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.