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Here's the latest addition to our contributors list: Mayank

Thanks Vyoma Here's the latest addition to our contributors list: Mayank

A great many thanks to OpaQue for getting the contributions rolling. A good start And Vyoma, for topping it up.

A great many thanks to OpaQue for getting the contributions rolling. A good start And Vyoma, for topping it up.

Yup - I know. That's the issue am working on right now. I mentioned in the article that I'm soon going to list the organisations I'll donate the proceedings to. Without a concrete list, I don't think anyone will be willing to chip in But first and foremost, I've to personally visit/talk with these organisations and ensure that they're doing some real work. For example, my wife's already been in touch with SoiDogRescue - who've provided us with helpful pointers as to where to take these pups for shelter. Among the possibilities they mentioned are: Home for Handicapped Animals Thai Animal Guardians and PicAPet4Home

After a LONG wait, Google finally has managed to round-up it's online office suite by adding in a basic Presentation creator. However, contrary to all earlier speculations - they haven't named it Presently. Rather this new app doesn't have any distinct name at all other than being refered to as Google Presentation. Features Microsoft PowerPoint files less than 10 MB can be imported and exports take the shape of HTML files with images. Themes and layouts of slides can be modified - but there aren't too many available options. As it is with Google Docs, you presentation can be shared / viewed / worked on by collaborators. All in all it's a pretty basic package with very limited functionality as compared to the other existing options like Preezo and Zoho Show. Also, Google's office suite has undergone a slight name change and is now called Google Docs rather than Docs & Spreadsheets.

Originally posted at Xisto.

Hey everyone, I'm starting a fundraising campaign to help our poor canine buddies in desperate need of shelter and treatment. The donations will be disbursed to 3-4 dog shelters here in Bangkok who're really known to do good work. We have a few candidates at hand but haven't finalised the list yet. As soon as the list is ready - we'll put it up in this space along with the links to their websites. Here's how the idea came up.. ------------------------------- There's a sizeable bunch of stray dogs in my neighbourhood - and one of them gave birth to a litter of 8 pups about a month back. The mother herself is of extremely poor health with a very thin and frail appearance. Not surprisingly, the pups too came out small and weak. However, they are really cute and in a multitude of colours - 3 pitch blacks, 1 brown, 3 whites with black patches around the eyes (looks like they're wearing glasses) and 1 white with a black patch only around one eye. As they grew a little bigger, the mom couldn't feed them anymore - and would run away everytime they tried to suckle. Every now and then you could hear their pitiful cries of hunger. Luckily the people staying around kept leaving food for all of them on a regular basis. That helped quite a bit. Now, these pups stay in this uninhabited house situated in a back lane right behind my house. These playful little tykes can always be seen and heard from one of the bedroom windows upstairs. Since the evening of last Thursday, one of the pups started whimpering. Initially we dismissed it as we thought it was out of hunger. However, as the evening grew, the cries grew louder and more consistent. It was pretty dark by then - and nearly impossible to get into the house, as it's entrance is covered with dense foliage (in all probablity with loads of snakes and scorpions around). The cries didn't stop even around midnight. Rather they kept sounding more like that of a human baby in great pain crying for his/her mom. We couldn't hold back any longer and had to go and check it out. I donned on my high-ankled boots and somehow made my way through that vegetation. What I found was one of the black pups lying on the ground seemingly paralysed. All he could do was move his his head around and cry pitifully. Everytime I picked him up, he'd stop for a while - but the moment I put him down, he started all over again and with renewed vigour. He was so weak that he couldn't stand up on his feet at all... and even if he managed to somehow, he'd start going around in circles and then collapse. While we were bringing him back his cries woke up half the neighbourhood. A lot of them suggested we rush the little one to some clinic - as something seemed seriously wrong with him. We got him admitted in a local dog clinic cum hospital - but even there they couldn't figure out what was wrong with him. The prognosis kept varying from canine distemper to worm toxemia and even some sort of a brain damage during birth. The only thing they were sure about is that this pup wouldn't be living a normal life and wouldn't survive even a day out on the streets. It needed proper food and shelter all through. Both me and my wife are away for good periods from time to time owing to work. It's not possible for us to be with the poor thing all the time and under no circumstances can he be left alone - even for a day. The clinic further informed us that the rest 7 (of the lot) stand a high chance of contracting whatever disease this pup had and have to be vaccinated immediately. Hence, we started searching for dog shelters around this region - and found quite a few active ones who'd take care of sponsored strays. By sponsored it means they accept monthly donations. In turn they guarantee good care of the dogs. Come to think of it - nothing can run without the fuel named money. As of now, I'm footing the bill for this pups treatment - but I don't know if I can keep up with the monthly sponsorship for all eight of them. ------------------------------- This brings me down to the point - am actively seeking help from all of you who can spare a penny towards a good cause. Any amount of donation is accepted - even a single cent matters. You can donate using the ChipIn widget either through my blog, Chaos Laboratory or through MindChimes - the blog run by my wife. Once the campaign is over - names of all donors will be published in a note of thanks in both the blogs - along with links to their sites (if any). As an incentive, if you own a site, I can offer one-way backlinks to your site from two PR4 and PR3 blogs.

Couldn't resist letting you guys drool over this one... Read the full story...

Newspaper bloopers can be real funny, but I haven't seen one of the likes of this in ages... The Nation, one of leading English dailies of Thailand reported today that ... Google Sky launches Bobby Johnson, technology correspondent. Apparently, The Nation was supposed to run this syndicated story on the launch of Google Sky, written by Bobby Johnson. Seems like they were mighty impressed with Johnson and decided to launch him instead Here's a screenshot... Incidentally, the latest version of Google Earth (v4.2) has been dubbed Google Sky because of the inclusion of a "virtual telescope" that allows you to observe the night-sky in all it's glory. Exploring star constellations, viewing planetary motions or supernova explosions is now just a mouse-click away. Source: Guardian Unlimited, Google launches Guardian hack, says Thai paper

True. Very much possible. You could just copy off the entire suite to some temp folder on the hard drive and run off it. Thing is, if the USB port you plug in your thumb drive is USB 2.0 compliant then you should get decent enough speed. Moreover, Firefox will only take a bit of time while starting-up. After that it's all smooth sailing I've got the whole of PortableApps (possibly every app they've got listed on their site) crammed onto my 4GB USB drive. Plus loads of other PC Repair Utils.. even then I got close to 3GB to fill up. Actively seeking more such apps

I've seen small hand-held torchlights that work in a similar fashion - but instead of shaking there's a small flip-flop crank on one side of the handle which you press a couple of times to fire up a dynamo, which then charges the battery. Pretty neat thing and doesn't weigh any more than your average flashlight. Coolest part is that you never need to panic panic when your batteries give out on you in pitch dark.

Yep.. I've been using it for a good while now.. in fact ever since PortableApps came out. They keep launching frequent updates too and keep abreast with the mainstream releases. In fact, I'd written a pretty lengthy review of it sometime back - both here and in my blog. For those who haven't tried it, it's one of those must-see things.

Have neglected continuing this series for a long time.. will come up with a record fetching / saving tutorial asap.

Yeah - the footer has already been set... but I was still wondering if there's any way to cap the number of pages..

No probs here.. I just checked and both your domain/subdomain worked out just fine for me.. Dunno how you keep landing at the default page..

Simple but stupid question Say I'm writing a paper and I don't want it to step beyond 10 pages. Is there any way to fix the maximum number of pages in MS Word i.e. I keep typing without bothering to check how many pages I've typed but Word won't let me step beyond the page limit ?Thanks,m^e

Good topic.. no responses yet???

Man.. you're excelling yourself every passing day... Keep it up dude. You should post that image of Mayank in here too.

Agree with all of you. The plot definitely is quite thick and you get thrown about just everywhere for a good part of the movie leaving you with that dizzy, disoriented feeling.... nevertheless, makes a very enjoyable watch. I guess they've left it storyline open for another sequel - hence such an ending. Calypso's role has been somewhat underplayed... prior to her release there was so much of hoo-haa about her "powers" & "wrath"... once released, she pretty much went off on a vacation without further ado So fancy fireworks on her part.Now waiting for Shrek 3 and Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer - which are due to be released here (Thailand) over the next 2 weeks.

Good tip... anyone who's into designing a blog/CMS/Forum software or just a plain web-site which uses a navigation method based on URL encoded variables should implement such a check from ground up. If this trick is kept on mind and integrated into the core of the system, it can save many tears later on

Aaah.. same old sad story. When will these maintenance jerks realise that we DO NOT need their "foresight" and that there exist tech savvy people out there who can carry out their own re-formatting tasks.. urggh.. my sympathies ..

I have a script (JS) that allows you to effectively filter out keystrokes.. i.e. if you allow only { A-Z, a-z, 0-9 }, the input field will not accept any keystrokes other than those... that might help you somewhat. If you need it let me know and I'll post it here.

The Mana refreshing is probably done through a cron job.. i.e. a separate SQL script that executes at a prefixed time (say 12:00am / 0:00 hours) and simply stuffs the mana field in the character stats table with the full value. I don't see any other easy way of doing it with PHP. If it's a function built into the game - I don't see how it'll execute on the exact time... Yeah. Pretty much so. NOW() will automatically insert the current timestamp (the moment NOW() is executed) of the server into the DB. To calculate whether the user really waited out the required time... you can always use another call to NOW() and use the timestamp you get to perform a difference with the old timestamp stored in the databse. Then simply use an if statement to compare the differential value with the desired result and act accordingly.

When you make such posts about a good piece of software, it'll be a great help if you include the link to the download page. Without that, you leave the readers pretty much in the dark.Cheers,m^e