Acer buys Gateway!!!

That'll make them #3 PC manufacturer

It explains why Gateway were putting out all those loss-leading laptops over the last 18 months - they were making themselves an attractive prospect for acquisition.

Firefox or IE? Strange answer to security question

Here's the jist - "not-for-profit", "independent" Honeynet Project undertakes study of browser security, using 30000 known exploit servers and find that Firefox shows up more remote code execution vulnerabilities than IE and Opera put together.

Thing vs. thing demonstrating that Firefox does more of something than IE and Opera put together (like ruling and not sucking, for example):


Yet, despite these amazing findings, I still use Firefox. Why? Well, because it's more useful, a pleasure to use and, in my experience, more reliable and secure. Oh, and it doesn't suck ass.

Opera is one hell of a good browser, but it won't be my first choice for some time. It may be high on security in this test, but that's probably because nothing is quite sure how to attack it - or its user base is so small it's not worth figuring out its vulnerabilities. Besides, there are a few sites and gadgets that don't work well (or at all) in it - though that probably says more about the way they are coded than it does about Opera compatibility. No SeaMonkey or Safari in this study.

Not convinced? Join the debate.
Preaching to the converted, am I? Join the debate anyway. Just for japes.

Two great freeware tools

The first, Texted, is a web developers friend - a unicode text editor with code folding, code completion (HTML, CSS and classes), advanced column editing and an FTP mode for uploading. "Why should I bother with this when I have Studio 8?", I hear you say - well, it's fast and it's simple, and sometimes that's all you need.

Teracopy is the real find. It's a copy and paste file transfer replacement for Windows Explorer that uses asynchronous copying to speed up file transfer. The handiest feature is probably it's error recovery: while Explorer just stops mid-operation when one file in a folder can't be transferred, Teracopy just carries on copying everything it can and lets you know which file couldn't be transferred afterwards. You can then choose to retry the transfer of that single file after you've figured out why it was "in use". With shell integration, you can bypass Explorer for copy functions for good.
There are lots of great shareware and premium tools out there that will do this better, but this is a very good freeware tool.

The SDLC in Pictures

Building an Object Model in PHP

Follow the link to read through a very succinct tutorial on how to build a combo-box populated by values retrieved from a MySQL database (Note: the example can easily be adapted for PostGre and not-so-easily for DB2 - but why would you want to use DB2?)

Network Magic (might be worth a try)

Just found a promising looking program called network magic. Read about it here.
I'll report back when I've given it a test run.