smart computer use?

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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This is awesome. I ran across these muscle car flash drives at the Deadly Computer Blog.

What would you rather be carrying… a flat black boring USB flash drive or one of these stylish roadsters?

From etsy.com:

New to the car lot is this awesome USB Flash Drive Muscle Car. Under the hood, this thing is packing 1Gig of memory.

Click here to buy one of these bad boys. Looks like they are sold out right now.

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I recently visited one of the web sites that I regularly maintain and noticed that the CSS of the web site seemed to be missing. It was all plain text and plain images stacked up down the page in an orderly fashion.

Luckily Wordpress looks pretty decent even when a stylesheet disappears (for the most part). Even then I was pretty disturbed by the fact that the styles were gone. I didn’t think that I had done this. But, nobody else has access to the site. Who knows. I’ve seen my Wordpress themes malfunction or drop while I was developing on them and refreshing the pages quickly and heavily.

Maybe something just malfuctioned and managed to delete every line of code from my Wordpress theme css stylesheet?

The other best bet as to what happened was that I accidentally deleted all the code from the stylesheet when I was modifiying the web site at one point. I guess I would have noticed if I accidentally deleted every line of code from a file before saving it, but who knows.

Luckily I had a backup of the stylesheet on my computer at home. This issue, regardless of how it happened, was an easy fix.

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What is the difference?

I recently browsed the isles of a local HDTV dealer. There were walls that were many, many feet in length. Expansive isles of HDTV’s. There were many options. Many price differences. I saw many situations where two very similar HDTV’s were sitting next to each other, but each was priced on a wildly different level.

The difference? It’s the resolution of the HDTV’s that is different. The main point to recap this whole comparison is that if you don’t have an HDTV that is bigger than 50 inches you probably won’t be able to tell the difference between 720p vs 1080p.

Why the choice?

1080p is the top level spec to shoot for. 720p will suffice for now, and looks great, but will not be a great long term option.

1080p will probably be a better bet long term option for power savvy folk.

First and foremost, some people just want what’s considered the best spec on a TV. If you’re one of those people, spend the extra dough, you’ll feel better in the long run. Secondly, if you’re thinking of going big, really big (a 55-inch or larger screen), or you like to sit really close (closer than 1.5 times the diagonal measurement), the extra resolution may make it worth the difference–as long as you have a pristine, 1080i or 1080p HD source to feed into the set. And finally, it’s a good idea to go with 1080p if you plan to use your TV a lot as a big computer monitor.

720p is the most cost-effective option, and not necessarily the worst option.

If none of those factors jump out at you as true priorities–and you are working on a tight budget and want to save some dough–a 720p set is going to do you just fine. HD will still look great on your set, I swear. In fact, our current highest-scoring HDTV, the Pioneer Kuro PDP-5080HD, is a 720p, er–768p, model.

Read the entire source article here.

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