Disposable Phone Numbers

July 7th, 2006

For years I offered my fax number when asked to give a phone number to a credit card company, bank, merchant, politician, or other organization that I knew was going to turn around and sell it telemarketers. After I disconnected my fax line a couple of years ago, I switched my standard fake to my office number since it has no answering machine and I’m only there about one hour a week. (If I actually want to talk to someone, I’ll give them my home number.)

However, now NetZero has launched Private Phone which provides an unlimited supply of disposable phone numbers for free. This is like Mailinator for phones (though unlike Mailinator you do have to sign up before using a number, and you’ll have to clear your cookies if you want to change numbers).
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Copying files from one JAR to another using ANT

July 7th, 2006

To avoid needless duplication of source files in two different repositories, I would like to write an Ant build.xml file that copies files from one .jar file to another. I don’t want to copy everything in the source jar, just certain selected files.
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Shopping for a Prepaid Mobile Plan

July 5th, 2006

I’m a very light cell phone user, except occasionally when I travel. Currently I’m on the very bottom-of-the-barrel T-Mobile monthly plan that they don’t even offer any more. Only 60 minutes a month + weekends, and I very rarely even use that. Looking around it seemed I could save quite a bit of money by going to a prepaid plan. That wouldn’t cost me more than about $100 a year, roughly 20% of what I’m paying now. I was just going to switch my T-Mobile phone over, but apparently the roaming on their prepaid plans isn’t so good.

What are people recommending for prepaid phones these days? I need:
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Apple Mail Shows Home Directory

July 5th, 2006

Here’s something I just figured out a year+ too late. If you’re using Apple Mail (at least in version 2.0, but probably others as well) to access an IMAP server for a Unix account with shell access, it will treat your home directory (i.e. ~) as the mail folder. This is almost always wrong. It may work for mail only accounts, but regular shell accounts usually place the mail somewhere else; for instance in ~/mail.

To tell Apple Mail where the mail folder is, place the relative path to the mail folder (starting fromn your home directory) in the Advanced tab of the Accounts pane of the Preferences dialog:
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How to Dissect a Brain

July 2nd, 2006

I’m looking for a reference to a story I vaguely remember reading sometime in the last ten years or so. To my recollection, a pair of doctors had dissected a human skull in a new way; i.e. with a new pattern of cuts. In the process they found a completely new organ that had been missed for hundreds of years because the standard pattern of cuts destroyed that organ. Does anyone remember this story, and can point me to a citation for it?
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The Elements of C# Style

June 30th, 2006

What’s the best book discussing the proper writing of .NET code in general and C# in particular? I’m thinking of something along the lines of Joshua Bloch’s Effective Java, but for C# instead of Java. That is, I want a book that assumes I already know the basic mechanics of the language, and am quite familiar with general object oriented principles like polymorphism, but need to know things such as “classes begin with lower case letters and methods begin with upper case letters.”

Here are a few possibilities:
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