According to a new study, Web browsing can actually refresh tired workers and enhance their productivity, compared to other activities such as making personal calls, texts or emails, let alone working straight through with no rest at all….Because Web-surfing can aid productivity, the researchers caution employers against over-restricting workers’ Web access. They recommend that managers allow time for limited personal Web browsing “since it has a salubrious impact on employees’ productivity,” while limiting access to personal emails.

It has happened to me many times that I am stuck on a problem and just come up with a solution. Then I spend a few minutes “wasting time” on some website and the answer comes to me. Nice to see it substantiated in a study.

Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a website enjoys effective immunity from civil copyright liability for user content, provided they, promptly remove infringing material at the request of a rightsholder. That’s how sites like YouTube are able to exist, and why Wired.com allows users to post comments to our stories without fear that a single user’s cut-and-paste will cost us $150,000 in court.

But to dock in that legal safe harbor, a site has to, among other things, register an official contact point for DMCA takedown notices, a process that involves filling out a form and mailing a check to the government. An examination of Righthaven’s lawsuits targeting user content suggests it’s specifically going after sites that failed to fill out that paperwork.

“The DMCA is a good deterrent from being sued,” says Kurt Opsahl, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, “Complying with conditions of eligibility for the safe harbor is a good thing to do. It probably will prevent somebody from suing you in the first place.”

(Hopefully that excerpt is short enough to be considered fair use, combined with the citation and link. Would be kind of ironic if I exposed myself to a legal troubles by quoting from an article that talks about how you can avoid such things). An alternative is to use a hosted service for your blogging, who will have already registered a takedown contact and will handle all DMCA notices.

So they want me to insert dashes into the SSN so that it is in the format of XXX-XX-XXXX (the format in which a social security number is normally written). That is not so hard for me to do. But why should I have to do that? They are already validating that I have the proper number of digits. So once they know that I entered nine digits, why can’t they just enter the dashes for me? No reason to bother the user with inanities like this. (One could also ask why they need to store the SSN in this format – storing them as nine digits in an int field is probably more efficient than storing them in a text field.)

After some Googling, I saw that the first thing to check in my case would be the system temperature. If the system is overheating then the processors cant run to their full potential. And lo and behold, when I lifted up the laptop, there was dust all over the Fan intake (and the laptop was so close to the desk that even with it clean hardly any air would get in). So I cleaned off the desk and underside of the laptop, and propped up the back of the computer (I knew that I would get some good use out of this). Downloaded and installed Speed Fan and watched all of the core temperature numbers drop. Computer performance immediately went up. (I also took off the keyboard and checked to see if there was a buildup of dust inside the fan, but it was clean. Ran the fan diagnostic and it was ok as well). The computer is still running hot (still something to work on), but I have definitely learned my lesson – high performance laptops really suffer in the heat. Keep them cool!

In the years following publication, this work could not be duplicated by any other research group. It also became apparent that there was a conflict of interest in that the senior author of the paper had accepted funding from a lawyer who files lawsuits for damages on behalf of families of vaccinated children, including the published study.
As a result, most of the co-authors of that paper withdrew their designation as co-authors.

Now, Lancet has finally withdrawn the paper (with a short and hard-to-understand statement that seems to avoid mentioning the real controversy). Better late than never. However, it might be that no other publication has been as damaging to the field of vaccines and to public health as this one – now officially discredited.

Please pass this note along to anyone you know who is afraid of vaccinating themselves or their children, with any vaccine and especially with MMR vaccine. As quoted in this article “”It’s very easy to scare people; it’s very hard to unscare them.”

(The above was sent to me by my father, who has worked in the Vaccine industry for the last thirty years. Not the normal fare for this blog, but I thought that it is worth sharing, especially considering how Mumps outbreaks are back in the news. And since billg did just pledge $10 billion to vaccines through his foundation, the topic is almost tech-related).

Well, I’m glad that that one is finally all cleared up.

1. Set up a Custom Search Folder, set to include all messages that are in any of your mail folders (including Sent). You can get to this with File > New > Search Folder or Ctrl + Shift + P. There are also good instructions for this at HowToGeek.
2. Click on the new Search Folder, and then go to View > Arrange By > Conversation.

That’s it. It works pretty well, though it does rely a bit too much on using the subject as the thread/conversation identifier (which is fine when you have a unique subject, but not fine for generic subjects). Hopefully this will be improved in 2010 (though as of now, initial reports are not good). Still, in many ways it is far superior to the regular inbox view (and unlike Gmail, you can still maintain a different grouping method in your inbox, and apply technologies like Sorting which for some reason are still beyond Gmail’s capabilities).

I am not the first person to whom this happened. Hopefully my wasted time figuring this out can help save someone out there a few hours.

We have a budget for programmer time but no budget for buying software, so it wouldn’t matter how money we’d save to buy a COTS product.

This strikes me as a pretty stupid corporate policy that in the end will result in the company spending more than they need to in order to reinvent the wheel. What is they would save 1,000 programmer hours by spending $1,000 on one piece of software. It is not too far fetched. In today’s programming world, the most capable development teams are those that know how and when to leverage expertise from outside of their immediate circle (and outside of the company payroll, when necessary). I realize that from an accounting perspective, one could claim that payroll is a fixed, budgeted cost, and since the developers have to be paid anyway, why shouldn’t they do everything in house? But every hour spent on developing something in-house that could be bought elsewhere for less money than the cost of the salaries being spent is another hour that the company could have used to use its employees for increasing its own revenues and profitability. Oh well, their loss.

After a bit of digging, I found the location where Chrome stored user data:

• On XP – C:\Documents and Settings\<User Name>\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\User Data
• On Vista - C:\Users\<User Name>\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data

The User Data folder contains three files: Local State, Safe Browsing and Safe Browsing Filter, along with a folder called Default. Default in turn contains your browser cache, plugin data, and all of your cookies and history data. To move my profile over to my new computer, I copied all of the files and folders under User Data on my XP machine, and moved them into the User Data on my new Vista machine (all of the files were nearly 100mb after only four days of use, which will give you some kind of idea about the amount of indexing going on in the background). When I next started Chrome on my Vista machine, it was identical to the app on my XP machine, down to most popular sites, history and cookies. I even started writing this post on my XP machine, and then continued it on my Vista machine without having to log in again into my WordPress admin.

In the end this was pretty easy to do. Though the ease of profile transfer could in turn make it easy for someone to steal someone else’s identity – after all, the cookies file (presumably a sqllite db or something similar) was only 256KB, and merely dropping it in the new User Data allowed a complete transfer of identity (perhaps a good security feature would be to allow the \User Data\Default\Cookies file to work only on the originally installed instance).