Changing Background Color of an Image in GIMP

Recently I needed to use a simple picture in my presentation. However, the picture had its own background color which was annoying for the presentation template. What I did is the following:
1. I opened the picture in GIMP.
2. There is a nice set of selection tools in GIMP. I used scissor selection tool to choose the relevant parts of my picture.
3. Pasted the selected tool to a new file without background color...

That is it. There is a nice tutorial about the subject here: http://docs.gimp.org/en/gimp-tool-foreground-select.html

Deforestation and dynamic world forest coverage view

It is sad that the deforestation is still a problem despite the global awareness of environmental concerns. I was caught up with the fact that Ireland, a country that continuously gets rain, has relatively very small forested area. Starting from this point, I came by this link and I wanted to share...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/interactive/2007/dec/13/forests

Youtube repeated

Today I discovered an interesting link for listening (watching would make less sense) Youtube repeatedly :http://www.youtuberepeat.com The idea is quite simple but smart :)

ACM Author-izer

ACM has introduced a new policy when accessing scientific publications. The authors of the papers can now manage the access to their papers.Although I haven't verified, it is said that the access through the Web site of the author is allowed...

Stay tuned ...

Choices...

An interesting video to watch (don't get paralyzed :))):

http://blog.ted.com/2006/09/26/paradox_of_choi/

Eclipse UTF Encoding and Simple Copy/Paste to Text Editor

Eclipse may be painful when writing cross platform codes. There are several links on the Web that explains how to setup UTF-8 as encoding of the Text editor. Here is what I did: Right click the Project>Properties. From the Resource, choose UTF-8 from Text File Encoding (Eclipse also does some changes when you insert the special characters you want in the code).

A good source of these special characters (more of a mathematical operators) and their codes are here : http://tlt.its.psu.edu/suggestions/international/bylanguage/mathchart.html

Stay tuned ...

Session independent background job and source code addition in Eclipse

When you log out from a server or close the shell window, your associated jobs will also killed with your session. In order to have a job in background in these situations use:
nohup :
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/285015/linux-prevent-a-background-process-from-being-stopped-after-closing-ssh-client

For a library you use as a jar file, it is easy to add the source of the jar later for debugging:
http://www.eclipsezone.com/eclipse/forums/t82300.html