best freeware lists

Here are some sites giving lists of some of the best freeware out there:

• http://shellcity.net/ (see Dec.27, 2007 and onwards)
• http://techsupportalert.com/issues/al_current.htm

Attention Economy

See these interesting posts:

• http://www.workingcogs.com/2007/attention-economy-i-what-is-it/
• http://www.workingcogs.com/2007/attention-economy-ii-today-your-attention-builds-the-implicit-web/
• http://www.workingcogs.com/2007/attention-economy-iii-how-to-start-taking-control-of-your-attention/
• http://www.workingcogs.com/2007/attention-economy-iv-summary/

good calendar maker

http://www.somacon.com/p352.php

Windows STOP messages

I just had Windows reboot out of the blue (no BSOD, just as if I pressed RESET). Looking at the system event log it seems Windows ran into trouble: Event Type: Information Event Source: Save Dump Event Category: None Event ID: 1001 Date: 12/11/2007 Time: 3:19:32 PM User: N/A Computer: SKYNET Description: The computer has rebooted from a bugcheck. The bugcheck was: 0x100000d1 (0x00000000, 0x00000002, 0x00000001, 0xba940dc2). A dump was saved in: C:\WINDOWS\Minidump\Mini111207-01.dmp. For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp. A useful website detailing the STOP codes: http://aumha.org/a/stop.htm Also of interest is the KB article on dealing with the minidumps: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315263

Java links

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

• JOGL website
• Java OpenGL (JOGL) Wikipedia article
• Introductory JOGL Tutorial
• JOGL forum post: How to: Getting started with JOGL
• Lightweight Java Game Library (LWJGL)

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.

the water charlatans

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://espring.com/English-EU/ResearchCenter/ElectricPrecipitator.pdf
• http://www.watertestscam.org.za/
• http://kharahais.gov.za/content/view/76/2/
• http://www.ncf.org.za/docs/publications/consumerfair/vol4/testing.html

It's been suggested that drinking distilled water for long durations is bad for you: long-term deficit in mineral intake causes the body to use its own stores to achieve the same concentration in the distilled water. Here are some links:

• http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=210005
• http://www.cyber-nook.com/water/distilledwater.htm
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distilled_water
• http://kharahais.gov.za/content/view/76/2/ (see latter part)
• http://www.mercola.com/article/water/distilled_water.htm (NOTE: this guy seems a bit of a quack, so take with a grain of salt)

Incidentally, an interesting way to expose the invalidness of a precipitator test is to throw some table salt into the container with distilled water, the one which is apparently so pure and good and wholesome, and see it start generating the same type of ugly, discusting gunk and scum as the rest. The salt creates charged ions in the water, which make it conductive like the others, and thus the spectacle can then go on.

interesting pages

• humour: Ze Frank on St.Vallentine's
• rest of Frank's site is also good (props to mjmcguff for the pointer)
• cool online tool for unmangling Dvorak typing on QWERTY keyboard (handy if stuck at a QWERTY keyboard)
• Microsoft guidelines on designing icons
• an interesting post that couples AutoHotKey with Windows keyboard layout engine
• (all?) books by Peter McWilliams; interesting and refreshing viewpoint on many things in life
• Bradicon!, a cool tool where you upload a picture and it online generates an icon from it

modifying the "look-in" buttons in standard file dialog

Standard file dialogs under Windows (2000 and higher?) have a set of five big buttons down the left side which you can click to be directly taken to the corresponding directories. It's called the "Places bar", and the buttons might be called "look-in" buttons. I went in search of how to modify them, as the default set was uterly useless to me. Here are interesting things I found:

• a thread with all the info
• a cool utility, which alas does not aid with the problem
• donationcoder.com has a review of various other file dialog extenders, some of which modify the places bar too (Direct Folders, in particular)
• how to do it using registry editing
• but it's much easier to do it using TweakUI

notes: interesting Gothic III threads

• General computer & Gothic 3 specific improvements (no fixes!)
• INI Tweaks: How to make G3 look and perform better!
• Improved performance tweaks
• changing in-game font (helps some people with performance)
• fire sound fix (see first post)

notes: Martin's sugs/research on startups

• useful: CS course "Business of Software": CSC2527F  M6-8, M8
• useful: http://paulgraham.com/
• good read: Hackers and Painters, by same
• good read (slides): The Long Tail, by Chris Anderson

hard water woes

I've been having issues from the start with my shaving brush quickly becoming hydro-phobic after one or two shaves. I suspect one of the main culprits is hard water, although apparently Markham/Toronto has decent water. Here is a site that gives the water hardness of various towns around the GTA: http://www.justwater.ca/town.html Also of interest is a forum post about "Calgon", and water softener agents in general: http://www.mothering.com/discussions/showthread.php?t=68131 Here is the particularly interesting bit of the thread:

Water Conditioners There are two types of packaged water conditioners: non-precipitating and precipitating. Generally these names do not appear on the labels. ---Non-precipitating water conditioner characteristics: ties up hardness minerals in the water and holds them in solution (sequestering). No visible particles are formed. water remains clear usually contains phosphates water feels slippery safe for all washable fabrics used in automatic washers Examples: Calgon (a mixture of non-precipitating and precipitating chemicals), White Rain, Blue Raindrops, Spring Rain How they work: This type of water conditioner softens the water, breaks up the soil in the wash and keeps the hardness minerals from depositing on the clothes. These conditioners also trap the iron in the water if it is only a low concentration. When using non-precipitating water conditioner add the conditioner to the wash water before the detergent and again during the rinse cycle. It is especially important to add the conditioner during the rinse cycle. It will again lock up the hardness minerals to keep them from combining with the detergent left in the clothes from the wash. The amount of water conditioner you use depends on the water hardness as well as the amount of water and detergent. Read and follow the manufacturers' instructions for the amount of water conditioner to use. A correct amount will feel slippery between the fingers. Fabrics that have become discolored from detergent build-up can be restored or brightened by washing them in warm water using a cup of water conditioner without a detergent. The conditioner frees the trapped detergent and soil from the fibers. If you see suds appear as the clothes are washed, you know excess detergent and hard water deposits are being stripped from the clothes. When suds no longer appear on top of the water, it indicates the complete removal of trapped dirt and residue of washing additives. ---Precipitating water softener characteristics: combines with hardness minerals to form a visible, insoluble precipitate that floats on top of water makes water cloudy particles cling to fabric and to the inside surface of the machine the deposit makes fabric harsh, somewhat abrasive and dulls colors highly alkaline adversely affects wool and certain dyes not recommended for automatic washers Examples: Arm and Hammer Washing Soda, Raindrops, Blue Dew, Borax, Climalene, Melo, White King Water Softener, Borateem How to use: Use only in the wash water, not in the rinse water. If the softener is not thoroughly rinsed from fabrics, it can irritate the skin and affect the natural characteristics of the cloth. Fabrics that hold any residue become harsh and may scorch when ironed and yellow while in the dryer. Precipitating water softeners work satisfactorily in wringer-type washing machines. The soap curds and mineral residue are squeezed out of the clothes as they move through the wringer. In an automatic washer precipitate softeners form a residue which clings to fabric and the machine and is hard to remove.

DemoCamp

I should go to one of these... DemoCamp Interesting blog post on the topic: post In particular, it mentions a thread being used to put together a "subway map" of tech companies in Toronto: thread

Sacha Chua

I didn't realize that Sacha Chua has come to UofT, and is currently on the verge of completing her Master's!  Her blog is here:     http://sachachua.com/notebook/wiki/today.php It's been a while.  Last time I exchanged emails with her is when she maintained the Emacs planner mode, which I used at the time.

link collection: posture

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

interesting blog: academic productivity

http://www.academicproductivity.com/blog/

interesting series: Pmarca guide to startups

part1 part2 part3 part4 part5 part6

interesting blog: pmarca

http://blog.pmarca.com/ A blog by Marc Andreessen, of Netscape fame.