Off to Spain
I'm off to spain on Saturday on a Contiki
tour through Spain. Itinerary is as follows:
Madrid
Cordoba
Granada
Costa del Sol
Mijas
Seville
Lisbon
Salamanca
Madrid
I'll try to post some pictures out here 
Aspose Powerpoint
I reviewed the Java Powerpoint generation from Aspose . It comes with little to no documentation or examples, nevertheless I was able
to figure out how to create some simple slides. It was not
quite as nice as the library from Tonic Systems, but they had
a very reasonably price redistribution license.
Generation of Powerpoint Slides
2 years ago I had a client that wanted to generated powerpoint slides
on the serverside from a java web application. Powerpoint is
a single threaded app that cannot service the multiple simultaneous
requests you would get from a serverside app. I had to write a "Powerpoint
broker" to serialize access to powerpoint and automatically kill the process
if it hung(COM interface would be non-responsive if the serverside powerpoint
had a dialog up).
Painful as it was this solution allowed me to use powerpoint to generate some
very nice tables and charts. However there is a library that supports
a limited subset of these functions with a pure java api - Tonic System Powerpoint library.
This product is kinda expensive, but allows you generate powerpoint
slides without powerpoint. Really cool and about 100times faster than
using COM.
State of American Health Care
My mother recently had a heart attack, they were able to
open up the blockages in her heart with a stent and
some amazing drugs. For that I am very greatful, I do
however have some gripes. During her stay at St. Joseph
hospital in Kansas City, they failed to provide adequate food
for a vegetarian diabetic with high blood pressure. At one
point they brought her a plate of fruit with chocolate cake.
Her blood sugar was already high, seems to me that if they
had an integrated computer system all this could be avoided.
