Your Brain Lies to You

FALSE beliefs are everywhere. Eighteen percent of Americans think the sun revolves around the earth, one poll has found. Thus it seems slightly less egregious that, according to another poll, 10 percent of us think that Senator Barack Obama, a Christian, is instead a Muslim. The Obama campaign has created a Web site to dispel misinformation. But this effort may be more difficult than it seems, thanks to the quirky way in which our brains store memories — and mislead us along the way.

The brain does not simply gather and stockpile information as a computer’s hard drive does. Facts are stored first in the hippocampus, a structure deep in the brain about the size and shape of a fat man’s curled pinkie finger. But the information does not rest there. Every time we recall it, our brain writes it down again, and during this re-storage, it is also reprocessed. In time, the fact is gradually transferred to the cerebral cortex and is separated from the context in which it was originally learned. For example, you know that the capital of California is Sacramento, but you probably don’t remember how you learned it.

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Using Runtime.exec in Java

Here is a Javaworld article explaining how to use
Runtime.exec to execute external commands and batch/shell files etc from java
http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-12-2000/jw-1229-traps.html

The Java Developers Almanac

The Java Developers Almanac 1.4.
All the code examples from the book. Simple examples of how to use the API
http://exampledepot.com/

Name

• ForEnso
  
• PrimeEnso
• GroupEnso
• TwoEnso
• InEnso
• EnsoIn
• MicroEnso
• BeyondEnso
• WalkEnso
• UnoEnso
• NowEnso
• EnsoNow
• CyberEnso
• NorthEnso
• GoEnso
• TriEnso
• TrancEnso
  

Blacklist monitoring and removal procedures

From the blog

http://mailchimp.blogs.com/blog/2007/05/is_your_domain_.html

You probably also know that if your server is in the same "neighborhood" (IP range) as another server that sends spam (like in a shared environment at your ISP), then your server could get blacklisted too.

But not a lot of people know that your domain name can get blacklisted. If that happens, it doesn't matter where you send your email from. If spam filters simply find your domain name in the email's content, the message will get blocked.

The idea is that if you're an evil spammer (or just a really sloppy company), and you pay affiliates to go out and spam on your behalf, your company's name and reputation can get tarnished right along with theirs.

They call it "spamvertising," and you do not want to be labeled as a "spamvertiser." You'll end up on a "URI Blacklist" or "URI Block."

You can check if your company's domain name is blacklisted at:

http://lookup.uribl.com/

More from the blog

The other list is maintained here
http://www.surbl.org/

remove CR and LF

   function escapeVal(data,replaceWith){
   //textarea is reference to that object, replaceWith is string that will replace the encoded return
   data = escape(data) //encode textarea string's carriage returns
   alert(data);   
   for(i=0; i   //loop through string, replacing carriage return encoding with HTML break tag
   
    if(data.indexOf("%0D%0A") > -1){
     //alert("1 ");
    //Windows encodes returns as \r\n hex
     data=data.replace("%0D%0A",replaceWith)
    }
    else if(data.indexOf("%0A") > -1){
          //alert("2 ");
  //   Unix encodes returns as \n hex
     data=data.replace("%0A",replaceWith)
    }
    else if(data.indexOf("%0D") > -1){
     //alert("3 ");     
     //Macintosh encodes returns as \r hex
     data=data.replace("%0D",replaceWith)
    } else if(data.indexOf("%20") > -1) {
     //replace space
     data=data.replace("%20"," ")
    }
   
   }
   
    data=unescape(data) //unescape all other encoded characters
    alert(data);
    return data;
   }

The Humans Behind the Google Money Machine

Snippets from the article

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. " If Google were the United States government, the data that streams onto Nicholas Fox’s laptop every day would be classified as top secret.

Mr. Fox is among a small group of Google employees who keep a watchful eye on the vital signs of one of the most successful and profitable businesses on the Internet. The number of searches and clicks, the rate at which users click on ads, the revenue this generates " everything is tracked hour by hour, compared with the data from a week earlier and charted.

"You can see very, very quickly if anything is amiss," said Mr. Fox, director of business product management at Google.
------------------------

raffic was growing rapidly, as was the average price that advertisers were paying for clicks. But Mr. Fox and others realized that measuring the average cost-per-click was not good enough. Users might be clicking on more high-priced ads and fewer lower-priced ads. That would cause the average cost-per-click to rise, but it would say little about the health of the overall system.

So Mr. Varian and Diane Tang, principal engineer in the ads quality group, helped devise what they call a basket of keywords. Much like the consumer price index, a basket of goods and services that economists use to track inflation, the measure is made up of a broad sample of keywords and is weighted to make it statistically accurate. This internal benchmark helps Google get a clearer picture of its performance.

As measurements improved, Mr. Fox’s team unleashed a stream of experiments meant to optimize the ad system. They evaluated changes to things like the clickable area and background color of ads, and the criteria for placing ads above search results rather than beside them.

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

These factors contribute to an ad’s “quality score.” The higher that score, the less the advertiser has to bid to secure top billing. For example, an advertiser who offers to pay $1 per click to attract those searching for “vacation rentals in Colorado” may receive more prominent placement than another who bids $1.50 for the same query but has a lower quality score. An advertiser with a very low quality score may have to bid so much for placement as to make it uneconomical.

Quality scores work as an incentive to advertisers to improve their ads, which benefits users and, in turn, benefits Google, Mr. Fox said.

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Link to my KEF photo Album

Here is my link to KEF photo Album

CacheFile.Net - Open Source CDN

CacheFile.net is an HTTP web server that contains common Internet resources that are frequently reused on other web sites. It exists to alleviate the need for a common root URL for web resources that are otherwise not directly linkable at their primary URLs.

For example, popular Javascript libraries may have a direct download link for a specific version of their script files, but may discourage the direct linking of these files on their site. People are instead encouraged to download the scripts and manage them on their own servers. But the problem with each web site retaining its own copy of the same resources is that web users must re-download them all over again as they navigate from site to site. Over browsing five different dojo-driven web sites using the same version of dojo, there may be five different copies of the script being seperately downloaded.

If all web sites used a common URI for each frequently used web resource, the user's browser would only download that resource once, until the user's cache is either cleared or expired.

Randy Pausch's Last Lecture

Carnegie Mellon professor Randy Pausch after being diagnosed on Sept 2006 with cancer and with only 3 months to live gave one of this wonderful, uplifting lectures titled "The Last Lecture".



His book titled "The Last Lecture" is a New York Times #1 Best seller.

some snippets from his update page are below

"you can't control the cards you're dealt, just how you play the hand."

April 17 2007: an email I wanted to share...

Through all of this, I've tried very hard to stay positive, but it's very hard to know how one is really doing in situations like these. I received the following email, which gave me hope that - at least during the moment described - I am managing to enjoy life through all this...

... I happened to have been behind you for a few blocks as you were driving from campus last night (Monday). Before I recognized it was you, I found myself thinking, "Gee that guy is really enjoying the moment.....driving down the road on a warm, early spring evening, top down, wind blowing through his hair, with a smile on his face.....probably headed home to a wife and maybe a little one or two......that's the way to live life.". And then you turned left and I recognized it was you. I then found myself thinking, "It's Randy! He looks so happy! And, in this most private of public moments (alone in his car, yet on the road for anyone to observe), I can't imagine anyone who IS living life more. No one is more deserving!". Thanks for sharing your happiness/your life so fully with so many of us.......on campus and in your car. You can never know how that glimpse of you tonight made my day, reminding me of what life really is all about...

March 17, 2007: A note on staying positive

Many things have helped keep me going throughout this process, mostly knowing how many people have been rooting for me. When I was first diagnosed, I was told that the overall odds for surviving for 5 years were only 3%. My immediate reaction was: "I don't believe in the no-win scenario." (Star Trek fans will recognize this quote from the second movie, Wrath of Kahn. In the film, Star Fleet cadets are faced with a simulated training scenario called the Kobayashi Maru where - no matter what they do - their entire crew is killed. When Kirk was a cadet at the academy, he reprogramming the simulation, because "he didn't believe in the no-win scenario."

So imagine how uplifting it was when I received the following while at MD Anderson, just as things were getting rough: if you can't read the handwriting, it says "To Randy -- I don't believe in the no-win scenario -- My best, Bill Shatner"