According to digg, Speedtest.net made some changes:
Cool.
(Thanks to Don MacAskill for hosting this speedtest.)
ora-code
A clever site I found is ora-code.com. Basically you just type the ID of your Oracle error as the subdomain and it jumps you to the answer.
Here is my latest error.
Reading too much…
“Sara would read anything you handed her…She read upon waking, sitting on the toilet, stretched out in the backseat of the car…If there was nothing else she would consume all the magazines and newspapers in the house—reading, to her, was a kind of pyromania—and when these ran out she would reach for insurance brochures, hotel prospectuses and product warranties, advertising circulars, sheets of coupon. Once I had come upon the spectacle of Sara, finished with the volume of C. P. Snow while only partway through on of the long baths she took for her bad back, desperately scanning the label on a bottle of Listerine.”
—Michael Chabon, “Wonder Boys”
I can relate.
This leads to the famous line in the movie: “She was a junkie for the
printed word. Lucky for me, I manufactured her drug of choice.”
Reading my height
I got my kitchen closet shelving today. (It’s actually a coat closet, but I’m turning it into a kitchen one which says something about my priorities.)
In about 3rd grade or so, we had to write down a self-description. The teacher gathered the cards, read them, and the class would try to guess who it was about.
My description started out: “I am 3′ 11″ tall…”
That’s about all I remember and it’s just about as far as the teacher got before the entire class guessed it was me. While I thought it was a pretty impressive number, I was still the shortest kid in my grade.
I’m standing in the elevator reading the side of a box I’m hauling up to the apartment. The shelves are 48″ long, an inch longer than I was at the time, and how this event comes back to my mind unbidden.
Gizmodo should stick to gadgets
It always annoys me when Gizmodo writes about digital photography. Mostly because they get almost nothing right.
Case in point: their article on today’s Lexar UDMA CF cards, which has three egregious errors.
First, I would believe that CF at PIO-5 (aka 133x) is already close to SDHC’s theoretical max speed and faster than any SDHC card out there, so it’s hardly “playing catchup.”
Second, there is already a camera that supports this card: the Hasselblad H2D and H3D. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the MF digital backs support UDMA. Sure they’re expensive, but they are not “theoretical.”
Third, UDMA is supported in the newest CF reader from SanDisk. This means that you have a practical advantage today in download speed to an external reader. Who would have thunk?
I know if they had bothered to read an article I wrote last year, they could have avoided foot-in-mouth disease.
I’m a simple guy
Because I haven’t moved in yet, there is a dearth of good books at my place. In light of that, I finally picked up a Redbook. No, I don’t mean I’m interested in how to find my inner sex goddess, I mean I wanted to see what IBM’s developer tech support has to say.
This one is called Developing PHP Applications for IBM Data Servers. And that’s a tad ironic because I’m using Oracle. As Chris is fond of saying: people are born with either an I or and O stamped on their foreheads.
I was born with “cheap ass” stamped on my forehead since I’ve tried to stick to MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite. But flipping through the book makes me make an observation from the cheap ass camp.
[Getting me to switch after the jump.]Continue reading
True Trucker
Toyota ultimately decided to pursue customers it calls “true truckers.” True truckers aren’t ordinary pickup owners; rather, these men are the Platonic ideal of truck-driving authenticity. They might work on the ranch or the construction site; they might fish for bass every weekend. “They’re the taste makers, the influentials,” Ernest Bastien, a vice president of vehicle operations, told me in San Antonio. “I think all consumers are influenced by professionals. The professional uses a certain tool, and then they want it, too.”
—Jon Gertner, “From 0 to 60 to World Domination, The New York Times
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.
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
paperjam and treekiller
At work one of the printers is named “paperjam” and the other is “treekiller.”
I printed out my stuff on treekiller.