Dogbert: barking up the wrong tree

Do you do any PHP development? If so, you’ll be aware of the LAMP acronym. LAMP stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP: all open source development tools available under the GNU license. The Open Source community has fully embraced the LAMP set of technologies and this combination is rather robust and has also been used to implement commercial-grade web solutions.

I’ve wanted to implement one of the client-server applications at my workplace into a web application but since we run Windows Server 2003 on our servers, I couldn’t quite use LAMP. But guess what I just found: WAMP Server .This is Apache,MySQL,PHP on Windows platform. One of the first hurdles to cross with these tools is installing each one. It can easily take a working day to install and configure MySQL to work with PHP and Apache. Especially if you haven’t done it before.

With WAMP, you download one exe installation file, run it and you have all the tools installed and all the services running in 3 minutes flat! Morever, you get a little icon in your task bar that allows you to stop start the services. Here’s a screen shot:

[Courtesy of WAMP]

OnLAMP is an excellent resource for LAMP developers.

I like to change my desktop wallpaper once in a while to avoid the monotony of my otherwise mundane life (I know, Dogbert needs to go out more).

Anyhow, what I wanted to say is that MacDesktops is an amazing place to get really great wallpapers. What’s really sweet about MacDesktops is that all wallpapers are free, high-resolution and most of them are available in 1920×1200 resolution that is perfect for my widescreen Inspiron 8500

So MacDesktops is my one-stop-shop for wallpapers. Screensavers are a different story though. I’ve seen some stunning screensavers on TV programs that would make maximum use of the GL capabilities of my graphics card but I just can’t seem to find them online.

If anyone has a good site for OpenGL screensavers, then drop me a line.

Really cool! Check it out:

Transparent Screen slideshow

I’m going to try to come up with some of these myself (right after I get that digital camera!—I gave my last one to my folks). If any of you guys take pictures like these, send me a copy at dogbertq8@gmail.com and I’ll post them here.

Nooo! Not again. After waiting patiently for more than 10 days to get my Netgear router from the US, I was so excited to test it out that I plugged it into the mains without reading the voltage readings on it

Result: The acrid taste of burning circuits and expressions of “Doh! Doh! Doh!” reverberating across the hallway.

Luckily, in my excitement I had not plugged in the router to the power adapter so the adapter was the only damaged component. I’ll have to go back to Hawally to shop for a replacement adapter.

And this is not the first time I have done this. I have a history with electronics and high voltages. My first one was a Dell desktop I brought back to Kuwait when I was in college and I managed to fry the power supply because I forgot to switch the voltage jumper from 110 to 240. That one resulted in a mighty bang and lots of fireworks. Luckily the damage stopped at the power supply and didn’t harm the motherboard.

The next one to go was my digital camera. After carefully reading the jargon on the power adapter, I plugged in the docking station of my digital camera into the socket only to see it go up in smoke.

And now this router. Final score: me 0 – electricity 3

With all the hoopla about Maps, I couldn’t help tinkering around with them myself.

Over the weekend, I took the Google Maps API out for spin and I was impressed by the ease of use of the javascript API. Checkout my quick hack here:

Google Maps – Kuwait

It’s only a very crude application that allows you to click around on the flags and see the name of the cities. It may take a while to load since it’s mapping about 200 locations.
But these basic tools can be used to conjure up some wicked apps like these:

oodle maps
Bicycle Route (Let’s you map your bicycle tour as an animation on Google Maps. Very innovative hack to animate the route.)

If people can provide me geocodings (latitude/longitude) of popular Kuwait landmarks, I can add them to the map.

I’ll do a small write-up later on if anyone is interested in playing around with the API (You don’t really need to be a programmer to do simple things with it).

I saw some “How many books do you own?” type questions on some blogs recently and IMHO, it was either using a really silly premise (your intelligence is directly proportional to the number of books you have) or was just good ole’ ego-inflation at it’s best.

In order to disprove the abovementioned premise consider the fact that I have about 3000 books and am told that I have (under?) average intelligence.

You don’t believe that I have 3000 books? Just take a look at my library.

Working where I work, I get free subscription to this wonderful resource called Safari Online . Safari Online (SO) is an online library of IT-related books from leading publishers (O’Reillys, Pearsons, SAM Publishing etc.). SO contains not only the full-text books online for your viewing pleasure but also includes a really good search tool that let’s you search for text, and more importantly, relevant pieces of code.

That’s incredibly useful because I can directly copy-paste code rather than have to type it out from a book. The only issue right now is that I have to read the books online and can’t print them out or save them as PDF (I’m guessing this is for IP reasons). Although there does seem to be a more expensive subscription where you can download and print chapters.

Subscription to Safari Online is “Enterprise-only” which means that your organization has to purchase group-wide subscription for SO. I’m not exactly sure why they’ve done that. One reason may be that if books are illegally distributed, they can hold your company liable (If that is the reason, then it’s one smart move).

Oh yes, they also have a library for Business professionals (which is a lot of handwaving if you ask me).

Here are some useful links:

Safari Online
Test Drive SO instantly
Trial Subscription to SO-Tech Books Online
Trial Subscription to SO-Business Books Online

Top 5 Reasons why I still prefer Opera to Firefox:

#5. Download Manager: I find Opera’s download tab much more nicer to use than the popup window in Firefox. Why doesn’t Firefox just integrate the download as just another tab?

#4. Session Saving support: If i have 10 tabs opened up and my boss passes by, I just close Opera. When I re-open it, it asks me whether I want to restart the last session. I click ‘Yes’ and voila, back to time wastin’ =)

#3. In-built support for RSS feeds: It’s child’s play to subscribe to RSS feeds. Just click on any RSS link and it will ask you whether you want to subscribe to it. If you click ‘Yes’, it’s added to active RSS feeds. Anytime there is a new post, there is a notification in the taskbar telling you that the feed got updated. You can read the feed in a ‘mail-reader’ like tab.

#2. The ‘Zoom’ feature: It doesn’t just resize the text but zooms into pictures as well. You have to see it to believe it.

and the #1 reason why i still prefer Opera to Firefox (drumrolls)

#1: Bookmarking: I love the fact that you can navigate down to the target folder and click “Bookmark Page” and the bookmark directly goes there. Big points on usability. Firefox should have taken this cue from Opera.

(Next up: “Top 5 Reasons why I may switch to Firefox” =)

Check this out: Hollow Einstein illusion. A bit unnerving.

There are other really great illusions, all based on sound physics, at the Grand Illusions site. The video downloads are a bit large but well worth it.

Use the ‘Brillian Button Maker’ tool to make link buttons. Real tacky.

I just got a killer broadband connection at home courtesy of my workplace. Seriously, this baby can run. I just downloaded the RedHat 9 ISOs (total 1.5GB) from the KEMS mirror in under an hour. Now those from outside Kuwait seeing this might be thinking that’s freakin’ slow. Well, that is pretty good if you consider the fact that most DSL users in Kuwait call 128 or 256Kbps highspeed dsl!

Doing a quick price check on qualitynet.net shows that for roughly the same amount I would pay for an annual 128Kbps connection here in Kuwait, I used to get 1.5Mbps (yeah that’s 1500Kbps) in the US! That’s an ‘order of magnitude’ difference.

Anyways, getting back to my dsl connection, it averages 512Kbps usually and since it’s free, I’m not complaining =)

What I will bitch about though is the ridiculous price gouging on wireless routers here in Kuwait. I want to setup a wireless network at home so I went around Ibn Khaldoun expecting to find a decent router for 20Kd or so. Boy was I wrong or what. Even bottom of the barell stuff like DLink was retailing for a minimum of 35KD. I know that it shouldn’t cost that much because I bought one in the US about 2 years back and it was like half that price. So did a search on PriceGrabber for that same DLink router and, guess what, the price is literally less than half of that.

I ended up buying a Netgear wireless kit for $75 (I need the USB WiFi key for my desktop because I don’t have any spare slots on my the motherboard for a NIC!)