Categories
Cars

Chrysler: Ugly cars don’t sell, do they?

According to the Wall Street Journal (quoted in Jalopnik), Chrysler is talking to Nissan about farming out small and mid-size car production to Japanese firm. The Wall Street Journal also had a rather eye-opening list of car sales figures, showing the Camry and Accord up top, and somewhere down there, with less than 4000 cars sold for the month of July, Chrysler.

How did Chrysler fall so low? They can make cool cars, like the Dodge Charger and 300C, and in the recent past its cars were interesting to look at (still fell apart but that’s a different story) like the Dodge Intrepid and Stratus which were powerful and fun to drive. The convertible Sebring was quite attractive, too.

These days, sadly, the produce truly hideous cars.
The Sebring and Avenger are just plain ugly. They are smaller, yes, but they look perplexingly half-baked. The tail is just incomplete and does not cover the back properly. The hood has ugly lengthwise metal strips and the headlights just look unappealing. These are two really ugly, blah cars. The only thing that was as ugly in recent memory is the 1990s Buick Skylark with its awful front.

It is just sad that they are giving up when their own designers create the best looking, butch (in a good way) cars (Charger is a favorite of mine). This time, manufacturing in America is giving up because the designers just suck, and that’s sad.

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Categories
General

Microsoft LiveMeeting gets a D

My company is evaluating Microsoft LiveMeeting as an alternative to Adobe Acrobat Connect (formerly known as Macromedia Breeze). The installation of the plugin is clunky – a plain old download and installation from Firefox, though without a browser restart. The layout is even more confusing than that’s of Acrobat Connect, with menus that open but do not really close, and menu items that are not really descriptive. Not sure if it was our fault but image quality was just awful. So it works – you can see what the presenter wants you to see, but other than that, it is no fun.

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Categories
Java

Working with Jetty

For my thesis, I am going to use the Jetty lightweight web server and as such am going to need a lot of trying and learning around how to use it, as it is more ’embedded’, for lack of a better word, than Tomcat. For me, Tomcat is a relatively known entity, having worked with in one form or another since 2000.

I am using Jetty 6.1.7,

So here goes…

Lesson #1: Setting Jetty’s default Port

  1. Open the file jetty.xml under the /etc folder inside the Jetty installation directory.
  2. Inside of the element with the name "addConnector", look for the element
    <Set name="port"><SystemProperty name="jetty.port" default="8999"/></Set>
  3. Change the value of the default attribute to the port you want to use.

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