Give me a break. The fact that Blockbuster, a company not known for being nice to the competition, is suing someone in an AntiTrust suit is just laughable. So this is what happens when someone gets knocked off their high horse by a company without a strong physical presence.
Source: Ars
Every so often the mass concerns about Google and the data they collect rear their ugly head. Accusations that Google is tracking anything and everything about us yadda yadda yadda. I find it interesting that nobody drew that link regarding the recent MySpace Google deal. Google PAYS MySpace $900M in order to provide them a service? Isn’t that kind of like paying someone to come to work? Did it ever dawn on anyone that Google might have ulterior motives?
With an estimated 100 million profiles Google could easily use the data on these people’s profile pages in conjunction with their search history to completely map out who these people are, with photos, and what their taste, interests, and habits are? It also shows who their friends are, again with pictures, etc etc. The list of how this social site is linked together gives Google access to far more personal data than anything they have done to date.
I don’t know about you, but that puts them in a pretty powerful position.
My wife saw a story on the news yesterday that some researchers at Harvard have been looking into the link between drinking soda and obesity. Apparently 1 soda per day isn’t going to have a detrimental effect, but a 2nd soda per day can lead to as much as a 15 pound weight increase over the course of 1 year. Yikes. Now imagine that many people drink 3–5 sodas per day. I think it’s no wonder the average weight in the US is on the rise.
To track the sites that I read I use the customized Google homepage at http://www.google.com/ig. I have basically run out of screen real estate and so the need for an RSS Feed Aggregrator has arisen. I tried out a few products and settled on RSS Bandit and boy does it rock. I was worried I would have to shell out $20 or so for a decent product, but the Open Source community didn’t disappoint me with this product. If you are looking for a reader I suggest looking no further than RSS Bandit.
It looks like someone is finally taking WebKit, the rendering engine for Apple’s Safari browser, and making a Windows based browser out of it. If this thing ever becomes stable I could definitely see using it so that I could test compatability with the sites that I develop. I’ll keep my eye on this as it is still a 0.1 pre version, which means it’s prone to crashing.
So today I decided to look into standardized classes for DB access so that my sites had more portable code and weren’t tied to a single type of database server. My search led me to the DB and MDB2 Pear modules for PHP. After much reconfiguration of my setup at 1&1 I got Pear and the DB and MDB2 modules installed and running.
The following is a snippit of code that shows the same query run with both modules and gives you a framework for how you can start using it:
require_once("DB.php");
require_once("MDB2.php");function dump_users( $type )
{
$dsn = array(
'phptype' => 'mysql',
'hostspec' => 'localhost',
'database' => 'db_name',
'username' => 'db_user_name',
'password' => 'db_user_password'
);if($type == "DB")
{
$db = DB::connect($dsn);
if (PEAR::isError($db)) { die($db->getMessage()); }
$db->setFetchMode(DB_FETCHMODE_ASSOC);
$res = $db->query( 'SELECT * FROM users');if (PEAR::isError($res)) {
die($res->getMessage());
}
echo ‘<pre>’;
while( $res->fetchInto( $row ) ) {
print_R($row);
}
echo ‘</pre>’;
} else if($type == "MDB2") {
$mdb2 =& MDB2::connect($dsn);
if (PEAR::isError($mdb2)) { die($mdb2->getMessage()); }$res = $mdb2->query( 'SELECT * FROM users');
// Always check that result is not an error
if (PEAR::isError($res)) {
die($res->getMessage());
}echo ‘<pre>’;
while ($row = $res->fetchRow(MDB2_FETCHMODE_ASSOC)) {
print_R($row);
}
echo ‘</pre>’;
}
}dump_users('DB');
dump_users('MDB2');
Obviously you need to set the settings for the above $dsn variable as well as execute a valid query. To read more about these modules you can check out their respective pages: DB and MDB2*.
* When installing MDB2, you must also install the driver for your respective database application such as mdb2_driver_mysql. You can find all the drivers listed here.
I obviously do a lot of work on the web and I continually forget that my resolution (1280x1024) is not the most common resolution for my readers. That leads me to use the WebDev toolbar for Firefox which has a handy feature of letting me resize my browser to see what users of different resolutions would see. As a note to myself and anyone else that might need it, here are the resolutions for a few different browser windows. Take note that the vertical pixel count will be different for you as I have 3 additional toolbars on my browser.
800 x 600 has a viewport size of 792 x 412
1024 x 768 has a viewport size of 1016 x 580
1280 x 1024 has a viewport size of 1272 x 836
Also keep in mind that this includes having a scrollbar.
On Sunday Microsoft released the Vista upgrade matrix which tells you which OS can be upgraded to which version of Vista. I personally will be purchasing the Ultimate version and will do a clean install just to be safe. I would recommend a clean install to anyone moving to Vista. As far as which version you will be needing, that is a question you have to determine on your own.
You can check out the graph over at Ars.
I find the concept of a hybrid car to be ingenious and I wish the technolog were cheaper. It seems that tech-minded people have started “modding” thier hybrid cars to get even more out of them.
University of California, Davis engineering professor Andy Frank built a plug-in hybrid from the ground up in 1972 and has since built seven others, one of which gets up to 250 mpg. They were converted from non-hybrids, including a Ford Taurus and Chevrolet Suburban.
I would love 60–80mpg, but 250mpg will definitely do.
Source: Live Science
