Eye HDR – Gaze-adapting system for displaying HDR images.
Posted by thinsoldier in Uncategorized on February 8, 2010
Netbeans Bugs
Posted by thinsoldier in Note-to-self on February 5, 2010
Feb 3 2010
Netbeans bugs
Toggle comment menu command on a line of html gives two slashes instead of html comments [ // foo vs ]
Editing CSS – does not auto-complete pseudo elements like :hover
I just pasted this code:
// a comment here
if (isset($_SESSION['level'])) {
header(‘Location: index.php’);
exit;
}
If I place the cursor in front of “if” and press return I get this code:
// a comment here
if (isset($_SESSION['level'])) {
} // <– NOTICE THE ADDITION OF THIS BRACKET! BREAKS EVERYTHING!
header(‘Location: index.php’);
exit;
}
Posted by thinsoldier in Web Development on February 5, 2010
This is a comment I had about an article on the Decorator pattern
I think some people may overlook the importance/usefulness of the decorator pattern since all you’re doing in the examples could be accomplished by just concatenating P and /P around the getData() wherever it is you were going to display it.
I find the decorator pattern is best for when you have a lot of parts to the data that need a lot of manipulation of their values and a lot of html but not so much html that it warrants a full page/template/view.
For example Read the rest of this entry »
Avatar and Race
Posted by thinsoldier in Uncategorized on January 7, 2010
These are my responses to various articles and comments on this subject.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/markmardell/2010/01/is_blue_the_new_black_why_some.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/22/AR2009122203276.html
The majority of the ‘whites’ are the bad guys who ultimately take an inglorious beating with the survivors leaving in chains… the natives win! Then there is a healthy dose of inter-species love and the main man even chooses to give up his white, human form for one of the natives.
I think he gave up his CRIPPLED, human form for a SUPER HUMAN form and a community who lived a lifestyle that he liked better than his old one and lived on planet infinitely cleaner than his home planet.
So what if he was “white”. What if he was latino and the helicopter pilot was white? Would it make a huge difference? What if the tall skinny guy was Japanese. What difference would it really make?
I might be wrong (was half asleep watching the movie. eggnog) but there didn’t seem to be many black people in the military. And if this was a multi-national corporation running the show, why weren’t there more people of more nationalities?
Some of the other comments seem upset that the natives had to rely on a “white” outsider to save their butts. Of course they needed an outsiders help. Up to this point they had no idea the earthlings would consider attacking them for no apparent reason. They had no idea just how big and how powerful their weapons and vehicles were. They know nothing about human technology and therefore would never have thought to launch a surprise attack in the floating mountains because they would not know the magnetic field would give them an advantage. Without the help of a human (no matter the color) they would not have had a chance.
I see nothing racist about the movie.
Annalee Newitz, … io9, criticized “Avatar” for depicting yet another white man as a hero in the liberation struggles of oppressed people of color.
They never saw him as a white “Man” until near the end of the movie. And they weren’t “human” PEOPLE. They were aliens. For all we know the Navi consider the pattern of white spots on their skin to be the deciding factors of “race”.
“”"a white guy manages to get himself accepted into a closed society of people of color and eventually becomes its most awesome member.”"
Again, they never saw him as “white” or even “human” until the end. They probably wouldn’t even comprehend the “white guy” “black guy” foolishness and would tell us we’re morons for making such a big deal out of it.
“”A “race traitor” to his fellow humans, Sully leads the cat people in thwarting the military invasion. “”
Considering the Na’vi aren’t of the human species, it would be most accurate to call him a Species Traitor.
“”You can tell some cat people are Native Americans, for instance, because, as Newitz describes them, they “wear feathers in their hair, worship nature gods, paint their faces for war, use bows and arrows, and live in tribes.” “”
If I recall there are people from the southern tip of africa to the northern tip of Alaska who do one or all of the above. Native North American’s do not have a monopoly on of those things.
“”Newitz concluded: “Speaking as a white person . . . I’d like to watch some movies about people of color . . . from the perspective of that group, without injecting a random white . . . character to explain everything to me.” “”
Well, speaking as a person who lives in an apartment and drives a car on paved roads… when I watch documentaries about people <strike>of color</strike> from a very different society I find it helps to have someone from an english speaking culture to explain the important parts to me. It doesn’t matter what color they are. They could even just do a voice over. I just don’t need to see their skin.
“”Think of it this way. Avatar is a fantasy about ceasing to be white, giving up the old human meatsack to join the blue people, but never losing white privilege. Jake never really knows what it’s like to be a Na’vi because he always has the option to switch back into human mode. Interestingly, Wikus in District 9 learns a very different lesson. He’s becoming alien and he can’t go back.”"
Did this guy miss the end of the Avatar movie and most of the District 9 movie?
Jake did not cease to be white. He ceased to be Human! He ceased to be an earthling.
Wikus spent the whole move helping the alien so the alien could turn him back into a human. From the first signs of transformation he was desperate to regain his pure human form.
At the end of Avatar Jake willingly chose to permanently leave his human body. No going back. Why go back to being a parapalegeic on a toxic planet earth when you could be a big blue ninja and have sex with cat-woman? Even if he didn’t fall in love with the Na’vi woman he still would have stayed.
There wasn’t anythng particularly “white” about Jake. His character could have been black, greek, gypsy or Japanese and it would have had ZERO effect on the story. If Jake was played by Bruce Lee would you say he ceased to be Chinese? Ceased to be a U.S. Citizen? Ceased to be light-skinned?
“”Seegz wrote: Did anyone notice that during Sergent Scarface’s “we gotta flush out them blue savages” pep-rally, it was a person of color who verbally rooted in appreciation of it?”"
That’s because that person of color was HUMAN and he saw the Na’vi as ALIENS. Not as “other” <i>people</i>(humans) of color.
Even in the U.S. and caribbean there are people of one color(african american, bahamian, jamaican, chinese etc) who hate people of another color(mexican, hatian, dominican, japanese etc)
“”Bcbgrl33 wrote: I also just can’t believe that not only did Sully become a magical negro, the Deus Ex Machina was brought on by Mother “Earth” listening to HIS prayers even though Ny’teri said she didn’t take sides. Well I guess she never took sides if you weren’t a magical white man in “blue face” Ugh Thanks for this post”"
Jake told the tree to look into Sigourney Weavers memories and what it saw there about humanity’s greed, lack of respect for life, and overwhelming atomic firepower would make it realize it had no chance for survival unless it helped the Na’vi.
I swear, people need to actually PAY ATTENTION to the dialogue and stop being distracted by the special effects.
Anti-viral
Posted by thinsoldier in Uncategorized on December 20, 2009
Either Microsoft Security Essentials is ABSOLUTELY USELESS or Avira AntiVir Personal has major problems with false positives!
Hacked, then hacked again.
Posted by thinsoldier in Uncategorized on December 10, 2009
… then hacked one more time 
— edit —
After not having a blog for so long I finally got around to installing wordpress. Then it needed an upgrade. Then, it got hacked. I tried removing the malicious iframes manually (not in the mood for re-installing) and it got hacked again 2 weeks later!
I almost want to say I should have just written my own simple blog from scratch. I would not have had these problems. Sure my code would suck but IF there was a bug in I doubt anyone would bother finding it. Certainly none of the automated systems these troublemakers use to randomly scan the web would pay attention to me.
I’ve set up automated tests using Unmask Parasites and installed the AntiVirus plugin. Lets see how well that works.
Another site I built years ago has also been infected with something. The host has taken the site offline until the account holder logs in again.. I hope she remembers her password this time. I’m not looking forward to trying to clean that one up. It was running a really old Zenphoto, Coppermine, and PHPBB! Any of them, or all could be the source.
And all this after wasting my weekend trying to rescue and clean my windows xp machine.
Then you create 7 classes
Posted by thinsoldier in Uncategorized on October 6, 2009
Mark Says:
August 30th, 2008 at 1:44 am
1. It all starts with “I don’t need a framework.”
2. Then you create 7 classes.
3. Now you have a small library of classes.
4. Then you create an application that uses your library.
5. It works and it’s fast, hurray!
6. Then someone asks you to extend the functionality of your application.
7. And they keep asking for more, and more, and more and more…
8. Now you have 43 classes.
9. You’ve learn so much in the last 2 years. Design patterns, security, performance, testing…
10. What once was a small library is now a big, ugly, un-tested, un-documented, scary framework.
11. Then you change jobs.
12. And you create another 7 classes…
This has been happening for the last 30 years.
Pirated Site
Posted by thinsoldier in Uncategorized on September 22, 2009
Came across this today in an e-mail from Kemis.net:
http://chrealtybahamas.com/
I just knew I had seen this before and I was right :
http://bahamaswaterfront.com/
CH Realty’s website totally ripped of the css and most of the images from Bahamas Waterfront Properties!
The footer on CH Realty says SolveITBahamas built the site. It turns out both CHRealty and SolvITBahamas were both built by Symmetrix Systems, a company out of east India.
Screenshots: (coming later)
XDebug option missing from Zend Studio 7…AGAIN!
Posted by thinsoldier in Uncategorized on September 21, 2009
I wanted to try out the Zend Studio 7 beta but AGAIN there was no option for XDebug showing up in the preferences despite the fact that XDebug works fine on my system.
I’m hoping it’s the same issue I had with Zend Studio 6. It seems Zend hates XDebug or something. People say PDT (upon which zend studio is based) works fine with XDebug but for some reason the Zend people chose to hard-code the XDebug option OUT of the Zend studio preferences.
After a lot of searching I finally tracked down remnants of the instructions that got XDebug to work in my old Zend Studio 6. I’ll repeat them here if they work for 7.
distreff – see dtaylor7’s post above yours for steps on how to get XDebug enabled again. Having a Mac, I started with the steps I’d worked out for PDT (http://www.makovec.net/software/39-software/55-eclipse-pdt-with-debug-on-leopard.html), then did the following from Terminal.app:
cd /Applications/Zend/Zend\ Studio\ for\ Eclipse\ -\ 6.0.1/plugins
mkdir disabled
mv com.zend.php.debug.* disabled
/Applications/Zend/Zend\ Studio\ for\ Eclipse\ -\ 6.0.1/ZendStudio.app/Contents/MacOS/ZendStudio -cleanAfter you’ve done all that from the command line, your XDebug options will be back. You can then quit out and go back to loading up ZSE from the desktop.
– http://devzone.zend.com/article/2930
– http://devzone.zend.com/member/5810-dmakovec
The specific commands that worked for me:
:: cd /Applications
:: cd Zend
:: cd Zend\ Studio\ -\ 7.0.0
:: cd plugins
:: mkdir disabled
:: mv com.zend.php.debug.* disabled
:: cd ..
:: cd ZendStudio.app/Contents/MacOS/
:: ./ZendStudio -clean
Firefox Add-Ons
Posted by thinsoldier in Uncategorized on September 21, 2009
Just a list of my most useful installed extensions (on my Mac) so when I go home to my PC I can compare what’s on there and make sure both have everything I need.
Abduction
Delicious Bookmarks
Dust-Me Selectors
Extension Manager Extended
Firebug
GooglePreview
Greasemonkey
HttpFox
Image Toolbar
Link Evaluator
Locationbar2
Menu Editor
Mouse Gestures Redox
Operator
Pixel Perfect
Save File To
Stop-or-Reload Button
TooManyTabs
URL Flipper
UrlParams
View Image (Filename)
Web Developer
Webmail Notifier
YSlow
Zend Studio Toolbar