uppercase numbers

My mother should not own laptops.  She likes them I guess because she doesn’t need a separate desk for them and she doesn’t need to figure out the extra wires on the back of a desktop.  Whatever the reason though, she is incredibly hard on them.  Broken displays, broken powerconnectors, liquid damage, crush damage, drop damage, power adapter shorts, and lots of dust, pet hair, and cigarrette smoke.  I get a laptop from her to repair every year it seems.  She recently broke the power connector on the HP Pavilion ZE4xxx laptop she had repaired a half dozen times and got a Lenovo something or other to replace it.  She promptly ruined it with a cup full of some sort of driink.

She gave me the poor Pavilion though.  She had taken it to some other local guy who tried to repair it by DESTROYING the motherboard in various places.  Ugh.  For whatever reason she just hates sending these things to me to repair first, even though I’m ultimately the one who ends up with them.  Repairing the power connector would have taken $4 but since some other idiot wrecked it before I could fix it the right way it’d cost $210-$250 to replace the mainboard.  To make matters worse, the damn asshole didn’t give her back the power adapter.  So I’d have to spend on another one of those.

It might be worth fixing if I needed an old laptop.  It’s not siginificantly better than the Dell I have and I’m going to be getting a new one for myself anyway so I assume it’s just going to sit in a box.  This happens a lot to me.  I end up with things that could easily be made to work with a small investment of cash but it’s really not worth fixing these things to sell and I personally don’t need it myself.

I wish there was an easy way to interface a laptop LCD to some sort of video input standard.  It’d be nice to use a laptop screen for other things.  What they really need to do though is build laptops a bit more modularly.

I’ve had iPhone envy for a while now.  They’re the ‘in-thing’ at my office and provide for great entertainment when needing to wiki something while out at lunch.  They seem to be useful for getting Exchange calendar alerts as well.

I just wanted one for Google Maps.

I’m not a gadget guy.  Up until a few years ago I didn’t even have a cell phone.  I don’t own a watch, a GPS, or an MP3 player.  As much as I like technology, I’ve just never been a fan of lugging it around with me.  The cell phone is a necessity these days even if only for safety reasons while on the road.  And I do own a PSP and a digital camera but I almost never have them with me if I’m out somewhere.  I found myself playing pinball on the cell in waiting rooms or using cell phone cameras for this and that.

If I have to lug something around it should really be as much of a multitasker as possible.  And the iPhone is that.  I’ll regularly use it for gaming, google and wikipedia.  I’ll use it once in a while for IM or SMS.  I’ll use it even less for phone conversations.  The camera, notepad, and calculator functions will be handy once in a while.

And then there are the apps.  Wow, what a great library even if you want something for free.  From Flashlight apps to rolling dice to a WoW character viewer.  There are a lot of cool things you can do with the iPhone.  A subject which others will go to in much greater depth than I will.

The last time I spent $200 on a phone it was for a Sony Ericson W600i.  It was a pile of shit from day one.  Fragile as hell, the camera hasn’t worked in 6 months.  The battery life is about 12 hours on standby.  Each button on the phone is designed to bring up some useless feature that will cost $0.05 to even access or blast MP3s with seemingly no way to stop them at the worst possible times.  It’s only redeeming qualities are the fact that it has a nice speaker phone, a bright white LED ‘flash’, and that it came with a PC data cable.  It played MP3s which was a decent feature at the time that I didn’t care too much about apart from ringtones.  I bought it because it was supposed to have a solid camera.  The picture quality was okay but some cheaper phones did better.  The iPhone isn’t much better itself unless you can hold it really still and have good lighting.

A lot of people don’t like the iPhone because they dont have (want) AT&T wireless.  I already had it so it was an easy upgrade path.  I’ve never been unhappy with AT&T so if there are better plans out there I don’t really know.

Another thing to consider are all the iPhone competitors on the market now.  The BlackBerry Storm looks interesting.  My reasons for going with Apple were purely laziness.  It’s a known quality.  It does what I want and I have a lot of friends with it so support will be easy.  I also know that it has a ton of cool free user created apps.  Also it’s been on the market for a while and this is the second generation so maybe it has a little more polish, even if that means it’s built more cheaply.

My first impressions are really good.  I can’t begin to tell you the awe which this device holds for me.  It works seamlessly with WiFi and cell networks.  It holds 8G of data.  It has a camera, a GPS, a tilt sensor, speakers, microphone, a big touch screen, and has extremely impressive battery life.  And it’s something that just about anyone in a first world country can afford to buy.  This really is ‘futuristic’ technology and sums up some of the best we’ve ever achieved as a race.  Believe me, I am not an Apple fanboy by any stretch and I know they just assembled the pieces everyone else was making.  Any company can do it.  But just on a macro scale this sort of thing seems amazing.  Not even my PC can do this much.

Of course most of the apps don’t seem to work right.  They’re prone to crashing or just being crap.  There doesn’t seem to be a hard and fast versioning scheme for ‘apps’ like you see in FireFox or something.  I’ll let other sites tell you about the iPhone problems.  They know better than I.

Except for one.  iTunes is garbage.  It’s slow.  It’s designed to make you purchase not to make your life easier.  It has no concept of sharing with any other applications or being ‘universal’.  And not letting me make a ringtone off of media I didn’t buy from the Apple Store is appealing.

I suspect it’s still better than most cell providers.  It’s still crap though.  The same kind of ‘marketing genius’ that has been killing the Sony PSP.  Stop locking us in to your ‘payment’ schemes people.  I might be a lot more willing to drop a few bucks at the Apple Store if they didn’t resort to these desperate measures.

Seriously, I’m not going to.  I *was* going to until that.  I’m that pissed off about it.  I can’t wait to see what else I can’t do because of ‘business level restrictions’.  One of the most amazing devices on the planet and some jerkoff with a BA degree and ‘nice hair’ wants to fuck it up by nickling and diming us.

I have two main desktop PCs.  One is water cooled and overclocked and represents the peak of affordable PC technology.  I use that one to play PC games.  My other machine is many years old and functions as a file server, video editor, and internet endpoint.  It’s the machine that has everything already installed on it.  It’s always on and it’s there and it just works.  I mentioned this one briefly in my dust borg post.  It’s still a P4 3.2C with 1G of RAM.  Great technology for 2003 but really slow for the things I need it to do.

I sort of regret selling off some of my older Core2Duo chips and boards.  I regretted that when I had to buy brand new stuff for Abi’s new PC.  And I’m regretting it now since I’m facing the inevitable processor upgrade for the dust borg.  It also means I have to buy more DDR3 since I’d like to use the same RAM types in all of the desktops here.

But first!  I need a new laptop.  I’m still rocking the old Dell Inspiron 600m with the Latitude mainboard.  I got to be honest… I’m not a big fan of Dell.  Their stuff is crashy and cheap.  But this notebook has been rock solid and I’ve put it through a lot of abuse.  Not bad for a 5 year old machine I got dirt cheap on Ebay.  I’m strongly considering a Dell XPS although there are some Asus brand notebooks I think have potential.

Between my laptop, my cube, and my work PC, I spend all my time and do all my important work on computers 10x slower than the one I use just for gaming.  It’s a very strange and seemingly stupid situation.  I could just do more on my gaming machine but one of the main reasons I don’t is because I like to keep it clean and fast.  Also because I may choose to blow away Vista x64 at any moment.  I’m really getting sick of Vista and it’s complete lack of driver support.  Driver support is supposed to get BETTER with newer OS releases, not worse.  Without driver support you might as well be using a Mac or Linux.

I simply cannot wait for PHP 5.3 to be released in some stable form.  I can only hope that we can start using it right away in my company as well but those are high hopes I think.  There are a lot of reasons that 5.3 should be better.  A couple things I’m looking forward too.

1.) $class::method()

2.) __callStatic()

3.) Late Static Bindings

I really hope the latter addresses a serious problem when it comes to PHP and static class inheritence.

class a {
static $var = ‘monkey’;
static function doSomething() {
echo self::$var;
echo __CLASS__;
}

class b extends class a {
static $var = ‘hate’;
}

b::doSomething();

What is output in PHP 5.2.6?

monkey
class a

That’s terrible!  I did manage a work around for class b:

class b extends class a {
static $var = ‘hate’;
static function doSomething() {
parent::$var = self::$var;
parent::doSomething();
}
}

But that’s pretty ugly.  There are some cases where you really want static class inheritance like this.  Here’s hoping for a fix in 5.3.

Another minor thing that grave me trouble recently was the lack of read-only class members.  It’s probably a rare problem but one that other languages provide solutions for.  It’s not always ideal to do all access through get accessors.