If you've been holding out for Firefox 2.0 (although why would you?), you'll be glad to know that Firefox 2.0 is now available. Lots of new goodies in this release: inline spell checking (the greatest feature yet), better tabbed browsing, session saver, and more. It doesn't get much better than this (until Firefox 3.0, that is).
While you're upgrading, make sure you have the latest versions of CoLT and Googlebar Lite.
My dad and I wanted to donate some money to WNCU, a local jazz station that we both enjoy, so I called the number they gave out tonight to make a donation. Does an operator willing to take my money answer the phone? No. The host of the live talk radio show that was currently on the air picks up. I explained that I was calling about the fund drive, and he explained that this was a live radio talk show. I apologized, gave him my number (hopefully off the air), and hung up. He still hasn't called back, and he no doubt had a good laugh at my expense.
Oh the humanity!
My family took a trip to the North Carolina State Fair today (as we do every year), and we had a great time. While there, I had some interesting thoughts on the types of people one sees at the fair. And, to some level, these groups also apply at amusement parks (though I'm not sure why). Here are the major people groups that I came up with:
Teenagers This demographic makes up a large portion of those actually at the fair. Many teens apparently mistake the fair for some sort of mass orgy; the girls dress scantily and the guys hang all over the girls they are with. Some teen "couples" can be seen walking around as if in some sort of mental haze. These particular teens "hold hands" (rather loosely, mind you) and seem stare into the distance at all times. Is this a result of a drug induced stupor? Quite possibly. Many of the teens smoke, and curse like sailors. I enjoy avoiding this group as much as possible.
Pre-teens Trying to Be Teenagers There are fewer people in this group, but enough to be categorical. The kids who aren't quite teenagers do their best to mimic their older counterparts, albeit in a much more immature way. I mostly feel sorry for those included in this group, since they just seem so pathetic.
Parents with Small Children Small children drive me crazy, and this year's fair seemed to be packed with them. There were strollers everywhere, and whiny, snot-nosed kids populated those strollers. And, through all the whining and tantrum throwing, mom and dad do nothing. Could they too be in a drug induced stupor? This group makes up (in my estimation) roughly a third of the people at the fair, if not more.
The Elderly Lots of older people can be seen at the fair, which isn't too surprising seeing that people 65 or older can get in free. The only main problem I have with this group is that they always walk slowly, and I inevitably get caught behind them. Come on grandma; get a move on!
Thugs Black, White, Hispanic, it apparently doesn't matter what color you are; "gangstas" can be seen all over the place. Baggy jeans, gold chains, over-sized clothing, threatening looks, this group has it all. The end result is so pathetic, I can't help but shake my head in disappointment.
Ugly People The fact is that there are a lot of butt-ugly people out there. And they seem to flock to the fair. Why must ugly, overweight women wear clothes that reveal more of themselves than anyone wants to see?
Can you think of a group I've omitted? If so, feel free to discuss.
While working on my photo album software, I ran into an interesting SQL problem. I wanted to be able to display information about my photo albums, along with the number of images in each album. The problem is that my data is broken up into two tables: an albums table and an images table. My goal was to use exactly one SQL query to access all of the data, including the count of images. And I wanted empty albums (no images) to also show up in the query's results. But try as I might, I couldn't get the query to return the data I wanted. I finally found a solution that works, and I present an example below.
Let's suppose we have two MySQL tables: one that represents directories, and another that represents files. The directories table has the following columns:
And the files table has the following columns:
The Parent_ID field in the files table corresponds to the ID field in the directories table. In order to select both the count of files in each directory, as well as all of the directory information, we do a simple join. But here's the trick: the order of your tables matters! Here's the query that works for this scenario:
SELECT d.*, Count(f.ID) AS Count FROM directories d LEFT JOIN files f ON f.Parent_ID = d.ID GROUP BY d.ID
When the tables are reversed in the JOIN, only tables with 1 or more entries show up in the results. What a subtle change! Hopefully someone will find this tip useful. It sure took me a while to get this working.
It turns out that DreamHost does not allow system() calls to be executed from PHP. This nugget of knowledge essentially throws a gigantic monkey wrench into my plans for the photo album software I'm writing. I was planning on allowing the large thumbnail creation process to run in the background, while the user continued to do whatever else they wanted. Since I can't spawn another process, these plans are shot. :-(
So here's what I plan to do for the time being: instead of using two thumbnails (100 x 100 and 640 x 480) and a base image (1024 x 768), I'm switching to one thumbnail (100 x 100) and a base image (800 x 600). It's not what I had planned, but it'll have to do for now. Thoughts? Suggestions? Sympathy?
Google has apparently bought out YouTube, which is a rather surprising move. Greg Linden predicts that this will be the point in history where people say that Google jumped the shark. While I don't think things are quite that extreme, I certainly don't fully understand this acquisition.
Perhaps the Google higher-ups have insights that we do not. Or perhaps Google felt like dropping 1.6 billion (with a b) dollars for no good reason. It should be interesting to see what happens to YouTube as things move forward. Will Google Video be rolled into the YouTube look and feel? Or vice versa?
A chemical plant in Apex, NC has apparently exploded, causing over half of the town's population of 32,000 to evacuate. It's made the top story at CNN, as well as other news sources.
I went to school at Apex High, and know lots of people in the area. One of my family's good friends lives near the plant (1/4 to 1/2 of a mile), and she is unable to drive due to a disability. We haven't heard from her, so hopefully one of her friends came to pick her up to get her out of harm's way. There's apparently a toxic gas cloud over the city, so hopefully nothing bad will come of that. The current rain appears to be helping in that regard.
This entire event reminds me of a scene from The Simpsons (from episode 2F32, 'Round Springfield):
Lisa returns to KJAZZ with the album, and the DJ puts it on a turntable and hands her a radio. "Here, you can listen to it on this," he says, but as she walks away from the station, all she picks up is static. She sighs heavily, "I did the best I could, Bleeding Gums." Just then, a large cloud appears over the radio tower and lightning strikes it. Suddenly, the signal comes in clearly -- for Lisa, Homer at home, Abe at the Castle, and Wiggum in his patrol car. "Attention all units, attention all units, poison gas cloud heading for --" announces the dispatcher, but her voice is cut off by the jazz transmission. Wiggum approves until he passes out from a cloud of poison gas.
Today is my birthday! :D
I received a Nintendo DS Lite, along with the new Mario Brothers game, and they both rock! The DS is quite impressive, and I've only played with it for a little bit. Perhaps I'll post some photos in the next day or so. I also scored another Al Di Meola album (this guy can really play guitar - I highly recommend any of his stuff).
Quite some time ago, I saw a posting by Matt Cutts, detailing when he tends to write new blog posts. I thought it might be interesting to see what kind of posting habits I tend to have, so I ran some similar commands to gather the data. Through the magic of Excel, I've come up with some interesting results.
First, let's take a look at the days that I post:
Interestingly enough, Sunday is the most common day for me to post (42 total posts), while Thursdays are least common (only 31 posts). It is quite fitting, and ironic, that this post is being made on a Thursday. For the most part, I post fairly evenly during the week. But what about the time of day?
This graph reveals some much more interesting results. Early morning posts are virtually non-existent, with only 1 post made during the 12:00 AM hour, and 4 during the 7:00 AM hour. Between 1:00 and 3:00 PM, posting picks up heavily, revealing an interesting trend in my typical work day. Early afternoons tend to be the slowest part of each day, and I apparently post to help pass the time away. The drive home from work can be seen in the 5:00 hour, with only 2 postings during that time. But things pick up again steadily during the evening. I post most often between 7:00 and 11:00 PM, with a combined total of 114 entries being filed during those times.
It's always interesting to see what trends occur in data like this. While I'm not surprised at the data, I find it interesting that my likelihood of posting varies so much with the time of day. Isn't statistics great?
I recently "discovered" the Optional Excerpt feature in WordPress, which is sad considering that it's been in plain view the entire time. From here on out, readers of my RSS feed will get a summary of each post instead of the first N characters. This should help make each post's intent more understandable. The only problem is whether or not I'll remember to create an excerpt with each post. I've clearly got to train myself to take this extra step before posting.
One other interesting feature that I recently learned about is the "post slug" field. This allows the author to specify what text to use when creating the permanent link for the post. How awesome is that? No more awkward contractions in the permalink URL's!
Here's a handy tip for all you WordPress 2.x users out there. The inline uploading feature of the "Write Post" administration page was completely useless to me. I never have, nor will I ever, upload files to my web server using the WordPress interface (that's what we have SCP and SFTP for). What irritated me most, however, was that I couldn't turn this feature off, thereby hiding the iframe that contained the uploading controls. It took up a large amount of space on the admin page, and it looked ugly. But I've figured out how to "disable" it. Here's what I did:
In the wp-admin/ folder, I opened up the file named edit-form-advanced.php. Doing a search for the word upload yielded a block of code controlled by the following conditional expression:
if(current_user_can('upload_files'))
I simply commented out this block (including the conditional) with some c-style comments. I did the exact same thing for the edit-page-form.php file. Voilà: no more inline upload! I'm so glad I've been able to reclaim that wasted screen real estate.
I've got several disjointed thoughts for you today.
I'm going to make a valiant effort to pre-order a Nintendo Wii via my favorite online retailer, Amazon.com. The Wii looks like an incredible platform, and is the only modern gaming system that has gotten my attention. With any luck, Nintendo will really score with this system; I can't wait to try it out.
The new theme I'm working on for this site is moving along nicely. I've gone through a number of test designs, and I've finally settled on one that I like. Development work is still taking place (I only estimate it as about 75% completed), but I hope to roll it out here at the site in the next 4 to 6 weeks. Keep your eyes peeled.
Last month, I mentioned the new photo album software I was planning on writing. I've come a long ways with that project, but I still have a long ways to go. A number of design paradigms have changed mid-stream, so code rewrites are plentiful. I'm looking forward to rolling this out on my site. I estimate this at a 40% completion level.
I'll leave you with a great Kent Brockman quote:
Ladies and gentlemen, I've been to Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and I can say without hyperbole that this is a million times worse than all of them put together.
There are a few categories of software applications that suck across the board. Instant messaging clients are one primary example (though Google Talk is changing that). Another seems to be CD-RW burning software. I've tried a number of applications, all of which seemed to either not work or not have the features I desired. Does anyone have any recommendations for decent burning software? The free packages I tried (Deepburner and CD Burner XP Pro) didn't impress me, and the Nero Express version I got with my CD writer is really old (5.something). I hear Nero 7 is horrible, but that 6.6 is pretty good. What do you use and prefer?
I recently mentioned the stuttering problems I was seeing in some games (Half-Life 2 to be precise), and my attempts to fix it with nForce 4 drivers and a fix from AMD. One of these changes, strangely enough, has made my computer run hotter (the graphics card now reaches up to 50 degrees under load, which is still somewhat cooler than my previous card, but warm nonetheless).
Before installing the nForce 4 drivers, I created a restore point using Microsoft's System Restore. And, after I noticed the heat problems, I tried to go back to the state the machine was in before I did the driver install. But restoring to my saved point doesn't work! After a reboot, Windows reports that it was "unable to restore to the previous point" and that nothing has been changed. I'm not exactly sure why I tried System Restore, because it has never worked for me before. Has anyone else ever gotten this thing to work? As far as I can tell, it's completely useless.
With Firefox 2.0 RC1 on the horizon (the branch apparently froze last night for check-ins), I think it's time for another of my opinionated views on the new Firefox theme. I have mentioned before that the new theme looked pretty bad, and apparently a number of people agreed. Thankfully, the theme was revamped in the September 11 nightly builds, and it looks a lot better. But people are still complaining. I like the new 2.0 theme much better than the previous attempt, but I still feel the Firefox 1.5 look and feel is ideal. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
So this leads to my main point: themes (or skins, whatever you want to call them) just seem wrong. So much time, energy, and development effort gets put into how stuff looks. Couldn't all of that be better spent in making Firefox better than it is today? Let's have faster start up times. The Places feature looks cool. And I'm sure there are other great ideas on the horizon. Can't we work on those instead of arguing about the icon used for the "Home" button?
At some level, a certain look will always have problems. One can't please everyone all the time, especially when it comes to looks; everyone's idea of beauty is different. So, set a look that most everyone agrees on (e.g. the current Firefox 1.5 theme) and leave it alone! Put all of the development effort on cooler features, not on shinier icons. In the end, I think everyone will be happier.
Yesterday, while playing through Half-Life 2 (this time at 1600 x 1200 ... :-D), I noticed that, after playing for a while, the game began stuttering. Strangely enough, changing the graphics and audio settings didn't make things any better. Even down at 640 x 480 with everything as low as it would go, the game was still quite choppy. So I got looking around the web, and began wondering if my new AMD dual-core processor was the problem.
I found a number of pointers to CPU drivers, dual core optimizers, a hot-fix from Microsoft, and more. But one forum post in particular caught my eye. It has links to all of the aforementioned fixes, and contains a number of tips on how to get games to work properly in a dual-core environment. This morning, I installed the latest nForce chipset drivers from nVIDIA, as well as the dual-core optimizer from AMD. The nForce drivers have unfortunately made my SATA hard drives appear as removable, which is odd but understandable considering that SATA drives support hot-swap functionality. And the dual-core optimizer seems to have removed the stuttering (though I haven't played as long today as I did yesterday; I still need to investigate whether this has truly fixed the problem or not).
Anyways, if you happen to have a dual-core processor, and are concerned about game stuttering, I highly recommend the forum post above. Perhaps the steps I've taken so far will fix the problems I was seeing.
I've been meaning for some time to comment on several fast food commercials that have been airing on TV. I find each one quite repulsive, and each motivates me to stay away from its respective establishment.
First up is a McDonald's ad. In it, a team of girl soccer players plays a game on an incredibly muddy field. I guess that the McDonald's folks are trying to appeal to those who have a thing for mud-covered young women. But what really gets me is what the narrator (one of the girls in the ad, presumably) says. She tells the viewer that she is someone. And not just someone, but someone like you. So, are they trying to say that if you work at McDonald's you're a nobody? Or some kind of freak? I've certainly never thought that way of McDonald's employees. While I do consider McDonald's among the lower echelons of the job pool, I don't go around each day making fun of those people. It's sad that McDonald's own self image is so poor. I guess it's somewhat deserved, however.
Next up, is any Hardee's ad that's aired in the past few years. Hardee's has tried vigorously to change its image, after suffering incredible setbacks a number of years ago. Their new image strives to be "tough" or "macho." But, at least to me, they end up being homoerotic. There's something about listening to two scruffy guys chew that's just not appealing. I get a major case of the jibblies any time I see one of these. Jibbly jibbly.
Finally are the recent Wendy's ads. What's up with the off key whistling that goes on? It's not musical and it's incredibly disturbing. I really miss Dave Thomas; his ads were simple and to the point.
I don't know what it is with ads these days, but the quality has really gone down the toilet. Not that ads were that good to begin with.
Apparently Steve Irwin, of Crocodile Hunter fame, has been killed while filming a documentary. I always enjoyed Steve's shows, his sense of humor, and his passion for animals. He loved doing his work so much that it made viewers love it too. It's always great to see someone so devoted to their work. He will certainly be missed.
The second beta build of "Bon Echo" (what will become Firefox 2.0) is nearing completion, so I am officially switching to the nightly builds for my browsing needs. And I've already been quite pleased. By default, the nightly builds come configured to use the nightly update channel. Through this channel, you can receive each day's updates just by using the Help » Check for Updates... menu item in Firefox. They get downloaded, applied, and the browser is restarted. And with the new session saver feature in Firefox, you start right back where you left off when you downloaded the updates. How cool is that?
I still dislike the theme, and the list of bugs written against it continues to grow. Thankfully, the list of fixes is also seeing some growth. Hopefully things can get polished up by release time.
Sometime at the end of this week, or perhaps this weekend, I will be updating both CoLT and Googlebar Lite to work in the beta 2 builds (stupid maxVersion, grumble, grumble).
For whatever reason, I've been in an incredibly lazy mood over the past several weeks. Every day brings a new stretch of boredom, and I don't know what to attribute it to. Perhaps I need a vacation. Thankfully, I'll be taking one in two weeks. A new PC game couldn't hurt either. I recently realized that I've been growing more and more tired of the games I've got. This past weekend, I reinstalled Quake 4, to try out its dual-core support. Although it was an enjoyable experience, it felt hollow. A new experience would be most welcome, but sadly there aren't any games on the market that pique my interest. Prey looks interesting, but I'm not willing to pay $40 for it. Oh how dry the well seems to be!
In other random news, I'm working on a new theme for this blog. It's still in the concept stage, but maybe I can get it up sometime this fall.