I saw the movie Idiocracy and I can’t get the phrase “It’s what plants crave” out of my head. Now I want the T-shirt!
This is the best one I’ve found: Cafepress BRAWNDO Dark T-Shirt
Here are two others that are cool, but are missing the ‘what plants crave’ text.
VintageCotton BRAWNDO
CultClassicTs BRAWNDO
By the way, electrolytes are what plants crave!
If you are a Verizon Wireless customer and use Firefox, check out the Verizon Minutes Used Firefox Extension.
Link: http://verizon-minutes-used.blogspot.com
I was looking for a Google start page widget to monitor my Verizon Wireless minutes usage but stumbled upon this Firefox add-on.
This Firefox addon works great! I have it configured to 0nly display the peak minute usage in the status bar. It has a nice pop up tool tip screen with all the details I would ever need about my account. You can double click the add-on to sign into the Verizon Wireless web site too.
Verizon Wireless, you should be paying this guy for this plug-in. It is these convenience features that will keep me a Verizon Wireless Customer.
I’ve found a couple useful web sites to help tune Apache with PHP on web servers.
phpLens has a pretty detailed page on the subject that hits everything pretty well.
For the most part I agree with everything this page says. I do have a few other suggestions though.
Addressing the 3rd suggestion on the phpLens tuning Apache and PHP post, I recommend turning compression on for specific content types using the mod deflate module in Apache 2.0 or greater. Apache 1.3 uses a different compression module which is a bit more complicated to setup. Here is a link on ClarkConnect that describes how to add the deflate support to your web site and track its statistics with awstats. Don’t forget to compress javascript, css and xml as well as html.
Link: http://www.clarkconnect.com/wiki/index.php?title=Howtos_-_Activating_content_compression_on_Apache
Web server or module level PHP accelerators seem ideal for speeding up the performance of php scripts. Though the 6th suggestion, I would debate whether caching pages in the PHP level is faster or not. Libraries like Smarty are great for templating your pages but they have their limits. If you are hosting a web site with constantly changing dynamic content, the caching built into Smarty is minimal at best. Granted that your original PHP script was well written, the cached Smarty version technically can’t re-optimize your database queries, which is most likely the source of any delays with a dynamic web page.
One suggestion that is missing from the post is optimizing your SQL queries and methods how you select the data. phpLens mentions the concept of output buffering. What I am about to explain is similar and should be deployed together. First and for most, when you are working with a result set of data from a database, loop through all the data and store it in variables as quickly as you can and free up that queries resource. This will use the time you are connected to the database as efficiently as possible and prevent you from accidentally creating nested queries. Since this practice is very similar to output buffering, perhaps we should call it ‘database buffering’. The database may still buffer data as well, but your script knows better than the database what to do with the selected data and your script definitely knows what queries are going to happen next. Database buffering practices just make sense.
I would also recommend testing your web sites for security issues. Check out Nikto, it is a pretty powerful web server scanner that looks for vulnerabilities and security issues.
So I saw the Dr yesterday, and I have high cholesterol. Of course I knew that already but I also found out that I can eat Avocados and guacamole! My last doctor gave me an information sheet for my diet which put Avocados at the top of the list of things to avoid eating because they are high in fat.
I was aware that doctors have now classified two types of cholesterol; a good one and a bad one.  Even though Avocados are high in fat, it’s the good fat! Read more here: http://www.goaskalice.columbia.edu/0656.html
The looser in this post is sour cream. I love sour cream, especially when I eat Mexican. I also love Guacamole. Typically I use either or both to add some flavor and moisture to an otherwise bland burrito or fajita. The past few years I have avoided guacamole and used sour cream, sort of a less of two evils decision. Now I know better, the sour cream is out and the Guacamole is in! Yea baby!!!
If you are looking for a full featured and simple to use CD/DVD burning application, look no further. Check out InfraRecorder found at Source Forge.
Link: http://infrarecorder.sourceforge.net/
I just used it to do some basic burning and it worked beautifully. It’s light weight and gets you going. Check it out!
Heather’s dad got the ceiling fan installed in the Master Bedroom. It looks great!
The ceiling fans we got come with a remote. I guess the remotes are cheaper than the traditional pull chains. The lights can be faded with the remote.
So I’ve put over 1,500 miles on the car now and let me tell you, all the miles have been wonderful. I’ve been keeping track of my gas mileage and I am happy to report I am getting over 30 mpg at every fill up thus far. I’ve filled the car up 6 times now and the worst fill up I got 30.1 mpg. The best mileage I’ve seen is 31.4 mpg. My last car, a 2000 Civic EX Coupe, ranged from 29 to 36 mpg.  The month before I purchased the new Civic I was averaging between 32 and 34mpg. This is a good comparison since I have not changed my driving routes or habbits in the past 6 months. I do drive mostly highway miles though.
Gripes
Yes, I have a few gripes about the car. They are small but they could make a difference. Here’s the list.
This is more of a thought than a gripe. The location of the cup holders is not ergonomic in my opinion. It does allow you to put larger than normal containers in them but they are not easy to reach when driving. In particular, I find it difficult to open a can of pop at the angle I sit in the seat.
Anyway, these are small issues I have with the car and they certainly don’t make me regret buying the car. The car kicks A$$! I think everyone should test drive an Si to truly appreciate what a small car can be if a manufacturer puts the effort.
Heather’s dad got the fan installed in our office. It looks really good.
Next is the ceiling fan in the Master Bedroom.
Wow. I am blown away. I think the pricing is just a tad too high though. I would recommend selling the Standalone Edition for $100 and the for Visual Studio Edition for $75. Anythign prices over $100 is a hard sell. Lucky for me I have a copy of Visual Studio Standard I got from a Podcast promotion from Microsoft last year.
I am hoping that the debugger in this product works well. This is the one thing that PHP lacks. So far I’ve confirmed that it is not a Dreamweaver replacement. It does not have a split view for editing HTML and it does not treat PHP pages the same as HTML pages. I would like to edit my PHP in a design view. Most likely the developers of this application do not consider the spaghetti coding style as a way their program should be used.
Heather and I purchased 2 new ceiling fans for the master and 3rd bedrooms. The fans come with overhead lighting and remotes.
Heather’s dad is installing them for us. The builder did not install overhead lighting in the home so the installation is a bit more complicated for myself.
