Randy Pausch

Randy Pausch's inspirational last lecture. Also see website. Randy Pausch is a professor at Carnegie Melon University which was recently diagnosed with pancreatic cancer (operated on, but the cancer returned), and knows he has only a few months to live. What wisdom would you impart to future generations if you were in this position? The lecture's title is "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams".

interesting ideas about achievement, success, life

• Dangerous Ideas: Productivity is Overrated
• Dangerous Ideas: What If Everything We Thought Was True About Productivity Was Wrong?
• What Makes an Interesting Life Interesting?
• How to Make Resolutions that Stick

In fact, many of the other posts are quite interesting as well on that blog. Definitely a blog I'll be keeping an eye on, I find a lot of the author's observations to be quite penetrating and mirroring my own experience and half-baked thoughts.

autonomy for space robotics

Just discovered that there is some research on robot automation, the Mars explorer type, but it is happening away from St.George campus. See:

• UofT Institute for Aerospace Studies
• Tim Barfoot's page

flashing firmware for SonyEricsson Z710i

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:

• http://www.wotanserver.com/en/supported-phones/sonyericsson-z710-debranding/
• http://www.topsony.com/forum/showthread.php?t=3519
• http://forums.wirelessadvisor.com/sony-ericsson/500-latest-firmware-for-sony-ericsson-phones.html

The interesting tidbit from the last posting is that the Service menu on the handset can be accessed using the following key combination: Right * Left Left * Left *

Adobe prevents normal.dot writes in MSOffice

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.