I seem to be surrounded by problems these days. Zend has announced that Zend Studio 7 is now in Beta, so I figured I’d go give it a try since I was having so many problems with Eclipse being sluggish and overall a piece of junk. Yes, I know Zend Studio 7 is based on Eclipse, but I can’t help but think that the slowness is a part of the PDT plugin I use for PHP development.
I’m running Gentoo Linux AMD64 on a dual-screen monitor utilizing Xinerama. I ran into a problem when trying to start the installer for Zend Studio.
Continue reading →
As one of the first few languages I learned, PHP has a special place in my heart. I am able to do a lot with the language. But sometimes, I wish that the core development team would actually make it into a full object-oriented language. See more of the story for the exact reason.
Continue reading →
I’ll keep this brief and won’t include any spoilers. Out of 10 Star Trek gets a 12. The movie didn’t just beat every last one of my expectations for the movie, it flat out obliterated it. I was really impressed by how much different it was from the old series, yet not. For those trekkie fans out there, you’ll definitely notice the things that are the same from the original series & movies, and will hopefully like the fresh perspective and view that its taking to make it different from the past. Cheers.
While working on one of my consulting projects, I was having a difficult time finding documentation anywhere online on how to use the Dojo Drag-n-Drop (dojo.dnd) features with forms. I wasn’t too keen on making JSON calls or writing a whole-lotta JavaScript to solve my problem. Well, luckily I managed to derive a solution rather quickly. Read on for more details.
Continue reading →
Posted in PHP
|
Tagged dojo, javascript, PHP
|
I typically only install Mozilla Firefox plugins that I find really useful and help improve my browsing experience. Because I’m a hardcore Linux geek, I also love applications such as vim, which is a text-based, high-performance editor. When I head about Vimperator, I immediately grabbed it and started using it. The plugin was amazing in that it really helped me move away from that dreaded mouse and back to my keyboard, improving my overall efficiency.
Well, Vimperator recently released an upgrade to 2.0. This upgrade really overhauled the performance and indicates that the developers are serious about making sure this plugin is useful for its audience. It did, however, break compatability with one of my other plugins, Tab Mix Plus.
Tab Mixx Plus is a great tool in that it can help manage your tab bar and do cool things such as make all tabs a fixed width and spill tabs over to other rows (so that if you have 40+ tabs open like me, you can still stay somewhat organized). Additionally, if you open new tabs from a link inside an existing tab, the color of the tabs will change so you can see which are related. However, upon reading about Vimperator 2.0 and Tab Mixx Plus, I found that the Vimperator team doesn’t prefer Tab Mixx Plus because of the way it interfaces with Firefox.
Their alternative is Tab Kit. In addition to being more standards compliant in terms of how it interfaces with the tabs in Firefox, it also has more features than Tab Mixx Plus and also is more efficient. This is another plugin that I’ve found helps improve Firefox performance, since I was hell bent on reducing the amount of memory Firefox consumed on my 4GB system.
Hope this helps.
When Mozilla Firefox was still in Beta stages (e.g. pre-1.0), I fell in love with it. The browser was light-weight, standards-compliant, and much more secure than Internet Explorer. Ultimately, the thing that won me over was the fact that the browser had multiple tabs to allow me to browse multiple web sites without having to open a dozen different windows, yet still consumed very little memory.
Flash forward to today and we find that Firefox 3 is a bloated monster, especially on anyone’s computer that has more than 2GB of RAM. Why? Well, everything points to the caching that Firefox does behind the scene’s to make it have accellerated performance. However, after a certain point, this performance drops not just the browser, but the entire system. The caching algorithms by default use a percentage of total memory. Thus, the more memory you have, the greater initial percentage taken up by the caching system. So, on a system with 4GB of RAM (such as mine), I easily see Firefox consuming > 1GB of RAM – even with only 12 or so tabs open and things like Flash blocked.
I believe I have found a Firefox plugin that has managed to bring that memory bloating under control. The plugin is called RAMBack. So far on my Linux system, Firefox has gone from consuming ~25% of memory (~1GB) to just 4-6% (roughly between 175MB and 225MB). I’m going to try this plugin out on different platforms and see how it compares, and I encourage anyone else to do the same if they want to see immediate performance.
So, one of the things I’ve been working on is getting a nice Virtual Mail system setup for Cerberus’ Enterprise Hosting Solution. One of the things I’ve come to be really annoyed with is the lack of being able to apply procmail filtering to my mailbox (getting ~100+ e-mails from systems logs every day really makes my phone’s battery drain trying to download them all). After scrounging around, I managed to find a nice solution for my virtual mail hosting.
Continue reading →
No, I didn’t get neutered, for those of you with a sick sense of humor. I got my hair cut. How much? Let’s say about 12″+, e.g. almost all of it got cut off.
Why, do you ask?
- I couldn’t sleep right – I kept rolling onto it and yanking it
- I hated how much shampoo and conditioner I had to use to keep it sane
- I hated when I didn’t wash it because I woke up late
- I’ve been yearning for some sort of change
- I felt like giving some charity – I decided my hair could go to a good cause (Locks of Love)
I’ll post pictures of before and after soon.
I was on a quest. You know, one of those quests of “I can save myself close to $200 if I can figure out how to fix this.” types of quests. It involved trying to replace the chip on my color toner cartridges. My first attempt at replacing a yellow toner cartridge with a magenta chip failed (presumably because I scratched the chip). On my way back, though, my foot slipped off the little ledge in my garage and onto a box of nails – where one of them proceeded to go about half an inch into my foot.
Needless to say, blood, pain, and some betadine was in order. On a positive note, however, my yellow cartridge is printing again – so it wasn’t all for not. 
