cool tweak to the silverlight pie chart

http://community.irritatedvowel.com/blogs/pete_browns_blog/archive/2008/12/04/Pie-Chart-Styling-in-the-Silverlight-Toolkit-_2D00_-Cross_2D00_Slice-Gradients.aspx

Yep, he did a nice shade using absolute values. Haven't found any good use of it yet, but I will try to see if I can change it dynamically.

That could be amazing!

A close relative of mine (Let's name her "X") is about 2 month pregnant. This morning she went to doctors for a check out. She was excited because she know they will be able to tell her the baby's gender today. The doctor told her she had a girl, and she called everyone about it me included.

Baby One
X's brother has a boy (Baby One) who is two and a half year old, and his mother told Baby1 that his aunt will have a girl. And the 2 year old said "No". So his mother asked him "Why, is it a boy?" and he said "yes". Not long ago when we have a family reunion, X who is pregnant asked Baby One if he want a little brother or sister, and he said he want a sister, but when asked if it is a boy or girl inside of his aunt, he said it is a boy.


Baby Two
About two years back, another relative of mine come to visit. They also had a two year old boy (Baby Two). X was also present. At the time X is trying to have a baby for some time with no luck. After the relative returns home, Baby Two one day wake up and said "Aunt X give birth to a boy".


Baby Three
The above two cases I know personally. According to X, she also did the same thing (gender guessing) to her best friend's son (under 2 years of age). And when asked if he want a little brother or little sister, he wanted a little sister. But when asked if X has a boy or girl, he said boy.

I checked Google, and it was said there could be mistakes on the doctor's part. If it turned out to be a boy, this would be rather amazing. One kid knows it even before X's baby is conceived, and the other is also confident that the unborn is a boy. Of course they could both be wrong, it might just be some garbage that kids are spitting out, but if it turned out to be true, what the odds that several kids can know what we as adults don't? What could cause this? It will be very interesting if we could also be trained to have the same abilities. Of course instead of baby guessing, we will use it on the stock markets, that could really screw this ability up.

I will keep an close eye on this one :-)

Need help from Blizzard

At current rate I might need to suspend the bot and WOW soon. My wife is getting more and more angry over my playing WOW. This afternoon after I get home, I spent about 5 minutes to res my baby and she got unhappy. I don't want to get upset over those tiny things any more, very annoying.

I remember the days of Diablo II, when me and my wife both play, she never complained me playing too much. One big reason is she likes to combine the diamonds, skulls etc, but she hate the 3d interface.

I wonder if Blizzard could give the people who hate 3d interface a fixed 3d view (i.e like in Diablo), and make tailoring/jewelcrafting more interesting, create complex patterns that combines different outputs into dazzling dresses.

Of course that is only my dream.

How abut that!

After reading this post by Patrick J. Buchanan, I think Buchanan is not a fiscal conservative. However this comment posted by everyman is very interesting:

Any bailout plan I have read about so far appears to be a bailout of the UAW, not the companies. I MIGHT back a Big 3 bailout, IF:
1. The companies agree to restructure, including but not limited to new management teams.
2. GM in particular needs to downsize to perhaps three divisions: say GM, Buick, and Chevrolet. They then need to eliminate the duplication of models; can anyone really tell the difference between a GMC Jimmy and a Chevy Blazer?
3. The unions make concessions, not only on current wages, but on the killer retirement funds that add (I've read) $1500-2000 to each GM car.
4. Bring back Lee Iacocca from the dead. Reinvent the original Plymouth Caravan and the original Jeep Cherokee.
Giving the Big 3 without some concessions like this is a waste of time and money.
If Congress is determined to dole out $35 Billion or so without these concessions, they should do it by giving $35,000 each to 10 million taxpayers,allowing them to vote with their wallets onh who survives and who doesn't.
The ten million winners could be determined by a lottery run by the state of Illinois. The only requirement would be the filing of a tax return for the fiscal year 2008. The winners would be required to buy a car (any car, any manufacturer) within the next two months.

Danger!! Read this!

That is if you are using IE 7.0 on XP or windows 2003 server.

the 0 day exploit.

I uses firefox mostly, and from now on I will always run it as guest.

So always have a backup browser. Let's see how long it will take MS to fix this bug, and how big (if any) a share FireFox will gain.

NO DRM

This link on tomshardware, I think that is a good step forward.

I believe DRM hurts legit buyers more than the pirates, and the people who wants to copy games are the ones who don't have money (students etc). If they can't copy they won't play.

I am a fun of blizzard games, can't wait to try out StarCraft II. But if Blizzard installs DRM, I will hold my urges and save the money.

And the game developers should stop making the original CD in the rom thing mandatory. It kills me to try to find the original broodwar CD from the pile when I want to play it. With CD burners so common, they should save the trouble and just relax.

Final exam

Yep, I had to prepare final exam for my students during the weekend, and was not able to do much. Someone has submitted some valid bugs to me but I will have to deal with them tomorrow.

Chained/quest levelings

I got sometime to try to make a chained quest leveling profile.

All I can say is, it is so boring!! Need to note the location of every npc and objects, take the fun out of everything ....

Now I need to think a better way of doing it.

So I guess I will put it off even more :-(

been busy

didn't do much for the entire week. My job is taking most of my time.

Did a release and botted some just to make sure the release works, but can't afford any other activity that are time consuming

Better Mine/Herb methods

The next version of zoloFighter will have better Mine/Herb methods. I changed the way waypoint notes are implemented (so your old waypoint notes will dispear).

Before, waypoint notes are used for people to fish (so they know where to stop once a pool disappears). Now, a new property is added to allow you to access all waypoint notes. I will add a new button to one click add notes, and when you found a herb/mine you can add a note. Later on instead of let fighter randomly running, you can control fighter to go through all noted locations.

Another reason for not to bail out

As seen on Yahoo, Laura Rowley Money & Happiness.

"Unintended Consequences

In a Freakonomics column earlier this year in the New York Times, Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt offered a few potent examples. One study that examined the effect of the Endangered Species Act found that property owners who suspected their land might attract protected species rushed to clear-cut the trees (despite low timber prices) to avoid losing their investments.

Another study found that employment of disabled people actually fell after the Americans with Disabilities Act was adopted, because employers -- afraid they wouldn't be able to discipline or dismiss an incompetent worker who happened to be disabled -- stopped hiring them altogether. This isn't to say these weren't worthy laws, only that they can engender unintended results."

Ban panhandling

Pan-Handing, also called begging is bad. Here is a quote from the above link:

"According to studies, giving money to panhandlers does not help those in need because:

• Cash given to panhandlers will most likely be used to buy alcohol or drugs.
  
• Most panhandlers are NOT homeless.
  
• For some, panhandling is a profession and at times, studies show, a lucrative one.
  
• Homelessness is not the problem for truly needy panhandlers, but rather a symptom of underlying problems. They need help, not handouts."
  

Well, but I am not talking about the panhandlers in downtown this time. It is the big three auto CEOs. They are asking for billions of tax payer dollars. The same principles applying to panhandlers in your downtown also applies to them! They flew to DC in their private jets, that alone shows how much they care.

The Big Three has bad Union contracts, pays average about $80/hour while other foreign car makers who also have factories in US only pays half of that. Their management don't care about cash either, check out their jets and how careless they spent money. I won't be surprised that they have a safety nest of money waiting for them even when their company tanks. Delta CEOs did that.

And just look at how Delta at its bankruptcy. That was not bad at all.

Let them bankrupt, get ride of the fat CEOs and Union contracts. Give the taxpayers a break.

more problems

Not much to say. After I forced everyone to the latest version (0.8.4.9) and thought I could rest a bit, more problems are found.

First I confirmed sales/repair is broken. This is a script fix, I forget that the sales/repair npc list in javascript contains a simplified npc object, not the full object, and broken repair.

And several people reported res is not working. Now I have to kill myself again :-(