Weblog Archive

You get what you pay

JR.com: CARDO SYSTEMS Scala 500 Bluetooth Wireless Headset in Headsets:. I bought this fairly inexpensive headset for my phone (from what I hear, Macs can also use this for hands-free talking using Skype and other VoIP solutions in the Mac). The darn charging cradle is so flimsy and broke on me with the release button popping off and the spring flying out. The metal contacts for charging also broke off since they were made of thin loops of brass that were so easily bent. Now I have an almost unusable cradle. I had to temporarily fix it by making a loop from a staple and pushing it into the cradle with a pair of pliers. It's not permanent, but I guess I can try soldering it. But better yet, I fired off an email to ask for a replacement. Hope they send it to me free of charge. From the looks of the construction, I'd say it's worth only a few cents anyway.

Calm before the storm

For the one person out there who actually reads my blog: I've turned off comments and trackback pings to ALL of my entries (past, present and future), so my entries will unlikely be open for any discussion--it doesn't matter much anyway. I'm too lazy to implement and maintain comment moderation and I just got two trackback spam entries. I'm reminded of when comment spam was beginning to be troublesome, and so I'm nipping this trackback problem in the bud now before it gets crazy. These spammers have nothing else to do with their time? They've now infiltrated the trackback system. If there is anything you feel you'd like to add to any of the entries and if you feel it's important enough to be posted as a comment, you can always email me.

Collaborative writing

SubEthaEdit. I got this tip from a slashdot posting. It looks like an interesting way to collaborate on a writing project where changes need to be made in realtime without the hassle of dealing with a CVS. It's currently just a simple text editor, but add the powerful functions of LaTeX and you have an awesome tool for writing and publishing. I'm sure there are other tools people are using to write their scientific papers, but at the university where I am, just about everyone is using MS Word with its bloated editing functions/macros, and dealing with versioning manually. Sometimes I'd like to make changes to my paper even after I sent it to him for proofreading and editing. It appears that SubEthaEdit (such an unremarkable name?) can be the trick to do this in the future.

SimplyBibTeX

technotecture labs : SimplyBibTeX - Share BibTeX Online

SimplyBibTeX is a simple PHP server application to view and share BibTeX bibliographies. Your coworkers can subscribe to RSS and Atom feeds and get notified if something changes in the particular database. It supports unlimited databases, stores metadata and is using an internal templating mechanism to change the user interface.

Google desktop doesn't search gmail

Google desktop does not search gmail. It sounds like a feature that google would have already rolled out, but alas it's not yet a feature. In other news, it appears that I was wrong in predicting google would buy Flickr---apparently they are refining Picasa, the software that manages the mounds of images and photos you have in your system.

Scaled back the promises

NIH Revises Plan for Quick, Free Access to Study Results (washingtonpost.com). This tells you that the lobbyists for the publishers are doing quite a job.

An ambitious proposal to make the results of federally funded medical research available to the public quickly and for free has been scaled back by the National Institutes of Health under pressure from scientific publishers, who argued that the plan would eat into their profits and harm the scientific enterprise they support.