I have been following this multi-touch sensor based computer technology pretty closely. I am fascinated by the thought of these types of devices to replace our current constraint prone desktop and laptop computers. The file transfer feature has got to be one of the coolest features of the coffee table computer shown in the video. I dream of a day when wads of cables become non-existent.
I heard a rumor that McDonalds charges a dine-in tax to its customers who eat in the restaurant. I had to see for myself, so I called four McDonalds in four different states and asked them about it. To my surprise every one of them confirmed they did have such a charge.
I try not to eat at McDonalds as much as possible because of health reasons but I am anxious to see if anyone out there has a receipt from their dine-in experience. I would love to see what they are actually calling this alleged tax. I am not even sure they can call it a tax unless the U.S. Government is actually levying this tax. If any of my readers have any information on this please comment.
Tiggers love bouncing, we all know that. Well apparently they also love boxing as this video shows Tigger connecting with a left hook to a 14 year old boys face. The teen went to the hospital and the Tigger was suspended. The plush bully has yet to apologize to the boy or his family.
Has anyone been to the airport lately? Well I am here to tell you it’s not what it used to be. As many of you may know airport security has stepped it up a notch after the events of 9/11/01. This has caused some delay in many peoples lives as they are frisked, scanned and even questioned at the security gate. That’s why I created “6 waysto make airport security painless”.
The idea behind this method is be prepared for the security check and things will move in a more timely fashion. This is not an article on how to avoid being the lucky flyer number 23 who is submitted to a full body cavity search. It is however an article featuring 6 ways for you to optimize your luggage. Doing so will ensure that if and when you do get stopped the delay will be minimized.
1. Make a list of everything you are going to take with you on your trip. Once you have this list it is time to start minimizing. Less is more and that logic can be directly applied to this situation. Try to exclude items you may be able to obtain at your point of destination. This will make les luggage for you to carry and also less luggage for them to search.
2. Once you have your list in order and you have removed the kitchen sink from it :) it is time to categorize your belongings. I personally use the three tier method for this part. The three tier method is a priority based categorization method. The first tier is the highest priority items. These items include crucial necessities such as plane tickets, cell phone, laptop, pda, tom tom, jewelry, maps, important documents, invitations and other highly important items. The second tier is depreciated from the first tier and includes medium priority items such as clothing, hygiene products, and gifts ect. . Then there is the third tier depreciated from the second tier the third tier is the easiest to fill. At this point anything that didn’t fit in the first and second tiers will no belong to the third tier.
3. Check as many bags as possible. You will want to try and check as many bag’s as possible. This is something that may make many people nervous based on previous experiences with lost or stolen luggage, however this will make it easier on you at the security gate. The fewer bags you have the less they will have to search “right there” and the faster you move through the gate and on to your flight. (Hint check the second and third tier bag’s to ensure your important belongings are not victims of the infamous lost luggage scenario)
4. The day of your flight schedule yourself one hour earlier than your flight departure. The airport recommended two hours for security but trust me you should not need more than one unless you are at an international airport and have to go through customs.
5. Purchase your tickets as far in advance as possible. This will not only lower the cost of the flight and get you a better seat but also will lower your chances of being selected for a random search. Evidently passengers who purchase tickets 60 days or more in advance are less likely to be subjected to a search.
6. Have proper identification available and ready to go. Make sure you have some sort of dmv issued valid photo id handy. You never know when someone may want you to identify you. Not having your id can cause a major dilemma if you have to return home to retrieve it. So be prepared and have all your identification documents on your person (or in your carry on).
Anyone who has used a web statistics program should understand that to a competitor the statistical data found in a web stats page is very valuable. Something this valuable should be kept safe from prying eyes right. Well in some cases web stats can be extremely insecure and need further configuration beyond the default settings. This article deals mainly with the Awstats program. I am most familiar with Awstats and I am sure the majority of readers are too. With that said lets get started.
Overview
Ok go to Google and do a search for inurl:”awstats.pl” I came up with 296,000 pages with public stats using just that search string. As you can see everything about these sites is made public thanks to Google and poor web administration practices. So now you see the problem, now I am going to show you some methods to prevent this sort of snooping on your own site.
First and foremost many websites are hosted on shared hosting accounts. The web stats are installed either automatically or using some sort of installer such as Fantastico etc. For these users you will need to start by contacting your web host. Some other methods of preventing you web stats being made public are to restrict search indexing of the cgi-bin and other sensitive directories within your web space using a Robots.txt file. This will prevent search spiders such as Google and the like from spidering your stats pages. Another way would be to use .htaccess to prevent access to that directory all together. For the purpose of example and simplicity I will explain only the latter. The Robots.txt file mentioned before is a simple text file that search engines look for as a set of guidelines for proper indexing of the site. The Robots.txt file tells the spider where it is welcome and where it is not welcome. Now I am not going to go into major details on how to setup a Robots.txt file. I will give a quick overview on how to protect your cgi-bin with a Robots.txt file. First things first start by creating a plain text document in the root folder of your site and name it robots.txt. Open the file and on the first line type User-agent: * then on the second line type Disallow: /cgi-bin . Explanation : Ok so the first line tells me the user agent (i.e. the search engine reading the file). Using a star or “wildcard” makes the rule apply to all spiders. There are literally thousands of spiders out there so here is a list of spiders I found
Ok so far we have learned how to make a robots.txt file that will disallow all spiders from spidering out cgi-bin directory(I chose this directory because it is the primary location where most stats scripts are installed). Now let’s learn how to disallow just one spider.
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /cgi-bin
ok the above instructions tell Googlebot the spider to exclude the /cgi-bin directory of the site from its crawl. You can change the user agent to whatever spider you want and set specific instructions for the spider.
This is by no means the most secure way of preventing access to your cgi-bin folder. It is however a simple precaution to make the public viewing of your stats pages less probable. To prevent access using a more secure method use the .htaccess file to restrict access to the directory.
I hope that this tutorial has brought to the attention of web master’s that their competition could very well know their next move or even their latest clients and should take precautionary steps to prevent it.
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — Apple Computer Inc. shares climbed almost 10% Wednesday after the company unveiled software that will let its newest Macintosh computers run Microsoft Corp.’s Windows operating system, a watershed decision that may help boost its share of the PC market.
This was a long time in the making.
From correspondents in London
MACQUARIE Bank has appointed Goldman Sachs to advise on a possible takeover approach for the London Stock Exchange, sources familiar with the situation said overnight.
Europe’s largest share exchange is still the target of possible bids from rivals Euronext and Deutsche Boerse as well as Macquarie Bank (mbl.ASX:Quote,News).
After a long inquiry, the UK Competition Commission cleared the way last week for Euronext to make a bid, subject to certain conditions. The LSE then said on Thursday it was in talks to bring the offer period to an end and return STG250 million ($601 million) to shareholders.
But British newspapers overnight speculated an approach from Macquarie could come as early as this week.
Macquarie Bank shares jumped on the news early today, up 99 cents or 1.47 per cent to $68.19 at 1024 AEDT.
THE Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) says business investment is expected to continue to expand while labour conditions remain tight.
In its quarterly statement on monetary policy released today, the central bank said growth in investment had been broadly based with forward indicators of investment intentions pointing to further growth.
“One important factor contributing to this has been the high level of commodity prices, which has stimulated investment in the mining sector and in resource-related manufacturing and infrastructure projects,” the RBA said.
“This is not surprising in an environment where businesses, with the exception of trade-exposed manufacturers, are generally experiencing good trading conditions, high levels of capacity utilisation and strong profitability, a situation which has also been reflected in a strong share market.”
The bank said favourable external conditions and high commodity prices had also contributed to a narrowing of Australia’s trade and current account deficits this year as a result of higher export prices and volumes.
The farm sector had also improved with output likely to be around the average of recent years compared with below average outcomes that seemed likely earlier in the year.
“The strong upswing in business investment seen in recent years continued in the first half of 2005, with real business investment increasing by 15 per cent over the year to the June quarter, underpinned by high capacity utilisation, healthy profits and falling prices for capital goods,” the RBA said.
“Conditions remain supportive for further growth in business investment with sound prospects for the domestic and world economies and a favourable funding environment.”
The bank said the economy was still operating at a relatively high level of capacity utilisation and that labour market conditions remained tight, with many businesses continuing to report considerable difficulty in attracting suitable labour.