Misc

I'm a big sucker for good command line tools, often improved version of their (often) GNU originals.
One of these tools I simply love is ack. It saves me a lot of typing and produces a much nicer output:

And another one:

However ack has caused me some confusing moments, by default it searches only for files of a certain type. Basically meaning, it ommits files it doesn't know (by default). Small suggestion, to add -a to your .ackrc or just know what happens when you don't! I also added '.inc' in the list of php extensions, since it's commonly used.

It's a brilliant tool! Even though I was a bit sceptical about it at first, and it took me some time to fully trust it (because it's much faster). It's a good asset to my daily set of tools !

With the new PHPMyAdmin they changed a whole lot, and I like the new version! However everytime when I want to see details (like keys/indexes, etc) I needed to click on 'Details' or 'Options' to show all available details/options

Probably done to save space, but I just want to see it unfold by default. I couldn't find a configuration setting for it, but I found the use of "$GLOBALS['cfg']['InitialSlidersState'] == 'closed'" somewhere (libraries/common.lib.php:2390), so I added:

$cfg['InitialSlidersState'] = 'open';

To the config.inc.php and voila! If you find the correct way of doing this, let me know. In the mean while I'll use this.

I ordered a new (company) laptop a while ago and even though I was a bit skeptic I went for a Dell XPS. A colleague had the big brother and was very pleased with it.

I went for the small one, the 1330. I mostly hook it up to a big external screen so I didn't care much for the screen size. And it suits me just fine when I'm in my hotel room and want to watch a movie, play a nifty race game or want to work a bit more. It's definitely not enough for every day work, but I knew that up front. And I admit being spoiled with my other setup: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dynom/2434179780/sizes/o/

For the geeks amongst us, some specs:

• 13,3" WXGA screen (1280x800)
• Intel Core 2 Duo CPU 2,6Ghz (800Mhz FSB, 6MB L2 cache)
• 4Gb Ram (667Mhz, DDR2 SDRAM)
• 200Gb HDD (7200rpm and Free Fall Sensor)
• 8xDVD+/-RW Slot-load drive
• 9-cell 95WHr Li-Ion battery (standard is 60WHr)
• 128MB Nvidia GeForce 8400M GS
• Dell TrueMobile 355 bluetooth module
• Intel Next-Gen Wireless-N wifi card.
• Biometric Fingerprint Reader

The Fingerprint reader is awesome, it saves a lot of password typing. But you do have to configure and fine-tune it a bit. And you need to have pretty clean fingers.. But that's easy with my line of work

The pictures: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dynom/sets/72157605282116013/

 

The new milestone of Firefox is almost here!

Firefox 3.0b1 is released a few days ago and already shows positive results in performance, it runs faster, uses less memory and has nice new features! The most important improvement is the performance, Firefox was the slowest of the 3 especially when starting up and had a memory leak that let it consume lot of memory quite rapidly. I didn't care so much, when I browse I rather have full use of my system, so if it uses a lot of memory so what, but then again memory leaks are never a good thing.

Already many people wrote something about it on their blog, but there is only one that I read and find interesting enough to link here.
And that is: http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=960 an entry made by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes where he writes a little about memory usage.

To download the beta2 version, look here:

• http://developer.mozilla.org/devnews/index.php/2007/12/18/firefox-3-beta-2-now-available-for-download
• http://developer.mozilla.org/devnews/index.php/2007/11/19/firefox-3-beta-1-now-available-for-download

 

Who doesn't know wiki!
A great system for people to share information. This is great for websites and communities, but has downsides when you want to make one big information source.
Since as you can read on many news sites and/or blogs the information isn't always correct. In fact many propaganda is added to our beloved wiki.

Danny Wool (former) member of the wikipedia foundation and long time contributer started Veropedia.

To quote from the Veropedia.com website:
"Veropedia is a collaborative effort by a group of Wikipedians to collect the best of Wikipedia's content, clean it up, vet it, and save it for all time. These articles are stable and cannot be edited, The result is a quality stable version that can be trusted by students, teachers, and anyone else who is looking for top-notch, reliable information." 

All I can add is that I truly hope that it becomes a success as much as wikipedia is today.

There is much talk going on about it, name based hosting should score more negative in google then dedicated hosted websites. The opinions are spread, both sides have good arguments but the side that says "it's mostly bogus" I agree with. Your site CAN have a more negative ranking then a dedicated one if the IP you host on get's shitlisted. Meaning... Continue reading "SEO - shared hosting or dedicated hosting"

Today I've encountered the jpeg format and the conversion between CMYK and RGB.

I'm working with ImageMagick and the struggle to view 'corrupted images' at least that is what Firefox and Internet Explorer try to tell us. But in fact they just can't read CMYK. And I don't blame them, they have no business reading it anyway, they should stick to RGB.

The command turned out to be quite simple:

convert myCMYKimage.jpg \
    -colorspace rgb \
    ...

The colors however aren't all that great, in fact if you plan on using it seriously they plain s*ck, but all in all I blame that on the user who uploads it, not the 'failing' of the browsers or IM in this part.

IM supports much more advanced way in converting to RGB, using color profiles, etc. But this script is used in a public upload system and I'm not planning to fix something the user should have taken care of!

 

Thanks to ##imagemagick on freenode IRC who helped me with this.

Postbank ( a dutch 'bank' ) always had and for some till has a bad name. But they are trying hard to improve it! Now they thought of something new, the buddy! It's an MSN contact that you can request information from, like your last transactions and the amount of money you have atm. No very critical information or commands can be showed/issued so fairly safe, and in my opinion.. just cool!