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Cape weather, 22 Feb

Today: 17-23 °C, 60% rain.

Thu		17-24 °C
	Sunny
Fri		17-26 °C
	Sunny
Sat		17-27 °C
	Sunny
Sun		18-26 °C
	Sunny
Mon		18-28 °C
	Sunny
Tue		17-24 °C, 20% rain
	Partly cloudy
Wed		16-22 °C
	Sunny
Thu		16-26 °C
	Sunny
Fri		17-27 °C
	Sunny

Jun
13 Laser is produced by a living cell. The technique starts by engineering a cell that can produce a light-emitting protein that was first obtained from glowing jellyfish. »

May
29 Cleaning Up Radioactive Mess with Blue Goo. A clever technology is helping crews in Japan contain and clean up the contamination caused by the ongoing nuclear disaster there: a blue liquid that hardens into a gel that peels off of surfaces, taking microscopic particles like radiation and other contaminants with it. »

May
27 The Art of the Animated GIF. Animated GIFs are like the jazz of the internet: they could only exist, and be created and appreciated, online. Photographer Jamie Beck and motion graphics artist Kevin Burg may have finally found a way to elevate the animated GIF to a level approaching fine art, with their "cinemagraphs" - elegant, subtly animated creations that are "something more than a photo but less than a video." »

May
27 Proof That Einstein Got It Right. Einstein's general theory of relativity predicts that massive, spinning objects like Earth should warp space and time around them, as well as drag space and time along as they rotate - as a dipper twirling in a honeypot would spin honey. Francis Everitt talks about how NASA's Gravity Probe-B experiment has just confirmed both predictions. »

May
27 USB-stick PC could sell for £15. A miniaturised computer could sell for as little as £15 when it is launched next year by veteran computer games developer David Braben. The device, produced by a new group called Raspberry Pi, is approximately the size of a USB memory stick. »

Apr
30 Ultrafast fibre optics set new speed record. Two separate research groups have just set a world record by sending more than 100 terabits of information per second through a single optical fibre. That's enough to deliver three solid months of HD video- or the contents of 250 double-sided Blu-ray discs. »

Apr
23 Dutch To Build Solar Panels Into Their Roads. The Dutch are well known for their ubiquitous bike lanes, to the point where Amsterdam is neck and neck with Copenhagen for the title of most bike-loving capital in Europe. Now, Denmark will have to come up with something big to match the latest plan from the Netherlands - the installation of solar panels in roads, starting with bike lanes. »

Apr
23 Rumor that "God Particle" Has Been Detected. A rumor is floating around the physics community that the world's largest atom smasher may have detected a long-sought subatomic particle called the Higgs boson, also known as the "God particle." »

Apr
23 Lasers May Replace Spark Plugs. The spark plug's days are numbered though thanks to a new breakthrough from some scientists that have found a way to replace the spark with a laser inside the internal combustion engine. According to researchers, the move to lasers from spark plugs will allow cleaner and more efficient vehicles and with the looming increases in mandated fuel economy, the auto industry will need all the help it can get. »

Geek things

Some geek stuff I refer back to often, kept here for posterity.

Reference links

CSS reference doc. Short and to the point, with easy to use samples.

Nice Struts introduction and tutorial. Oversold your skills during an interview? This should sort you out in no time.

Acme laboratories. Poke into some interesting source code.

java-source.net Very nice open source Java compendium..

Rational unified process, Extreme programming and dX. Ammo for methodology debates. Sound like a pro and say "but dX ..." a lot.

Tweak Windows

Permanently stop Windows Messenger from loading

Rename "C:\Program Files\Messenger" to "C:\Program Files\Messenger1", and remove the "1" when you change your mind (The "proper" way is using the Group Policy Editor).

Tweak Windows Explorer startup

By default, Windows Explorer opens to My Documents. If you want Windows Explorer to open to drive C, open the shortcut properties and change as follows:

Before: c:\windows\explorer.exe

After: c:\windows\explorer.exe /n,/e,c:\

For more information check out the Microsoft site.

Bypass Windows login

If you have a machine that must be secure from a network perspective, but is in a secure enough place that you can automate the login process, this is for you.

Click the start button and then run. Type control userpasswords2 when the "Run" dialog appears, hit enter, and youíll be taken to a "User Accounts" dialog. Uncheck Users must enter a user name and password to use this computer, and then click Apply.

Youíll be prompted for a user name and password that Windows will use to log you in automatically.

Make ads disppear

Many web sites use a cheap and nasty way to push ads on you, and worse than that, incorporate "beacon" sites that track your web usage. External sites are merely linked into theirs using an iframe. Taken to extremes, your bandwidth is sucked dry while others are spying on you at the same time. The solution: edit the hosts file.

The hosts file on Windows XP can be found at C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc. Point Windows Explorer there and open the file "hosts" with notepad. Simply follow the pattern presented there, e.g.

127.0.0.1 localhost

And add your own entries in the form:

127.0.0.1 domaintohide.com

What this does is to override the real IP address of the site (domaintohide.com) with the address of your machine. Since your machine does not host the requested page the browser silently ignores that reference and continues processing the rest of the page.

I played around by viewing the source of web pages that bothered/annoyed me, and then added (a suprisingly small number of) ad syndication sites. Look for iframes containing URLs that contain "ads", "advertising" and "syndication". Now I am amazed to see sites with ads sometimes, as this approach seamlessly removes ads irrespective of browser or platform.

Open command prompt from Explorer

Normally you can only open the command prompt from the shurtcut in accessories, or by running cmd.exe. This leaves you with the tedious task of changing drives / directories to wherever you actually want to be. Download and run the script below to add an Exlorer context menu that opens a command prompt within the chosen folder.

add_cmd_to_xp_folder.vbs

Use at your own risk, and don't ever run these things without checking first.

Fix Exporer folders not opening properly

In Windows XP, Explorer folders normally open when double clicked. When you poked about in the advanced settings of the "File Folder" file type, you can cause explorer to mess up its own settings. Once this has happened, the "Search" action usually becomes the default - when you double click a folder you get a search dialog.

This is probably coincidental, since the "Open" action is merely replaced by the next one down the line. Here is a script that puts back the missing setting, allowing folders to open normally again.

fix_xp_folder_open.vbs

As before, don't ever run these things without checking first.

Group Policy Editor

From the Start menu, run gpedit.msc. "Administrative Templates" under both Computer and User Configuration has the most useful stuff. Remove "Documents" from start menu, disable Messenger, Set up logon scripts/applications, remove "My Documents" and much more. All those fiddly tweaks in one place.

Miscellaneous

UberNet ª

These guys have turned the modest task of creating MP3s from your favourite music into an art form. Well worth the effort if you like top quality music on your portable setup.

Hellkom ª

Stay true to the faith. See how exactly you are being ripped off on phone bills, Internet and a whole lot more.