Some New Stuff

FIRST post from new laptop and the latest Windows Live Writer. Everything is shiny and new. Vista Home Premium is humming along with whatever I throw at it. The special effects are sweet, although Flip 3D, the Mac-like window-switching effect, is a tad bit slow. Ah well.

The laptop is an HP Pavilion dv6919ca from Wal-Mart, for $598. That came to about $676 with tax slapped on, but I still consider it a pretty good deal. Here's HP's page with all the info on the model. I think the main thing is the AMD processor--that's what cuts the price down so much. Oh, and the Wal-Mart back-to-school sale. I actually would have gone for a Toshiba Satellite that was $50 cheaper and ranked higher on Vista's built-in performance score, but it was sold out. Looks like the people can tell when there's a free lunch around.

Anyway, another thing about this machine is the monster 3 gigs of RAM, which finally gets my mind off worrying about whether I have too many programs open, too many background tasks running in the taskbar, and too many gadgets on the desktop. I'm just piling up whatever I like right now. No doubt it'll slow down a lot later. Maybe by then I'll be proficient enough with Vista to speed it up a bit myself.

Now about the graphics card--the Nvidia GeForce Go 7150M. I don't know much about Nvidia cards and their capabilities on laptops, but from the name this sounds like a mobile graphics card. It shares the system RAM--doesn't have any memory built in--but since I (think I) have plenty to spare, I don't mind. I don't see any heavy gaming in store for this machine so it should be fine.

Btw, Windows Live Writer is surprisingly polished. It's just very well designed all round, and is working with Blogger like a snap. I tried using a Firefox addon called Deepest Sender to do snap blogging, but it errored out on me. Kudos to the WLW team.

The Entitlement to Being Able to Do Anything

A LITTLE bit of a whimsical title to this post, couldn't really think of anything better on the spot. It's a rant anyway, so you've been warned. Anyway, Paulo Coelho asked something interesting in his blog/video blog. He basically is making the point that there are many things in life that we never try to do because we've been told that we can't do them: start a business, pursue a hobby, or a lifestyle, go into a career, or whatever.

What I want to talk about here is kind of the opposite end of the spectrum. My main idea is this: how many things in this world are being done an endless number of times, with no thought for the environment in which they are being done? Let me give a few examples: how much paperwork is being generated by people and offices around the world just because paper is cheap and abundant? What resources are being diverted by telecommunications companies in big, underpopulated countries like Canada and Australia to set up network range in remote and uninhabited regions where less than 5% of their subscribers will ever go? I mean, they're incurring all these costs of putting up networks in places where most of their subscribers will never want network coverage, and then passing on these costs to the same people who'll never use the coverage.

Recently there've been reports of rare metals like gallium, indium, hafnium and such being `threatened' in their supply. These metals are highly essential ingredients to a lot of modern technology. Without them, we can say goodbye to modern airplanes, LCD screens, and some more similar tidbits. While they're not imminently about to run out, these metals are limited in supply. Now imagine them being used up to feed rising demand throughout the world ... going into factories, getting put inside the devices rolling off assembly lines at ever-increasing rates, and then staying in these doodads, the majority of which are not being recycled, but just filling--well--landfills.

Of course, the biggest waste that just gets me every time is water. We just use too much of it. Our baths and showers and toilets and sinks and basins all flush water down the drain as if it's a magical never-ending supply. People leave their taps on and go off and play a round of golf. Stuff like that. We desperately need water-saving washing and toilet systems, but right now they're pretty expensive. Let's hope they get cheaper in the future.

Then there are the businesses which are built on taking advantage of cheap gas (gasoline, petrol) prices. Yes, I said today's cheap gas prices. Because if gas was priced at its real value, home delivery companies which deliver to your house in 30 minutes or less, no matter how small the order, would be impossible. And people would actually be forced to get off their couches, turn off the TV, and go outside and get their own pizzas.

A huge case of consumers getting their way no matter what the cost is the current ethanol situation, and world food prices. Check this out: with rising petroleum prices, the developed countries have suddenly decided to ramp up corn ethanol fuel production and introduce laws forcing food ethanol as fuel on the public. And voila, corn supplies drop, and world food prices jump.

These examples are just the tip of the iceberg. The world today has a culture of entitlement, an expectation of getting whatever it wants, in whatever quantities, and driving up the price of whatever's in short supply--to such dizzying heights that producers almost literally slash and burn anything in their path to fill this demand. There's something wrong with this economics--the economics of entitlement and expectations.

On the bright side, there is something I hugely appreciate about this sense of entitlement by the people of the developed world (I think I appreciate the irony of it). It's the huge advances in medicine that we've made over the past couple of centuries. I know it's a tired cliche, the repeated mantra of how we've eradicated polio and smallpox and malaria and so on, but it bears repeating. And modern medicine, and the expectations and entitlements which drive it, are working on cures to cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's ... the list goes on. Maybe even the cure to ageing. And these cures are slowly but surely getting passed on to the rest of the world.

This actually brings us back to Paulo's question of how much in life we're not able to do simply because we think we can't. What I've been talking about here is how much in life we do and consume just because we think we think we are entitled to them. Ironically, we may end up thinking that we're entitled to the impossible--and then achieving it.

Nine to Five

FINALLY got an honest-to-goodness 40-hour-a-week job. I must be seriously out of shape, because it takes a lot out of me. Still getting used to waking up at 6 am every day for five days in a row, getting home at 6 pm totally exhausted, vegetating till dinnertime, then going to sleep. Planning to join a gym soon, though, so that might get me out of the house and back in shape.

Before starting work, I'd been keeping really wild hours, going to sleep at 5 am and waking up in the afternoon/evening. Still doing that on weekends in fact, so far. But on weekdays I'm forcing myself to sleep by 11 pm and wake up early. It's nice to know I can get up early, have a good sleep rhythm and get enough sleep during the night. Feels like my body's clock is getting tuned. Slowly.

Still need a lot of coffee relative to, say, 5 years ago though, to get through the day. Not sure how much of this is because I'm doing more work than I was five years ago. Trying to have a big breakfast and a coffee in the morning, but at work, by 11 to 12-ish I can almost literally feel my sugar and caffeine high wear off, and drowsiness starts creeping in. Have snacks and lunch by 2--2:30 pm, and a coffee to jump-start the sluggish body again. The coffee at work is really good, by the way. They have a premium brand which smells pretty expensive, a full-fledged coffee maker with the works. It takes a hell of a long time but the coffee is great.

The Master and Margarita

I STARTED writing a small review of this book on my Facebook `Books' application, but then realised I had a lot to say about it. And one of the small book-review applications on Facebook is not a good place for a book such as this. (Which is actually a sad indictment of all my other book reviews there. Have to get them out here sometime.)

I heard about this book some time back, while I was in Malaysia I guess, as part of a controversy--a Russian film adaptation had been made, and was being denounced by religious groups there as being demonic because it showed a witch on a broomstick (and other things). If they had read the book, they would have seen how ludicrous that is.

It's a very complex book, hard to describe. I wholeheartedly recommend it to everyone who loves to read, though. The editorial review on the book's Amazon.com page certainly does it a lot of justice.

Having read it a long time ago, I'm fuzzy on the plot details, but I do remember this: I found the book absolutely gripping, right from the first chapter. It's a story about Yeshua (Jesus Christ) in Jerusalem shortly after he was denounced by Judas Iscariot and brought before Pontius Pilate; the Master (a persecuted and marginalised writer in Soviet Russia), his faithful lover Margarita, and the Devil, Woland. That is certainly a wide-ranging story. And the plots are mixed in such a way that blurs the distinction between story and story-teller.

Bulgakov's imagination is certainly gripping. The characters and antics he dreams up are surreal and, at times, chilling. Woland comes to Moscow with his retinue of disguised demons; wreaks havoc on the Soviet literary establishment and high society; tempts Margarita with the promise of complete freedom from society's rules and boundaries; and in the process causes the Master and Margarita to be reunited, and their mutual story about Yeshua to be completed as they ride off, the Master healed after all his years in the wilderness, and Margarita finally at peace by his side.

Seriously. Read it. Update: read it with U2's Until the End of the World playing in the background.

Tabbing in Opera and Notepad++

Notepad++

I'll get to Opera in a bit. It took a quick read-through of the source code (hurrah for open source), but I've finally got Notepad++ tabbing set up exactly the way I like it. For the non-techies reading this, Notepad++ is a free and full-featured text editor for Windows which is meant to replace, and beat the hell out of, Windows Notepad. In fact it does such a good job that I'd rather use it than pretty much all the other editors I've ever used.

After recently being forced to install Ubuntu Linux on my laptop (and loving it), I missed N++ so much that I downloaded and started running it with Wine, a kind of environment which fools a Windows-only program into thinking that it's running in Windows. (I've used Wine before to play Windows games such as Diablo II.)

Anyway, a couple of things were bugging me about Notepad++. Firstly, its tabs couldn't be navigated using the standard Ctrl-PgUp and Ctrl-PgDn keys. The program author doesn't consider them as standard as Ctrl-Tab, and leaves it up to you to change the shortcuts. Well, this I did, but N++'s default tabbing settings also show a small `task list' of open documents whenever you try to switch among tabs. For some reason this task list doesn't automatically disappear under Wine as it would under Windows. You're forced to right-click on it to choose the tab you want.

So this was the situation. What I did was:

1. Go to Settings > Shortcut Mapper... and, under the `Main menu' commands tab, changed the last two items's (`Switch to previous document' and `Switch to next document') shortcuts to Ctrl-PgUp and Ctrl-PgDn respectively. It's pretty easy--double-clicking on the command lets you choose a shortcut graphically.


2. Go to Settings > Preferences... and, under the `MISC' tab, disable the `Document switcher (Ctrl+TAB)', which is what N++ calls the task list there.

That's it. With this setup, N++ has tabbing the way God (and Firefox) intended--with Ctrl-PgUp and Ctrl-PgDn.

Opera

Opera is the shiznit, if I may use the term. Particularly the latest beta version, currently 9.50. I, a long-time Firefox user, have been enjoying its speed, new `speed dial' feature, new `quick find', built-in Bittorrent downloading and IMAP-enabled email client which lets me access my Gmail. It really gets the job done, and then some. Everyone should seriously try it out. The only thing is, to a Firefox veteran like me, I can't live without my Ctrl-PgUp and Ctrl-PgDn.

Opera has Ctrl-Tab tabbing with a task list by default--almost exactly the same as N++. Here's what I did to get back good-old Ctrl-PgUp & Ctrl-PgDn:

1. Go to Tools > Preferences..., then the Advanced tab, and the Shortcuts list item on the left side.


2. Make sure the Opera Standard keyboard setup is selected and then click the second Edit... button to edit the setup.


3. Type `cycle' in the Quick find search box on top of the Edit Keyboard setup dialog. This shows the page (tab) cycling commands. Double-click shortcut (on the left) for Cycle to next page and change the shortcut to `PageDown ctrl'. Then change the Cycle to previous page shortcut to `PageUp ctrl'.


4. Type `page left' in the search box and clear the shortcut for the Page left command. Really doubtful I'll ever need to scroll horizontally in screenfuls. If I ever do, I can worry about it later. Then type `page right' and clear the shortcut for the Page right command. We need to clear these because they would clash with our tabbing commands.


5. Click OK to get back to the Preferences window.


6. In the Advanced tab, click the `Tabs' item on the top left and under `When cycling through tabs with Ctrl+PageDown', select the `Cycle without showing list' option. This makes tabbing exactly like classic Firefox.

The reason I tackled both these programs here is there's a large similarity between what I had to do with each. Will try to put up screenshots later.

A Shoebox Budget

A recent Lifehacker article gave me the idea of turning my formerly-useless Nokia phone box into a repository of all my receipts:



This way I figure I can follow my dad's advice about reconciling my spending with my monthly bank statements, say, once in a blue moon when I have some free time.

I still have the Expensr webapp, but man it's hard to get back into the habit of using it every day!

Found in Response to a PC World Article

The article, 18 Features Windows Should Have (but Doesn't) elicited some less-than-reverent responses from readers:

zipzap said at Apr 29, 2008, 05:04: `Oh yea, MS really want to put more built in software... so they can get sued for being uncompetitive and monopolistic and all that rubbish.'

And at Apr 29, 2008, 05:59: `Things PC World should have but doesn't:

1) Brains
2) More Brains
3) A little more brains'

Fantastic.

Also, it's a little weird to see PC World so out of touch with its readship--nimble online blogs like Lifehacker often do a much better job at giving us the tips and tricks we need to get the most out of our PCs.

Hilarious Misuse of `Mullahs'

I found this hilarious new usage of the term `Mullahs' and couldn't resist putting it up here:

`Furthermore, I made the switch because developing Ruby on Rails applications on Windows is such a pain, and most developers know this, so they go out and buy Macs. Well my friends, you can save your mullahs and turn your stock standard Dell into a kick arse development environment for Rails. Just check out the screenshot of my desktop below.'

For those not in the know, mullahs are respected Islamic scholars who often give sermons at mosques. Basically the Muslim equivalent of clergymen. Now what this inadvertent author probably meant is `moolahs'. Lol.

The Monkey King ... er, The Forbidden Kingdom

VERY enjoyable movie. Jackie Chan and Jet Li together make movie magic--I just had to say it--and give the audiences a compelling show. Ironically, Chan and Li both come from this genre of action movies--chop-socky--but they had to do Western-style action movies to achieve Hollywood star power. And meanwhile, the genre was revived by such notables movies as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and House of Flying Daggers.

OK, now that I've had my say, the movie. The hero is the ordinary and likeable kid in Brooklyn (Boston?) obsessed with old kung fu movies, Jason Tripitikas (Michael Angarano, who perfected the ordinary-guy-forced-to-become-a-hero technique in Sky High, another enjoyable movie--sorry, now I've had my say :-). He frequents the old Chinese memorabilia shop around the corner always in the hope of finding another old kung fu classic.

One day he finds an ancient staff of power in the store, and the elderly proprietor tells him that it's waiting for someone to return it to its rightful owner ... a mischievous deity known as the Monkey King. The Monkey King is probably the most interesting character in the movie, although he's absent for most of it. (Indeed I keep thinking of the movie as The Monkey King. Hence the accident-on-purpose title to this post.) The legend goes that he was imprisoned in stone after being tricked by the Bad Guy, who we'll come to in a bit.

Almost as if on cue, Jason gets into serious trouble with some of the neighbourhood thugs. Although the thugs do look like they could be from the cast of West Side Story, they are deadly serious for Jason, who is forced to run for his life, with the staff in his hands by accident.

He's cornered by the thugs, who're about to kill him, but the staff mystically transports him into ... The Forbidden Kingdom ... I guess, a faraway ancient China. He regains consciousness to find that some kindly villagers have taken him in, and finds soon enough that the villages and people of the kingdom are mightily oppressed by the armies of the Jade Warlord, who rules over the Kingdom in the absence of the Heavenly Emperor, and has imprisoned the Monkey King by tricking him into parting with his magical staff.

By chance, Jason is saved from some Imperial soldiers by Lu Yan (Chan), a vagabond who drinks wine all day and swaggers along until he's forced to fight, at which time you get to see some MAD skillz. Recognising the holy staff and taking Jason for a monk who is trying to return it to the Monkey King, Lu Yan takes Jason under his wing and teaches him the kung fu he will need to defend himself. They're joined by Golden Sparrow, a young maiden who has her own reasons to go along with them.

Along the way they meet The Silent Monk (Jet Li), who mistakes Jason for a thief and snatches the staff from him, leading to maybe one of the most anticipated fight scenes in movie history, between Chan and Li. Eventually they learn they're on the same side, and share a good laugh over Jason--`He's not even Chinese!'

Anyway, that's the setup, and these four characters are faced with the quest of returning the staff to Four Elements Mountain and freeing the Monkey King from his stone prison, where he's been for the past 500 years while the Jade Warlord terrorised the Kingdom unchecked.

Now, I won't talk about the quest itself--how Jason is trained by the two martial arts masters, how they survive a desert crossing to come to Four Elements Mountain, or how one of them is treacherously shot in the back by the White-Haired Bride (another staple of old martial arts cinema), and what Jason has to do to save that person. But it's all well worth watching, in the theatre if you can, with friends or a girlfriend (I think).

But I will talk about the Monkey King a bit. He is an unbeatable warrior with his mystic staff of power, and a mischievous spirit, always thumbing his nose at authority--especially the Jade Warlord, who is the Commander of the Imperial Army. This is what arouses the Warlord's hatred of him, and maybe what turns him evil. The motivations of the deities aren't examined in full--probably the movie would become an angst-ridden existential piece--but there's just enough there to leave you wondering what kind of politics they would have had in a heavenly imperial court. Hypothetically speaking, of course.

There's one thing I want to rant about. Apparently the consensus in reviews of the movie is `Great fight scenes, but too much filler'. To me, it was just the right amount and length. I've heard about, and been sceptical of, American audiences' apparent desire for `dumbing down' of movie plots, but this movie has an intriguing plot which makes you care about the characters, wonder about the life and times of the setting, and miss it when Jason gets back to New York, as he must in the end. If you don't know some backstory, how can you fill in the blanks in your head with interesting fantasy? That's part of what makes it fun. It's like these reviewers want a made-to-order story with exactly right amounts of setup and payoff, and no lingering anywhere, in case they're forced to think about a fantasy world (<Deity> forbid).

At one point, understandably, Jason's reaction to finding himself in ancient China is thinking it's a dream. There's a moment slightly after this where it's driven home to him how dangerous the dream is. Lu Yan for once sheds his humorous nature and says to Jason something like, `If you die in this realm, you will be found dead where you came from!' A dire warning in an otherwise light-hearted movie. The mix of light and heavy elements is right.

SPOILER WARNING: There is a spoiler (at least by my reckoning) in the comment below. Scroll down to see it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Synchronicity

This is kind of a strange post. The thing is, I see or experience strange coincidences in my life often enough that I've given a name to the phenomenon--synchronicity. Of course, I'm hardly the guy who came up with the word or its meaning. Nor am I the only person who thinks that coincidences happen to them. But I do use the word to describe strange, chance-defying happenings or experiences that, oddly enough, happen surprisingly often--to me.

The reason I'm writing about this just now is that, well, something ... synchronicitous (is that a word?) ... happened just now. Well, it seems like that to me. See for yourself.

First, I was browsing through the BBC News site and happened to come across an interesting graphical illustration of how the US sub-prime crisis happened. I was interested because I'd recently been looking at graphing and charting, and how to make eye-catching charts to visualise a lot of data.

So anyway, the BBC's sub-prime crisis guide happened to use the US city of Cleveland as an example of how the mortgage crisis affected poorer urban populations. I was curious as to why they used Cleveland; but there's a good explanation in the page itself which I will give here, also because it happens to be an important part of why the crisis happened at all.

For many years, Cleveland was the sub-prime capital of America.

It was a poor, working class city, hit hard by the decline of manufacturing and sharply divided along racial lines.

Mortgage brokers focused their efforts by selling sub-prime mortgages in working class black areas where many people had achieved home ownership.

They told them that they could get cash by refinancing their homes, but often neglected to properly explain that the new sub-prime mortgages would "reset" after 2 years at double the interest rate.

The result was a wave of repossessions that blighted neighbourhoods across the city and the inner suburbs.

By late 2007, one in ten homes in Cleveland had been repossessed and Deutsche Bank Trust, acting on behalf of bondholders, was the largest property owner in the city.

So, enough about Cleveland. Not quite, as it turned out.

I then came across this, an article about a couple of books written by one William Cleveland, who is `[o]ne of the pioneers in developing guidelines for comprehensible data graphics'. (By the way, the site where I found the article, Pictures of Numbers, is a blog about charting and graphing with some very good articles, if anyone is interested.) It turns out that Prof. Cleveland developed something called lowess, a statistical technique used in scatter-plot charts.

Now, lowess is something I've been coming across in the mathematical software package, called R, that I've been using to make my charts.

And lastly, while finding the above article, I came across another article, by Stephen Dubner, a journalist and one of the authors of Freakonomics. (I haven't read it yet. Hear it's good though.) Anyway, Dubner's article, called `How's This for a Coincidence?', mentions that he was on a plane to Cleveland, where basketball star LeBron James plays for the Cavaliers (I don't know if that's still true). Dubner was blogging about an earlier post by his Freakonomics co-author, Steven Levitt, in which Levitt had asked the readers what LeBron James had in common with his (Levitt's) wife. They like doing the `have-in-common' thing from time to time.

How's that for synchronicity? (Sorry. Couldn't resist that last line.)

Synchronicity update: the Freakonomics blog has done it again, with their latest post: Levitt's `What Do Lolita and Freakonomics Have in Common?'

Synchronicity update 2: coincidentally, the above blog post talks about a chart of US students' SAT scores compared to their reading habits. I came across this chart a few days ago.

Life in the Cloud

OK, so suddenly I find myself with the urge to blog a bit about my changing computing habits. If reading techie stuff makes you want to tear out your own eyeballs and pin your eyesockets with two large needles, you should quit reading this now.

So. First off--the title. I'll explain it in a bit, but right now I just want to talk about what's behind it. Lately I've been moving a lot of my personal data online. I mean stuff that I'm used to keeping on my own computer, I'm uploading it for various reasons. For backup being just one of them.

Gmail--The Beginning of the End of an Era
It all started with Gmail of course, with its humongous 1 gigabyte of storage space. We quickly started using it to store our documents and such, a kind of freestyle file manager. And by now this has been going on for some time.

Google Docs
Then Google introduced Google Docs, the lightweight office suite which lives entirely on the web. It too stores files, albeit only documents, presentations and spreadsheets. But if you're whipping up a bare-bones document (assignment, proposal, whatever), and want to share it with friends and co-workers, it's excellent.

Google Notebook
Now we also have Google Notebook, which allows you to manage any textual info you might want to save for later use. These include bookmarks, and regular notes wherein you can keep stuff you've written but aren't sure what to do with it, stuff you need to remember, like an itinerary, or stuff you can't afford to forget, like your passwords. And of course, all of these are available from any web browser that can go online. I've found it very useful to have access to these notes both when I'm at home and at work.

Google Reader
I'm also using Google Reader, which just seems to be getting more and more powerful every few months. At this point I'm hard pressed to decide which is my favourite Google web app--Gmail or GReader. But I digress. If you're not a heavy (and I mean prolific) web surfer, you're probably not sure what exactly Google Reader is. A site that lets you read books, maybe?

Nope. It's a site which collects articles from websites you specify, and shows all new articles in bold highlighting. It actually shows all articles within its own page. This is incredibly useful because it saves you from having to hop around among a dozen different sites that you like. Instead you stay in Google Reader and read one article after another, skimming past the ones that don't interest you and digging down into the ones that do.

Once you pass over and read an article, it's changed back to non-highlighted. So you can always easily tell which articles you've read and which are new. You can `star' articles, like in Gmail, to keep them in a special folder in case you want to look at them later. You can `share' articles, which adds a link to the article on an automatic `blog' GReader creates for you, and which your friends can access once you give them its address.

I'll admit I'm a moderately fast reader, but GReader literally lets me read or skim through thousands of articles every month, no joke. So if you're someone who has to or wants to keep track of some kind of news, GReader will give you a considerable boost. And these days, keeping track of any kind of news is a snap thanks to search engines like Google automatically giving you continuously updated feeds of the search results. For example here's a feed on news about Jamie Lynn Spears. If you add this feed to GReader, it'll show the news headlines, and short summaries, as items almost as soon as they're posted onto the web. (Tip: don't do it, for your own sanity.)

Once you start using GReader and learning more about feeds and just how many kinds of information they can track, you'll be well on your way to becoming a true web guru.

Flickr
Now owned by Yahoo, and still offering a boatload of free storage space for photos, Flickr is probably the best photo storage site on the web. I've been uploading photos to it left and right. The only limitation for the free service is that you can upload a maximum of 100 MB each calendar month. Shouldn't be a problem for the occasional uploader.

Honourable mention: Google's Picasa Web Albums, a slick photo sharing app that lets you do one thing for free that Flickr doesn't: organise photos into albums. Free Flickr lets you create a maximum of 3 `sets', which are its equivalent of albums. But you can get around that by `tagging' all photos which would go into the same album with a common tag, and then doing a search for that tag.

OK, that is a bit cumbersome. So why do I recommend Flickr over Picasa Web? Because the latter has an absolute storage limit of 1 gigabyte, which feels rather irksome in these days of unlimited storage. But then again, who's going to use up a gigabyte of storage, right? Hmm....

Expensr
Last but not least, a gem among web apps. If you've ever had to manage money, you might have found yourself asking, Where did all the money go? Expensr tries to answer exactly this question, by making you keep track of all your expenses. It's free and it's fully on the web--once again, you can access it from any device with a proper web browser. (Forget the PC--I've heard people are using their Wiis to surf these days.)

If you take a few minutes to sign up and set up the accounts, you'll be rewarded in just a few days with a day-to-day visual analysis of your spending habits--as a pie chart showing where the money goes, and a bar chart showing how much goes each day. The site is new, but it looks promising. Some of the community-based features are intriguing. You can `tag' yourself as `in my twenties', `in my thirties', `in college', `renting', `a smoker', and so on and compare yourself anonymously to others in these categories.

The Cloud
Now, you might be getting a sense of how much you can put online just for the sheer convenience of it. Nowadays this data space is being called the cloud, and cloud computing seems to be headed for the big time, with Google and a select few others poised to be in the epicentre. And given the quality of their web offerings, I feel pretty good about that.

LEDs: Light Emitting Diodes

If you look at your car's digital clock, microwave display, laptop computer's indicator lights, or your keyboard's Num Lock/Caps Lock indicator lights, you're seeing LEDs. They never wear out and they don't give out heat. The last bit means that they're turning hardly any of their input electricity into heat. That in turn means huge amounts of electricity is being saved.

If you think about it, they're pretty miraculous compared to incandescent lighting and fluorescent lighting, the two most popular lighting technologies we have today. I've been hearing more and more about LEDs since this past year and it looks like they're going to hit the big time pretty soon. For example, it looks like the developed world is passing regulations to ban incandescent bulbs in a few years.

Currently most LED lights are pretty small. But slowly we'll be seeing LED desk lamps, lightbulbs, laptop display backlights, televisions, and on and on. They're going to be rolled out and just blend in with our everyday technological landscape.

Such an important technology deserves to be well understood simply because it's going to become a huge part of our lives in the future. And, it's a pretty nifty application of simple high school physics. I recently found a good article that explains the whole thing very simply, and reminds us of how LEDs managed to attract our attention.

From the article: `Up until recently, LEDs were too expensive to use for most lighting applications because they're built around advanced semiconductor material. The price of semiconductor devices has plummeted over the past decade, however, making LEDs a more cost-effective lighting option for a wide range of situations. While they may be more expensive than incandescent lights up front, their lower cost in the long run can make them a better buy. In the future, they will play an even bigger role in the world of technology.'

Monopolists and interoperability?

Here's an economist's take on Microsoft's new file formats. From the article: `While Microsoft could have kept the traditional ``.doc'' as its default format for MS Word, this would not have served its purpose: eventually, after enough of the world pays for Office 2007, holdouts will be dragged along, kicking and screaming. Then, in four or five years, Microsoft will begin our agony all over again.'

I'm not sure I understand what this means. After all, wouldn't it be in Microsoft's best interests as a monopolist to have everyone use its own established file formats? Why introduce new ones and create confusion in the marketplace? A later paragraph makes things a bit clearer: `So, by creating incompatibilities, some subtle and some obvious, that make its old software obsolete, Microsoft can sell its operating systems at high profit margins without fear that people will wait until the price drops. The price will never drop, because Microsoft will just roll out a new system, again at high profit margins.'

Of course, he's trying to find a purely economic explanation for Microsoft's new file formats, which is fine but it's not the whole picture. There's a growing movement in the world today that's pushing towards office document formats which are open and XML-based, to make it easier to process them and extract information from them. I myself hit on a similar idea--of serving XML-based Word documents ready-made in response to users' queries--a couple of years ago while doing time (my internship in a bank :-).

Anyway, Microsoft can't be left behind with its older, closed file formats, plus it too sees how useful XML-based formats can be, so it develops XML versions of its formats. The problem with that is there is already a growing XML-based office document standard--Open Document Format. Microsoft wants its own standard--it says ODF can't support all the features of Microsoft Office.

It's kind of sad reading about the kind of troubles ordinary, non-technical people have been going through adjusting to the new Office, file formats, and Vista: `The first person at my company to use Vista was our Executive Vice-President. He was furious. Vista and Office 2007 came with his new Dell computer by default. Dell didn't ask: ``Would you prefer the old versions of the operating system and MS Office that you know how to use?'' So our VP got a shiny new computer that he didn't know how to use: functions were rearranged, and keyboard shortcuts were different.' Especially because we have something like OpenOffice.org, which offers a familiar interface and the ODF standard file formats, for free.

Slashdot Humour Post #2

I'm sorry but this stuff is just too funny not to share with y'all non-Slashdotters. The post (Your Ex-CoWorkers Will Kill Facebook) was about how awkward it would be to add your colleagues and boss as your Facebook friends, and then maybe stumble on pictures of you and your friends pinned up in their cubicle sometime. And what do you do after you leave that job? There are actually some good ideas in the comments. Some people apparently use LinkedIn to do professional social networking and Facebook for personal friends. Here are some of the funny comments.

Finally (Score:5, Funny)

by j.sanchez1 (1030764) on Thursday November 29, @01:55PM (#21521823)

Your Ex-CoWorkers Will Kill Facebook

At least those idiots will do something right before they die.

Re:uh, dont use it? (Score:5, Funny)

by AdmiralDouglas (1158047) on Thursday November 29, @03:29PM (#21523275)

Pembo13 read the post with a sigh. Thoughts of his lost love came streaming in on him from every direction. The parent's post was all too remeniscent of that seductive MySpace page he fell in love with so many years ago. He was sure she was the one. He knew it down to his bones.

But just as most of the turbulent online relationships he'd known ended up, he too, was doomed to her foe list.

He'd heard so many stories of couples meeting and falling love, when was it his turn? If only they could hear his heart, pleading for their attention! His fingers tapped away a message over the keys. A message in a cyberbottle. A plea.

A plea for a happy ending.

Don't worry, pembo13. Your time will come.

Re:Social Networking Sites in General (Score:5, Funny)

by Minwee (522556) <dcr@neverwhen.net> on Thursday November 29, @02:02PM (#21521943)
(http://www.neverwhen.net/)

It's beyond me why people are so quick to spill their most personal secrets on a social networking site

It's because they're hoping to score with Hot Internet Chicks. Why is this hard to understand?

If playing every Mario game ever made has taught me anything it's that guys will do anything, even eating strange mushrooms and jumping head first into sewer pipes, for the vague possibility of impressing women.

Re:this is old news... (Score:5, Funny)

by truthsearch (249536) on Thursday November 29, @02:05PM (#21521983)
(http://seenonslash.com/ | Last Journal: Friday May 11 2007, @04:02PM)

George: You have no idea of the magnitude of this thing. If she is allowed to infiltrate this world then George Costanza as you know him ceases to exist. You see, right now I have Relationship George. But there is also Independent George. That's the George you know, the George you grew up with... Movie George, Coffee Shop George, Liar George, Bawdy George.

Jerry: I love that George.

George: Me too, and he's dying. If Relationship George walks through this door, he will kill Independent George. A George divided against itself cannot stand!

Rambling post

My discerning readers may have noticed by now that I'm not much for blogging about personal stuff that's been going on in my life. Or maybe not--personally I suspect my total readership here has the combined IQ of an eathworm. Ha, ha. That was me making a House-ian sort of crack. I promise I'll try not to do that--much.

Well, the past few days have slowly gone from being boring to more and more filled with anxiety, as the exam results come closer and closer. Mind has basically been on stasis, with online TV shows and movies keeping me entertained, apart from the quick snippets of The God Delusion read between computer reboots.

I have been programming quite a bit, though. At least, in JavaScript and CSS. Tried to make a simple CRUD web app using only those two--i.e. nothing on the server side. The aim was to make something that looked and felt Web 2.0-ish. It worked, except couldn't find any good way to store data on the local computer using only JavaScript--so in the end was forced to just pop up a new window with the data and ask the user to save it as a file with the correct name. Quite a stop-gap.

From there somehow I ended up trying out Dojo, which is an impressive framework but I'm still getting used to it, and trying to get it to work properly for me. It kind of gives the impression of being a bit buggy. But the use of `widgets' and easy theming are impressive.

Then I tried tackling rounded corners in HTML boxes using JavaScript-generated SVG images, on-the-fly, on the client side. Haven't got that to work properly yet, and needless to say, it will only work on browsers with native SVG support, like Firefox and Opera.

Update: Happily, I seem to have done OK in the exams, pulling through to the last phase of my time in Monash. It's just a huge relief. Now my last unit is left, consumer behaviour.

Windows died

I was on ouou.com, watching some video when suddenly Windows faltered and crashed. I briefly saw a blue screen detailing some error and then Windows tried to reboot but couldn't find ntfs.sys. Whoops! It told me to try repairing the install from my original Windows CD. Now I know I have it around here somewhere, and it might be the best idea to just use it to repair Windows--after all I did pay a fair amount of money for it. But--I also had a Mandriva 2008 live CD lying around fairly close, and it's really impressed me with its performance on my laptop and its overall ease of use.

So I thought, what the hell, this is a sign, it's time to go back to Linux. And I did it. And ten minutes later, here I am with Mandriva installed and up and running. It looks and feels great, but I know it's not coming without a price. And so, here's a list of Windows software I'm really going to miss:

Microsoft Word. I was familiar with it, it did what I needed, and it was powerful so I could do a lot of other stuff with it, like easily writing VBA macros. Oh well.

EndNote. With EndNote and Microsoft Word working together, referencing became easy and powerful at the same time. I can only hope one day to create a perfect bibliography style file with BibTeX and use it with LaTeX.

EViews. Really going to miss this one, especially as I'm hoping to one day write a clone of it. Needed to familiarise myself with it more.

Firefox profile. I'd built it up over more than a year of browsing and storing passwords and bookmarks. Oh well. Will just have to build it up all over again.

Let's hope everything else goes great.

Beowulf

Very impressive movie. I could have sworn in some scenes that the actors were really there, but apparently it's an animated movie, so there's no telling what was there and what wasn't. One thing I was really intrigued by was--you guessed it--Angelina Jolie. Her character appeared fully nude except for some body paint, and nothing got censored--even here in Malaysia. The movie got a PG-13 rating. I might be ranting here a little bit, but it just seems like kids these days don't even have to try to get to see nudity--it's just being handed to them nowadays. I'm happy to report Roger Ebert has noticed this too.

Well, not that I'm a prude--well, maybe I am if I have to see this stuff with kids under 15 or 16.

But yeah, really enjoyed the movie. And now, can't wait for the Dragonball Z movie to come out!

Some interesting articles about child abuse

These articles raise some interesting questions about society's tendency to see all men as potential child molesters:

Are We Teaching Our Kids to Be Fearful of Men? (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118782905698506010.html?mod=Moving-On)
Managing the Risk of Child Sex Abuse (http://www.bennettandbennett.com/blog/2007/09/managing-risk-of-child-sex-abuse.html)
We Predators (http://www.bennettandbennett.com/blog/2007/09/we-predators.html)
Avoiding Kids: How Men Cope With Being Cast as Predators (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118903209653018615.html?mod=loomia&loomia_si=1)

The last article is especially interesting to me as an adult male -- for obvious reasons. Should I assume that because I am an adult male, society will automatically profile me as dangerous and threatening to children? And will children behave towards me as if I'm a potential criminal? It's a strange world we live in.

On another note, Mark Bennett, the attorney who authors the blog `Defending People: The Art and Science of Criminal Defense Trial Lawyering' (http://www.bennettandbennett.com/blog/) seems to be a very good writer. Will be adding him to my blog feeds.

Some cool Firefox themes

Aside from the default Firefox theme, there aren't any really cool themes that I've found -- but I do like a couple of themes which give Firefox the look of MS Office 2003. Here are the links:

Outlook 2003 Blue (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/890)
Outlook 2003 Green (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/892)
Outlook 2003 Silver (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/894)

An ideal theme for me would be a really minimalist theme which uses very dark colours, but doesn't overdo it. Yup, it's a high hurdle.

Update: Just found the perfect theme: Miint (http://www.twistermc.com/blog/miint/). Mmm, tasty.

Getting my.monash email in your Gmail inbox

Yup, it's actually possible to send and receive my.monash (or any other uni/workplace) email from your beloved Gmail account. Here's how:

Receiving (mail into Gmail)

When someone sends mail to your Monash email address, you can have the Monash mailing system forward it to Gmail. Sign in to Monash Webmail (https://my.monash.edu.au/email/webmail.html) and choose the Options link from the row of links at the top. In the Options page, choose the Forwarding and Delivery link from the left side. There you can specify that email should be forwarded to your Gmail address and then deleted (so it doesn't take up any space in your Monash inbox).

Sending

You can compose and send emails from your Gmail account which will appear to be from your Monash address. To set this up, you need to be signed into both Gmail and my.monash. In Gmail, go to the Settings page, then go to the Accounts tab. Click the Add another email address link, and a window pops up asking for the name and address. Enter your my.monash name and email address here, click Next Step, then Send Verification. Keep the small window open because the Monash email site has a bug which makes it show Web page links incorrectly. In other words, you won't be able to verify that you own your Monash address simply by clicking the link in the email that Gmail sent to your Monash address.

Now go to your Monash inbox, open the message from Gmail, and copy and paste the confirmation code in Gmail's verification window. Hit Enter, and Gmail adds your Monash address to the list.

Try It Out

Compose a message in Gmail, and choose your From: address from the drop-down box. The person who gets the message will see the Monash address, and when they reply to it, the message will automatically come to your Gmail inbox. When you reply to this reply, the new message will automatically have your Monash address in the From: field. And so on.