I’d recommend anyone with a laptop to at least undervolt their CPU. You’ll prolong battery life, decrease energy costs, increase the lifespan of the hardware, and help save the environment– all at no cost to performance! Here’s a nifty guide to follow. It’s written for Vista, but you can extrapolate it to work for XP without any problems.

Never before has so much been asked of so many to bail out so big a problem created by so few people.

Now I gotta get back to work.

It’s funny how software preferences and opinions on sensible computer usage evolve over time.  For example, I used to think blogs were the most retarded idea and that “bloggers” were those who had failed at life.  Now look at me.  Pretty sad, huh?  Then there’s the view of Windows Media Player users as misguided souls who need to be shown the light (e.g. foobar2k–in right screenshot–, mplayerc, VLC, etc.), similar to the perception online bourgeoisie now have of people who still use IE.

But even software choices that used to reveal technical savvy are being corrupted.  My favorite text editor for a long time, UltraEdit, seems to be killing itself by becoming bloated with more and more useless features while failing to fix existing bugs.  Still, I prefer it over the alternatives like TextPad, Notepad++, etc, although not by much anymore.  My new love is AutoHotkey, which allows you to create macros and assign them to global hotkeys.  I can now automatically launch PuTTY, login, start a shell, and cd to my project directory with a single key, and I’ve also configured a macro to perform KDE-style moving and resizing of windows (ALT+leftclick anywhere in window to move it, ALT+rightclick to resize it).  How sweet is that?

And then there’s another commercial that touts “IPod compatibility.” Okay, that’s a bit more accurate, but still, that’s like saying, “this CD player can play Soulja Boy CDs.” Soulja Boy isn’t the only music artist on CD out there, and the IPod isn’t the only portable music player with an audio jack connector out there.

echo “fund.Data={$ydata};\n”;

This caused a Javascript error, which didn’t make sense to me until I realized that the squiggly brackets weren’t being printed, so the output was actually:

echo “fund.Data=$ydata;\n”;

This was strange, because squiggly brackets aren’t the type of characters you normally escape in a double-quoted string.  However, if placed around a variable name, they apparently mean something special and aren’t printed.  So in the end, I just broke up the string:

echo “fund.Data={” . “$ydata};\n”;

And that worked fine.