A Day in Paradise

SWindows Live Mail - Mini Review

Check that out!

Mini-review at this awesome Spell Checking blog *cough* *cough*

Looks cool

The news has broken in a report on PHP-Center that the traditional annual PHP Spring Conference in Amsterdam has been cancelled this year. Because of the World Cup, people from all over the world will be flooding into Amsterdam, this influx of tourists has created a shortage of some of the essential ingrediants without which the conference cannot operate. Of course, I’m talking about the lack of a venue

I enjoyed the very successful Spring PHP Conference last year, the only complaint I had was the venue and specifically the wifi (or lack thereof). So I hope they can find a great new venue for next year, and that once football is out of the way the traditional Spring PHP Conference can continue as usual.

On the bright side, there’s word on the rumor mill that the International PHP Conferece in November is going to be bigger that ever, and will introduce a big sponsor which has yet to sponsor PHP events.

larry ellison - Google Search

Google picked some nice images here

The 40 Year Old Virgin (2005)

This is probably one of the funniest movies I’ve seen this year. The title pretty much sums up the premise of the movie, there aren’t a whole lot of big surprises as far as the plot goes, but it’s still an enjoyable watch.

We watched the 133 minute unrated version, which while a bit too long, it had plenty of good laughs, and even had some jokes that I hadn’t seen done before. The song-and-dance ending was especially amusing.

First time I’ve noticed Steve Carell, and thought he did an excellent job.

welcome our new music listening, game playing, media sharing, internet browsing, graphically challenged windows vista overlords!

MySQL AB :: Coding and Indexing Strategies for Optimal Performance

Must watch sometime

And the thunder!

The first Monday of Daylight Savings Time. It always sucks loosing an hour of sleep, but then again I get the benefit of sitting in my kitchen with my coffee just in time to watch the sun come up.

Another weekend gone by too quickly. On the list of things that didn’t get done was to set send out the first mass mailing to all the readers of this blog. I’ve been toying with setting up an email list for quite a while, and a couple weekends ago set up dadamail for this purpose. What I’ll eventually do is grab the emails of everyone who has ever commented and left their email on this blog and then send a subscription invitation. Once I get a couple “readers” I’ll start to send out a weekly email with a roundup of the blog entries for the week plus some unique content (aggregation of popular linkblogs, del.icio.us feed, etc.).

I did get a new phone (Nokia 6230i) and hooked it up to my laptop via bluetooth, the thing that I was most impressed with is the 1.3 megapixel camera. In good lighting it is good enough to take “OK-for-Web” pictures, because there is no flash, the shutter speed is very slow. I downloaded a bunch of applications and loaded the phone up, so we’re good to go. I also upgraded my mobile phone package, but am not very happy with the deal I got, since while there are plenty of free talk minutes, there aren’t any free SMSs included with the package. This makes sending 2 SMSs just as expensive as a 1 minute call, that sucks…

OK, now back to work…

Cool program thanks to My Heritage Happy Weekend

Update (this is too much fun!)

Stella is in Great company… mine is bit iffy :S

World news from The Times and the Sunday Times - Times Online

And finally a bit of good news…

Three Western peace workers held hostage in Iraq, including retired British professor Norman Kember, were freed today in a special forces operation near Baghdad after four months in captivity.

Details of the operation early this morning are still unclear but it was thought to have been led by Britain’s Special Air Service (SAS) and to have involved other units from the United States and Iraq.

Mr Kember, 74, was kidnapped with two Canadians, James Loney, 41, and Harmeet Singh Sooden, 32, in Baghdad on November 26.

A fourth member of the Christian Peacemaker Teams abducted alongside them, Tom Fox, an American, was killed two weeks ago. Mr Fox was found handcuffed and shot dead on a rubbish dump in west Baghdad on March 9, his battered body wrapped in a blanket and stuffed in a plastic bag.

I’ve wanted to comment on Tom Fox, the member of the team who was executed. Anyone who is interested should listen to the March 13th episode of Democracy Now, which talks with the CPT coordinators about Tom Fox and his execution.

The most powerful part of the broadcast was the reading of the “Statement of Conviction” as written by Tom Fox and Matthew Chandler in October of last year. Following is the rush transcript taken from the Democracy Now website. Read it through till the end.

“We members of Christian Peacemakers Teams in Iraq are aware of the many risks both Iraqis and internationals currently face. However, we are convinced at this time that the risks, while significant, do not outweigh our purpose in remaining. Many Iraqi friends and human rights workers have welcomed us as nonviolent independent presence. During the previous year, they asked us to tell their stories, since they could not easily be heard, nor could most flee to a safer country. We continue to act as a resource to connect citizens of Iraq with human rights organizations, both local and international, as well as accompanying them as they interact with the multinational military personnel and Iraqi provisional government officials.

”As Peacemaking Team, we need to cross boundaries, help soldiers and other armed actors be humane, and invite them to refuse unjust orders. We need to help preserve what is human in all of us and so offer glimpses of hope in a dark time.

”We reject kidnapping and hostage-taking wholesale. If any of us are taken hostage, absolutely no ransom will be paid. In such an event, C.P.T. will attempt to communicate with the hostage takers or their sponsors and work against journalists’ inclinations to vilify and demonize the offenders. We will try to understand the motives of these actions and to articulate them, while maintaining a firm stance that such actions are wrong. If appropriate, C.P.T. will work with diplomatic officials from our representative governments to avoid a violent outcome. We reject the use of violent force to save our lives, should we be kidnapped, held hostage or caught in the middle of violent conflict situation.

”We also reject violence to punish anyone who harms us. We ask for equal justice in the arrest and trial of anyone, soldier or civilian, who commits an act of violence, and we ask that there be no retaliation on their relatives or property. We forgive those who consider us their enemies. Therefore, any penalty should be in the spirit of restorative justice, rather than in the form of violent retribution. We hope that in loving both friends and enemies and by intervening nonviolently to aid those who are systematically oppressed, we can contribute in some small way to transforming this volatile situation.”

Great for front controllers - courtesy of Wordpress

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule (.*) /frontcontroller.php?foo=$1 [L]

Indices

So Barra stopped updating their historical S&P numbers last November. This leaves me having to update 30+ product deployments which have been cut off from thier benchmark datasource.

I’ll admit it was rather silly to make my application dependant on a single source of information which I didn’t have control over. In hindsight it’s obvious that I should have built my own webservice, which would not be dependant on any one source of information.

I guess we live and learn. Now to find alternative datasources and roll out a new webservice and update those deployments. Like I didn’t have enough to do already.

I’m not sure if anyone has anyone run into this, or has a better solution to this problem. What I’ve been doing is simply saving the document as an HTML and then grabbing the JPG or PNG image.

Is there a correct way to do this?

Google Finance

At first glance google’s new financial portal looks like another catch-up attempt to offer an alternative to a Yahoo! service. However, once you get past the simple front page, the individual stock pages are quite impressive.

Using a mix of Flash and AJAX, Google finance mixes the stock charts with their news service, allowing users to view access news articles and press releases directly from the stock graphs. The Flash interface also gives makes it very easy to select a time window to examine.

Company and management information are also presented as well as a summary of blog posts related to the company and timeframe. Unfortunatly, it seems that they only have hourly from the 14th of this march. Other than that it certainly ranks up there with Fool.com and Yahoo Finance as a great financial reference source. Interestingly Google hasn’t updated their stock search to include Google Finance.