Colin Powel on Islamophobia

"I'm also troubled by, not what Senator McCain says, but what members of the party say, and it is permitted to be said. Such things as 'Well you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.' Well the correct answer is 'He is not a Muslim, he's a Christian, he's always been a Christian.' But the really right answer is 'What if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country?' The answer is 'No. That's not America.' Is there something wrong with some 7-year old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she can be president? Yet I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion he's a Muslim and he might be associated with terrorists. This is not the way we should be doing it in America.

I feel strongly about this particular point because of a picture I saw in a magazine. It was a photo-essay about troops who were serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. And one picture at the tail end of this photo essay was of a mother in Arlington Cemetery and she had her head on the headstone of her son's grave. And as the picture focused in you can see the writing on the headstone. And it gave his awards, Purple Heart, Bronze Star, showed that he died in Iraq, gave his date of birth, date of death. He was 20 years old. And then at the very top of the headstone, it didn't have a Christian cross, it didn't have a Star of David. It had a crescent and a star of the Islamic faith. And his name was Karim Rashad Sultan Khan. And he was an American, he was born in New Jersey, he was 14 at the time of 9/11 and he waited until he can go serve his counrty and he gave his life."

Internet searches may improve brain function

I've been a big fan of internet searches, Google searches in particular, since the 1990s. Web searches have changed my life- by searching the web I have learned things that have launched me on a new, very fun and satisfying career.

When I compare myself to other people, it appears I am a person who has trouble storing particular types of information, specifically proper nouns; people names and street names are particularly difficult for me. Other types of information, often completely useless, I store with great ease.

While I have a hard time storing this data, which might just be a bunch of garbage anyway, I have a great love of uncovering data and getting to the bottom of how things work.

I remember thinking the card catalog at the library was a fairly cool thing, and as kid I spent many hours looking through card catalogues by subject, learning how to use them better. It was just fun. So clearly, I was a web search fanatic waiting to happen.

When web searching started, I dove right in asking questions of the search engine as if it were some sort of genie in a bottle. Of course this is a silly way to search, which trial and error quickly revealed.

The real way to search is to think about how people will write about the problem you are trying to reasearch. Somewhere, there is a set of keywords that will get you right to the answer of your question, and those words do not include things like "the" or "and" or "is", unless you are searching for a quote or song lyrics.

This is pretty straightforward stuff, and I mention it to point out the idea that as you search, you get better at searching, and you think about the problem of searching differently as time goes by.

A study has come out that point to the idea that web searches are actually good for your brain, and good for old brains. It just gives me that warm fuzzy feeling to know that my addiction is actually good for me.

Below is the article:

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7667610.stm

Article:

Internet use 'good for the brain'

Areas activated by reading a book in the brain of an experienced web user
For middle-aged and older people at least, using the internet helps boost brain power, research suggests.

A University of California Los Angeles team found searching the web stimulated centres in the brain that controlled decision-making and complex reasoning.

The researchers say this might even help to counteract the age-related physiological changes that cause the brain to slow down.

The study features in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry.

As the brain ages, a number of changes occur, including shrinkage and reductions in cell activity, which can affect performance.

It has long been thought that activities which keep the brain active, such as crossword puzzles, may help minimise that impact - and the latest study suggests that surfing the web can be added to the list.

Lead researcher Professor Gary Small said: "The study results are encouraging, that emerging computerised technologies may have physiological effects and potential benefits for middle-aged and older adults.

"Internet searching engages complicated brain activity, which may help exercise and improve brain function."

The latest study was based on 24 volunteers aged between 55 and 76. Half were experienced internet users, the rest were not.

Each volunteer underwent a brain scan while performing web searches and book-reading tasks.

Both types of task produced evidence of significant activity in regions of the brain controlling language, reading, memory and visual abilities.

However, the web search task produced significant additional activity in separate areas of the brain which control decision-making and complex reasoning - but only in those who were experienced web users.

The researchers said that, compared to simple reading, the internet's wealth of choices required people to make decisions about what to click on in order to get the relevant information.

However, they suggested that newcomers to the web had not quite grasped the strategies needed to successfully carry out a web search.

Professor Smith said: "A simple, everyday task like searching the web appears to enhance brain circuitry in older adults, demonstrating that our brains are sensitive and can continue to learn as we grow older."

Rebecca Wood, chief executive of the Alzheimer’s Research Trust, said: "These fascinating findings add to previous research suggesting that middle-aged and older people can reduce their risk of dementia by taking part in regular mentally stimulating activities.

"Older web users - 'silver surfers' - are doing precisely this."

"Frequent social interactions, regular exercise and maintaining a balanced diet can also reduce dementia risk."

Dr Susanne Sorensen, head of research at the Alzheimer's Society, said: "Use it or lose it may well be a positive message to keep people active but there is very little real evidence that keeping the brain exercised with puzzles, games or other activities can promote cognitive health and reduce the risk of dementia."

David Letterman Reacts to John McCain Suspending Campaign

Italian robot

An Italian candidate for the Google X Lunar Prize:

(more)



Note: Very good moves and looks, but those little feet are going to have problems in dust, particularly the teeny little wheels. A Lamborghini might drive better on the moon.

Interesting robot motion

An Italian candidate for the Google X Lunar Prize:

Morbo on politics.

Linda: “And so with two weeks left in the campaign, the question on everyone’s mind is, who will be the president of Earth? Jack Johnson or bitter rival John Jackson. Two terrific candidates, Morbo?”
Morbo: “All humans are vermin in the eyes of Morbo!”

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Morbo: “Morbo will now introduce tonights candidates. Puny human number one, puny human number two and Morbo’s good friend Richard Nixon.”
Nixon: “Hello Morbo. How’s the family?”
Morbo: “Belligerent and numerous.”
Nixon: “Good man, Nixon’s pro-war and pro-family.”

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Morbo: “Morbo demands an answer to the following question. If you saw a delicious candy in the hands of a small child. Would you seize and consume it?”
John Jackson: “Unthinkable.”
Jack Johnson: “I wouldn’t think of it.”
Morbo: “What about you Mr. Nixon? I remind you. You are under of a truth-o-scope.”
Nixon: “Question is vague. You don’t say what kind of candy and whether anyone is watching. In anyway I certainly wouldn’t harm the child.”

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Linda: “The sheer drama of this election has driven voter turnout to it’s highest level in centuries, six percent.”
Morbo: “Exit poll show evil underdog Richard Nixon trailing with estimated zero votes.”
Linda: “The time is 7:59 and the robot polls are now opening. And robot votes are now in. Nixon has won.”
Morbo: “Morbo congratulates our gargantuan cyborg president. May death come quickly to his enemies.”

Biking from Chicago to San Fran

I've got this buddy named Dan, who works, or worked rather, at the Jefferson Tap near where I live in Chicago. He's riding his bike from Chicago to San Fran. Wait that sounds like the beginning of a limerick.

You can check out his site at http://homeless-and-unemployed.blogspot.com/. He's set up to post to his blog directly from his camera phone, hopefully he'll take advantage of this.

VSS Internet - Not exactly user friendly

I've been working for some time to get VSS Internet service set up on my CrystalTech dedicated machine. It's been somewhat less than easy.

If you're attempting to do it, you may come across a notification that says..

Visual SourceSafe Internet was not enabled on this computer because Internet Information Services (IIS) is not installed. Please install Internet Information Services before configuring Visual SourceSafe Internet.

This is pretty annoying when the simple fact is that IIS is running wonderfully. The problem? If you've done any customization to your virtual folders, you may not have a default website, and if you do, that default site's ID number may not be 1.

VSS Internet requires that your site ID be 1. More info on this, taken from here...

Hi,You are correct that VSS is looking for the website with ID=="1".Currently, the VSS Admin tool can only enable the VSS Internet Service on the default website, with ID==1.The RTM version will include some help pages that will allow you to enable manually the service on any website.Meanwhile, the simplest workaround may be to:1) use IIS Manager to export the websites configuration into an xml file, - open IIS manager and select the "Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager" node. - right click the node, choose AllTasks/BackupRestoreConfiguation... - click CreateBackup button - pick a filename (say "changesiteid") and click ok, close the backup dialog2) manually edit the metabase/xml file and change the desired website ID to "1" - locate the changesiteid.MD0 file (generally in %windows%\system32\inetsrv\MetaBack folder) - edit the file and replace the site id (all occurences of "/LM/W3SVC/nnnnn" with "/LM/W3SVC/1") - save and close the file3) import back the configuration using IIS Manager - right click again the IIS node, choose AllTasks/BackupRestoreConfiguation... - selec the "changesiteid" backup line, click Restore button - agree with restore, etc. close the dialogs after restore is complete4) use SSAdmin to enable the webservice on the default website.(you may also need to create manually the upload/download folders, if you encounter problems see this long thread http://forums.microsoft.com/msdn/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2774)

Alin

This Alin dude rocks. He may have been on the VSS Internet development team or something, but he fleshes out the highly sketchy help files in VSS on his personal blog at...

http://alinconstantin.homeip.net/webdocs/scc/vss_internet.htm

Take some time to read his post, it's great.

Boy, Norton Internet Security 2006 really blows

Not only did I have to nearly completely cripple the software, turning off just about everything except for the Norton Antivirus part of the suite, every time I shut down my system would hang because of this pile of garbage.

I eventually got sick enough of it that I hunted down the answer. Do yourself a favor and stay away from this piece of junk; I'd always liked Norton in the past, but not after the amount of time I had to spend just to get my machine working properly. The fix...

Turn off Auto-Protect floppy drive scan on shutdown
Norton Auto-Protect is configured by default to scan floppy drives when the computer shuts down. This message can happen on computers that do not have floppy drives. If your computer does not have a floppy drive, follow these steps to turn off that option.To turn off floppy drive scanning on shutdown
Start Norton AntiVirus. If Norton AntiVirus is installed as a part of Norton SystemWorks or Norton Internet Security, then start that program.
Click Options. If you see a menu, click Norton AntiVirus.
In the Norton AntiVirus Options dialog box, in the left pane, double-click Auto-Protect.
Click Advanced.
In the right pane, uncheck Scan floppy disk in A: for boot viruses when shutting down.
Click OK.
Shut down the computer.

Wanna add a sort arrow to your GridView in ASP 2.0? This is an arrow that points upward and downward in the sort column, depending on the direction of the sort.

It's easy, just use the DataBound event like this...


protected void GridView1_DataBound(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
GridViewRow headerRow = GridView1.HeaderRow;
string strSortExpression = GridView1.SortExpression;
for (int i = 0; i < GridView1.Columns.Count; i++)
{
string strColumnExpression = GridView1.Columns[i].SortExpression;
if ((strSortExpression == strColumnExpression)&&(strSortExpression != ""))
{
Image img = new Image();
if (GridView1.SortDirection.ToString() == "Ascending")
{
img.ImageUrl = "App_Themes/ArrowUp.gif";
}
else
{
img.ImageUrl = "App_Themes/ArrowDown.gif";
}
headerRow.Cells[i].Controls.Add(new LiteralControl(" "));
headerRow.Cells[i].Controls.Add(img);
}
}
}

Wanna send a text message to your buddy, but do it using email?

The easy way is to type in the email address of the person as

phonenumber@teleflip.com

where phonenumber = the 10 digit phone number

www.teleflip.com is a spiffy service, but it can be a little slow, and might not be around forever. Perhaps you want to send to your buddy quickly, not using teleflip? You can, but you have to know their cell phone service provider. Type in one of the following values as the email address:

T-Mobile: phonenumber@tmomail.net
Virgin Mobile: phonenumber@vmobl.com
Cingular: phonenumber@cingularme.com
Sprint: phonenumber@messaging.sprintpcs.com
Verizon: phonenumber@vtext.com
Nextel: phonenumber@messaging.nextel.com

Just remember, text messages are limited to 160 characters, so anything you type over this limit will result in the message being broken up into multiple 160 character chunks, which can be pretty annoying, particularly if the chunks happen to arrive at the phone in the wrong order.

Perhaps you own a Siemens SX66, also known as "Audiovox PPC-6600, PPC-6601, XV6600 / O2-XDA IIs / XDA III / i-Mate PDA2K / QTEK 9090 / Siemens SX66".

Perhaps you've considered purchasing the Jabra C220s or the Jabra C120s to use with your Siemens SX66.

Well, I just tried it, and it didn't work, but it could if you were willing to mess around with customization. The Jabra headsets have posts that are longer than the SX66 headset jack channel by about 3 millimeters. If you plug in these headsets, they essentially go too far into the jack, past the "sweet spot". If you pull the plug out of the jack about 3mm, things work great, but that just sounds like trouble to me.

If you wanted to weld a spacer, sort of like a small stack of washers or something, to the base of the post, the Jabra headsets would work fine.

Go for it McGuyver, you can do it! (I'll pass)

I once heard true creativity as being defined by producing innovative results in the face of some restriction. The person put it better than that, but I can't remember the exact phrase.

Anyway, here is a good example of creativity, by this definition:

Noises

I just have to recommend this product I bought. It's a file comparison utility, and it's the best twenty bucks I ever spent. It's "Beyond Compare", by Scooter Software.

As a developer, I'm always comparing versions of files from here and there. As someone who collaborates on HTML, it's easy for people to step on each other when your only connection is a remote FTP server. BC let's you open up local and remote versions of files simultaneously and do a line by line comparison. Out of the box it's extremely powerful and intuitive, and with deep customization features it only gets better.

As a general computer user, I use BC all the time to compare folder structures, do quick backups to remote drives, stuff like that.

If you compare files and folders, or you should and you just cut and paste instead like I used to, you have to get this thing.

Perhaps you are, like me, using SpamNet, a fine anti-spam solution by Cloudmark. You may have noticed in the new version you get popups every now and then asking you to refer your friends as potiential customers.

This seems like spam to me, doesn't it to you? I emailed the marketing director at Cloudmark and got some results. To turn it off, follow these instructions...

Please do the following:
1. Choose Start > Run and type REGEDIT
2. Navigate to the following key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Cloudmark\SpamNet\DialogPrefs
3. Double click on SignatureOffer.
4. Change the value of this from 1 to 0 with a Base of Decimal.

Happy spam destruction,

Jamie

Pure, table free HTML is not ready for prime time. That's where I come down today.

This blanket statement is based on the following assumptions:

1. You are building web applications, not displaying content.
2. You need your pages to be resizeable.

This page does not meet the above conditions. Yes, the content is displayed without tables. But this is not an application, and the content does not truly resize.

If you can use absolute positioning, and you don't care about resizing, go right ahead. But if you're looking to deploy your application to multiple browsers, and you really need that resize capability, you're going to get lost in your CSS. It reminds me of trying to build cross-browser JavaScript in the late 90s, and absolute nightmare.

You can get pretty close to perfection without tables, but the browsers fall down, most notably FireFox, when you squish your screen to the point of collapsing elements. Things get ugly in there, and the time investment required seems huge for the payoff of true display abstraction.

Go ahead, use tables, but use them sparingly. Put your table formatting off into CSS wherever possible. Wait patiently for the bold new day when all the browsers truly support the new CSS standard.

Problems with updates using OleDbConnection in VS.Net when dates are present.

In my last post I forgot to mention, if you're having problems updating something and you're connecting to Access or another database using OleDb, do yourself a favor and edit the autogenerated code that handles record creation and deletes.

In your oleDbUpdateCommand section, you'll find that date fields are handled with the attribute

System.Data.OleDb.OleDbType.DBDate
 
Instead switch the "DBDate" to "Date" and the update will actually function, like

System.Data.OleDb.OleDbType.Date
 
It is safe to do a global search and replace on this, as the other areas that use DBDate without problems aren't affected by the change.

This reminds me of all the trouble you have to go through with date delimiters when you're working with old ADO in Access and SQL Server, that is, using "#" or " ' " respectively.

Somtimes, they lie to you. Microsoft has plastered all over it's documentation that you can just call "Update" on a dataset, and bingo, all relevant changes will be posted back to the datastore in a bandwidth conserving manner.

An example...

private void btnSave_Click(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
     oleDbDataAdapter1.Update(dataSet1);
}


How tidy this would be! To bad it doesn't work if you're doing something of any value with the dataset. For example, you might be using databinding on a form. Not exactly stretching the limits of the IDE here. The thing is, the CurrencyManager, which handles the task of binding datasets to form elements, is a bit sloppy. You get intermittent results if you just bind a form element to a dataset and then call update. The form does not consistently "let go" of the bound value, so when you call update, it may be the case that the dataset does not appear to have been altered, so you're hosed.

Here is an example of a properly built function, replacing the one line piece of crap above...

private void btnSave_Click(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
     this.BindingContext[dataSet1, "TableName"].EndCurrentEdit();
     try
     {
        if(dataSet1.GetChanges() != null)
        {
           this.oleDbDataAdapter1.Update(this.dataSet1.GetChanges());
           this.dataSet1.AcceptChanges();
        }
     }
     catch(Exception err)
     {
        MessageBox.Show(err.ToString());
     }
}

Not exactly the same, but it works.

I'm working in VS.Net, and I'm creating a setup package. I ran into an obscure problem that I just had to pass along. When you create a setup package, an MSI file, it doesn't include the ability to create any procedure based code like the old, really lousy setup funtionality under the old Visual Studio.

When you register users, you sometimes want to create a file, in my case an XML file containing configuration information, in the folder the user selects for the installed application. The problem is, you can't use "Application.StartupPath" in an EXE that is called from the MSI file, because that file runs in a temp folder, and there is no point in creating a settings file there. Obviously, you want to save the file to the folder where the application is running, but how do you pass the user's selection to your registration EXE at runtime?

The setup package offers a screen named "Installation Folder", which is where the user selects the deployment folder. You can get at the string the user selects using the attribute "TARGETDIR", however there is a trick to it, and that's what I wanted to pass along.

In your "Register User" screen, the one that calls your registration EXE, you have an attribute called Arguments. To correctly pass the path to your EXE, you have to make sure it can accept command line arguments, and example of which you can find here.

To put it short, the text you should enter in the arguments field is (in bold for clarity) "[TARGETDIR] . Notice the quotation mark at the beginning and not the end of the string. Isn't that nasty? If you don't add this, you are going to end up with an arguments array that automatically splits at any space characters, (" "), so if you try to read the value your going to get "C:\Program" because of the space in "Program Folders". If you add the quotation mark at the end, like "[TARGETDIR]", you end up with a path that includes a trailing quotation mark, such as C:\Program Files\Company\Application" . Another option would be to join the elements in the array within your EXE, but this is just easier, and gives you the ability to pass arguments as well, although I haven't teased out the syntax for this.

Cheers!

OK, so you are using moving to Windows XP from Windows 2000. You are on a laptop, or a machine with a keyboard with all these ridiculous little custom buttons at the top that do stuff like pull up your system manufacturer's PDF file. You like to lock your machine when you step away from it, like any sane person does, knowing that they are all out to get you, but you miss hitting Ctrl-Alt-Delete to gain access to the quick "Lock Machine" function that Windows 2000 offers.

Why not use one of those stupid "extra" buttons on your keyboard to lock your machine with? It just so happens I have an EXE you can use, I pulled it off of an HP Pavilion, but you can use it on any XP machine. Just map one of those buttons to the EXE, and you're all set. Here is the file... QuikLock.zip