Books

Some good books from the UWA library:
Influence; Science and Practice. Second Edition. Robert B. Cialdini
153.852 1988 INF
More Effective C++; 35 New Ways to Improve Your Programs and Designs. Scott Meyers.
FIZ 005.133 1996 MOR
Working Together: A practical guide to collaborative decision-making. Dr. Bob Montgomery
658.3152 1986 WOR
Introduction to Robotics; Arthur J. Critchlow.
FIZ 629.892 1985 INT

And finally for those who follow dennetts work, a collection of short essays/papers:
Dennett's Philosophy; A comprehensive Assement eddited by Don Ross, Andrew Brook and David Thompson
hssmn 191.9 DEN

German holiday times

German holiday times:
(from http://portal.tum.de/studium/semestertermine)

Semester:
01.10.2006 - 31.03.2007

Teaching Semester:
16.10.2006 - 10.02.2007

Christmas Holidays:
24.12.2006 - 06.01.2007

Summer Holidays:
01.08.2007 - 30.09.2007

Additional Holidays:
Allerheiligen  01.11.2006 
1. Weihnachtsfeiertag 25.12.2006 
2. Weihnachtsfeiertag 26.12.2006 
Neujahr   01.01.2007 
Hl. Drei Könige  06.01.2007

Addsense site

How to make your own addsense site.

http://www.xedant.com/researches/crazy_adsense_experiment.php

Closing Apps on shutdown

Forcing Unresponsive Applications to Close at Shutdown
http://geeksaresexy.blogspot.com/2006/05/forcing-unresponsive-applications-to.html


I've not done it yet, since mostly its notepad asking me to save... but its tempting.

Women and Men - spacial skills

This is a great find:

Men and women differ in their ability to solve spatial problems. (...)
we found that the women relied on the object's visual features to solve the task, while the men used both visual and location information. There were no differences between the sexes in memory for the visual features of the objects, but women were poorer than men at remembering the locations of objects.

So now you know why women are always getting you to clean things up - they cant ever remember where things are. I always have a cluttered room, and as einstein said ""If a cluttered desk signs a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?"

Now I can justify never cleaning my room again - it goes against the way I organize information, and people who ask me to clean it are just too dumb to organize by location as well as appearance. (Hmm, is lacking a certain capability dumb? interesting..)

see:
http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2006/05/visual-spatial-ability-sex.php

anyway, nice eye candy site, great idea:
http://www.wefeelfine.org/index.html

DCOM & CoInitializeEx

Remember:
_WIN32_DCOM

How annoying is the new split of DirectX? Very. You want directshow?
Grab the latest DirectX SDK, install (so you can have ddraw.h -- how lame)
then grab the lateest Platform SDK (atm, 2003 server RC2)

inside the platform sdk is a media/directdraw/samples folder, where good old baseclasses sits, you need to create a project, cos there is none (how very very annoying) set the appropriate flags (above) set up your include directories, and build.... and wait...

The idea was that directshow users would not need to install directx anymore. Except ofcourse directshow depends on directdraw, and direct draw is part of directx... so now you need to install, not only directX, but also the full platform SDK..

can you say "lame"?

Perfect major

Results from my perfect major test:

Philosophy 92%
Psychology 92%
Dance 92%
Engineering 83%
Mathematics 75%
English 67%
Sociology 67%
Biology 58%
Art 58%
Anthropology 50%
Journalism 42%
Theater 42%
Linguistics 33%
Chemistry 25%

I'm quite suprised by the presence of 'Dance' - didn't even know you could major in that :P. Interesting that music didn't show up, not suprised by philosophy or psychology but interesting that it beat engineering & maths. No suprise chemistry was down the bottom - although interesting that it made it on the list at all, ditto english.