Often, I will need to set environment variables in DOS, Unix/Cygwin environments. I end up creating scripts to do this. However, it is quite painful to have one script with commands starting with export (for bash) and set (for DOS). Most of the time I would rather like to have a simple property file - like key=value in each line - that I can use to set the environment variables.

Download this Leo file. It has a script in one of the nodes. You put your property file in child nodes with @url node types. Then, when you run the script, each such child node is taken and written out as batch file or shell script as identified by the node header text. A silly little solution that took 5 minutes and has already taken lot of pains out for me!

1. Leo Outliner
2. Abstractspoon Todolist
3. Wikidpad
4. Jello Dashboard
5. MonkeyGTD
6. TVO – The Vim Outliner

So, what is the pick?

Main features are listed below:

• Configure your accounts as you wish
• Configure categories of expenses
• For categories you want to monitor, set monthly budget and track against it
• At any given point of time, you can see how much money you've with you!
• Expenses by categories are reported on a monthly basis and on YTD basis
• Quick check to see your monthly net flow (earnings - expenses)
• It takes about 3 seconds to record one transaction :-)

If you are interested, you can download the zip file (108KB) that has the Excel file. It has couple of macros - that is only for sorting data. Excel will still work without the macros - you just have to do sorting once in a while. Extract the zip file. Open the Excel file and look at Instructions sheet. The Excel has some sample data that you can use as a starter.

One easy solution is to just select only the range that has the data, as opposed to full columns, while choosing the input to pivot. What it means is that just select the rows and columns in the grid, but not using the header bar. One drawback with this approach is that when the data changes or more rows are added to it, you will need to redefine the input to the pivot table. Read on to see how to get around this problem using dynamic ranges.

1. Go to Control Panel - Phone and Modem Options.
2. Click on Modems tab.
3. Click on Properties button.
4. Click on Advanced tab.
5. Add ATX0 to the field Extra initialization commands:.
6. Click OK as many times as is necessary to get back.

Now, you are ready to dial in.

Wow! I should feel pretty good about working in an industry that makes you routinely talk about such complicated matters.

Then again...

IT spends a considerable sum of dollars in creating company-wide frameworks as part of building their business applications. This is especially true for typed languages like C++, Java, and C#. The core of this spending goes towards coming up with an architecture for the middle tier. How does one know if the resulting architecture will serve the needs? This article examines the qualities of a good middle-tier architecture and answers how the well known middle-tier architectures that are in vogue today stack up against this analysis. The middle-tier architectures analyzed include stored procedures, SOA, EJBs, COM+, and SQLJ.

Several points raised in the article resonate very strongly with me.

One reason why I think Groove is such a great tool is that it supports this way of functioning. You are not grounded if you don't have network connectivity.

Here are two formulas I use in almost every sheet where I've a date column.

Some time during mid-June this year, in the Virtual Reality Lab of the University of Buffalo, New York, a professor and his student sitting at two different computer terminals 'touched' each other over the Net. The duo had been struggling for the past six months trying to develop a technology where the person at one end could actively follow the finger of the person at the other. With the invention, the professor Dr Thenkurussi Kesavadas and the student-Dhananjay Shripad Joshi-have added an important dimension to communication of the sense of touch.

• Haptics is the science of integrating the sense of touch into human-computer interactions.
• Imagine there are two users A (transmitter) and B (receiver) sitting at two computer terminals.
• A holds an object. The data glove he wears captures the pressure he applies as he uses it.
• A's tactile experience is transmitted over the Net to B, who receives the data using a sensing tool. B is now able to feel the hardness or softness of the object the same way as A feels.
• The screen shows the orientation of A's hand so that B can mimic that orientation for a total experience.
  

Great work. Congratulations!

Unison runs on both Windows (95, 98, NT, and 2k) and Unix (Solaris, Linux, etc.) systems. Moreover, Unison works across platforms, allowing you to synchronize a Windows laptop with a Unix server, for example.

Groove is now at 2.5. All the issues I had with 2.0 still remain. Anyway, here is my first impression as a draft outline. To summarize, if you have a group that digs Groove, it can be a really good investment. I'm not sure how to make people love Groove though.