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