Author: tychay

light writing, word loving, ❤ coding

Costco camera thought of the day

I noticed recently at Costco that they’re selling the Canon Rebel XTi with 18-55mm and the Nikon D80 with two lenses kit.

That’s silly. The D80 + 2 lenses (28-70 and 70-300) cannot compete against the Rebel XTi (+ 18-55) in a store like that. For one thing, they’re the same 10 megapixels. The D80 kit works out to be much more expensive (around $1200 vs $900). Sure there are differences, but the lenses aren’t even connected to the cameras so who is going to notice the larger and brighter viewfinder or better construction? And really, is this market going to care about those things? All your typical Costco buyer is going to see is that the D80 looks to be the same camera for a lot more, breaking the $1000 barrier is a big deal nowadays

It should come as no surprise that last time I passed by, the XTi was sold out.

Continue reading about A better strategy after the jump

Posted on by tychay 8

Clever HTTP

I was looking at FirePHP today, trying to figure out what the point is, because the screenshots they keep directing me to are a joke.

Here is a better summary:

Basically it is allows PHP scripts to send debugging (or profiling) information to Firefox’s Firebug without having the write to the page itself.

How it does this is quite clever.

[More on FirePHP after the jump]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 12

POW makes Ajaxian

Dave told me his website was getting stumbled.

The reason is he made Ajaxian:

FirefoxScreenSnapz001

Congrats. I love Ajaxian even if you have to wonder with all the Web 2.0 koolaid they drink there what’s going to happen when they have a James Jones moment.

Dave, as your first user ever, you have to convince me why I need to use it. I’m sure one of these ajaxnauts can figure out something useful to do with the extension.

[Personal stuff after the jump.]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 1

Amazon Prime a**hole

I paid for Amazon Prime because I’m rich and lazy. Besides, I spend about 15 hours a day at work, now.

This means whenever I have an urge to get a spatula, I just order it and it gets sent two day shipping at no charge. (Yes, I’ve actually done shit like that.)

But the new thing is they tried to sell me digital access, which, while a neat idea, is like a dumb ass version of Safari so no thanks.

Doing that must have caused a big mess up in their order flow because it just sent the stuff to my old company using my old billing information. I went to my accounts page to correct it but because the Amazon Prime thing, my order was being processed and I couldn’t cancel.

Dave IM’d and said it was a convenience tax.

(Just think what would have happened had I had 1-click turned out.)

[Updates after the jump]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 7

Creative abuse of the OSCON submission system

OSCON proposals are due in 20 minutes. I submitted something just now. That’s like 10 minutes sooner than last time. I am improving. 🙂

The last talk new talk I gave was at OSCON so I had to come up with something new. Since I just changed jobs and actually spent the afternoon B.S.ing one of Dave’s submissions (in exchange, he was the one who reminded me (multiple times) that proposals are due), I had to keep things sort of vague but possibly interesting at the same time.

That was a challenge.

[My proposal after the jump.]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 5

Terminology soup in x86

I’m trying to help someone in academia buy a unix workstation. The task involves intensive number crunching on very large (14 GB) data sets using packages like Maple, MatLab and SAS.

Here is a quote they got from their computing department:

There are two main UNIX servers:

  1. Sun Microsystems V40z with 2 Dual Core 64-bit AMD 852 CPU’s and 16GB RAM
    running Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS (64-bit).
  2. Sun Microsystems V40z with 4 Dual Core 64-bit AMD 880 CPU’s and 32GB RAM
    running Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS (64-bit).

Can you translate the above into English?

I appreciate any help.

[My translation after the jump.]
Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 1

On PHP Debuggers

[The views expressed in this blog are definitely my own and not those of anyone I work for, have worked for, or even get drunk with.]

I’m used to Xdebug. We use Zend Platform. Am I going to have to have a Rodney King moment?

Here is Derek’s take on it, and here is some guy from Eclipse PHP IDE’s response.

I don’t care.

I want the developers here to use the development environment they want and me to use the debugger/profiler I want. Anyone know a solution? Currently it seems that if I use Zend Platform, we have to use Zend Studio or Eclipse PDT to debug. If I use DBGp, we can use ActiveState Komodo, NuSphere PhpED, or PHPeclipse.

Am I wrong? Are there other editors that support DBGp? Which should I use (in particular I want have valgrind for profiling output and I like the built in error system in XDebug, but I haven’t had a chance to delve into Zend Platform so you can try to sell me on that).

[Other rants after the jump]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 2