smart computer use?

Haha. I don’t know why this one made me laugh. Once I noticed it, I thought it was quite hilarious.

The funny thing is this:

• I am first told that the message is exactly 2148991 characters long. This is a very specific and large number. This computer is showing me that it knows insane details that a mere mortal human should not care about.
• I am then told that a certain amount of characters from the beginning of the message are being shown to me. 106496 to be exact. So exact, that the computer adds “or so…” to the estimation of characters that are being shown.

Come on. Don’t think that I don’t know what you are up to, you program. You are a lot smarter than you lead us to believe… you can’t play it off.

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I usually take a quick browse through my spam about once a day, just in case something that I need to pay attention to has been dumped into my spam folder. It does happen from time to time. Gmail does a nice job of filtering spam accurately, so I don’t have too much of a problem with various spam or non-spam getting labeled incorrectly, but it does happen.

I pretty much never read any spam mesages, or much less pay attention to various spam. There are many funny spam messages to be found, but that is another story.

The only spam message that got me to open it recently was this: Personal jetpack made affordable.

Sounds interesting enough. Better than the usual pharmaceutical offers I find the spam archives. This is unique. After reading the contents of the message, however, I no longer believed that the sender of the email could deliver on the promise of an affordable personal jetpack.

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I’ve recently run into an issue with Gmail (only on one of my computers) where the font type changes after I click any link in Gmail after viewing my inbox.

When I load my inbox initially, I see this style of font, the standard Arial Gmail font at it’s normal size:

But, after I click on anything… viewing a message, archives or anything else, the font style changes to what looks like Tahoma:

As I mentioned this only happens on one computer, in FireFox. I’m not sure what is causing this. I’ve cleared my cache a few times, tried messing with FireFox font style settings, and also restarting my computer. No luck yet.

Hopefully I figure this out before it drives me nuts… Any input would be appreciated if you happen to run across this blog post and happen to know what I am running into here. But that occurence would be a great coincidence, right?

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When it comes to PHP rapid development frameworks, two of them tend to get lumped together and compared a lot. CodeIgniter and CakePHP are two MVC (Model/View/Controller) frameworks that share a lot of similarities but at the same time have some distinct differences.

I have built 5 web sites using CakePHP. I found CakePHP to be a refreshing look at how to develop a web site. Maybe it wasn’t so much CakePHP itself that was appealing to me, but the concept of Model/View/Controller architecture.

Once this architecture is understood, it is pretty easy to dig into any MVC framework.

I found a great article written about a year ago regarding CodeIgniter vs. CakePHP at snook.ca. This post sums up the major differences quite well.

I believe much of CodeIgniter’s appeal is its simplicity in its approach. Most of the work is done in the controller, loading in libraries, getting data from the model, and pulling in the view. Everything is in plain sight and you can really see how things work.

CakePHP’s simplicity comes via automation (euphemistically referred to as “automagic”). It makes the coding process quicker but harder to figure out “what is going on” without popping your head into the core. For me, I like to understand how everything works and I’ve had to poke around under the hood more than once. For people just getting started, things probably look a little daunting.

Basically, both frameworks try to get you along your way quicker than coding from scratch, but both accomplish this in different ways.

Good stuff.

So, now, back to my thoughts. After using CakePHP on a few projects, I decided to give CodeIgniter a try. I found CodeIgniter to be a lot easier to work with. I just seemed to be able to accomplish my goals faster with CodeIgniter.

I still have yet to use CodeIgniter as much as I’ve used CakePHP, but I’m really liking it. I just started putting together a new web site for myself today, using CodeIgniter, and I seem to be able to translate my ideas to code much faster than if I was using CakePHP.

I am thinking that as I learn each framework more, I will continue to swing back and forth as to which one I like. The good old pendulum concept.

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I’ve been pretty reckless with my new laptop. It’s a little Toshiba machine, dual core Pentium CPU, 13 inch screen.

Very portable.

It’s so portable that I am finding myself to be very careless while “porting” it.

I often find myself walking with the laptop computer in one hand and the power supply in the front pocket of my hooded sweatshirt, for example. If I was to drop the machine, BAM! $600 down the drain, probably. I don’t want to speculate and create an omen.

I’ve been putting a lot of thought into buying a cheap yet serviceable laptop backpack for my laptop computer. I don’t want to sacrifice portability too much. It needs to be a pretty accessible and portable backpack.

Backpack Requirements

I want the backpack to be able to do the following:

• Hold a laptop
• Hold the laptop computer power supply
• Make both the laptop and power supply easily accessible
• Hold a camera, cell phone, wallet, notepad, pencil/pen and some other stupid crap that I probably don’t need to carry around at all
• Cost $20 or less

Backpack Actualities

I think my last bullet point relegates me to getting a backpack due to a:

• Garage sale
• Target/Kmart/Walmart/Some other supertmart “sale”
• Good pawn shop find
• Theft (I don’t condone theft, but it’s a realistic option to some)
• eBay special find

I’ll find one somehow. It’ll probably be at Kmart. I shoulda just went there instead of even typing out this blog post.

Backpacks of time past

I used to have a decent laptop backpack. It even had a nice shoulder strap, which made it very versatile. But one of the cats pissed on it, so much for that backpack.

Am I asking too much in my search for a decent, cheap laptop backpack?

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