k_nitin_r

Hi!Wacom sells graphic tablets that are great for professional usage, but if you do want to get something at an entry-level price, take a look at the Genius tablets. The cheaper tablets only feature a surface with a battery-operated stylus, but the professional ones feature a screen so you can see where your stylus is at.Better yet, you could get a reasonably priced touchscreen LCD monitor or attach a frame over your monitor. If you prefer a portable unit, HP sells laptops with touchscreens that convert into tablet PCs (not the same as a graphics tablet, which is what you are looking for) but there's a really cheap one from Lenovo, the Ideapad S10-3T that costs roughly $350-$500 depending on the specifications. Although these exceed your budget, they provide you with a fully-featured computer with its own touch-sensitive interface.

Hi! The UPS plane didn't crash in India. It crashed in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, within a military air base. There's a news article on the Telegraph with more details about the incident as well as a picture of the traffic being blocked at the gate of the military air base (no pictures of the actual crash, sorry - it's a military-controlled area)

I've been using the VLC player for a while and noticed that the playlist feature usually caused the player to crash in the older versions. Version 1.0 was actually quite stable, with playlists working as intended and better support for certain file formats, and just when things took a turn for the better, VLC pops up a message about the availability of 1.1.0, which I upgrade to. I now experience frequent crashes when switching between videos by double-clicking another file while the first file is playing or when using a dual-display setup. I have no clue what I'm going to miss when I hop over to the next version, but I won't even know what I'm going to gain, so what the heck.... "Update Now"

There doesn't seem to be a problem with the assignment operations for $recipients and $cost. Look up the values for $to, $balance, and $left. Try XDebug - it's a pretty good free debugger that works with Eclipse (or NuSphere, NetBeans or any other PHP IDE).

Hi!I strongly believe that vegetarians have a greater chance of surviving longer because of the lack of toxins that tend to build up in upper levels of the food chain. The presence of toxins or other carcinogens make mutations more likely and could leave individuals dependent on supplementary drugs and can even lead to death.The cholesterol and fat is just as common in vegetarian food as it is in the various kinds of meat, though it depends on what kind of cuisine you are considering. French fries and just as bad for health as beef burgers, and therefore it would be inappropriate to claim that a diet comprising mainly of meat would be healthier when considering cholesterol and fat.In addition, many of the diseases affecting animals can also affect humans in some form. However, plant diseases do not cause illnesses in humans for the most part - putrefying plant matter does not count as a plant illness.

Global warming, a scam? It would have been if they would have gotten away with selling us more of those gas guzzling automobiles and didn't come clean. Global warming is very real and the accumulation of green house gases would result in higher temperatures and significant changes in the ecosystem. The temperature differences does lead to a re-distribution of living beings. Irrespective of whether it does us any good by melting the polar ice caps and raising the water level to provide relief to areas with drought, our goal is to preserve the environment as it is. The year 2000 bug was fixed in time to avert disaster. It was made all too trivial by saying that the computers would crash and planes would be grounded - miscalculations and problems resulting from chaos in the economy is more realistic than anything else, and the current economic crisis is an indication of how much things can change with a technical glitch related to dates and times in computers.The concept of imposing taxes on anything that causes pollution is a very limited view - the view is that when somebody causes damage or consumes something, they should have to pay for it. Now, the compensation only provide economic benefits to the government and unless the government actually uses the funds obtained from taxes to plant new trees or preserve forests, it is going to do the environment no good.The environment is perfectly capable of dealing with a little extra carbon dioxide, just as we are capable of surviving with a lower percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere, but when taken out of proportion, the environment cannot deal with excessive amounts of carbon dioxide, just as we are unable to breathe in an environment with negligible amounts of oxygen.

Hi!I say, when you've read one book, you've got to move on to working with some source code. Sure, reading a second book might give you the concepts that you may have missed with book one, but you do not benefit as much as you could have with the same amount of time.Visual C++ books are different from plan old C++ books. Visual C++ books aim at targeting their readers into Windows programmers. You would find yourself working with the message loop, dealing with handles, making Win32 API calls, and stuff of the sort - instead, a regular C++ book tells you about classes, inheritance, the standard template library, operator precedence, and pointers.If you do feel like you've hit a glass ceiling when reading books, you ought to take the leap into open-source code. There are lots of open source projects out there and there's tons of code for you to sift through. In the process, you might even be able to resolve a couple of tickets and lend the open-source community a helping hand. It always starts with the first step and then, before you know it, you're a full-fledged open-source advocate and developer. The Linux source code is one place where you can look up C code. Notepad++ is a Visual C++ based text editor.

Hi!@deadmad7I'm a software engineer and a car enthusiast. I do know about different models on sale, but I don't get my hands dirty under the hood - I've never had a car have a breakdown except for the battery going dead or a filter getting clogged (totally not my fault - somebody forgot to send it in for a scheduled service).@rpgsearcherzA Mazda Miata is a pretty good car. I don't really know what you mean when you say that the normal headlights are dimmer than the pop-up headlights. Perhaps the cars come fitted with dimmer lights? Different bulbs are rated for different brightness and you can get a fitting to directly hook up the lights with an after-market cut-out for extra-bright lights, but if not done correctly, you could melt the light bulb holders - it's happened and it was not a pretty sight after having lost a headlight on an un-lit highway with oncoming traffic and unmarked turns. BTW, how did you wreck the two other Miatas? Miatas are fuel efficient, but don't expect to match the fuel economy of a Toyota Corolla, which is pretty much the epitome of fuel efficiency among cars with decent engines (1.6-1.8L... anything below 1.6L is underpowered)

Hi!I agree with yordan - technology is so much more. Whenever anyone mentions the word "technology", I think about the industrial revolution and mass production. Factories have driven a lot of family-owned businesses into the ground. Some industries now require government subsidies to continue to exist. The oversupply of goods, the speed at which information can be sent, and advancements in transportation have fueled globalization to the extent that a firm manufacturing products half-way across the world is a competitor to your business, just as much as the firm next door.Nuclear technologies that were supposed to provide us with an end to our dependence on fossil fuels took us half-way there. We have the technology to build nuclear fission reactors, but do not have any way to dispose of the radioactive wastes. Nuclear fusion is a cleaner means of getting energy, but we lack the technology to build nuclear fusion reactors. Right there, you can observe advantages and disadvantages - the disadvantage of nuclear fission reactors being the radioactive waste disposal, and the advantage of nuclear fusion being cleaner energy.To answer, ydrianne's question, did technology make people lazier? It doesn't have to be technology that made people lazier, but rather it's their lifestyles. If you could sow seeds in an acre of land in a week, and technology makes it possible to sow the seeds in a day, you could either spend the time saved in something productive and others will follow suit, or you could watch a movie, or spend time hanging out with friends, and be an influence on others either way. It is more of a psychological and sociological behavior than a direct cause of technology.

Hi!@XIII, Jeigh, et al.Notepad++ is a Windows-only editor. Porting it would take a lot of effort because all of the calls to Windows-only functions would have to be written to their GTK or Qt equivalents to run under Linux. The problem exists for many programming languages - a library specific to an operating system is provided and because it is used in writing a program, the program is unable to run on any other operating systems. Java, a platform independent language would run only on Windows if you used JNI calls for working with the system tray or bridging function calls to the Win32 API.If you run Linux and are looking for an editor, take a look at GEdit or KEdit. GEdit is pretty good as a graphical text editor. If you have used vi or emacs, you can find graphical versions that support all of the text-based commands that you are accustomed to.@mastercomputersThe Notepad++ editor provides syntax highlighting, can work with unicode text quite well (in fact, it's better in dealing with unicode than any other program I use for editing plain text), it has a plugin architecture (though you would have to watch out for unstable plugins) that provides FTP and other functionality, and supports Macros. The search feature can search for text within an entire directory (as opposed to within a single file) and has a search results window so you can easily navigate between search matches. If you haven't tried it yet, you should find yourself a Windows box and give it a shot. It pretty much matches the feature set of EditPlus and TextPad but is free (as in both, freeware and open-source).

Hi!Hooking up your iPod or iPhone to the car's audio system via an FM transmitter, cassette adapter, or an auxillary input jack is the cheapest way to mate the two, but if you want to get rid of separate power and audio cables and interfaces, and want to have a car stereo that supports the iPod out-of-the-box, you might want to look at an Alpine iDA-X305 or a Pioneer AVIC-U310BT. The Alpine iDA-X305 is a plain and simple digital audio playback system that can play MP3s and WMA formatted files, but it does not have a CD player. You can hook up an iPod cable to browse the iPod directly. The Pioneer AVIC-U310BT is a whole lot more and unless you are planning to go over budget on just the main unit, you ought to look elsewhere. The AVIC-U310BT is a sat nav and CD player that can hook up to your iPod or iPhone and provides a large display with touch screen. It's the whole works and Pioneer didn't hold back on its offerings with this unit.

Hi!@getubeThe Maruti 800 vintage models almost look very retro and if you could find one and give it a good paint job, it would look rather pretty. The 800cc engine is too small to run with air conditioning though. The WagonR is good as a full-sized vehicle to carry passengers and shopping bags, but if you do want something more fuel efficient, you should take the Maruti A-Star for a test drive. The A-Star is sold internationally as the Suzuki Celerio and comes with a 1.0 litre engine, which works much better than the 800cc of a Maruti 800 if you want to have air conditioning.Apart from manufacturing small cars, Suzuki also manufactures cross-over / minivans. The Suzuki XL7, which isn't available in India, comes with a 3.6 litre engine and provides a four wheel drive. Fuel economy definitely takes a hit, but it can carry seven passengers and the four wheel drive offers better stability on the highways and when driving through sand.@StrikeeI always figured the Vauxhall was something you would drive to get away on the weekends and didn't really see it as a car you would drive to work everyday. What kind of reliability problems did you have with it?@LailaMercedes S-340? The closest I've seen was a Mercedes S-350, so I'm guessing it's a region-specific model sold by Mercedes. The number usually indicates the engine capacity, but it is by no means a precise indicator. The Mercedes S-400 is a hybrid, but since none of the cars in the Mercedes S-class have a 4.0 litre engine, I'm assuming that it's a 3.5 litre engine i.e. a Mercedes S-350 with an electric motor. Hybrid cars come in a lot of different varieties so it's hard to tell by just looking up a car listed as a hybrid.

Hi!@sheepdogIf you are looking for something that you can haul people, puppies, and groceries, you could look at the Toyota Prius. It's safe and fuel-efficient. If you'd like to get something smaller, something even smaller than the Chery QQ or the Chevrolet Spark, you ought to look at the Smart car. Sure, they're tiny, but they can get you and another passenger around without taking up too much fuel and without giving you a frustratingly underpowered engine.There are some cars that are embarassing to drive but also offer poor safety. A Toyota Corolla or a Honda Civic offer you a good mix of low price, mileage, safety, and reliability and ought to be what people ought to look for in an economical car. Both the Corolla and the Civic offer luxury upgrades that match many of the offerings of larger cars, such as leather seats and partronic sensors, but don't expect electric seats and sat nav in them. My best bet would be on something that offers fuel economy while still being able to get onto the highway, and both the Corolla and the Civic can manage that.

Hi!I have an old diesel-driven car that I lent and by the time I got it back, it's been driven for about a year without having had the oil and filters changed as often as they should have... in fact, the oil and filters were changed only after the filters were clogged and the engine would stall each time the accelerator pedal was released. I know, it's a sorry state for a car to be in, but it is what it is.I was wondering what I'd have to do to get the car serviced. It runs just fine after an oil and filter change, but I thought perhaps I'd have to get the engine dismantled and the cylinders cleaned up or something of the sort.BTW, is it okay for me to pop the hood and hose down all the visible dust with water? I know it doesn't do the engine any good to have the dust taken off, but having so much dust in there just doesn't feel right.

Hi!The first algorithm I ever learned was the bubble sorting algorithm. It is quite simple, but before I figured out the bubble sort, I did a less efficient algorithm that did a 1 to N loop on both the inner and outer loops so I was comparing more elements than I needed to. After I figured out the bubble sort, I thought there couldn't be any other way to compare the elements of an array till I read about the O(n) algorithms, particularly merge sort and quick sort. It is getting such that business application programmers and web programmers don't have to code algorithms any more - libraries, the language features, or development frameworks take care of all the magic that happens behind the scenes, and this kind of abstract thinking is exactly what has enabled us to continue to build bigger and more powerful systems.Of all algorithms, I really like the binary search algorithm because it is quite simple yet very efficient at what it does. Sure, there are quicker ways, such as by doing a hash-lookup, but the simplicity of the binary search tree as a concept is what makes it so appealing.I probably can't paste the binary search tree on the forum, but I'll try to come up with a blog post about it.

Hi!I think the night unlimited plans are quite inexpensive and you can use them to run Windows updates and updates for any other software that you use during the off-peak hours. If you have to make a large download, you can download it at night. I'm not sure if you get the 2Mbps speed during the night unlimited period too - I'm guessing they might reduce the speed to 512kbps, as in the unlimited plan.Some Internet connectivity plans offer you a higher speed till you reach a certain bandwidth, which is when they would drop you down to a lower speed for the rest of the month. It's unlimited, but you only get half the speed if you are using it for extensive downloading.

A common argument that biomass promoters mention is that burning biomass is carbon neutral whereas burning fossil fuels is not. Now, that does not really make sense because fossil fuels were once living breathing beings that were turned into fuel due to the natural heat and pressure so for the fuels to have been formed, there would have been plants that were eaten by animals, which in turn were buried in the earth for hundreds of years till they were acted upon by heat and pressure and were turned into fuels. If algae were to trap the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and we were to burn them to obtain energy thus releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, what makes them any more carbon neutral than any other fossil fuels? Sure, they help us get around the shortage of fossil fuels and would enable nations that do not have oil reserves to produce their own fuel, in a much cheaper manner than by growing crops, and without affecting the economy. A strong opposition by people in the use of crops as fuel is that it inflates fuel prices due to the perceived shortage of the crop in the food market. There may not be a genuine shortage but due to the increased demand for the crop, farmers would raise their prices. In addition, as farmers choose to grow the fuel crop (either corn or certain kinds of seeds), fewer farmers would want to grow crops with a low demand. Besides, many industries pay farmers before the crop is sowed with a contract to be given a preference over other buyers to acquire the crop while taking the risk of a failed crop - as a farmer, who would be able to refuse such a deal?The shortage of fossil fuels and rising fuel prices is a genuine reason for pursuing research and development of biofuels, but the argument that bio fuels are carbon neutral does not really seem like a valid idea because fossil fuels can be termed as carbon neutral too, and so can the burning of wood by cutting down forests, but the point is that we want to keep the carbon sinks (opposite of carbon sources) around to continue to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in an attempt to reduce global warming. If you want to look for ways to obtain fuel without affecting the carbon release into the environment, consider the use of solar energy or wind energy, and possibly even hydel power and geo thermal energy. All of these sources provide us with energy without releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere or taking away the green organisms that fix the carbon from the atmosphere into other compounds.

Hi!There are two kinds of software that you can use to work with PHP source code. There is one class of software which consists of plain text editors that may include features such as syntax highlighting. These are essentially advanced versions of Windows Notepad and for the most part, whatever you can do with Notepad is enhanced by these editors by providing you with productivity features such as the ability to run commands without having to manually perform them separately. Another class of software consists of Integrated Development Environments (IDEs), which provide you with checking for errors while you are writing the program. They might warn you about invalid function names, they can walk you through the program with the debugging support, and they can provide you with auto-completion and help on function calls that you use in your code while you type them. As a beginner, IDEs would be your choice of software but as you become more familiar with the language and the functions that it has to offer, you would probably want to use a text editor for some quick changes.

Hi!I've found Drupal to be pretty good with managing multi-lingual websites, though I have no clue if it supports Macedonian. I have used it for implementing a website with two languages, one that was a left-to-right language, and another that was a right-to-left language. Themes that were built entirely with CSS with bi-directional text in mind worked perfectly well with the multilingual theme as the sidebar menus would swap around without requiring any intervention on the part of the webmaster/site administrator.I haven't had a chance to explore Joomla to the extent of supporting multilingual websites yet. WordPress doesn't have the capability to support multilingual websites, but it is possible to work it into the system with a little development (or rather, a customization).

A CRT display with the rainbox effect left by a magnet can be reversed at a service center through a process called degaussing. All they do is use a coil to reverse the magnetization of your display. Many televisions and computer monitors have a menu option to select to initiate the degaussing of the CRT display, but if you have something that still doesn't go away, the service center would be able to use a more powerful degaussing coil to work out a fix.

ew content management systems have been formed as open-source projects, among which are CMS Made Simple, Joomla, Drupal, and WordPress.For a newspaper that needs to be able to select articles to be laid out on the home page, I would recommend using Drupal or Joomla. WordPress does a pretty good job with displaying the first set of a sequentially ordered list of articles. WordPress has a lower learning curve and is quick and easy to work with while Joomla does require you to be more structure. There is a lot that you can do with Joomla without writing excessive code though. Drupal is a module content management system and at its core does not even include a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get editor for posts. You can, however, insert HTML tags manually to apply any necessary formatting.You might want to have a go at using commercial CMS systems too, which are optimized for performance. The Feather CMS system, for example, creates static HTML files that it serves visitors to help improve performance.

Hi!I've noticed that Ultra edit costs sixty dollars for a license and TextMate, which only runs on the Mac OS, costs fifty dollars. While I would pay for an integrated development environment, I wouldn't really want to pay for a text editor because there are free alternatives that get the job done and when I do want to have something with more advanced functionality, I would get an integrated development environment.Notepad++, by comparison, is a whole lot cheaper. In fact, Notepad++ is free and open-source! The core of Notepad++ is stable and works exactly as advertised, though you may find that some of the plugins are flaky. I don't really use the plugins so that has never bothered me - Notepad++ provides me with a quick-startup editor that provides syntax highlighting and the ability to work with Unicode text. Unicode may not be a priority for some people but I work on a couple of projects that require multi-lingual support.Adobe Dreamweaver, however, provides an excellent WYSIWYG interface, which is why I would consider buying it if I do extensive work with web markup, but in most cases I would just use Notepad++.

Hi!I have a preference for building a PHP website because of the convenience in hosting online, but for anything major, I'd pick ASP.NET over PHP simply because the servers are easier to manage and can cope with higher traffic loads. Having said that, I would also add that PHP development is a lot quicker than ASP.NET development due to the availability of free open-source components.

Hi!Putting together a portfolio that is separate from your blog would mean that you are managing two different sites to promote yourself rather than just one. Besides, most web designers don't really spend much time building their own websites because it is unpaid time so they try to get as much out of the door as quickly as possible.If you would like to highlight your resume by building a separate theme for your portfolio, you could have a more professional setup than your blog that you could send out to prospective employers. You can have a blog with the 'cool factor' from the grunge look, while the portfolio has a classic professional feel to it that employers would want to see their own brands showcased with.This is just my two cents worth, so if you do want to do something different and creative, you should.

Hi!Clean CSS / CSS Tidy is a pretty useful utility for optimizing cascading style sheets and it something I would want to use on future web design projects.I'm, however, not sure I entirely agree with you on loading as much information as possible when the page is first loaded. By loading just what is needed for the page to appear, one reduces the response time to the user's request while loading any additional information in the background through a separate request. Yes, this does increase the load for the web server which has to process two requests instead of just one, but with the Javascript libraries available that enable us to leverage the possibilities provided to us by AJAX, content that is not crucial for the user to perform his or her actions can be loaded after the core of the web page has been loaded. I do, however think that there is an excessive use of AJAX functionality that has been scripted in a quick-and-dirty manner, creating a perception that AJAX is slow. When the AJAX functionality has been built correctly, it would be hard to tell that a particular functionality was put together with AJAX rather than loaded initially with the rest of the page.Disabling buttons can sometimes keep users from getting to the information they need because if a request fails, which happens every one in a couple of requests, the user is left waiting on a page with a button that no longer works. Having a working button means that the user can make another request. Perhaps a possible compromise between the two solutions would be to incorporate a timeout such that when the timeout does occur and the request does not complete, the button can be enabled again and perhaps an error message can be displayed to the user indicating that the request was unsuccessful.The web wasn't really meant to provide the application interface that it has grown to provide today and plugins on web pages such as Flash objects or Java applets are adaptations that make it possible to serve an entire application within the web browser. There are security limitations that increase the overhead of development so if a particular functionality was meant to be an application, then it would be best to provide a desktop application with a limited-functionality web interface, such as that provided for Yahoo! Messenger.