FountainPen

Java 6 JDK 6 Documentation Setting the class path Lesson: Common Problems (and Their Solutions) Java SE Application Design With MVC Trail: Graphical User Interfaces A Visual Guide to Layout Managers OpenGL in Java

Turns out that the firmware for the Z710i can be flashed. This for example could alleviate the problem that Fido locks out the ability to use MP3s as ringtones. Even better, it seems the Z710i can be flashed with firmware for W710i, which is basically the same phone, but has nicer flash-based menu system and more advanced “walkman” music player (e.g., ability to fast-forward within a song). Here are some relevant links:

Grrr… I hate applications that self-insert themselves into your tools. It turns out the reason my customizations to MS Word toolbars weren’t sticking was that Word was prevented from saving settings to normal.dot, which in turn was being caused by Adobe. See this link; the fix worked wonderfully.

This post is a cautionary tale, and a snapshot of all the relevant information I gathered in the process. It so happened that one day I get a phone call from a company “that deals with water quality”, and they claim that Cathy has done a survey with them, and has won some prize worth over $xxx (as a “thank you”). They wanted to know whether they can swing by sometime, drop it off, and do a free water test for us. As Cathy wasn’t home, I couldn’t check with her whether this was legitimate, so I said, what the hey, come on over. I was interested in the water test because I was wondering earlier whether we were suffering from excessive hardness of water here, but that’s another story. 6:30pm, the representative shows up. Sets up in the kitchen a row of plastic drinking cups, as if preparing for an elaborate shell game. Each cup is made to hold water from various sources (distilled, tap, Brita filtered, and various bottled waters in our house). He pulls out an upright binder with what seems like “informational material”. Oh oh, red flags start going off in my head! First test is using a TDS (Total Dissolved Solids) meter. Distilled water obviously gets a very low reading. Tap water is higher. The readings for bottled water shoot up to 265. The “gentleman” claims that this reflects the amount of junk and pollutants in the water. In actuality, this is totally misleading. See here for a full skinny on TDS measurement. It’s a bit of a misnomer, all it really does is detect charged ions in water, most of which are from the (benign, or even beneficial) hard water salts dissolved in the water (Calcium, etc.) The 265 p.p.m. figure for the bottled water was meant to impress and frighten us, but inspecting the label for the bottled waters in fact explicitly states that the expected mineral content in the waters is about 290 p.p.m., so if anything, the TDS reading for these waters was in fact a tad low. I had a pretty strong sinking feeling at this point, that we’ve been conned into a sales pitch. The final touch was when the guy pulled out a precipitator test device for next round of testing. I’ve heard of these being used for scaremongering, and a quick check on the Net (I excused myself to grab my tea from upstairs) revealed to be the case, and also turned up this interesting tidbit (government forbade this particular company to do chlorine testing without getting certified; I presume they were scaring residents with yet more deceptive tests). Anyhow, in short, the company was Glacier Water Treatment Systems of Newmarket, Ontario. They sell water distillers for homes. Links explaining the bogus nature of the precipitator test:

http://www.wikihow.com/Improve-Your-Posture http://www.bodymindandmodem.com/Basics/posture.html

How to Make a Million Dollars* important books on topic from above talk* Web Knowledge Equals Wealth

This tickles something in my mind, some idea or truth I’ve sort of glimpsed, but haven’t grasped. I think this is meshing with some unexpressed ideas and intuitions I’ve evolved in my mind. Seek the link; it taunts me so.

A (social) command line for the Web: YubNub.org Additional related and interesting links: most used commands* installation* description

no support for “delete attachment” from email; I tried Attachment Tools extension as a workaround and it nearly destroyed my inbox! I think this functionality is coming in the next release of Thunderbird though… the “getting stuck” problem on moving an email with attachments to “Sent” folder; seems to occur whether using an IMAP or local folder for this!!!

The TeX FAQ lists alternatives; see here I think what I’ve been looking for is algorithmicx.sty, since it provides “procedure” and “function” blocks. newalg.sty looks good too. Claude (migration note): Filename renamed from alternatives-to-aglorithmic-sty to alternatives-to-algorithmic-sty (typo/encoding fix).