In XP I was able to plug in the drive and fudge around in the Disk Management window to get the disk to show up after many clicks. The same to un-plug it. So it was “plug-and-play” but definitely not convenient, quick, or user friendly to do.

Then when I tried to connect my dynamic disk to my cousin’s Vista laptop via USB (his laptop has no esata port) it was impossible to get it to show up. It wasn’t auto-detected and I couldn’t find a way to do it through the disk management window. Had the same problem plugging it back into my XP system via USB instead of esata.

Based on my experience I say for maximum compatibility do not make your external esata disk a Dynamic Disk.

When you know you need maximum speed, accept that you will need to shut-down, then plug in the esata, then start up again.

When you need to run around from one computer to the next with you drive (friends, neighbours, work, home, grandma, win98, win2k, winxp, vista, 7, os-x, ubuntu, linux, etc) then you will be so glad that you external drive also has the USB option even though it’s slow.

Supposedly if your motherboard/eSATA PCI card fully supports the hot-swap part of the esata standard and you install the proper drivers then you will be able to hot-swap like you can with USB.

That’s the way I see it. If you know better please enlighten me.

IF it were possible to specify the box-shadow values long-form instead being forced to use the shorthand style then maybe would could have separate values for spread-radius (top, right, bottom, left) allowing us to simulate skew or perspective.

[photoshop screenshot showing a shadow tweaked in all four directions in top row, in bottom row show that same shadow behind non-distorted design elements. It should look right.]

I think it might also be useful to have a box-shadow-rotation.

[screenshot]

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/CSS/-moz-box-shadow

And I still say that with so many attributes the shorthand syntax will be annoying to work with (for me at least). And when it comes to wanting multiple shadows (or backgrounds) having the grouping of the values be in comma lists intead of grouped together is much less user friendly than using an array-like syntax.

[ example code comparing the 2 ]

*screensots & code coming soon

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCKGW#Notable_keys

THIS IS USEFUL:

Eye HDR from Christian Bloch on Vimeo.

Toggle comment menu command on a line of html gives two slashes instead of html comments [ // foo vs ] even though netbeans is obviously smart enough to realize when I’m working in a block of html vs a block of php.

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;
}

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 in my (poorly written) real estate site I have an object that represents a property for sale in the listings table of the DB. All 126 fields of the property record!

When it’s time to show info about the property to a visitor I only need to show them about a dozen fields. But most of those fields need to be manipulated. I need to ucfirst() the property status text, convert the price to Euros/Pounds/USD/BSD, attach the http://www.site.com/listings/… onto the permalink text of the listing, convert 3.5 into “3 1/2 Bath”, convert the square feet values into Acres if they are over 1 acres in size and lots of other stuff. Also all these fields had to be wrapped in html tags and ids and css classes etc.

At first I had all that stuff as part of the code that happens _before_ the data is saved to the database. Then other clients came along who wanted the same system (but different) and I realized a lot of those manipulations were only relevant to the site visitors. So then I put those instructions in the main class file as $listing->displayOverview() method.

But then some more clients came along who wanted something other than the default set of info in the default format. Some clients wanted the category value to link to a search results page of everything in that category. Some wanted the neighbourhood value to do the same. Some didn’t want the category or neighbourhood value to be shown. Sure I could have just use css to hide the neighbourhood span but some high end clients don’t want anyone to know where their house is located so the neighbourhood/address values weren’t allowed to be anywhere in the markup. They had to be taken out at the code level.

It unfortunately took a looong time and a lot of clients on this system to realize I needed to take this segment of my code and turn it into a custom decorator for each client that needed one.

Before that realization, at one point I had a site identifier variable and a ton of IF statements strewn throughout the code that made it a nightmare to read!

For another good example of decorator usage see this Zend Framework Zend_Form screencast (requires having a zend.com account).

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.

— 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.