A Day in Paradise

Woohoo, new Rambo!

John Rambo has been living a secluded lifestyle in Bangkok and salvaging old boats and tanks for scrap for twelve years. But when a group of volunteer aid workers bringing supplies into Burma disappear, a relative of one of the missing missionaries begs Rambo to find them. He heads off with a small team of aspiring heroes to locate and rescue them.

tip from doug

This is old news by now… just wondering how the european section of the “coalition of the willing” will do anything to stop the handing over of saddam since it so directly opposes the European stance on Death Penalty.

With Iraqis braced for Saddam Hussein’s execution, the former dictator’s lawyer said Friday the U.S. military has asked that he arrange for Hussein’s personal belongings to be picked up.

But Hussein has not been handed over to Iraq authorities for execution and remained in U.S. custody Friday, according to Iraqi Deputy Justice Ministry Bosho Ibrahim.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki said Friday that nothing will stop or delay the execution, according to Iraqi national television.

I’m not sure if I’m really surprised at the outcome of this kangaroo court, it’ll be interesting to see what ensues in the weeks following.

Hiro Nakamura from heroes is actually a code warrior in real life. His profile can be found at this great wired article.

“I’ve been programming computers since elementary school, where they taught us, and I stuck with computer science through high school and college,” said Oka. “ILM offered me an entry-level position at its Marin, California, headquarters, but they refused to fly me out for the job interview. Fortunately, Microsoft also was interested in hiring me and they flew me out to Seattle, then down to San Francisco and back to Providence.”

Oka ended up taking the job with ILM and remains with the company to this day, despite his hectic TV production schedule. He said ILM was a great place to start in the industry because he learned a lot about the pipeline and how the company worked.

If you haven’t watched Heroes get started now, we’re only half way into the first season. Hiro Nakamura and his very broken engrish is definitely the hero!

A lot of the software Oka wrote became applicable to other shows. For example, the computational fluid dynamics he worked on in Terminator 3, which allowed liquid metal to take shape, handled the drool in Dreamcatcher. His surface-cracking technology from Star Wars: Episode II worked well for Pirates of the Caribbean.

In other geek news the IT Crowd is coming back on Jan 5th. The DVD is also out (with L33T subtitles), just incase you’re wondering what to buy me for Christmas. If you’re wondering what the php connection is… IT Crowd consultant Yoz frequents #phpc and is rockstar programmer at ning PHP coders are also geeks and enjoy geeky shows like Heroes and IT Crowd.

Happy Holidays!

Finally I got around to posting some of my old pictures from IPC2k4. A lot of the regulars, some faces who we haven’t seen in a while. Enjoy.

A couple blogs from back then:
http://www.wormus.com/aaron/stories/2004/11/07/php-conference-day-1.html
http://schlitt.info/applications/blog/index.php?/archives/274-PEAR-Powerworkshop-Part-II.html

Unfortunately a lot of the blogging was done on the phpconf blog which seems to be down

Celebrate with the apocalyptico remix, and 10 things I hate about commandments.

In all seriousness though, have a happy holiday!

a chat I had with some of the lurkers on #phpc

(more…)

A flurry of PHP updates this week… on the heels of PHP5.2 we have ezPublish 3.9 and Zend Framework 0.60 and ezcomponents. While I have updated the PHP version on the server, I’m holding out on ezPublish and ZF till the holiday weekends.

I released the 5th article on my Zend Framework Hidden Gems series, this week focusing on Zend_Db. The upcoming article will be on Zend_Feed and because of the good response to the initial Zend_Db article, I’ve pushed the article on Zend_Db_Select into the queue after Zend_Feed. Expect to see both those articles in the usual place in the next 2 weeks.

In work related news, I’ve just launched my second ezPublish site (working on my third as soon as I get finished with this entry) I’m putting all our site release information on our HedgeCo Hedge Fund Websites corporate blog, so as soon as I get around to writing a release announcement you can see it on the Hedge Fund website launch section.

Oh, and I’m talking at PHP|Tek (more information here), looking forward to that. Now that we’re talking about traveling, I’ll be working out of West Palm Beach from the 7th of Jan to the 2nd of Feb so if anyone in the area wants to meet up, it would be awesome.

Nice free enterprise search solution from IBM and Y! The 5 minute flash walk-through shows some of the neat features. There aren’t a whole lot of technical details other that it’s Lucene based.

As seen on UB

I wasn’t very impressed with this song in the tomb raider music video (what was with the flying elephants), but this version totally rocks!

… because they dive into it like this.

Image courtesy of an International PHP Magazine.

Light a virtual candle to raise awareness of AIDS/HIV in the US.

Current candle count: 1261368

… and wearing a kilt

Maybe I’ll “upgrade” now… can’t stand the way FF2 works with tabs

<awormus> anyone know a way to put the tabs in ff2 back to how they worked in ff1.5?
<Akrabat> yes
<awormus> TELL ME
<Akrabat> I suppose I’d better look it up now
<awormus> I have FF2 on my laptop, but there is NO way I could work with those silly scrolling tabls
<Akrabat> user.js in your profile directory
<awormus> what’s the use of a tab if it’s not visible on your screen
<Akrabat> user_pref(”browser.tabs.closeButtons”, 0);
<awormus> Akrabat: thanks
<Akrabat> where the number is one of:
<Akrabat> 0 = close button on active tab only
<Akrabat> 1 = close button on all tabs
<Akrabat> 2 = no close button
<Akrabat> 3 = close button at end of bar
<awormus> nice
<awormus> what about the scrolling tabs
<ramsey> Akrabat, that’s for the close buttons
<Akrabat> then you need
<Akrabat> user_pref(”browser.tabs.tabMinWidth”, 70);
<Akrabat> to make the tabs a more sane min size
<Akrabat> looking for the last one
<Akrabat> ah yeah
<Akrabat> user_pref(”browser.tabs.tabMinWidth”, 0);
<Akrabat> I upped it again to 70 when I worked out that I didn’t mind the scrolling as long as it didn’t happen often
<awormus> Akrabat: thanks
<awormus> I guess once I have 20 tabs open I can handle scrollign
<Akrabat> with tabMinWidth of 70, I get 183 tabs on average before scrolling
<Akrabat> 18, rather
<Akrabat> another useful setting: user_pref(”network.cookie.cookieBehavior”, 1); /*1 = Only cookies from the originating server are allowed.*/

I posted a seo review on my Hedge Fund Website blog. For anyone who’s interested… digg it while you’re there

… on this one.

I certainly don’t know all the facts, but 40 years sounds like the country throwing the book at the serviceman because they don’t like the fact that he was in the country to begin with. But then again, there are 968 people who were sentanced to death for rape, so maybe he got off easy…