White-colored Materials Reflect Heat More Than Dark-colored Materials

Agence France Presse reported today that ”US Energy Secretary Steven Chu said Tuesday the Obama administration wanted to paint roofs an energy-reflecting white, as he took part in a climate change symposium in London.”

It has been long known in engineering that white-colored materials reflect more heat than dark-colored materials; or dark materials absorb more heat than bright-colored ones. Yet most buildings designed to save on energy are painted in dark colors. But why, for aesthetic or architectural purposes?

This is probably one of the most neglected facts in heat transfer engineering; including designing buildings that has too much surface area that faces the sun at right angles. People design buildings and houses arrogantly as if the world has an endless supply of crude oil. When the price of this precious commodity soars high, we tremble and think of various forms of alternatives.

Painting roofs white not only saves energy it also reduces greenhouse gas emissions—and we don’t need a degree in physics to know this fact.

How to Disable Firefox Quick Find Completely

Installing an Add-on

Caution
As with every install, Firefox users are warned to install add-ons from trusted authors only. If there is a reason to believe that the file mentioned below is a malicious software then do not install the add-on.

Download the add-on
Go to Kaosmos Website. Find the heading SEARCHHOTKEYS on the page. You can find it too by clicking the link SearchHotKeys on the left sidebar of the page.

There are many ways to download and install this file. We will follow what the website suggests. This procedure assumes you are using Firefox 3.

1. Right-click the download link that corresponds to your version of Firefox.
2. On the options menu, click Save Link As . . . , a Save As dialog box opens.
3. Save the searchhotkeys-FF30-0.1.4.xpi file. I recommend saving the file on your Desktop.

Install the searchhotkeys-FF30-0.1.4.xpi file
There are two ways to install searchhotkeys-FF30-0.1.4.xpi file.

Method 1 With your Firefox open, choose File > Open File

1. Browse to the folder where you have saved the searchhotkeys-FF30-0.1.4.xpi file. Select the file and click Open. A Software Installation dialog box opens.
2. Click the Install Now button. An Add-ons dialog box opens.
3. Click the Restart Firefox button.

Method 2 (Recommended) With your Firefox open:

1. Open the folder where you have saved the searchhotkeys-FF30-0.1.4.xpi file,
2. Drag and drop the file into the Firefox browser. A Software Installation dialog box opens.
3. Click the Install Now button. An Add-ons dialog box opens.
4. Click the Restart Firefox button.

Test Quick Find
After restarting Firefox, click a blank area on a webpage. Press the slash (/) and single quote keys ( ' ). The Quick Find search bar must not show up.

Now, press SHIFT + caret (^) keys or SHIFT + vertical bar or pipe (|) keys. What happens? Quick find is enabled. This is because the SEARCHHOTKEYS add-on defaults for Quick Find normal search and links only are the caret and vertical bar keys, respectively.

Disable Quick Find completely
Backup the about:config files in Firefox before carrying out the steps below.

1. Open a new tab or window in Firefox 3.
2. Type 'about:config' (without the quotes) in the address bar. A page opens displaying "This might void your warranty!"
3. Click the "I'll be careful, I promise!" button. A new page opens showing user preferences with values that can be modified. DO NOT EXPERIMENT CLICKING ON ANY OF THESE ITEMS!
4. In the Filter box type 'searchkeys'. Three items must show on the page similar to the one below.



5. Double-click item #3, searchkeys.disable.all, to set the item to 'true' as shown below.



6. Quick Find is now disabled completely. Close the about:config page.
   

Change settings for Quick Find
You can enable Quick Find with this add-on and assign different keys for opening 'normal' and 'links only' searches. For example, if you want the tilde (~) key to open Quick Find (links only) when it is pressed, change the value of searchkeys.link.key to 126 which is the ASCII decimal value of tilde and set item #3 to 'false.'

An added bonus
Or just another annoyance? Press CTRL + F3 and you will have the classic search pop-up.


Read also: How to Disable Quick Find in Firefox, and How to Disable Firefox Quick Find
Another Ascii Table

How to Disable Firefox Quick Find

Finding a Solution to Disable Quick Find Completely

The predator
A friend of mine, Dr. Robertson, prompted me that somehow Firefox Quick Find feature still interferes in his typing practice even after setting the accessibility.typeaheadfind to 'false' in the about:config settings.

“How?” I queried him inquisitively.

“As we all know pressing either the slash or single quote key enables Quick Find, right?” I nodded in approval as he continued, “I was practicing typing online at typingtutor-online.com's My Text section when suddenly my typing was halted by something incomprehensible. I pressed every key on the keyboard and yet no character was coming out. Much to my surprise I found out that Firefox Quick Find had stealthily emerged above the status bar and it was stealing focus on my typing.”

“What do you mean by stealing focus,” I asked.

“You see, I was typing with texts full of slashes and single quotes. Every time I pressed either key, Quick Find springs up and like a vicious predator from beneath feeds on all my slashes and single quotes and all other innocent characters,” this he said haltingly. With a pale face and sweat as large as peas on his forehead, my perplexed friend concluded, “Arnel, your post on How to Disable Quick Find in Firefox last month is flawed.”

Looking for a cure
The horror, the horror of it all, right there in my desktop Quick Find was gorging on all the slashes ( / ) and single quotes ( ' ) as I reenacted the circumstances Dr. Robertson had narrated.

I opened about:config and look for clues inside the items, maybe there is a way, I thought, to disable Quick Find completely that would end my friend's misery. I tried to configure all typeaheadfind Boolean items to 'false' and then to 'true' and back again to 'false' and configured accessibility.typeaheadfind.timeout value to zero; all efforts failed.

So I invoked the power of Google and prayed that it provide a vaccine to this ailment plaguing Firefox users. It showed me a website and directed, “Go to Kaosmos Website!” Upon arrival at the site, I saw plug-ins and extensions free for downloads. And somewhere on this site a solution not only for my friend's Firefox 3 but also for Firefox 1.5 and 2.0 users.

Bearer of Good News
So I turned from my desk and reach out for the phone to report the good news to my dear old friend.

“Good news, Dr. Robertson. I finally found the solution to your predicament,” I told him as I opened Gmail. “I will be sending you the procedure through email.”

“Thank you, Arnel. I can't wait to tinker with my Firefox again.”

As I was about to give him a word of reproach on tinkering Firefox, he proudly announced that his typing speed had increased considerably since our last conversation. “It's 40 cpm!”

And then he asked, “What does cpm stand for?”

And so the day went on for a tutorial on abbreviations . . .


Read also: How to Disable Quick Find in Firefox, and How to Disable Firefox Quick Find Completely

NOTE: The author does not consider Firefox Quick Find as a virus. Dr. Robertson is not real. However, Kaosmos Website and Google are real.

Mongolia: What Is It Like There

I was watching the “Priestess Warrior” on The National Geographic when a scene caught my eye—an airport's waiting area so small that I couldn't believe it is located in a country as vast as Mongolia. I reached out for my mouse and started to what I will call a travelnet, a travel through the Internet. This is what I have learned so far about Mongolia.

Mongolia has an estimated population of 2.9 M (2008 est.) with a land area two-and-a-half that of France. The capital is Ulaanbaatar (Ulan Bator). Nearly half of the people live in urban centers.

Most images of Mongolia I found on the Internet contain a view of the sky with a wide uninhabited land.

Camels grazing on a steppe, majestic mountains on the background

A "ger" camp

After seeing the pictures above, a romanticized image of Mongolia set in into my mind. Breathe-taking landscapes of deserts, mountains, lakes, and steppes.

But then once I saw the picture below, I wondered if the tenement is deserted or not.

The sad fact is that unemployment, alcoholism, and prostitution are rife in Mongolia brought about by a depressed economy.

It has given in to the social evils such as karaoke bars fronting for “sex tourism.”

Orphans live in manholes, keeping themselves warm during the winter by huddling together in Ulaanbaatar's underground heating system. When accidents occur—due to bursting pipes—these children are boiled alive.

Lakes are dried up by “ninja miners” digging tunnels in search for gold.

Mongolia is not perfect after all.


Pictures courtesy of clairegeneva33, musicgeek935, Abate Busoni, Calix

OpenOffice

The Best Alternative to Microsoft Office

What’s in a name?
First, there was Word, then OpenOffice . . . but not exactly. I just found out that the open-source office software suite installed in my PC has a formal name OpenOffice.org and OpenOffice is actually a trademark of a different company somewhere in Europe.

It’s free!
OpenOffice (I prefer this name) is an office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics and more. If Microsoft has Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Visio, then OpenOffice has Writer, Calc, Impress, and Draw, respectively, and best of all, it’s free.

Consider OpenOffice Writer
Writer is the word processor component of the OpenOffice suite and it has similar functionality to Microsoft Word. I have been using OpenOffice Writer for quite a while and it’s probably the frequently used program in my PC; together with the math editor Math, and vector graphics editor Draw. Most amazing is that, a document written in Writer can be converted (exported) to PDF format effortlessly—I didn’t expect this feature embedded in a free software.

In addition, Writer can save my work as a .doc file (Word 2003) and can open (version 3.0) both .doc and .docx files (Word 2007).

Navigating Writer is not difficult, it feels like using Microsoft Word. There was one instance though that I got lost finding Page Setup in the File menu; page formatting is located at the Format menu in Writer. Since then, I never fail to ask OpenOffice.org Forum for help every time I run into a problem.

OpenOffice is probably one of the best free downloads available on the Internet. This amounts to great savings compared to buying the Microsoft Office Suite software.

The latest version of OpenOffice is OpenOffice.org 3.1.

In Search of William Safire

In the early eighties I used to read a column reprinted from The New York Times by a local newspaper, The Daily Express. The author’s column was about the origin and usage of a word or phrase.

Who said what, who incorrectly used a word, who quoted a phrase—the author would always recount to his readers of when and where a word was used, misused, or mispronounced. (I wonder how he kept his notes at the time.)

His writing of a distinct topic (who’s interested with words?) made me anticipate his column every week and found it informative, and sometimes amusing; especially when it was about someone (usually a politician) who incorrectly used or mispronounced a phrase or word.

Then the newspaper closed down but the author’s name, William Safire, I did not forget. I eventually turned my interest to reading science magazines and popular novels.

Fast forward to two decades, I am sitting in an Internet café googling. Does William Safire still write? This is the raison d’être of the Internet; in one click I will be able to find out more about William Safire.

Indeed he still is and has a column in The New York Times Magazine called “On Language.” Since then, William Safire’s column occupies a permanent tab in my browser.

My weekend is not complete without reading his column and it always feel like reading a book I started more than twenty years ago.