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.
Author: Lilly Wang
Nanotechnology is a hot topic these days. Just imagine you now can control the construction of material on the molecule level, it is really an exciting step in both science and engineering.
In regular organic reactions, the molecules tend to form a random state to achieve the maximum entropy for the stability. In another word, the material won’t be stable if the structure is not in a random state. In contrast to this, the nanotechnology basically builds up the structure with molecules aligned (ordered state). And if the molecules are polar (meaning it has dipole), the material constructed in this way will create enhanced electrical and optical effects. Also the way this type of material interacting with other material including human cells will be different since they are polar and have magnetic effects.
As a matter of fact, the nature has built material in this way much long before we found the nanotechnology. Think about protein and DNA, they are all self-assembly, ordered structures that our bodies can create themselves. Some of the techniques used these days borrow that idea. When I was in graduate school, my dissertation was working on the synthesis of constructing aligned material (thin-layer) on gold surface. Those good old days...
If you are interested in nanotechnology, the wikipedia site has really good coverage. Maybe we can discuss more later ...
Wiki pedia nano technology link
Author: Girish Bajaj
So which os do you think is better? Linux or Microsoft or Mac OS?
I know MS has better UI, and Linux does not, but Mac is becoming very popular and linux is very good at multi tasking.
I dont like working on MS because it hangs so often. So is linux good? Is Mac OS the ultimate OS since its got an awesome UI and based on linux?
Im going to install Linux at home now and check it out...
I have been working with XML for about 5 years now and I would like to share my pain points with you. One big thing I have learnt about XML is that you cannot use it anywhere and everywhere, because sooner or later you are going to have an XML hell. Let me give you some examples.
When I created this website about a year back I did not want to use a heavy backend for it. I searched around for a lightweight database and did find some (I know you are asking for the names of those light weight databases but it's been a year now. I shall dig up some materials and add a separate post later). After not finding any good one that works well with .NET I decided to use XML. After all XML is everyone's favorite. Today as this site stands, it is running off of SQL Server. WHY?
- I invited a couple of friends to blog on the site, but as soon as I did that, I realized that I would have concurrency issues.
- I have added features like entries by author and entries by category. Adding those features with XML would be difficult. A lot of custom code would be required.
Second, I created a project about 3 years back where I stored a lot of information in XML files. Later due to load that application had to be run on multiple machines. Soon we were heading towards XML hell. Individual machines had a bunch of XML files. Anytime you had to search for anything you had to go to each and every machine and search the directory with *.xml.
So what is the moral of the story? Do not use XML? No, use XML, but plan ahead. Sometimes it is very difficult. Projects start small and everything works fine, until it gets bigger and bigger and things get out of hand. I am not saying XML is at fault. I am saying we need to be very careful of when and where to use XML.
In both the above examples when the project started, it started small, I never thought of inviting a bunch of friends to blog on my site. I realized the problem sooner, so I could fix the issue before it took my site down. Like wise for the other project I migrated all the data to SQL Server just like this web site and things started turning around.
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.
I have been following DnrTV for some time now, and I want to recommend the following 2 videos a must watch for anyone who is serious about .NET programming.
Both these videos are presented by Venkat Subramaniam. He is a very good teacher. He teaches OOP to undergrad students at the University of Houston. I am really thinking of taking a course with him.
Just checked DnrTV and he is back with another show this time on .NET in general. I am off to download the latest video. More later!
UPDATE: The latest show was just ok. It did have some good examples, but there was too much talk about dynamic languages than .NET. He is going to come back with another show on the language Ruby. It will be an interesting show to watch.
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.
I have moved my existing XML file based blogging solution to SQL Server. This should allow multiple people to work with their blog entries. Also have added a couple of new features. You can now click on the "Category" (Tag in red) and read all entries by that category. Also you can click on the "Author" and read all entries by that author.
Some bugs may have crept in, please let me know if you find any.
Lilly, don't freak out, the entry you made yesterday shows the author as me :). I need to create a new user for you after which I will have to fix the author for that entry in the backend.
Thanks,
After going back and forth on making a decision, I finally decided that I will stick to my existing code base. I really enjoy coding and did not want to take away the fun in coding my own solution as opposed to using a ready made solution. I know I would be reinventing the wheel, but that's what weekend coding is for.
The biggest change that I am planning on the site is moving the existing code of saving blog entries to XML file to saving them to a database. This is especially required since I have asked a couple of good friends of mine to enter their own blog entries here. File locking would simply kill the enthusiasm.
I am already through with the database schema and business logic and am currently testing the solution. Basically I have 3 tables Categories (used simply to tag blog entries), BlogEntries (stores all the blog entries entered by various authors) and Comments (any feedback received on a blog entry). Once I am done with testing, I have to migrate existing XML file entries to the database (this is going to be fun).
