My Geek Notes

This is an update to a post I made about how the themes are broken in phpMyAdmin 2.10.x.

While getting a new development environment setup I thought I would check to see if any progress had been made to update some of the themes I use for phpMyAdmin. I found that the following themes have been updated and the version it works with:

The one I use the most:
Very small PMA-Version 2.7 - 2.10

Others that I usually download:
Arctic Ocean PMA-Version 2.9 - 2.10
Grid PMA-Version 2.9 - 2.10
Silk PMA-Version 2.10
Paradice PMA-Version 2.10

The updated themes can be found here

After searching and searching for some sort of solution to fix the crashing that happens with Firefox on Linux when exiting a page with Flash 9 content, I finally found a good workaround that will get me by until someone at Mozilla or Adobe gets it fixed for good. I found this solution while digging through a couple of threads on some message boards. Once I saw it posted a couple of times I figured I’d give it a try myself, and go figure, it’s working!

1. Open up a browser window to some web page that has Flash 9 content on it - Yahoo, Digg, MSN, CNN or whatever - they all have ads in Flash (most times).
2. Move that browser to another desktop or minimize it - make sure not to close it.
3. Open a new browser and use that as your primary browser.

The key seems to be that when you close the only page with Flash on it, it crashes and kills Firefox at the same time. If you have another browser window open then it keeps the Flash alive there and anything you open or close on your primary window doesn’t crash. Simple and stupid, but I’m game until someone finds something better.

So i was recently browsing the web to find some new wallpaper for my monitors at work (a weekly ritual to help liven up my work week), when I came across the really cool one shown here on Iconfactory’s website.

The wallpaper intrigued me so I decided to find out what the word “frenzic” at the bottom of the image stood for. After researching for a minute on Iconfactory I found out that the image came from a new game that ARITS Software had released earlier this year called Frenzic.

I downloaded the free trial from their site and gave it a go, not knowing what the game was about. After my first game I was hooked. The game is laid out with a main circle (where the new pieces show up) and six surrounding circles (where you place the pieces). There are three different color of pieces in the game and each circle is broken down into six wedges. A piece will show up in the center circle and you have to place it into the corrosponding spot in one of the three outer circles before the timer reaches full. You get points whenever you fill up an outer circle. But the most points come from filling up a circle with a pieces that all have the same color. This also gives you a bonus: 3 circles give an extra life and the other three give you a bonus action: slow speed; destroy all peices in outer circles; double points. The speed with which you have to place the peices increases the longer you are able to play so it gets harder and harder.

On the Frenzic website they have instructions, high score boards, forums and all sorts of of other stuff about the game. So if you have a Mac and are looking for a fun game that you can play for a few minutes (or a few hours) download the free trial from the homepage of their site and give it a try. And if you get addicted to the game you can buy it for $14.95, or pay $24.95 and get unlimited lifetime access to all of the online features available on their site.

My initial plan was to wait a while before seeing Spider-Man 3 (in fact I think I may have even mentioned that here), but one of my co-workers talked me into taking off early and going to see it at the IMAX. So I’m guessing you want to know what I thought. Well the last time I checked Rotten Tomatoes Spider Man 3 stood at 61%, just barely fresh (the cut off is 60% for some reason), which is a pretty fair assessment I think. Going in my big worry was that they had tried to do too much, for one thing three villains seemed excessive. On that count they did pretty good, which is not to say that three villains wasn’t excessive just that it went about as well as it could. So as you can see I went in with fairly low expectations, and as a result was probably overall pleasantly surprised.

Other good things: The final fight was quite good; the actors who have just joined the franchise were excellent. As usual J. Jonah Jameson was hilarious (though I think the funniest scene was Bruce Campbell’s obligatory cameo). I was once again reminded that James Franco would have been 10 times better than Hayden Christiansen as Anakin (IMHO). Some of the scenes with Peter and Mary Jane were painfully realistic. On the negative side, there’s a section in the middle after Spiderman gets the black suit (not spoiling anything I hope) that is… well awful. If you’re like me and you drank too much soda pop, when Peter changes his hair style, that’s your cue to make a break for the restroom. Which bring up another point, it’s long… nearly 2 hours 20 minutes as I recall.

Oh one last thing, I noticed that “Gilwell Park” was the featured article on Wikipedia today. That probably doesn’t mean anything to most of you, but trust me it’s cool.

Bear your weekend with longanimity

ArtRage 2 is a free digital painting application that allows you to use a handful of tools that mimic the real thing. The free version let’s you save and print as much as you’d like. Pay $20 bucks and you’ll gain a few extra tools with the ability to edit and fine tune those tools… not to mention several other features that are disabled in the free version.

If you don’t want to drop several hundred dollars on Painter X yet still want that real media look and feel than this is the software for you!

I played around with ArtRage 2 a little last night and was very impressed!

Normally I alot about 15 minutes for my blog post, most of the time that’s sufficient, though obviously sometimes I go over that. Oftentimes when I select a topic I can tell it’s going to take longer than 15. This is one of those times, but the trouble is I really do only have 15 minutes, so we’ll have to see how far we get…

Earlier in the week someone submitted (or dugg) a story that contained the decryption code for Blu-ray and HD DVD disks. Well Digg.com was sent a cease and desist letter, and so they removed the link to the story. Well a revolt ensued and Digg users flooded the site with hundreds of stories and thousands of comments all containing the code. Someone even wrote a song with the code in it and posted it on YouTube. For a more complete look at what happened here’s the NYT article on it, and here’s an Information week story with a larger discussion of the DMCA.

Digg eventually gave into the pressure and stopped removing links to stories with the offending code. Here’s what the founder said:

After seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

So the quandry arises what was the right thing to do in this situation? Now IMHO the DMCA is a bad law, particularly in the area of cryptography. Also it’s clear that “The Code” got much, much more exposure in this ill-considered attempt to stifle it then it would have ever gotten otherwise. In other words even if they had the legal standing to send a Cease and Desist, it was a dumb thing to do. On the other hand respect for the rule of law is quite possibly the single greatest factor seperating a successful country from an unsuccessful country, and there is an element in this story that reminds me of a child throwing a tantrum.

Of course respect for the rule of law is greatly facilitated when the rules are just and wise, which as I mention is probably not the case with the DMCA (though I hardly think it’s the end of all creativity in the universe that it’s more vocal detractors make it out to be.) Perhaps the more intersting statement is what this incident reflects about the architecture of Web 2.0. This ABC News article said it best:

But the biggest problem with Digg is not the business itself, which is an impressive creation, but its community. One of the things we’re learning about the Web 2.0 world is that all communities aren’t alike; when you let millions of anonymous users design your product, you also let them determine your fate. And Digg has put itself in the hands of an army of postadolescents with too much education and too much free time, the age cohort that gets its news from “The Colbert Report” and holds the anarchistic view that all information should be, in fact, “wants to be,” free.

Nothing wrong with that. Indeed, been there, done that. But now, in my gray-haired middle-age I’ve come to realize that if you are going to create a venue for children to play, someone has to be the grown-up. And that is where Digg blew it.

Don’t look at me I’m not the grown-up

I’ve been using Linux (Slackware w/ Fluxbox) as my primary desktop OS for the last couple of years and continue to tweak it to perfection adding or modifying apps. I’ve done the same thing with my Windows (XP Professional) laptop over the same time period as I use both Linux and Windows for work in testing how websites render across browsers and platforms.

This last week I’ve been looking into a solution to my number one annoyance with Windows - the lack of a decent terminal/shell app. The command prompt doesn’t even come close to what I can do with Aterm or Xterm on my Linux box. When I SSH onto a server I can use Putty, sure, but even that is lacking in the stylistic options.

The solution - Cygwin. I printed the 66 page manual with the intention of tweaking it to do what I need, but my primary reason for installing it was to get Xterm and OpenSSH installed so I can finally have a decent terminal/shell app on Windows. The initial install does not include either Xterm or OpenSSH, but has a lot of the other core tools for Linux. Here’s the simple set of steps I used to do the install.

1. Go to http://www.cygwin.com/ and download the setup.exe file (the “Install or update now!” link).
2. Run the setup.exe file and walk through the wizard - I left everything default except for the “Download Site” where I chose ftp://mirrors.xmission.com because it’s the closest one to my location.
3. On the select packages step expand the “Net” section and click on “openssh: The OpenSSH server and client programs” (it will select other required packages for you like “openssl: The OpenSSL runtime environment” right below it along with any others in other sections).
4. Also, on the select packages step expand the “X11″ section and click on “xterm: Xterm - X terminal” (again, it will select other required packages for you).
5. Click Next to proceed.
6. On the last step check the 2 boxes to “Create icon on Desktop” and “Add icon to Start Menu”.
7. You should now have a Cygwin shortcut icon on your desktop, clicking it will bring up a command prompt and create some default files then put you at the prompt line for your input.
8. type startx at the prompt, hit enter, this will open up the xterm window where you can type ssh blah, blah, blah.
9. Any time you want to install other apps, just run the setup.exe file again and add or remove your apps - super easy!

I’ll be adding some more tweak instructions as I work my way through the manual and install some more of the apps that are available. There is even the option of getting Gnome and KDE working under Cygwin - check out those options with the following links.

For Gnome - http://cygnome.sourceforge.net/
For KDE - http://kde-cygwin.sourceforge.net/

I’d love to hear about your installs, setups, and tweaks.