disclosure: my company develops an open-source enterprise service bus, or ESB, called Mule.) All of our use cases involve some kind of complicated messaging architecture, whether it be Web-service based, publish and subscribe, one to many, direct connection, etc. And most deal with data transformations and a vast array of protocols.

In my view, what Twitter needs is to adopt a bus-type of architecture that separates the transport from the application and uses a middleman to process the transactions. This is a very common enterprise scenario that needs to be applied. This is what an ESB does.

publish and subscribe!

Sars Information

Damn Interesting

The Heroes of SARS
Written by Matt Castle on May 23rd, 2008 at 1:00 am

On 21 February 2003, a physician in Hong Kong was feeling particularly unwell. He must have had an inkling that something serious was amiss, for his symptoms closely matched those of a number of patients he had treated in recent weeks: fever, aching muscles, headache, a dry cough, and shortness of breath. An alarmingly high proportion of these people had become critically ill, with inflamed, fluid-saturated lungs. Breathing was rendered somewhat difficult, and death frequently followed.

hi sir

hi sir this is a test blog! sorry i am testing my software

How many month's is each belly?

Just like when i finished colleged!!

Degree no job guarantee in China - Los Angeles Times

WUHAN, CHINA -- Sun Yuanping skipped her college graduation ceremony for a job interview. It was an all-day affair and the bookish 22-year-old felt good about it. After all, she has degrees in marketing and botany from a well-regarded school in this central Chinese city, and she ranked in the top fifth of her class.

Sun never heard back from that prospective employer nor from dozens of other companies and government agencies where she has applied since she graduated in June. Recently, after tearful self-reflection and long nights tossing in bed, she pared down her expectations and began sending her resume to small businesses offering salaries as low as $140 a month, a third of what she had hoped to make.

As each jobless day passes and Sun lives off a $100 monthly allowance from her parents, she feels more and more guilty.

Free Business Book Online!

Free business book is Web sensation - Yahoo! News

NEW YORK - The Oprah touch doesn't just work for traditional books. More than 1 million copies of Suze Orman's "Women & Money" were downloaded after the announcement last week on Winfrey's television show that the e-book edition would be available for free on her Web site, http://www.oprah.com, for a period of 33 hours.
ADVERTISEMENT

"I believe `Women & Money' is the most important book I've ever written," Orman said in a statement released Saturday by Winfrey. "So this was not about getting people to buy the book, but getting them to read it, and that was the intention behind this offer."

The download offer "has built excitement for Suze's book across all formats," Julie Grau, the book's publisher, said in a statement.

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.

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.

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

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.

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!

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 :)

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.

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.

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.

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."

Credit problems

Unpaid credit cards bedevil Americans - Yahoo! News

Experts say these signs of the deterioration of finances of many households are partly a byproduct of the subprime mortgage crisis and could spell more trouble ahead for an already sputtering economy.

"Debt eventually leaks into other areas, whether it starts with the mortgage and goes to the credit card or vice versa," said Cliff Tan, a visiting scholar at Stanford University and an expert on credit risk. "We're starting to see leaks now."

Don't use credit cards as a bank! the interest rate will get you! I know a few friends that had this problem... one missed payment.... pow!

Blackberry link to download facebook

http://www.blackberry.com/facebook/mobiledownload

I had a hard time finding the link to download facebook for the blackberry. you think you would be able to easily get it over the air(OTA.)

Traffic Gauge worth getting?

My wife drives through about 2 hours of traffic every day. It's the reality of living in LA. Most people I talk to in Los Angeles commute on average about 40 minutes a day. The traffic gauge provides real time wireless traffic. Price 80 to buy, then 10 bux a month for the subscription for real time traffic info. 

test cat 2

 

where does the cat live?

live writer test!

underground hackers

DailyTech - Study: Insight into Chinese Underground Hacking Economy

In all, the study claims that 1.49% of Chinese websites have malicious content within them. The study measures 145,000 of the most commonly visited Chinese websites and found that 2,149 of them contained malicious content. Each time a visitor to the websites containing malicious content visited that had certain software vulnerabilities in their browser or applications, the machine was compromised and some sort of malware was installed unbeknownst to the computer user. This kind of attack is known as drive-by-download-attack and the malware is typically a Trojan of some sort that harvests information and sends it to the attacker.

The study describes what it calls actors from the underground economy. The first actor is the Virus Writer, who has a certain degree of technical background allowing them to program viruses and zero day exploits. The virus writers are driven by profits says the study. On the underground market virus writers typically earn around the equivalent of $1.34 USD for the sell of Trojans they write.

A website master/cracker is the next player who attracts web traffic to a site with free goods like music or applications. These webmasters/crackers then sell the traffic to “envelope stealers” for around 40 -60 RMB ($4-$8 USD) per 10,000 visits. The envelope stealers attempt to harvest username and password combos for given sites, like online games. These envelope stealers then sell the harvested information to virtual asset stealers for tens of RMB, or around $1.35 USD. These players also sell access to infected computers for pennies to about $1.35 USD.

Virtual asset stealers buy the password, username combos from envelope sellers and then gain access to accounts in popular online games where they steal game assets like weapons and coins to sell for real world profits. What the study calls one QQ coin sells for about $0.70 USD. The final piece of the underground economy is the players who buy the stolen game goods. The study says these players are most often teenage males very into online games who spend their parent’s money.

apache deployments!

Indigio Blog - Colorado’s premier Interactive Agency blog - specializing in SEO, Creative Design, Development and Analytics » Blog Archive » Easier Production Releases

Set up an external dns entry for example.com and www.example.com (and the appropriate firewall rules to get port 80 of that IP to this apache box) and you now have a website that load balances over two separate clusters. You’re ready for a release during BUSINESS HOURS!

Choose a cluster to release to first and comment out all of its servers in the web-prod balancer. Run an apachectl graceful and you should then have no traffic going to that cluster. Shutdown the cluster, do your release thing, start up the cluster and then send QA off to test the cluster using the specific prod-a or prod-b.example.com url. Once QA confirms it’s good, uncomment the cluster from the web-prod balancer and comment out the other one. Fire off another graceful restart and repeat the release procedure on that cluster.

And *poof* you just rolled out a release with no downtime and very little impact to end users! Of course, this was just a very simple example. You can get much more detailed in your cluster design, especially with JBoss and different components. Just remember your individual clusters have to be completely separate. They can’t share any resources. Although, in all my experience they’ve always shared a database. You just need to make certain that any database updates the devs require you to make for the upgrade won’t cause the older release any harm.

This concept should work in most situations, just could take more planning/design/set up. I’ve got a similar set up running with 36 JBoss servers, 18 in each cluster. Quite a bit more had to be configured, especially to make sure that each individual cluster acts independently, and then there’s the SSL issues and sticky session requirements. But it’s so worth it though, and everyone will love you for cutting out the need for past midnight release “parties”.

I should set this up!

pooor kity

Cat survives 19 days with jar on head - Yahoo! News

BARTLETT, Tenn. - Tabitha Cain has fed a feral cat she calls Wild Oats for several years, but now she's thinking of changing the feline's name to Survivor.

That's because she says the cat survived for 19 days with a peanut butter jar stuck on its head.

"We tried to get her, but being the type of cat you can't catch, she kept running and hiding," said Doretha Cain, Tabitha's mother.

The family saw the cat several times with the jar on its head and tried in vain to catch it. But after not seeing the cat for a week, the Cains feared the worst.

"I thought she was going to die with that jar on her head," said Tabitha Cain, 25.

They found the once chubby cat on Wednesday, too thin and weak to flee. They caught her with a fishing net and used some oil to get the jar off her head.

dun buy that beagle

Our view on animal welfare: Beware of doggie in window - Yahoo! News

Under federal rules, a beagle could legally spend its life in a dishwasher-sized cage. Nor are there enough inspectors: 105 are charged with overseeing about 10,000 facilities, including kennels, zoos and research labs. High-volume operations that sell directly to the public don't need a federal license, and most state laws and enforcement are weak.

snogo i promise to be good

Fearing Divorce, Japanese Husbands Learn to Be Loving

Everything boiled down to the desire of wives to hear their husbands say "three magic phrases" more often: "Thank you," "Sorry," and "I love you".

Perched on a beer case serving as a makeshift podium in central Tokyo, a group of middle-aged Japanese men are standing up to save their marriages -- and, they hope, marriage in Japan generally. "I'm sorry I always forget to put the toilet seat down," said one man in a suit and tie confessed as he balanced on the beer box at Shimbashi, Tokyo's hub of "salaryman" corporate workers.

"I hereby declare that I will stop going to the hostess bar, I'm sorry," said another man as his wife looked on amid a crowd of curious bystanders.

Said another man: "I love you, even though I don't really say it."

In a country where reticence about one's private life is the norm, these men are trying to prove their worth to their wives by making their vows as public as possible.

The 20 men taking part in the unlikely rally chant their slogan together: "Say 'thank you' without hesitating. Say 'sorry' without being scared. Say 'I love you' without being shy."

hi snogo. i promise to put away the dishes every night.

please give me my money

Lottery winner wasn't supposed to gamble - Yahoo! News

BOSTON - The winner of a $1 million lottery scratch ticket may not be so lucky after all: He's a convicted bank robber who isn't supposed to gamble. Timothy Elliott faces a Dec. 7 court hearing over whether he violated his probation when he bought the $10 ticket for the $800 Million Spectacular game at a supermarket in Hyannis.
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Elliott was placed on five years' probation after pleading guilty in October 2006 to unarmed robbery for a January 2006 heist at a bank on Cape Cod. Under terms of his probation, he "may not gamble, purchase lottery tickets or visit an establishment where gaming is conducted, including restaurants where Keno may be played."

Please dress my doggie

Dog owners go barking mad for fancy dress - Yahoo! News

Sales soared by 300 percent over Halloween. Now costumiers have lined up a festive big seller -- the one-size-fits-all Santa pet hat for the dog determined to have a great Christmas.

"Some cynics would say the British love their dogs more than they do other people," said Benjamin Webb, spokesman for Angels Fancy Dress who have been supplying costumes for humans since 1840 and are now on a canine winning streak.

american eagle loses bags!

Travelers’ Odds Decline on Airline Baggage - New York Times

Counting together American and the regional airline it owns, American Eagle, mishandled bags rise to 8.69 for every thousand passengers, or a total of 639,146 through Sept. 30.

American Eagle had the worst bag-handling record of 20 airlines tracked by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics during that period, the agency reported.

lost luggage recovery!

Travelers’ Odds Decline on Airline Baggage - New York Times

“We never hit 100 percent — 90 percent is acceptable,” she said. Airlines are fond of saying that they have a success rate of more than 99 percent in getting luggage to its destination along with its owner. And every big airline has stepped up efforts to improve its operations. But the baggage problem is getting worse. One in every 138 checked bags was lost during the first nine months of this year, compared with one in 155 bags a year earlier.

free evdo!

Techcrunch

But Amazon must be taking a big hit up front on this. My Sprint EVDO data plan costs $60 a month. That is a consumer price. Obviously, Amazon was able to negotiate a much lower price. Even at $10 a month per Kindle, Amazon would need to sell a dozen books just to recoup its wireless network costs. Maybe it got a better deal than that, since the device is designed more for a download-and-read experience than an always-on experience. So the Kindles may not end up using a lot of bandwidth. It is not like most people are going to be downloading a new book everyday. If Amazon was able to negotiate the rate down closer to $1 a month, that would make more sense, because that would only require one or two book downloads per customer to pay for a year’s worth of wireless access. Amazon would not comment on how much it is paying for the wireless network. If it is paying Sprint on a per-device basis, it won’t really matter unless the Kindle takes off in sales.

The new device has evdo! this is great!

To get mysql to autostart on startup

LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) HOWTO: Installing MySQL and Apache with PHP support on Linux

/sbin/chkconfig --level 3 mysql on

I had to use:

/sbin/chkconfig --level 3 mysqld on

instead

goodbye doogggie

Dog gives up life to save man from fire - Yahoo! News

CARTER LAKE, Iowa - Bryan Smith has pictures of his dog in his coat pocket, a reminder of the pet that sacrificed itself to save him from his burning house.
ADVERTISEMENT

It was Tuesday night when Storm jumped on the slumbering Smith and alerted him to the growing smoke and flames outside his bedroom.

Smith says he grabbed his curtains, wet them for a mask and grabbed his puppy Daisy while the older dog ran ahead.

aiden gets his revenge

Popular NYC eatery shut down for rodents - Yahoo! News

While serendipity may be the art of finding pleasant things by chance, what health inspectors found at celebrated eatery Serendipity 3 was not very agreeable.
ADVERTISEMENT

Officials closed the restaurant Wednesday night after it failed its second inspection in a month. An inspector spotted a live mouse and mouse droppings, fruit flies, house flies and more than 100 live cockroaches.

send me videos!

TV sets a turnoff for South Korea's youth | CNET News.com

User-generated content sites such as "ipop" have clubs where users can pay by the download or pony up monthly subscription fees of about 10,000 won to 20,000 won ($11 to $22) that will let them tap into a huge library of U.S., Japanese, Chinese, and Korean TV programming and movies.

One of the most popular peer-to-peer clubs, Mansal, has had nearly 50 million visitors. While many are repeats, the total is still almost equal to the country's population.

"I like to download stuff because I don't have to wait to watch something" Seong-sun said.

The clubs make money from subscription fees and advertising. Young professionals with little time to spare and students with an abundance of time to search for material are the main clients for these services--making cable TV and TV sets obsolete.

don't eat me

Polar Bears on Yahoo! News Photos

Dolphins rescue surfer from shark - People: Tales of survival - MSNBC.com

That attack shredded his back, literally peeling the skin back, he said, “like a banana peel.” But because Endris’ stomach was pressed to the surfboard, his intestines and internal organs were protected.

The third time, the shark tried to swallow Endris’ right leg, and he said that was actually a good thing, because the shark’s grip anchored him while he kicked the beast in the head and snout with his left leg until it let go.

The dolphins, which had been cavorting in the surf all along, showed up then. They circled him, keeping the shark at bay, and enabled Endris to get back on his board and catch a wave to the shore.

Our finned friends
No one knows why dolphins protect humans, but stories of the marine mammals rescuing humans go back to ancient Greece, according to the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society.

A year ago in New Zealand, the group reports, four lifeguards were saved from sharks in the same way Endris was — by dolphins forming a protective ring.

diamonds

Wis. man finds 3.92-ct white diamond - Yahoo! News

His fiancee Susan Gabrielson — who has "only one carat on her finger" — her daughter Sayde and Susan's sister Sarah accompanied Blake to the park this week. Susan found a 1.47-carat stone and some smaller gems Monday.

"We're going back out today. We'll take a lunch and then go back into the field," Blake said.

More than 700 diamonds have been found at the park this year.

The Crater of Diamonds park is the world's only diamond-producing site open to the public and visitors can keep the stones they dig up. The largest diamond ever found in the United States, the 40-carat white diamond named Uncle Sam, was unearthed in 1924 at the Murfreesboro park.

I need more bling for my ring!

Chore Wars

'Chore Wars,' where 'World of Warcraft' meets toilet cleaner | Tech news blog - CNET News.com

'Chore Wars,' where 'World of Warcraft' meets toilet cleaner
Posted by Michael Kanellos

SAN FRANCISCO--Housework is a lot more fun with a battle axe and a couple of dwarves.

Chore Wars, a game shown off by noted game developer Jane McGonigal at the Web 2.0 Summit recently, gives users "experience" points for various household chores. Collecting those points then lets you advance your profile in the online game.

Jane McGonigal

Jane McGonigal speaks at the Game Developers Conference held in San Francisco this past May.
(Credit: James Martin, CNET News.com)

Swiffer the floor twice a week and get 20 points for charm, that sort of thing. You can also play for virtual gold doubloons. These can be exchanged for rewards, inside your own circle of friends. Earn 200 doubloons and you can receive a get-out of-cleaning-the garage card. Or if you are the low scorer for a month, you can be dubbed a scapegoat and put up for adoption.

Naturally, most players concentrate on people you know. Who cares if some guy in Texas slew 200 yards of PVC pipe in putting together his new sprinkler system and got 1,000 doubloons. The bean bags in your guest room still need to be stacked. Still, you can get a sense of the value that other people put on certain tasks to get a sense of the value of your own.

There are different roles you can play--apprentice, dungeon master (DMs have full administrative power and get to wield the unstoppable cleansing power of Comet) and adventurer.

I hate it.

mags would be he dungeon master, and I would have to clean the toilets for 20 gold.

Bubble Blogger...

Real estate blogger taps into bursting market bubble

Every once in a while his two worlds - programming and blogging - collide. Time was, Killelea was best known as the author of "Web Performance Tuning," a geeky manual that helped him get jobs. Now his fame as a bubble blogger has spread - not always to his advantage. "Once a guy called me in for a job interview just to berate me," he said. "I don't do this language called Ruby that he wanted, so I said, 'Why did you bring me here?' He said, 'I want to talk to you about your Web site.' He complained about how he had overpaid for a house in Palo Alto and couldn't get out of it. It was not a civil conversation."

Sometimes I ping dennis and yell at him too stupid php and housing in mountain view!

I go buckwild

Man in China dies after three-day Internet session - Yahoo! News

A Chinese man dropped dead after playing Internet games for three consecutive days, state media said on Monday as China seeks to wean Internet addicts offline.
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The man from the southern boomtown of Guangzhou, aged about 30, died on Saturday after being rushed to the hospital from the Internet cafe, local authorities were quoted by the Beijing News as saying.

when my wife goes out of town, I go on a gaming binge. She usually gets back in 2 days, to prevent my death... the third day would kill me.

old doods younger chicks

May/December Couples Boost Human Lifespan - Yahoo! News

How it works

Women often lose their reproductive capacity around age 50, but if men can still reproduce into their 70s, Darwin would say it's advantageous for males to live longer lives providing they can hook up with a woman capable of reproducing. Natural selection should favor longevity-boosting genes, which would get passed down from fathers to both sons and daughters. So women would benefit as well in future generations, the scientists say.

Result: Over time, the older-guy-with-younger-gal lifestyle would lift the lifespan ceiling for both men and women in the next generations and so on.

"By increasing the survival of men you have a spillover effect on women because men pass their genes to children of both sexes," said study team member Cedric Puleston, a doctoral candidate at Stanford University.

vacu seal my meat!

Tumble your way to tasty meat | Kitchen Gadgets - CNET Blogs

Tumble your way to tasty meat
Posted by Jennifer Guevin

Now even procrastinators can serve up tender, tasty meat as if they hadn't forgotten to start marinating until 10 minutes before their guests arrived.
Meat in barrel

The Reveo requires a surprisingly small amount of marinade. Mmmm...meat juice...
(Credit: Jennifer Guevin/CNET Networks)

I recently got to test out the Reveo MariVac from Eastman Outdoors, a funky kitchen appliance that looks suspiciously like a rock tumbler and that the company claims can cut down the time it takes to marinate meat to a fraction of the norm.

To use it, you just put raw meat and marinade into a compartment that tumbles it all together for up to 20 minutes. The idea behind the machine is that it vacuums out the air in the main barrel, stretching the fibers of the meat to allow the marinade to soak deeper into the meat in a shorter amount of time. All the while, the barrel turns, tumbling the meat and the marinade together in a messy bucket of flavor and goodness.

i want to order a hamburgler!

dont eat my doggie

Councilor: Ship stray dogs to Korea - Yahoo! News

A soup with dog meat called boshintang is popular in Korea, especially on the three hot "dog days" of summer on the lunar calendar. The traditional belief is that dog meat helps boost stamina and virility, but activists regularly criticize the practice and call for bans on eating dog meat.

Please don't eat my doggie... bow wow

watch out for da bomb!

hello kitty punishment

Bad Thai cops to endure Kitty shame - Yahoo! News

Police officers caught littering, parking in a prohibited area, or arriving late — among other misdemeanors — will be forced to stay in the division office and wear the armband all day, said Police Col. Pongpat Chayaphan. The officers won't wear the armband in public.

The striking armband features Hello Kitty sitting atop two hearts.

jumbo squid

Voracious jumbo squid invade California - Yahoo! News

An aggressive predator, the Humboldt squid — or Dosidicus gigas — can change its eating habits to consume the food supply favored by tuna and sharks, its closest competitors, according to an article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.

yummy

j2me 904 errors?

Are you getting j2me errors? This usually means that your cell phone decided to cache the jar file, while updating your jad file. Two possible solutions:

1. clear the history on your phone browser or power cycle the bastard.
2. update the jad/jar name. Stuff a random number param at the end of the jad/jar so that the phone doesnt update it
3. add this to your apache config file

LoadModule expires_module modules/mod_expires.so
.....
AddModule mod_expires.c
.....


ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType text/vnd.sun.j2me.app-descriptor "access plus 1 second"
ExpiresByType application/java-archive "access plus 1 second"

so sad

j2me woes

Java ME Mobile Phone Applications - Conclusions - www.shinetech.com

Conclusions

In this article I’ve explained the good, bad, and just plain ugly features of Java ME.

First, we saw that "the good” included:

* Core features for interacting with devices
* Easy to develop, and existing Java skills can be leveraged
* Wide ranging availability
* Package portability across different devices
* Deployment is trivial
* Tools are abundant and of an excellent caliber

Next, I explained how "the bad” concerned problems of API versioning and fragmentation, and the associated difficulties of configuring mobile phones for internet access. Finally, we saw how "the ugly” usually concerned the runtime environment (devices and carriers) and centered on security certificates, locked-out functionality and Java verification.

In my opinion the “good” of Java ME far outweighs both the bad and the ugly. There are alternatives to Java ME, but if you want to deliver robust applications to the widest possible mobile phone audience, it’s the best technology to go with. The Java ME community is active and exciting. Furthermore, it’s a technology that is both a de-facto standard and rewarding to work with.

Java ME – a little bit of bad, a touch of ugly, but mostly good.

Decent article summarizing the challenges of using j2me. I'll have to say that porting is a nightmare, especially when you are working on cutting edge work.

Opera 4 mini is good web browser for mobile phones. I’ve used it on a new prototype MOT q9 phone and 8830 black berry. It displays a website, exactly how you would see it on a computer. And it auto-zooms to the readable portions of the website, and the text is sized to fit on the screen perfectly. The text and images in the zoomed in portion are very readable on my blackberry 8830. However in the zoomed-out view, the view is too fuzzy to be useful. You can navigate if you know what you are looking for. Most phones are about 72 dpi, which contributes to the fuzzy screen. The iphone is much more useful in the zoomed out view because of the 140 DPI, and 480x640 screen.

You have be a bit careful though, the websites you visit are processed and read by a server hosted by the opera folks. I would not do any secure type of banking or ebay things with opera mini.

Watch this annoying video about iphone browser against opera mini.

http://www.operamini.com/beta/video/

Annoying blackberry j2me development notes

1. No left or right soft keys.
2. You cannot mix midlets and blackberry APIs.
3. Garbage collection causes hourglass to appear on the screen.
4. Track wheel on older blackberries go only up and down. Trackballs act normally.
5. Video implementation for MMAPI is crippled for video running from http URL.

2 billion Chinese mice overrun lake area - Yahoo! News

Now, an estimated 2 billion mice are ravaging crops in 22 counties around the lake, and authorities were rushing to construct walls and ditches to keep the rodents out. Residents have killed more than 2.3 million field mice — or 90 tons of the rodents, Xinhua said.

In Hunan province's Yiyang County, a ditch along the lakeshore was filled with mice. Residents were using clubs and shovels to beat them to death, while others scooped the furry animals out using fishing nets.

Ratatuillie goes crazy!

i hope there aren't any lines here!

China public restroom has 1,000 stalls - Yahoo! News

BEIJING - They're flush with pride in a southwestern Chinese city where a recently-opened porcelain palace features an Egyptian facade, soothing music and more than 1,000 toilets spread out over 32,290 square feet.
ADVERTISEMENT

Officials in Chongqing are preparing to submit an application to Guinness World Records to have the free four-story public bathroom listed as the world's largest, the state-run China Central Television reported Friday.

My wife would love this, then she wouldn't have to wait in line!

J2ME streaming.....

www.DrHu.org

J2ME Streaming is always a hot topic. How to implement streaming via HTTP protocal in GPRS?
Of course if the streaming media is not support partial data play (ex. midi sound), we can't do anything about it, right?
But how about if the media can play partial data (ex. arm sound), can we do it?
Here comes a wonderful J2ME application. Remember that we are not talking about RTSP/MMS, we are dealing with HTTP.
The idea is very simple. We open two thread, one thread is for download the data, the other thread is play the data that already downloaded so far.
Once the first chunk of data is available, we play it. When finished play the first chunk of data, we play the second available chunk of data, and so on.
If your mobile phone phone support two players, the play will be more smooth. The data is dynamically fetched into the next player.
Well you may ask "If finished play the first part of data and there is no second part data available which can be likely happened via airtime GPRS, what to do?",
just play the first part data again right!
Once the data is 100% downloaded, you can always replay again and again.
There is no need for special treatment of the host server that provide the media.
Yeah, you can play from any media server with this application.

Things to remember:
1) We assume that your mobile implemented the JSR 135 API getDuration and setMediaTime (tested on Motorola v188).
2) Download big size of streaming data may cost you a lot of money if it is not monthly service based on.
It is you own responsibility for the cost, not my application.
3) The application provided a demo, therefore try the demo first and let me know which device can play and what problem you have.
4) You can find what media is available now in my server here.
5) My contact email: drhu00@yahoo.com

This guy has a pretty good streaming ideas.....

i would eat it

Rare blue lobster avoids the cooker - Yahoo! News

The 1 1/2-pound clawed creature is bright blue, the result of an extremely rare genetic mutation.

It turned up Sunday morning in one of Hatch and Green's lobster traps at the mouth of the Thames River.

"I've heard about them but this is the first one I've ever seen," Hatch told The Day of New London newspaper.

Later that afternoon, he put the lobster in a cooler and brought it to the Mystic Aquarium and Institute for Exploration, where it will live out its days in an elementary school classroom for children to learn about.

I would eat this lobster. yummy....

AddType text/vnd.sun.j2me.app-descriptor .jad
AddType application/java-archive .jar


Header set "cache-control" "no-transform"


Add the code above so that Apache does not mangle your jad and jars.

Domo Arigato, Pass The Sashimi: Sushi Robots Will Destroy Us All, Make Delicious Sushi - Gizmodo

We're not sure this these sushi robots are for "home use," but who wouldn't want their own mechanical man making sushi for them? The various rice-ball-forming machines make anywhere from 850 balls an hour up to 1200 balls an hour, and the various parts of the sushi robot lineup make 2000 to 3000 pieces an hour.

Sounds pretty industrial/restaurant to us, but great if you like to have sushi every day of the week. Or really like robots. – Jason Chen

mysql longtext and seam

If you are working with seam and one of the columns in your tables is of the longtext type.

Make sure you set uncomment this line out inside your persistence-prod.xml



This will allow your EJB3s to deploy correctly when working with the long text type.

What makes the rich rich.....

What got them to the highest level? It isn't necessarily stock-market savvy: On average, folks who recently hit the $5 million mark report that only 10% of their money came through passive investments. And only 10% of pentamillionaires inherited their wealth. One might think that good fortune would play a role, but even luck is largely a matter of one's own making. Psychologist Richard Wiseman has found that people who describe themselves as lucky share common habits that account for their success: They're friendly and fond of new experiences, traits that put them on a collision course with new opportunities. In addition, "lucky" folks simply have higher expectations of success — they're too pigheadedly optimistic to heed the long odds and call it quits.

Not to say that getting rich is simply a matter of having a swell attitude. The path to riches usually involves the kind of risk that would make most people feel a little queasy. Harrison Group head Jim Taylor recently persuaded more than 3,000 pentamillionaires to discuss their path to success. Perhaps not surprisingly, none of them had a cushy union job down at the DMV. The vast majority — 80% — either started their own business or worked for a small company that saw explosive growth. And almost all of them made their fortune in a big lump sum after many years of effort.

Agile Offshoring

Agile Offshoring : It's hard work but it works!

Principle 14: Become a learning organization through relentless reflection ( Hansei ) and continuous improvement (kaizen)

This is the most important principle which has helped us reach where we are today, we do rigorous iteration evaluations for reflections of good things to preserve and areas of improvement to help us improve iteration on iteration.

We solicit constant and immediate client and team feedback so that the ultimate aim of the software is realized in an effective and efficient way.

Apart from this we made it a point to get to the root cause of any problem that we came across by asking “why” 5 times.

Conclusion

To conclude I would say that we are still learning. The lean production metaphor has been successfully applied to software offshoring but it can be improved. The Toyota principles when applied to software offshoring can make remarkable differences to the way software is being developed and offshored. We are trying to continuously improve and reach our goal of 'Whitebox Lean Agile Offshoring' in which transparency and quality are taken to the extreme.

As an advice for the offshoring industry, follow Scrum with the Toyota principles in spirit without diluting their essence. Apply them to your way of working and see the magic unfold.

Offshoring takes difficult executation. The overhead in communications for the distributed teams is difficult. The technical architecture needs be componentized so that distributed teams can work on seperate pieces without conflicting with one another. The software development processes need to be tailored for the offshore and onshore teams. Although offshoring is difficult, it can have numerous benifits if challenges can be overcome.

Mad Opportunity to short chinese stocks.....

China Stocks: Tick, Tick, Kaboom?: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance

Further out, the introduction of a vibrant futures market--in which investors could make money shorting stocks ripe for a fall--would add more stability. Though Shanghai expects to introduce index futures sometime this year, market watchers say regulators are reluctant to launch them during such frothy times. The key thing, though, is for Beijing officialdom to understand the risk--a market crash would annihilate the finances of millions of Chinese households with big exposure to equities.

"The government should actively state that there is a bubble in China and the wording should come from senior Chinese Communist Party leaders," says Shaun Rein, managing director of the Shanghai-based China Market Research Group (CMR). "There are too many new investors coming into the market with glossy eyes expecting to make fortunes." In fact, some 368,000 brokerage accounts were opened on May 8 alone, according to the China Securities Depository and Clearing Corp.

Nasdaq 100 Leaders and Laggards: DISCA: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance

Amazon.com Inc. fell $2.41, or 3.8 percent, to $60.82.

Infosys Technologies Ltd. fell $1.98, or 3.7 percent, to $51.92 on a bad day for Indian technology companies. Investors sold on fears that a strengthening rupee could hurt profit margins at outsourcing companies.

Great fundamentals... but bit of bad news is drawing down this stock :(

Will the stock bounce back the resistance? It looks like it can go either way the 50 and 200 moving day average are going to cross.

Stock Chart AAPL




One of my favorite stocks is Apple(aapl)... Notice the new highs, when the market opens every day in the last five days.

Do I need a new phone?

Blackberry, new treo, or samsung blackjack?


RIM BlackBerry Curve (aka BlackBerry 8300) Reviews. Smartphones Reviews by CNET.

Simply put, it was love at first sight. Though we don't fully understand the name--it's no curvier than the BlackBerry Pearl or any of the other latest BlackBerrys--the RIM BlackBerry Curve offers a best-of-breed design that beautifully combines a full QWERTY keyboard into a sleek and compact form factor. The silver-and-black color scheme is standard but attractive nonetheless. We'll admit there's a slight resemblance to the Palm Treo 680 from the front, but it's much thinner and more manageable in terms of size. In fact, it's the smallest and lightest full QWERTY BlackBerry to date at just 4.2x2.4x0.6 inches and 3.9 ounces. By comparison, the BlackBerry 8800 measures 4.4x2.6x0.5 inches and 4.7 ounces, while the Treo 680 measures 4.4x2.3x0.8 inches and 5.5 ounces.

RIM BlackBerry Curve

This is my stock screenshot... how does it look? :)

yummy frog juice

Frog juice in high demand in Peru - Yahoo! News

LIMA, Peru - Carmen Gonzalez plucks one of the 50 frogs from the aquarium at her bus stop restaurant, bangs it against tiles to kill it and then makes two incisions along its belly and peels off the skin as if husking corn.
ADVERTISEMENT

She's preparing frog juice, a beverage revered by some Andean cultures for having the power to cure asthma, bronchitis, sluggishness and a low sex drive. A drink of so-called "Peruvian Viagra" sells for about 90 cents.

Gonzalez adds three ladles of hot, white bean broth, two generous spoonfuls of honey, raw aloe vera plant and several tablespoons of maca — an Andean root also believed to boost stamina and sex drive — into a household blender.

Disney Princess Gowns

Disney offers princess gowns to brides - Yahoo! News

NEW YORK - So many brides say they want to look like a princess on their wedding day — and now we're about to find out if they mean really mean it.
ADVERTISEMENT

The Walt Disney Co. has teamed with bridal designer Kirstie Kelly to create a collection of gowns inspired by the favorite Disney princess characters, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Ariel from "The Little Mermaid," Belle from "Beauty and The Beast" and Jasmine from "Aladdin."

Mags, you cannot wear this around the apartment.

6mbps down 600 up

Wowers!



So I moved into this new apartment 2 blocks up the street. Mags and I decided to upgrade our DSL.



We now get 5mbps! All this fancy ajax stuff isn't slow anymore! Now to see if my bittorrent stuff is any slower....

log4j.properties

Whenever you use log4j, make sure you stuff the log4j.properties inside your classpath. I always put the file inside the directory, but I forget to put it in the classpath. I then spend a hours wondering why nothing is being outputted into the logs.

Install Notify Errors for Motorola Phones

Be careful.... sometimes the url on the install notify for OTA is too long, and it will causes some motorola devices to reject the jad and jar.







Content Delivery [The Wireless FAQ]

906 Invalid descriptor Indicates that the device could not interpret the Download Descriptor. This typically means a syntactic error.

Nokia Cell Phones ignore the meta refresh....

For all you mobile wap developers...



The nokia phones like to ignore the meta-refresh tag.

 http-equiv="refresh" content="5" />

If you need do a long operation for a website like loading email or pulling up data for a report, this tag will be unreliable.



You will need to implement some sort of polling mechanism, where the user clicks on the link manually every 5 seconds to gather the information.

To go through a directory of log files and delete them on unix

for FILE in `find /home/evilsquid/logs -maxdepth 1 -mtime -1 -name *.log`

do

echo $FILE

rm $FILE

done



This is a useful tidbit if you need to do some log file monitoring....

Don't eat my kitty

Chinese animal rights victory takes cats off the menu | Special reports | Guardian Unlimited

Chinese animal rights victory takes cats off the menu


Jonathan Watts in Beijing
Tuesday February 13, 2007
The Guardian

China's nascent animal rights movement claimed a rare victory today after rescuing more than 400 cats that were about to be slaughtered for their fur and meat.

They were saved from a market in Tianjin after a standoff last week between 100 pet lovers and police which left one protester hospitalised.

Until recent years, respect for animal rights was almost non-existent in China, but the country's rising affluence has brought with it a pet-pampering middle class. Activists are becoming bolder, posting video footage of cruel treatment on YouTube and staging protests.

Article continues
In the latest confrontation, 100 supporters of the "Love Kitty" group in Tianjin surrounded a market, where cats and dogs were being slaughtered. Many of the protesters were local people who had lost their pets and suspected the animals had been abducted by furriers. The police refused to support the animal protection group because there is no law in China against killing cats and dogs, and all the animal traders were licensed.

Lu Di, director of the Small Animal Protection Association, said: "The demonstrators were afraid that the killings were continuing behind the closed doors so they made their way inside. They found cats crammed inside tiny wire cages about 10cm [4ins] high. About 80 police officers arrived and there were scuffles. One man suffered a head injury and is still in hospital."

To avoid further clashes, the Hebei provincial government allowed the cats to be taken to Ms Lu's shelter in Beijing. It has been difficult for her small, non-profit organisation to cope with so many mistreated animals.

Bow Wow

Mother cat adopts newborn Rottweiler - Yahoo! News

The tiny pup, named Charlie by Humane Society volunteers, nurses alongside a jumble of black and gray kittens recently born to Satin, who was taken to the shelter by an owner unable to care for her.

how to get the imei for a nextel phone

Every Nextel phone has a unique number that identifies it. Depending on your phone model,
you will need to locate a SIM ID or an IMEI number.





SIM ID phones

i30sx, i35s, i50sx, i55sr, i58sr, i60c, i80s, i85s, i88s, i90c, i95cl, i99cl, i205, i305, i530, i730, i733, and 2004 NASCAR NEXTEL Cup Series™ phones
1.		In a quick sequence, press # * MENU right arrow on your phone's keypad to pull up the Trace Mode menu.
2.		Scroll down to IMEI/SIM ID and press the option button (•) under VIEW, or press OK to display your IMEI and SIM ID.
3.		Add a zero to the end of your SIM ID for the complete, 15-digit number. stolen from http://www.nextel.com/registration/wiz_info_imei-sim.shtml

Adding unix services on startup

As root run:



/sbin/chkconfig --add mysqld



then run



/sbin/chkconfig --list to check

Should I do it? Should I modify my old controllers to make a xbox 360 controller?

http://www.gamersreports.com/article/24/

Launching new blog

Hey folks!



I am launching a new blog at evil pufferfish.com!



please visit and click on links! Add a link on your blog please!

Good Log4j documentation

This page here has good log4j documentation.



http://www.vipan.com/htdocs/log4jhelp.html



I usually do not need to modify my log4j.xml very often, but it's often pretty hard to find good documentation.

Happy New Year!

Happy new year everyone!



I'm amazed it's 2007 already. I am such a lucky person, my amigos and wife pitched in and got me a xbox 360!



Anyone on xbox live? what is your friendtag?





Happy new year!

Alert tabby saves family from fire

Timmy the tabby sprang into action by waking his unidentified owner when a mattress caught fire as the family slept early Friday in Cairns in Australia's tropical north.

"The cat was probably the best smoke alarm system ... it was clawing at the occupant's face and got him up and out of bed," Cairns fire service spokesman Robert White-Macfarlane told reporters.

Alert tabby saves family from fire

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