All posts by Mick

Food

Organic?

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Great, big companies are trying to cash in on Organic produce by having the definition of what is organic changed to included “19 food colorings, two starches, casings for sausages, hops, fish oil, chipotle chili pepper, gelatin, celery powder, dill weed oil, frozen lemon grass, and a sweetener called fructooligosaccharides.”

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19837522/

On June 9th, the USDA added 38 non-organic ingredients to the national list: These 38 items, chosen from more than 600 requested by food manufacturers, can now be used as minor ingredients in 95 percent organic products if a company can prove to its certifier that an organic version is not available in the quality or quantity needed.

“There are a lot of organic farmers and a lot of organic producers who are very concerned about this,” says Phil Lempert, consumer reporter and the Supermarket Guru on NBC’s Today Show. “They worry that by adding these 38 ingredients it actually diminishes the importance and the credibility of a lot of the organic products that are out there.”


phone, Tech

Nokia N73!

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I ordered the phone from Buy.com. They had it for $339 and a coupon for $15 off any purchase over $200. Subtotal after the coupon was $320, but as they have a warehouse in Massachusetts there is 5% sales taxes on that, which add $16 to the total. But, that’s still cheaper that most of the used models on Ebay.

I went for the free shipping is estimated at 7 to 9 days, but if I’m lucky they’ll ship from the local warehouse and it won’t take too long.

This is good news:

http://antrix.net/journal/techtalk/nokia_n73.html

The phone can be mounted as a USB drive so I had no trouble transferring photos to my Linux running computer and had no need of any special software. Nevertheless, I’ll be installing the Nokia PC Suite at work to get our Outlook calendar syncing.

Which means I’ll hold off on ordering a Bluetooth dongle from Newegg, and see if a cable is included with the Phone. Buy.com doesn’t say what’s in the box, but the same phone from Nokia’s US site shows it ships with a cable, but for $100 more.

I’ll need a memory card to hold pics and save on data charges from sending pics via T-Mobile’s network. But, I’ll wait until I get the phone before I order anything else related to the phone, except for either screen protector or a case to protect it.

Tech

Hmmm, phone lust

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Got that new mobile phone lust. Some friends at home (Mick McG, and Murph) had Nokia n73 phones. They seemed OK, when I played with them. But, looking at the specs, feature list, and the pretty decent photographs it takes has given me that new phone lust:

Nokia’s N73 Home Page

Nokia N73 Review

All this thing is missing is Wifi support for Web surfing off the phone company’s network. The iPhone looks really cool too, actually cooler, except here in the US you need to sign up with ATT, whom used to be ATT Wireless.

I had an ATT Wireless phone for 2 weeks when I got my first mobile phone here in the US, a Siemen S45 I think. But the quality of the service wasn’t that good, ATT was in the middle of changing their network from CDMA or TDMA to GSM. I had 28 days to return the phone and cancel the service, so I brought the phone back and signed up with T-mobile who allowed internation text messaging and at the time ATT didn’t. For the next SIX months I got bills from ATT claiming I still had service and had to pay. Every time I phoned their Customer Service, whom were always really, really nice, it took 30 to 45 minutes on hold to get to a human. This is why:

ATT System Upgrade goes haywire

Eventually, ATT Wireless got bought by Cingular, whom got bought by ATT. ATT & ATT Wireless were 2 seperate companies, so ATT renamed Cingular ATT Wireless.

Back to the iPhone, neat piece of technology, but I cannot imagine that Cingular were able to digest ATT properly and get their systems meshed and working properly and I doubt if the new ATT Wireless is much better. I’d wait a few years before using ATT Wireless.

Now if I could get an unlocked iPhone and use it with T-Mobile I’d be tempted, but I think to get full use of the iPhone’s phone feature it would need to be an Apple approved company. Articles I’ve read about the iPhone in Europe claim that European phone companies are or were balking at it because the iPhone requires Apple servers or technology embedded in the phone company’s network or systems for it the work as advertised which means it’s breaks the standard for GSM phone.

And, how do you keep the iPhone from getting all scratched to shit like my first iPod? My first iPod was a 3G 20GB, I had it for a week and kept it in the Apple supplied carrying case, and it got all scratched to fecking shite.

security, travel

Lighters to be allowed back on planes.

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Now that’s a surprise, seems keeping passangers from taking lighters on airplanes is a waste of time and resources:

http://www.nytimes.com

… authorities have decided to stop enforcing a two-year-old rule against taking cigarette lighters on airplanes, concluding that it was a waste of time to search for them before passengers boarded.

The ban was imposed at the insistence of Congress after a passenger, Richard Reed, tried to ignite a bomb in his shoe in 2001 on a flight from Paris to Miami.

Lawmakers said that if Mr. Reid had used a lighter, instead of matches, he might have been able to ignite the bomb, but Kip Hawley, assistant secretary for the Transportation Security Administration, said in an interview on Thursday that the ban had done little to improve aviation security because small batteries could be used to set off a bomb.

Matches have never been prohibited on flights.

“Taking lighters away is security theater,” Mr. Hawley said. “It trivializes the security process.”

The policy change, which is to go into effect on Aug. 4, applies to disposable butane lighters, like Bics, and refillable lighters, like Zippos. Torch lighters, which have thin, hotter flames, will continue to be banned.

The emphasis above is mine, I ownder if politicans did any research on if lighters were a threat or not or just acted irrationally. As Bruce Schneier keeps calling most of the security at US airports, “security theatre”!

portal, Tech

Jetspeed Login Portlet & WebSphere 6.1

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How to get the Jetspeed Login Portlet to work with IBM’s WebSphere 6.1. The default Jetspeed login Portlet doesn’t with WAS, it does work with Tomat, there is an alternative Login Portlet that can be used that will work with WAS. Follow the steps below to disable the LoginPortlet and enable the PortalLoginPortlet.

1. WAS version

First make sure you’ve running at least WAS 6.1.3 or higher.

2. PortalFilter & web.xml

Edit the web.xml file that’s in the Portal’s WAR file and uncomment the PortalFilter:

  <filter>
    <filter-name>PortalFilter</filter-name>
    <filter-class>org.apache.jetspeed.login.filter.PortalFilter</filter-class>
  </filter>

  <filter-mapping>
    <filter-name>PortalFilter</filter-name>
    <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
  </filter-mapping>

3. LoginPortlet & PortalLoginPortlet

Replace the LoginPortlet in your default-page.psml with the PortalLoginPortlet:

<fragment id="dp-12" type="portlet" name="j2-admin::LoginPortlet">
      <property layout="TwoColumns" name="row" value="1" />
      <property layout="TwoColumns" name="column" value="1" />
</fragment>
 <fragment id="dp-12" type="portlet" name="j2-admin::PortalLoginPortlet">
      <property layout="TwoColumns" name="row" value="1" />
      <property layout="TwoColumns" name="column" value="1" />
</fragment>

You may need to change the  “fragment id” also.
4.Edit jetspeed-portlet.xml

Add this to your j2-admin’s WEB-INF/jetspeed-portlet.xml, immediately below the first portlet entry:

<portlet>
        <portlet-name>PortalLoginPortlet</portlet-name>
        <js:security-constraint-ref>public-view</js:security-constraint-ref>       
        <dc:title>Portal Login Portlet</dc:title>
        <dc:creator>J2 Team</dc:creator>
</portlet>

5. Custom PSML?

If your using Maven 2 to build a custom Portal, override the the default page by putting the modified copy of your page in

portal/src/webapp/WEB-INF/pages

Tech

Firefox 2 & Tabs!

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Yup, Firefox 2’s tabs annoy me a bit, if you’ve too many open you can’t see them all. Here’s how you go back to the old Firefox 1.x behaviour:

http://www.humanized.com/weblog/2007/04/05/firefox_20_tabs_gone_wrong/

I met Aza, who wrote the above article, at the Ajaxian Conference here in Boston late last year. Nice lad, very smart, interesting ideas, and their product Enso Launcher is a interesting concept. His presentation at the Ajaxian conference really highlighted how you can use the keyboard, via Enso, to do just about everything on the desktop in an easy human thinkable way. It’s too bad they don’t have a version of Linux, I think the type of users who use Linux could really avail and use and promote it.