Breakfast steak cooked for 1:30 minutes on plate, covered with microwave wrap. A bit too tough. Seasoning with salt and pepper good, but feel more taste is needed. May consider marinade - soy sauce?

Have figured out way to revitalize artificial bacon bits - put into container and microwave for ~ 20 seconds to make them nice and crunchy again.

Dear Bong,

I'm glad to hear that you're working on an article focusing on assistive technology! I started looking into it because I wanted to be able to use my computer while walking around. Although the head-mounted display looked really cool, it was heavy and conspicuous. Fortunately, free and open-source tools such as the Festival Lite speech synthesizer and the Emacspeak audio desktop made it easy for me to glue together a system that let me browse, read mail, and do all sorts of things without looking at my computer.

I've Cc:'d Richard Burgos, the IBM guy who told me about their wonderful Computer Eyes workshop. They gave me an opportunity to help out before, and I can tell you that it is an amazing experience. However, the JAWS screen reader costs a lot (USD 895). Richard - IBM has helped people with disabilities for far longer than I have; perhaps you can spare time from your Christmas preparations to help this journalist out? =)

With the increasing interest in Linux as a low-cost alternative even for sighted users, maybe you can help convince your readers that Linux training will benefit sighted and visually impaired users alike. I'm sure that the Philippine Linux Users' Group (http://plug.linux.org.ph) and organizations like the Bluepoint Foundation (http://www.bluepoint.com.ph) would be willing to help out.

You might be interested in the BLinux community (http://leb.net/blinux/). They have an active mailing list and will probably answer questions promptly.

Major distributions are beginning to support blind users out of the box. If I'm not mistaken, you can get a Redhat install CD with speech support (requires a hardware speech synthesizer). Knoppix comes with Braille support out of the box.

Smaller distributions also cater to the needs of the visually impaired. Oralux (http://www.oralux.org/), a live-CD distribution based on Knoppix, has Emacspeak and the Festival Lite speech synthesizer - allowing you to use practically any computer with a supported sound card. Brlspeak (http://www.brlspeak.net/) has Braille and partial speech support and can be installed on an existing FAT hard disk without repartitioning.

Good luck and have fun!

Hi Sacha,

In case you didn't know, I've been drafted into Microsoft's Student Ambassador program. We're planning to go to different schools to give different talks/seminars on .NET.

Could you give me some contacts from UA&P? Maybe JM Ibañez or Chipi. We need to talk to them and some student orgs.

Thanks!

Mark

Awwwwww. He really is a convert...

E-Mail from Mark C. Punzalan

- Selecting: isSelected, highlighting

- Deleting shapes

- Changing colors

- Dragging / moving: mousePressed, mouseDragged, mouseReleased.

Optimal: relative position

- Creation: fixed-size fixed-location, fixed-size variable location.

How do you remember which shape to create?

- Simple resizing of selected object. Resize button. mouseDragged must

distinguish between moving and resizing

- Create and drag to resize: Use temporary shape of some sort or add

to vector and automatically go into resizing

- Lines: How to check if point is in line. Moving / redirecting.

Tricky: avoid divide by zero. Make sure it works for horizontal and vertical lines. Tolerance, fuzziness.

Miniproject: Should shape include the resize

Lecture: - inheritance mechanism (super, super constructors, rules for default constructors)

- More encapsulation, composition, and design (eval and filled oval, composite shapes, using points for person instead of coordinates), relative position, resizing persons, act, shapes with mouse listeners - pointing person)

Next year: Objects using each other. strategy pattern for operation on all, inner classes

Due first week