Archive
EU’s Horizon 2020 may include a cost model change to cover 100% of all direct costs, but limit the overhead rate to a flat 20%
According to a poll at Framework Programme Sevent (FP7) group on LinkedIn, Horizon 2020 (http://ec.europa.eu/research/horizon2020) may include a cost model change to cover 100% of all direct costs, but limit the overhead rate to a flat 20%.
From my perspective this is a change for the better:
• now some research organizations’ bureaucratic mechanisms sometimes act as leeches against the organization research teams that bring EU projects under the umbrella of a certain organization (like a university or research institute). So money goes to administration etc. and not to researches and developers
• Instead of supporting infrastructure acquisition/maintenance, EU should point the industry and research universities/institutes to cloud technologies market and cover such costs. That way they tap into cloud IT flexibility and lowered administration burdens, EU doesn’t pay for equipment that grows old quickly and also the cloud tech sector (SaaS [Software As A Service], PaaS [Platform As A Service], IaaS [Infrustructure As A Service] – referred all together as the SPI model in XaaS) get a boost.
Remove older crippled Google Search Provider from IE9 RC
Just installed Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) Release Candidate (RC), found the link at:
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/internet-explorer-9-rc-available-for-download/11349
Was amazed by it’s performance and clean GUI (especially the choice to move the yellow warning bar to the bottom and make it of smaller width than the browser window in order to be more noticeable). Do visit http://www.beautyoftheweb.com to explore IE9’s potential (and try the billiard game at http://agent8ball.com to see the graphics hardware acceleration).
However, when typing at the address bar (now combined with the search bar since new users were mixing them up and typed URLs at the search bar with unexpected outcome) the suggestions dropdown was showing two Google icons and one Bing.
Then I also noticed that one of the Google icons (the one that was already selected), didn’t allow me to turn on suggestions (send keystrokes to search engine as you type for dynamic search/suggestions).
The suggestions dropdown window just had an “Add” button that takes you to a page with more search providers to add, but no button to allow you to edit those search providers. So I right clicked the empty area at the right side of the address bar and selected to show the “Command bar” (means menu bar).
Then at menu “Tools”, I selected “Manage Add-ons”
There as you can see at the screenshot above (grabbed with ALT+PRINTSCREEN button combination and pasted into Windows Live Writer), the item selected says “Top Result Search” and has “Not Available” and also the “Top Result search address” field says the same. Also noticed in was using “google.gr” whereas the other google icon was using “google.com” and had all search address fields filled-in.
So I reckoned I should remove that problematic entry.
A thing I don’t get is those UIs that don’t allow you to press Remove button at a Default choice and force you to first set another one as default, then they enable the remove button. Totally non-intuitive for new users of computers. They should instead prompt you to select other default after you press Remove on the current Default one. If you must always have one entry there they should just disable remove when list item count is just one.
To keep it short, I clicked Bing as the Default search engine by selecting it and pressing “Set as Default”, then clicked the problematic Google search entry and selected “Remove” (the remove button was now available since it wasn’t the default search anymore).
The clicked “Close” and all was fine with search suggestions for both Bing and Google, plus got rid of that 2nd Google icon at the search suggestions drop-down window.
A new(?) kind of spam in blog comments
WordPress just asked me to moderate a comment saying "of the many video clips that i download, i always watch those that are very funny" (with some emoticon ASCII chars following it). It was a comment on a post of mine about LvS which is related to video, so it looked ok, but the URL of the sender made me suspicious. It was about Rhinoplasty operations (and their page was a classic low budget promotional one), so I search for that text on the web and found out it had been posted (albeit with a different emoticon char sequence at the end) as comment at various blog posts related to video.
Seems we are facing a new kind of (most probably) automated spam targeted at specific blog post comments (probably spotted using search by term and/or popularity ranking). The solution may be for spam filters to filter out commenter’s URL (and maybe also resolve short URLs, not allowing multiple levels of short URLs or even short URLs at all). Also they could contain a database of such comments and being able to detect variations too, but risking to also flag a real user comment.
Bug: “The disk is full” at base.bundle.js of #NewTwitter
Sometime ago I got the above error screen (after clicking on the error notice at the statusbar) on IE8/Vista at the new Twitter UI (aka #NewTwitter). Exactly what does “The disk is full.” error mean to say? Wonder if twimg.com (probably used to host images served by Twitter like avatar images) was itself running out of disk space and this was some error string returned via AJAX or if it’s some silly error message (maybe cause their code thought IE8 supports HTML5 local storage or something).
Maybe they’ve fixed it now, but in general even the classic Twitter UI didn’t seem to always play ok with IE8, e.g. Retweet didn’t always work (would see “Error on page” at the bottom) and you had to click on “x minutes ago” under a given status update to go to a page where you could retweet it…
Bug: Microsoft Office (2007) Diagnostics misleading summary view
At Office (2007) Diagnostics tests I’d expect more fine-grained status codes (rather than a mere “Completed”) so that the Summary view wouldn’t mislead you to think all the identified problems have been corrected. After all not many people would click on the “Detailed results” based on the falsely positive summary as pictured above.
text transforms: TemplateFilter, TextCaseConvertion, CharConv, Dos2Unix, Unix2Dos, ClearTextFilter
Added various tools related to text transformations at my tranXform website (30-Sep-2010 update):
TemplateFilter
DOS filter – parses CSV-style multi-column (“;” separator) input text rows (one row per text line) and generates text based on a supplied template that is applied per input row
TextCaseConvertion
simple GUI-based tool to convert string to upper-case, lower-case and camel-case
CharConv
Windows and Microsoft Word GUI for Text transformation given character set mapping (from/to) and calculation of mapping given matching (portions of) source and target text
Useful for deciphering copy-pasted text from PDF documents that ends-up with strange character swaps in it due to encoding reasons
Dos2Unix
DOS filter – converts CRLF (Dos/Windows style) to LF (Unix style) for text ending line markers
Unix2Dos
DOS filter – converts LF (Unix style) to CRLF (Dos/Windows style) for text ending line markers
ClearTextFilter
DOS filter – converts control characters to space chars
Suggestion: triple-click to select row in InputBox/TextBox and paragraph in RichTextBox
In upcoming Internet Explorer version (IE9), one can triple click text in a webpage to select a whole paragraph (vs double-clicking that already existed to select a whole word) of text. A really useful feature I believe (if coupled with an accelerator to send selected content to social networks it would be even nicer)
I’d suggested this feature is added to Windows native UI controls too (and hope this would eventually be implemented in Java and .NET WinForms and WPF controls too). It would be very useful to have in single-line InputBox / TextField (instead of having to press CTRL+A) but especially in multi-line ones like the classic TextBox (where it would select current text row) or the RichTextBox (RTF-enabled) one (where it would select current paragraph as in IE9).
Windows Live Writer tagging WordPress blog posts
I was delighted to see Windows Live Writer 2011 supports adding a WordPress blog nicely (pretty much automagically) and it even shows for each post a Tags input box at the bottom apart from the Categories option. It wasn’t showing a tags input box when working with Windows Live Spaces since it didn’t support such concept, but only a (limited) number of categories one could define along or replacing predefined ones (luckily Microsoft is migrating Windows Live Spaces to WordPress in a straightforward way for existing Windows Live Spaces blog authors).
Note that WordPress administration panel has online tool to convert existing categories to tags (and vice versa) which is very useful combined with the tag cloud widget, since categories are practically a tree of relations whereas tags define a full connectivity graph. Pretty sad though WordPress doesn’t have option to merge multiple preexisting categories/tags (e.g. Windows Live Spaces used to add localized and english versions for some categories) into one.
Version "14.0.8117.416 el" that I use (Windows Live Writer 2011) is still showing (C) 2009 in the About dialog btw:
And still crashes when selecting some menu options, but you can safely press "Cancel" there and keep on working fine without the app closing down which is very nice since you don’t lose any unsaved work.
Renaming a file but preserving its sort order on Windows
Sometimes you may wish to rename a file to mark it as being not yet finished or in need to be worked on etc.
In such a case on Windows if you want to make sure the filename shows first/last depending on the sort order you can prefix its name with a "_", an underscore char (assuming you sort by name ascending or descending – quick way to toggle this is by clicking one or two times as needed onto the "Name" column title at the Details view of Windows Explorer).
If you don’t want to ruin the alphabetical sort order you can prefix the file with "-" (the minus char). This seems to be a useful hack implemented into Windows, that is the "-" prefix is ignored when sorting by filename at a Windows Explorer folder view. You can even prefix with multiple minus chars there (all ignored). Using multiple dashes could help the file standout in the file list or help you visually order which one is more urgent to work on.
George Birbilis @zoomicon 