I have always wanted a screen capture utility that would be really easy to use. My search was over when I downloaded Cropper. I think this is the ultimate screen capture utility. It is easy to use, you have tons of options and the best part for us geeks, it's written is C# and the entire source code is available. The highlight of the tool is, that you can select an area on the screen and double click to capture that area. You can choose from a number of output formats like jpeg, gif, png or the clipboard. All in all a very handy utility.
Author: Lilly Wang
No, no, I am not talking about the different behavior, or habits, or thinking pattern between men and women, I am talking about the gender gaps when it comes to health.
I am reading an interesting article about the physical differences between men and women which can drastically affect the odds of getting a disease. For that sake, men and women need to be treated differently - which is often referred to his and hers medicine.
Here are some facts of the gender gap listed in the article (written by Dawn MacKeen):
- Heart disease - it strikes men at younger age but kills more women.
- Asthma - bulk of tthe patients are women;
- Strokes - more men have strokes, yet 62% of the victims of fatal strokes are women;
- Depression - before puberty, depression is about equally prevalent in boys and girls; by adulthood, however, depression is twice as common in females. Sad women are more likely to overeat and sleep too much, as well as ache from body pain. But males are four times more likely to commit suicide;
- Lung cancer - men suffer 60% of the death from it. But the gender divide is shrinking (due to the fact that few men smoke these days)
- Pain - males hold out pain longer than female; (hehe, we scream louder when pains come);
- Rheumatoid arthristis - is twice as common in women as in men.
Well, looks like God is more in favor of men when it comes to health. But women are better than men in other areas (oops, I start a war again...)
Just downloaded Sharepoint Portal Server 2007. I am really looking forward to see how this works, after all it is the best example of how to build an enterprise level ASP.NET application. It uses most of the features of ASP.NET 2.0 and builds a lot more on top of it.
Over the next few days I am going to go deep and try and learn as much as possible from SPS 2007. I have created a mini web farm (two machines networked with Microsoft Network Load Balancing) and a third server that would host the data. I have read that sharepoint keeps all it's documents in SQL Server and hope to see what kind of indexing schemes they have applied to make it super efficient.
Right now I am making too many assumption and am expecting to see and understand at least some code from the SPS bits. Only time will tell as to how many of those assumptions stand true.
Author: Lilly Wang
Why? Just imagine you just spent $300 to get a nano ($249 for the nano iPod + $50 for different accessories), and see what you get:
- a proprietary file format. Yes, you can convert regular mp3 to iTune. But why the extra effort?
- little tech support. Yes, Apple does provide support, but not without a price. $49 or $59 service fee, you choose.
- no backups, please. ok, you now have 10,000 songs on your new iPod, you want to back them up in your PC. No way! Apple won't allow it. Solution? download some third party software for a price (money, money... where is the end?)
- pathetic battery. life of battery? what life? if you are lucky, the battery may be re-charged about 500 times lifetime. after that? send me money to buy another one ($59+ $6.95 for s&h).
- no use in the car. ok, you can use your car speaker if you find the right radio frequency to tune it in. but we live in Houston, no readyily available frequency! just this one, it is enough to kill all my desire to buy an iPod. I spend the most time listening to music in a car. If i can't use it the car, what's the use?
- greddy Apple. they charge you for everything, from wall charger to a dock, to a connector to TV, etc, you name it. That proves one saying: there is no free lunch in the world. well, i don't want free lunch, please just don't over-charge me.
I will stay away from iPod as long as I can. And you can too.
Author: Lilly Wang
I am reading an interesting article on how our lifestyle can add years of living:
- Manage weight - potential longevity gain: 6 to 7 years
- Lower blood pressure - potential longevity gain: 5 years
- Exercise - potential longevity gain: 1.3 - 3.7 years
- Quit smoking - potential longevity gain: 10 years
- Think positive - potential longevity gain: 10 years (the winner!)
By the way, the once so favored green tea was recently annouced by FDA that it does not have all those fancy effects. Truth or false? It's really hard to tell these days. Just like one day it says coffer is the best antioxidants, while another day, it is claimed to be one of the main causes of heart disease. For me? I only believe my own theory: balance diet, exercise, and positive thinking.
Happy living.
Airlines used to punish the last-minute travel planner with brutal high airfare, now there is a paradigm shift. You can actually find good rate from last minute booking. Some good resources:
- You can sign up Southwest last minute fare alert service
- Site59.com
- LastMinuteTravel.com
- 11thHourVacations.com
- Travelzoo.com
Some tips of booking:
- Sign up for e-mail alert from major airlines and hotels
- Get a guarantee - some sites such as Expedia and Quikbook promise to match competitors' price
- Package it up - it is usually much cheaper if you tie up the airfare with hotels. But be careful. Some of the sites will still have this type of deal up even if it's already sold out. Use Travelzoo.com to check the availability.
Some people never like to wear their seat belt. If you are one of them just watch this video on youtube.com and see if it changes your mind.
Some people can be really sick, what the journalist said in the video was simply pathetic.
WARNING: the video is graphic (not nude), so watch it with caution
I have added basic RSS support for this website. If you are using Firefox or IE7 you should see the orange RSS/Feeds button enabled.
Well, I finally wrapped up switching to SQL Server 2005 and cleaned up all the bugs as of last night. It took me a total of 3 late nights to migrate over (which is not bad considering a new business logic that talks to stored procedures to handle data), but switching to a database gave me simplicity and less coding out of the box. I no more have to worry about file locking and corruption issues any more.
Following are the features that I added after the migration:
- List all entries by author
- List all entries by category
- Archive listing with count of entries per month
- Ability to disable comments on an entry (administration)
- Ability to delete a blog entry (administration)
- Ability to delete comments (administration)
- Ability to edit a comment (administration)
- Creating a new user (administration)
Now that I have wrapped up V1, I have started thinking on some other super important / nice to have features. At this point the top priority items are:
For the next couple of days I plan to review my code and see if I can improve the codebase, after which I will start working on Search / RSS.
