The serial port receipt printing in Openbravo POS (version 2.30.2) was implemented for 32 bit Windows. To use it on a 64 bit Windows, you will have to swap the rxtxSerial.dll (under the lib\Windows\i368-mingw32 directory) for the 64 bit version. This is available from the jLog project (thanks!). Since they also provide a corresponding RXTXcomm.jar, it makes sense to swap this as well (under the lib directory).
Just swapped my laptop HDD with an SSD as i have promised myself to do from a year ago. Looks like my prediction on the price of SSD came true – I managed to get a 128GB SSD for US$90 (S$110), well under the S$150 price point i was hoping for. The result of using an SSD instead HDD? Boot up time fell to under 15 seconds from more than a minute before, which was getting unbearable.
I purchased the Star Micronics TSP 100 thermal printer without realising it has the ability to print Simplified and Traditional Chinese characters as well as Japanese characters. This comes in handy if your products need to be in Chinese (e.g. Chinese restaurant). The printer accepts GB2312 encoded characters for printing Simplified Chinese characters.
Looks like MAS had 2 busy months preparing their response to the 50 years loan incident which probably caught them by surprise. Now housing loans are effectively limited to a maximum of 30 years where it had been predominantly 35 years before.
From the headlines: “MAS may relax monetary policy due to declining inflation: analysts“ (CNA 24 Sep) and “Price rises slow to lowest in almost two years” (Straits Times 25 Sep) – it looks like a depreciation of the S$ is in the works.
Now that the dust has settled on the new iPhone 5 and on QE3, they both felt like non-events. They both turned out to be everything they were rumoured to be, of which the most prominent aspects were that of the iPhone 5 having a 4 inch screen and QE3 being open-ended.
The watershed event happened last week (well, almost): the ECB announced its plan to buy sovereign bonds without limit (if needed). The market reacted immediately with the price of gold breaking above US$1700 and up further to US$1735.
Joomla! fans be warned, this may be a somewhat biased review, having been a long time Drupal user. Ok, i guess that pretty much tells you i don’t particularly like Joomla (exclamation mark left out from henceforth for easier reading). I was forced to take on Joomla because of the choice of the template.
Just read about news that a home loan with 50 years loan period was recently made available. My first reaction: sounds like a practical way to tackle rising housing prices to me. Though one may claim that a longer loan period will mean paying more interest, i’m sure people who take up such a loan wouldn’t mind – being able to “own” (the bank owns it while under mortgage) a house at all probably matters more to them.
