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September 27, 2005

Juice

Seven saintly fruit juices

Scientists have found antioxidant rich pomegranate juice is good for the heart. Just one glass a day improves blood flow by a third.

Here we explore the seven saintly fruit juices and their extraordinary benefits for your health as well as when to avoid them.

1: POMEGRANATE JUICE

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Good for: helping the heart. Pomegranate juice is bursting with antioxidants which help prevent arteries being clogged with cholesterol. It has also been linked with warding off prostate cancer.

The juice is packed with vitamins A, C and E, and folic acid which is important in the early stages of pregnancy.

Drinking orange juice
2: ORANGE JUICE

Good for: immune system, anaemia protection. The best source of vitamin C and also a source of folic acid - so pregnant women should drink plenty.

Drink with meals to increase the uptake of anaemia-protective iron. New reserach suggests a glass of orange juice a day may also help stave off arthritis.

3: GRAPEFRUIT JUICE

Good for: immune system. Rich in vitamin C, grapefruit is a citrus fruit and therefore high in beta carotene. This helps protect the skin from damage caused by free radicals.

But avoid when... You are on medication - Grapefruit juice contains a substance which can slow down the breakdown of some medications. This causes an increase in the amount of the drug in the blood stream, which increases its effect.

apple
4: APPLE JUICE

Good for: energy; heart protection. Flavonoid-rich which helps protect the heart. Has a third of the vitamin C of orange juice. Contains largely fructose sugar - good for slow-burn energy.

But avoid when... Feeding toddlers as it can give them a stomach upset.

5: PINEAPPLE JUICE

Good for: digestion. This exotic fruit contains the enzyme bromelain which helps to digest heavy protein and is high in natural sugars for an energy boost. Contains 11mg of vitamin C per 100 ml.

6: TOMATO JUICE

Good for: slimming; male health. Slimline juice has only 50 calories per 250ml glass. It contains bioflavonoids which help strengthen the capillaries so you don't get leakage and the pockets of water that create cellulite.

And the lycopene tomatoes contain has been linked with a decreased risk of prostate cancer.

cranberry bush
7: CRANBERRY JUICE

Good for: preventing cystitis. Proanthocyanidins in cranberry juice stop harmful bacteria sticking to the walls of the bladder, thus reducing the risk of urinary infection.

Very high in vitamin C, cranberry is sold with sugar added, because it is too bitter on its own.

WHEN TO JUICE UP

Drink juice with or after meals as the sugar and acid will impact badly on teeth if you drink juice between.

Also avoid cleaning your teeth straight after juice - its actually better to wait half an hour or so to avoid brushing away weakened enamel.

September 25, 2005

Unintentional MMORPG Plauge.

Gadgeteer talks about the plauge that popped up in World of Warcraft. A spell called Corrupted Blood got loose in the game and was able to spread from one player to another. George Bush has been slammed for his slow response. He was seen flying above the virtual environment in AF1.

How to send SMS messages via email.

Hattip Lifehacker

SMS through email

T-Mobile phonenumber@tmomail.net
Virgin Mobile phonenumber@vmobl.com
Cingular phonenumber@cingularme.com
Sprint phonenumber@messaging.sprintpcs.com
Verizon phonenumber@vtext.com
Nextel phonenumber@messaging.nextel.com

Seatguru

Prepare For Airtravel With SeatGuru.com - Lifehacker

September 21, 2005

Emergency notification

Emergency Email . . . . The Emergency Email Network

This is handy. It will "provide notification to citizens of local, regional, national and international emergencies utilizing the Internet and electronic mail (email) in a secure and expedient manner"

September 20, 2005

Heymath!

HeyMath! is an open learning environment for Math. I found it after reading the latest article from Thomas Friedman. This looks like it might be a good resource for a curriculum for 5-12th graders.

Read the NYT article for more details.

The New York Times
September 16, 2005
Still Eating Our Lunch
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Singapore

Singapore is a country that takes the Internet seriously. Last week its Ministry of Defense granted a deferment for the country's compulsory National Service to a Singaporean teenager so he could finish competing in the finals of the World Cyber Games - the Olympics of online war games.

Being a tiny city-state of four million, Singapore is obsessed with nurturing every ounce of talent of every single citizen. That is why, although its fourth and eighth graders already score at the top of the Timss international math and science tests, Singapore has been introducing more innovations into schools. Its government understands that in a flattening world, where more and more jobs can go anywhere, it's not enough to just stay ahead of its neighbors. It has to stay ahead of everyone - including us.

Message to America: They are not racing us to the bottom. They are racing us to the top.

As Low-Sim Ay Nar, principal of Xinmin Secondary School, explained to me, Singapore has got rote learning down cold. No one is going to outdrill her students. What it is now focusing on is how to develop more of America's strength: getting Singaporean students and teachers to be more innovative and creative. "Numerical skills are very important," she told me, but "I am now also encouraging my students to be creative - and empowering my teachers. ... We have been loosening up and allowing people to grow their own ideas."

She added, "We have shifted the emphasis from content alone to making use of the content" on the principle that "knowledge can be created in the classroom and doesn't just have to come from the teacher."

Toward that end, some Singapore schools have adopted a math teaching program called HeyMath, which was started four years ago in Chennai, India, by two young Indian bankers, Nirmala Sankaran and Harsh Rajan, in partnership with the Millennium Mathematics Project at Cambridge University.

With a team of Indian, British and Chinese math and education specialists, the HeyMath group basically said to itself: If you were a parent anywhere in the world and you noticed that Singapore kids, or Indian kids or Chinese kids, were doing really well in math, wouldn't you like to see the best textbooks, teaching and assessment tools, or the lesson plans that they were using to teach fractions to fourth graders or quadratic equations to 10th graders? And wouldn't it be nice if one company then put all these best practices together with animation tools, and delivered them through the Internet so any teacher in the world could adopt or adapt them to his or her classroom? That's HeyMath.

"No matter what kind of school their kids go to, parents all over the world are worried that their kids might be missing something," Mrs. Sankaran said. "For some it is the right rigor, for some it is creativity. There is no perfect system. ... What we have tried to do is create a platform for the continuous sharing of the best practices for teaching math concepts. So a teacher might say: 'I have a problem teaching congruence to 14-year-olds. What is the method they use in India or Shanghai?' "

Singaporean math textbooks are very good. My daughter's school already uses them in Maryland. But they are static and not illustrated or animated. "Our lessons contain animated visuals that remove the abstraction underlying the concept, provide interactivity for students to understand concepts in a 'hands on' manner and make connections to real-life contexts so that learning becomes relevant," Mrs. Sankaran said.

HeyMath's mission is to be the math Google - to establish a Web-based platform that enables every student and teacher to learn from the "best teacher in the world" for every math concept and to also be able to benchmark themselves against their peers globally.

The HeyMath platform also includes an online repository of questions, indexed by concept and grade, so teachers can save time in devising homework and tests. Because HeyMath material is accompanied by animated lessons that students can do on their own online, it provides for a lot of self-learning. Indeed, HeyMath, which has been adopted by 35 of Singapore's 165 schools, also provides an online tutor, based in India, to answer questions from students stuck on homework.

Why am I writing about this? Because math and science are the keys to innovation and power in today's world, and American parents had better understand that the people who are eating their kids' lunch in math are not resting on their laurels.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

LPIC 2 test prep

developerWorks : Linux Professional Institute (LPI) exam prep

How to configure VMware NAT

VMTN Discussion Forums: how to configure nat on VM

Roll with it baby

Packing Tip II: Roll Your Clothes details how to pack using rolled clothes. I know it sounds strange, but it works great. You can get more into your suitcase, and it comes out less wrinkled. Try it and you will be surprised.

September 19, 2005

Google gets cooler by the minute

Google Blog: The illuminated continent details how you can enable National Geo. photos within Google Earth. What will they think of next?

Howto Restrict Access to ESX SC and MUI

VMTN Discussion Forums: Howto Restrict Access to ESX SC and MUI

September 13, 2005

Benchmarking

I have noticed a trend in American business to benchmark your company against your peers and aim to by "Competative with our industry peers." If your company does everything inline with your peers does that make you average? What happened to striving for excellence? Are American companies striving for mediocrity? Iif mediocrity is your goal you will acheive it.

Neat solar products

PowerFilm� Rollable Series

Solar Solutions

Lpic level 2 prep

developerWorks : Linux Professional Institute (LPI) exam prep

Solar cookers

Solar Cookers International (Solar Cookers & Supplies)

Market forces clean up the air

"Burning Atlanta " by David Whitman is an interesting article. It details how cap and trade markets are cleaning the air where regulation failed. It talks about Plant Bowen in Cartersville.

How to disable windows messenger

PC Hell: How to uninstall or remove Windows Messenger on Windows XP

Updated suse / vmware install

Arcanus Maximus: How to install vmware 5 under Suse is a bit out of date. I foune a better way to do this...

login as root

cd /usr/src/linux-(kernelrev)

make cloneconfig

make prepare

vmware-config.pl

September 12, 2005

Apple varietes

Apple Journal- "A Passion for Apples" - Apple Variety Descriptions

More at this site as well.

Huh?

Georgia's New Poll Tax from the NY Times defys logic. Somehow ensuring that people are REALLY who they say they are is Jim Crow. Who in modern society doesn't have a photo id? How could you survive? This is nuts!

The New York Times
September 12, 2005
Georgia's New Poll Tax

In 1966, the Supreme Court held that the poll tax was unconstitutional. Nearly 40 years later, Georgia is still charging people to vote, this time with a new voter ID law that requires many people without driver's licenses - a group that is disproportionately poor, black and elderly - to pay $20 or more for a state ID card. Georgia went ahead with this even though there is not a single place in the entire city of Atlanta where the cards are sold. The law is a national disgrace.

Until recently, Georgia, like most states, accepted many forms of identification at the polls. But starting this month, it is accepting only government-issued photo ID's. People with driver's licenses are fine. But many people without them have to buy a state ID card to vote, at a cost of $20 for a five-year card or $35 for 10 years. The cards are sold in 58 locations, in a state with 159 counties. It is outrageous that Atlanta does not have a single location. (The state says it plans to open one soon.) But the burden is also great on people in rural parts of the state.

The Republicans who pushed the law through, and Gov. Sonny Perdue, also a Republican, who signed it, say that it is intended to prevent fraud. But it seems clear that it is about keeping certain people away from the polls, for political advantage. The vast majority of fraud complaints in Georgia, according to its secretary of state, Cathy Cox, involve absentee ballots, which are unaffected by the new law. Ms. Cox says she is unaware of a single documented case in recent years of fraud through impersonation of a voter at the polls.

Citizens who swear they are indigent are exempt from the fee. But since the law does not define who is indigent, many people may be reluctant to swear and risk a criminal penalty. More important, the 24th Amendment, which outlawed poll taxes in federal elections, and the Supreme Court's decision striking down state poll taxes applied to all Americans, not just to the indigent. A Georgian who votes only in presidential elections, and buys a five-year card to do so, would be paying $10 per election. That is no doubt more than many people on fixed incomes, who struggle to get by but are not legally indigent, are willing to pay to vote.

If Georgia's law remains in place, other states are likely to follow. There is also growing concern among voting-rights advocates that a self-appointed election reform commission, led by James Baker, the former secretary of state who played a troubling role in the disputed 2000 election, and former President Jimmy Carter, may be about to propose national voter ID standards that would similarly make it harder for poor people and blacks to vote.

The American Civil Liberties Union is planning to challenge Georgia's law. It will have several strong legal claims, starting with the 24th Amendment. The Supreme Court said in 1966, in striking down the poll tax, that "the right to vote is too precious, too fundamental to be so burdened." It still is.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

September 11, 2005

Mozilla based browser IDN vulnerabiltiy

SANS - Internet Storm Center - Cooperative Cyber Threat Monitor And Alert System - Current Infosec News and Analysis ahs details on the mozilla/FF/netscap IDN vulnerability. The fix is:

1. Type about:config into the address field and hit Enter.
2. In the Filter toolbar, type network.enableIDN.
3. Right click on the the network.enableIDN item and select Toggle to change value to false.


UPDATE: There are more details here.

September 09, 2005

I found my xmas present

New Mini On The Scene: TVix C2000U

Funny names

I was playing with the kids and we were talking about why there are boogers. I was thinking that there is no good term for them. I then tried to think of the grossest term for snot. I came up with head yogurt or nose yogurt. Any one know of any that are worse?

September 08, 2005

Sudoku craze

Sudoku Online : Sudoku of the Day

Sudoku is the latest in puzzle crazes. It is a numeric puzzle. Check it out.

AAAAAHHHHH

The Many Scary Faces Of Courtney Love is litterally the creepiest website I have every seen.

If LA is Courtney's first home, then rehab must be her second and the courtroom her third.

Another complimentary site is Awful Plastic Surgery

Update: Also check out Celebs Without Makeup

PBS, NPR, and the BBC podcasts

Podcasts from PBS

Podcasts from NPR

Podcasts from the BBC

htaccess cheatsheet

The the jackol’s den � htaccess Cheatsheet is a handy guide to setting up htacess protection with apache.

Here is a simple cheatsheet for the .htaccess file:

Enable Directory Browsing

Options +Indexes
## block a few types of files from showing
IndexIgnore *.wmv *.mp4 *.avi

Disable Directory Browsing

Options All -Indexes

Customize Error Messages

ErrorDocument 403 /forbidden.html
ErrorDocument 404 /notfound.html
ErrorDocument 500 /servererror.html

Get SSI working with HTML/SHTML

AddType text/html .html
AddType text/html .shtml
AddHandler server-parsed .html
AddHandler server-parsed .shtml
# AddHandler server-parsed .htm

Change Default Page (order is followed!)

DirectoryIndex myhome.htm index.htm index.php

Block Users from accessing the site


order deny,allow
deny from 202.54.122.33
deny from 8.70.44.53
deny from .spammers.com
allow from all

Allow only LAN users

order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from 192.168.0.0/24

Redirect Visitors to New Page/Directory

Redirect oldpage.html http://www.domainname.com/newpage.html
Redirect /olddir http://www.domainname.com/newdir/

Block Hot Linking/Bandwidth hogging

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?mydomain.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg)$ - [F]

Want to show a “Stealing is Bad” message too?

Add this below the Hot Link Blocking code:

RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg)$ http://www.mydomain.com/dontsteal.gif [R,L]

Stop .htaccess (or any other file) from being viewed


order allow,deny
deny from all

Avoid the 500 Error

# Avoid 500 error by passing charset
AddDefaultCharset utf-8

Grant CGI Access in a directory

Options +ExecCGI
AddHandler cgi-script cgi pl
# To enable all scripts in a directory use the following
# SetHandler cgi-script

Save Bandwidth

# Only if you use PHP

php_value zlib.output_compression 16386

Password Protecting Directories

Use the .htaccess Password Generator and follow the brief instructions!

September 07, 2005

Free credit report

AnnualCreditReport is a real legitimate website. I thought it might be a scam at first. It is sponsored by the credit reporting companies...


What is the Purpose of This Site?

This central site allows you to request a free credit file disclosure, commonly called a credit report, once every 12 months from each of the nationwide consumer credit reporting companies: Equifax, Experian and TransUnion.

Ext filesystem tools for windows

TinyApps.Org : Blog has a list of tools to access ext2/3 filesystems under windows.

Biomass options

I have wondered why we aren't looking for alternative crops that can provide fiber, fuel, etc. This article talks about buffalo grass as a fuel option. I think we are going to see more about biomass in the near future.
BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Tall grasses set to power Europe

"If we grew Miscanthus on 10% of suitable land in [the 15-member] Europe, then we could generate 9% of the gross electricity production," he told the British Association's Festival of Science.

September 06, 2005

Funny rises from unfunny

Herald Sun: Sean Penn's rescue bid sinks [05sep05]

EFFORTS by Hollywood actor Sean Penn to aid New Orleans victims stranded by Hurricane Katrina foundered badly overnight, when the boat he was piloting to launch a rescue attempt sprang a leak.

Penn had planned to rescue children waylaid by Katrina's flood waters, but apparently forgot to plug a hole in the bottom of the vessel, which began taking water within seconds of its launch.

The actor, known for his political activism, was seen wearing what appeared to be a white flak jacket and frantically bailing water out of the sinking vessel with a red plastic cup.

When the boat's motor failed to start, those aboard were forced to use paddles to propel themselves down the flooded New Orleans street.

Asked what he had hoped to achieve in the waterlogged city, the actor replied: "Whatever I can do to help."


With the boat loaded with members of Penn's entourage, including a personal photographer, one bystander taunted the actor: "How are you going to get any people in that thing?"

Back again

Back after yet another failure. Remind me not to buy the cheapest disks. I lost a month's worth of posts. crap.......