Wednesday, October 25, 2006

Spellcheck in Firefox 2.0

The Spellbound add-on does not work on Firefox 2.0, and I installed a new add-on named United States English Dictionary. It works just like Spellbound. There is also a British English Dictionary available.

Tuesday, October 24, 2006

IBM's patents

Just heard that IBM Files Patent Infringement Lawsuits Against Amazon.com. I am really curious to know these patents refer to what applications Amazon has done. The following is my guess:
"Presenting Applications in an Interactive Service" -- web application or web services or Amazon E-Commerce Service (ECS)?
"Storing Data in an Interactive Network" -- database or Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)?
"Presenting Advertising in an Interactive Service" -- all the Ads on the web?
"Adjusting Hypertext Links with Weighted User Goals and Activities" -- personalized recommendations?
"Ordering Items Using an Electronic Catalogue" -- the whole Amazon website?


Monday, October 16, 2006

Reading PDF documents on two monitors

Most papers I read are PDF documents, and I need to read two or three at the same time to compare different approaches related to the same topic. It is luck that my boss put two LCD's on my desk. Adobe reader annoyed me at first because I could not make two documents displayed on different monitors. I found the trick is at Window->Tile. It is perfect for two documents, but things will be messy when you have more than four documents opened at the same time. Now it is time to use gsview to read as many documents as you like. The difference between adobe reader and gsview is that the former can only have one application instance running on the system, but the latter has no such restriction. Therefore, there is no way to display different parts of one document on two monitors at the same time by using adobe reader when you do not make a copy of that document.