Inspiring Software Book Covers That Make You Want To Jump Out of Bed and Master Programming *Now*

Learning a programming language like C# is something everyone wants to do, because then you can be as cool as this

No? What about Visual C++ 6?

If you’re more into web programming, then you can considering venturing into Ruby on Rails:

Once you’re familiar enough with Ruby on Rails, you can move on to the more advanced version:

And to relive old times, how about some Forth?

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Randomly From the Archives:
Switching Off Appliances Still Draws Power

My previous post about power adapters got me interested in electricity and it led me to this article on how there are vampiric devices in your home, sucking energy all the time. I got pretty surprised when I read the article (Read the full article here: http://www.electronichouse.com/article/why_your_electronics_suck_energy/). It turns out that all our appliances still draw electricity even though they’re turned off.

I know that they require SOME electricity, especially things like DVD players which have an internal clock — but did you know that SOME electricity can mean around 9 percent of your total household electricity bill? That’s a lot for appliances that should be already turned off.

Even power supplies like those that are used by notebooks can result in drawing electricity for nothing. Have you ever left a power supply plugged into the socket, but not plugged to your notebook computer? Then this excerpt may surprise you:

Many power supplies are inefficient and result in power loss when converting the AC power to DC power needed by the electronics. These are conversion losses, but there are also no-load losses, when an external power supply may be detached from a laptop computer but remains plugged in. “In that case, the standby load is for nothing, and it is still drawing power and dissipating it as heat,” Meier says.

I have a portable scanner, and this point sure surprised me:

Portable printers and scanners that are operated by software programs often don’t even have off switches, and these can be very problematic if left plugged in. An unused but connected scanner can draw 12 watts continuously, says Meier.

If you’re interested in finding out more about how much power your appliance is drawing, there’s a handy device that can help you. It’s called Kill A Watt, and how it works is that it acts as a middleman between your appliance and the power socket. So essentially you plug your Kill A Watt device into your power source, and then plug your appliance into Kill A Watt’s input socket, as such:

It’s rather useful because you can now reduce your energy costs by identifying the real energy abusing devices in your home. Kill A Watt has a LCD display that shows you consumption by the kilowatt-hour, just like your local utility company, so you can quickly calculate costs. Amazon has several Kill A Watt devices for sale at pretty low prices, especially if you buy low and used!

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Mozy Online Backup Review

I have tonnes of data on my laptop that’s essential for my work and school. Stuff like my personal documents, school transcripts, projects, and program settings and data.

I used to use an external hard drive to do my backup, but I realised that most of the time all my data would be in the same area, since my hard drive is typically left at home. That doesn’t bode well if there’s a break-in, fire, or some other disaster that happens to my home.

Sometimes I travel too, and then all my data would be with my carry-on luggage. What happens if my carry-on luggage gets stolen, lost or destroyed? 2 executives who travelled on a plane flight that crashed carried both their primary laptop and secondary backup hard drive with them when the crash occurred. They survived, but not their data.

That’s when I started looking at off-site or online backup services, and after poking through the various offerings, I decided to settle on Mozy. One reassuring factor about Mozy is that they’re owned by EMC, a very reputable technology MNC specialising in information and data storage and management. With such sensitive data at risk, I’d personally prefer to go with someone reputable, and whom I know won’t go bankrupt tomorrow and disappear.

Mozy has a comfortable, user-friendly interface that’s easy to use and straightforward. Backups can be secured with a password that only you know. The encryption that they use is industrial-strength too. It would take a normal desktop millions of years to try to successfully crack the encryption via a brute-force attack. That’s one of my primary concerns when I look for an off-site backup service — security and privacy of my data. After all, my entire life’s worth of information is there and I definitely do not want someone else taking a peek at them.

After the initial large backup (it takes a while for me because I have so much data, but I just leave it running on its own), subsequent backups are fast because Mozy only backs up the difference. Thereafter, restoration is painless — you can select an entire folder, or a specific file to restore.

After using it, I highly recommend Mozy’s online backup service. Get it if you haven’t! Here’s a coupon code that you can use:

Edit: Coupon code updated

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Unlock iPhone 3g/3g S on new iPhone 3.0 firmware OS

ultrasn0w (created by the Dev Team, not related to Apple) has been announced that will unlock the iPhone on firmware 3.0. ultrasn0w is yellowsn0w, but for the iPhone OS 3.0 firmware. If you have been using turbo SIM cards to unlock your iPhone, then this is the solution that you’ve been waiting for.

Good news! Ultrasn0w will be released on Friday 19 June 2009!

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Change WordPress Category / Archive Page From Full Content to Excerpt

This problem was annoying me because WordPress themes may show the full content of every single post when you visit a category page or archives page, and I didn’t want that. I poked around the WordPress API and it turns out that you can just use a text editor (or the built in WordPress theem Editor) and search for function the_content() and change it to the_excerpt(). Simple!

These changes can be applied to the following files:

• index.php
• category.php
• archive.php
• archives.php
• search.php

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Father’s Day Big Skinny Coupon Code

If you haven’t gotten a Big Skinny wallet for your dad, now’s the time because Big Skinny’s offering a promotional coupon code until 21st June for free shipping of their slim wallets!

Free Regular Mail Shipping until 6/21/2009, just enter promotional code FD2009.

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PHP Code to Detect IE Browsers

The extremely buggy way that Internet Explorer renders CSS annoyed me again, this time because of the different way it displays elements with z-indexes.

I spent a couple of hours trying to fix the bug, failed, and decided to go about it another way. The problem lay in a CSS/Javascript rotating banner gallery ,so I used PHP to redirect all Internet Explorer users to a static version of that instead.

Here’s the PHP code that I used. This is the function, put it anywhere in your PHP file:

function detectIE()
{
if (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']) && (strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], 'MSIE') !== false))
return true;
else
return false;
}

And this is how I called it:

if detectIE() {
//if true, means the user's on IE
//do all the IE stuff here...
} else {
//all is fine
//use normal code here
}

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Using jQuery with MooTools

jQuery and MooTools are 2 great javascript frameworks that allow you to incorporate some really fancy effects on your website. I was using them while I realised that I had to use both of them on a single page at one point. I didn’t realise it then, and took me nearly an hour before I realised that the two frameworks were causing some conflicts. For me, I was trying out the accordion effect, and that caused a few compatibility issues — i.e. the javascript effects did not work at all.

<script type="text/javascript" src="jquery-1.3.2.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
jQuery.noConflict();

(function($) {
/*whatever jQuery stuff*/
})(jQuery);
</script>

<script type="text/javascript" src="moo1.2.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
window.addEvent('domready',function() {
/*whatever MooTools stuff*/
});
</script>

Done! By doing this and segregating your javascript effects, you can use both jQuery and MooTools together in a same page.

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