I found this article this morning, about some scientists who suggest that the universe is laid out in a fractal pattern… which is pretty hectic. Of course this challenges the current “big bang” theory, so “Many cosmologists find fault with their analysis, largely because a fractal matter distribution out to such huge scales undermines the standard model of cosmology“, even though “Nearly all physicists agree that on relatively small scales the distribution is fractal-like” - what amuses me is how religious people are mocked for, and accused of, holding onto their beliefs and disregarding “scientific evidence”, yet it seems the same thing’s happening here? Who cares if it goes against the standard model of cosmology… investigate, and update - isn’t that what science is meant to be about?

The problem, however, is that “According to the accepted story of cosmic evolution, there simply hasn’t been enough time since the big bang nearly 14 billion years ago for gravity to build up such large structures” - unlucky. Read more…

FireFox 3.1 beta has just been released (portable version available here), and the “Ctrl+Tab” (for switching between browser tabs) has been changed to work and look more like “Alt+Tab” in Windows… showing you a picture of each tab you have open and allowing you to switch between them. Or as they put it “A new tab-switching shortcut that shows previews of the tab you’re switching to” - gee, thanks.

Personally, I HATE this new functionality - hasn’t anyone ever heard of that say “if it aint broke, don’t fix it”? I’m all for adding new functionality and allowing people to choose if they want to use it, but don’t change how a person interacts with a program (though personally I would’ve preferred it was a separate addon). I use Ctrl+Tab all the time, and the way it works now does not suit me. You can still scroll between tabs the “old way” using “Ctrl+PageUp” and “Ctrl+PageDown” - so now a one-handed action requires two hands… thanks alot. Clearly people are more concerned with things looking pretty than being functional.

Anyway, the point of this post is to tell you how to disable this new functionality, so it works like it used to. Go to “about:config” and type “ctrltab” in the filter bar, then set:

1) “browser.ctrlTab.mostRecentlyUsed” to “false”
2) “browser.ctrlTab.recentlyUsedLimit” to “0”
3) “browser.ctrlTab.smoothScroll” to “false”

You might need to restart FireFox for the changes to take effect.

I’m left wondering how much time was spent coding this nice new little “feature”, and how much it increased the filesize and memory usage of FireFox. Bad Mozilla. Maybe one day I’ll have to switch to “Links” (which looks like this). How about you spend more time worrying about standards compliance, CSS3, and passing that Acid test, and less time on making thing looks pretty, huh? Just a thought.

I use a couple of programs that I probably couldn’t live without… most of them are portable (or can just be run without needing to be installed), and all of them are free. Combined they weigh in at under 20mb - a very small price to pay for the functionality.

I’ve listed them in alphabetical order, and will provide a brief description of what they do and why I use them, but it’s up to you to read more about them and try them out:

allSnap - enabled “window snapping”, like WinAmp and Steam do… just helps with positioning windows on the screen

DisplayFusion - allows you to set different wallpapers on different monitors and provides hotkeys for moving windows between monitors, when you have more than 1 monitor (yes, I know, you could just use UltraMon, but it’s not free - though it does offer more features)

Hamachi - allows you to “network” computers over the internet, works through all kinds of network setups and firewalls

KatMouse - by default Windows scrolls the “active” part of the “active” window when you use your mouse scroll whell, this program scrolls whatever’s under your mouse

Launchy - basically a “Run” menu on steroids, you tell it the directories and file types to monitor and it makes launching files or apps incredibly quick and easy

PowerMenu - provides extra menu items when right-clicking on items in the taskbar, allowing you to adjust a program’s transparency, minimize it to the system tray, make it “always on top” and adjust it’s priority

ProcessTamer - monitors running programs and lowers the priority of any using too much CPU usage so your PC doesn’t slow down or freeze (only started using this today, but it looks like a keeper)

StrokeIt - gives Windows “mouse gestures” (you hold down your right mouse button and drawing shapes/letters) to execute commands, maximize/minimize windows etc (DEFINITELY can’t live without this one)

Taskbarshuffle - allows you to reposition items on your taskbar or in your system tray by dragging them, and close them by clicking your middle mouse button (like FireFox tabs)

UltraVNC - allows you remotely access/control your computers (I use this with Hamachi to access my home pc from work and visa versa)

Unlocker - when ever you get a “file in use” error (eg: when trying to move or delete a file) this program will tell you what’s using the file and allow you to close that program or unlock the file

I hope you find these tools useful :)

I found this Team Fortress 2 video here, thanks to ubercharged.net:

I found this on “Kovorka’z Gravel Pit” and like it, so here it is:

I’ve been trying to get back into playing as Spy, I think I’m in the middle of the graph at the moment ;)

As a PHP developer I’ve tried many different IDEs but have always ended going back to SciTE. I started using a version with modifications by Bruce Dodson, but got frustrated with it not listing PHP files in the default “File Open” window, and not recognizing PHP5 files as PHP files, so I got to tinkering.

I changed the font and colours (for PHP files anyway), removed the other languages, enabled the auto-complete dropdown, changed the menus, included the PHP binary to check files for syntax errors, and included phpStylist to beautify source code. I also made a new icon, and added the latest “php.api”, and made F1 (help) open the PHP manual (included).
Read more…

Another really good (funny) TF2 video, called “Gogol Rush” :)

I just read about a program called “CleanMem” on gHacks.net, it’s a little program (36kb) that reduces the amount of memory that running programs use. There are lots of programs out there that claim to do the same thing that work by filling your memory, forcing stuff to be moved out and into a file on your hard drive. This program’s different, because (from what I can tell) it tells Windows to reduce the amount of total memory a program’s using… so it literally changes the amount of memory a program uses, not where a program’s memory is currently stored.

I’ve tried it, and it seems to work great, so I’d definitely recomment it :) did I mention that it’s freeware? Download it here: http://www.pcwintech.com/node/145

I used to be dead against things like triggers… mainly because I hated coding them (and SQL) back when I learnt Oracle PL/SQL at college, and I’ve always been a “bare-minimum, must-be-backward-compatible, code-it-yourself” programmer… but now I’ve decided it’s just much easier to use them, and it’s not my fault if people refuse to upgrade to MySQL 5.

So here’s my niffty trigger code for the day, which automatically updates the “last_updated” (timestamp) field in a table, when a record is inserted or updated:

CREATE TRIGGER `database_name`.`last_updated_insert_trigger`
BEFORE INSERT ON `database_name`.`table_name` FOR EACH ROW SET new.last_updated := UNIX_TIMESTAMP();

CREATE TRIGGER `database_name`.`last_updated_update_trigger`
BEFORE UPDATE ON `database_name`.`table_name` FOR EACH ROW SET new.last_updated := UNIX_TIMESTAMP();

There’s probably a better way to do this (and I think you can combine both triggers, using “OR BEFORE UPDATE”?) but this is the first I’ve worked with triggers in MySQL and I’m too lazy to fiddle. Hope it helps. As I’m sure you can guess, `database_name` is your database name, `last_updated_update_trigger` is the name of your trigger, `table_name` is your table name, and `last_updated` is your field name that will contain the timestamp.