August, 2008

This is a follow-up to my previous post regarding connecting your PS3 to a computer monitor. I received a lot of comments and emails regarding a (surround) sound system setup, so I'll try to answer them here.

While a am working on my secret project, I found a need for a local developing and testing environment which would provide the functionality of a LAMP stack (a WAMP Stack in my case). I had known about this nifty tool for a while, but had never had a chance to play with it at all. It's called XAMPP - it is essentially a WAMP or LAMP or MAMP stack rolled into ONE pre-configured package that you can run on just about any system.

After posting the quick "How to" regarding resetting your PS3 video settings, I received a ton of comments and questions. So, here is a post dedicated to answering them.

After spending a good deal of time trying to figure out what was wrong with my query, I finally spotted the problem. After doing some research on Google and trying all sorts of suggested 'solutions', the easiest one was right in front of me.

Here is the query that was causing the error: (names have been changed to protect identity)

DELETE r1_main FROM r1_main as r1, temp1 as b
WHERE r1.id = b.id
AND DATE(b.`timeStamp`) < DATE(init_startDate)
AND DATE(b.`timeStamp`) > DATE(init_endDate);

This statement kept throwing this error in the MySQL procedure:

SQL Error: Unknown table 'r1_main' in MULTI DELETE

After having owned my cellphone for about two years, I was expecting to notice a drop in battery life and it definitely has dropped - substantially. I have the Sony W810i, great phone, but it has always had crappy battery life. For the first few months, one charge would last me less than a day and a half. Now I'm happy if I can make it through a whole day without having to charge it in the car.

Here are a few things I've been doing to get the most juice out of my battery:

I've seen way too much of this in the past little while. As companies and institutions adopt a more technological approach to solving problems the human interface to things is quickly disappearing. Here are two situations I've encountered in the past few days, and I've been giving them some thought.

The Mosquito - Huh? What?

A friend asked me today if there was a tool that would convert files/documents to PDF. I've been asked this question before, so I though I'd answer it for everyone.

There are a few free utilities out there - I'm talking about the free ones only because they are for personal use where you don't need a licence.

When it was first introduced, I was wondering why in the world Facebook would incorporate a chat feature. Over the past 2 years, Facebook has gone from light and fun to heavy and repetitive. By adding yet another 'application'/functionality, they were just bogging things down even further.

I didn't care to use it at first, but now I'm using it quite a bit. The main reason is that when I see a friend online, it find it better to just send a chat message and get a live response - most of the time.