Friend of mine was complaining that Skype still didn’t work on 64 bit linux. I bet him money that it did and won. It turns out the average person downloads the binaries for their distribution and then promptly gives up after they find out their download is meant for i386 architecture.

http://www.skype.com/go/getskype-linux-dynamic

I downloaded the dynamic linked installation and it works just fine on my vanilla 64 bit Ubuntu 8.10 install on an AMD64.

Adsense will only be king until a site thinks they can make more money by not making their own system. The risk/cost of making their own system is should be more than the amount of money that they get through a deal.

Also, focusing on a search engine as a revenue stream is something that is old hat. The Crome Omnibar and Firefox both function as searches without page impressions for Google. Some print/tv advertising now takes advantage of this. Keywords are coming back and the whole searchengine/domainname experience is on its way out.

Google isn’t in trouble if their search page drops in usage either. Adsense is just embedded search dressed up as advertising.

I’m having the hardest time rating photos in Media Player 11 so that I can share anything over 3 stars with my Xbox 360 through Media Sharing. I’ve spent a good amount of time using Google to find an answer and cannot find one. Does anyone have this problem? I could rate photos in Media Player 9.

Is this feature broken? It seems like I don’t have the correct media usage rights but its unclear how I fix this problem. I see

This file is missing media usage rights

When I go to the Media Usage Rights tab viewing the properties of the photo. This is frustrating me, I really don’t want to share a whole folder. Is there a solution for this?

Firefox 3 was released today

Anyway you should upgrade. Firefox 3 is much faster and more responsive. If you’re like me you will want to grab the addons oldbar, adblock plus, and noscript.

My bad, I plan on moving it over to godaddy because Directi isn’t doing it for me. I should of renewed and transfered it a long time ago before it got locked. Almost criminal how they can keep the domain for themselves if it expires while they are the registrar.

I finally found a fix for my Wacom touch screen on my Gateway E155c. I noticed that it stopped working whenever the laptop resumed from sleep or hibernate. To fix this I had to tell vista that it needed to restart the service if it failed. If you are having this problem you can run services.msc from your start bar.

Then scroll down until you find the Wacom Touch Service

Double click on the Wacom Touch Service and go to the Recovery Tab

Change the highlighted areas in the image.

OneNote highlighter and screen grab did its job

Yesterday, I participated in CSS Off which is basically a 24 hour competition to see who can turn a Photoshop design into the best web page.

I used YUI reset-fonts-grids for speed and browser compatibility so I expect to get criticized because its CSS doesn’t validate properly. I also noticed that I have a small error in my tabbed menu when the font gets changed. I should of styled the background on the bottom instead of the top of the tabs so when it resizes it doesn’t gap. I also used could of used a definition list instead of misusing bold and emphasis tags.

Overall, I spent a little over 4 hours on the entire thing. I’ve never had to deal with a PSD file with so many layers before. Usually, I just get one or two backgrounds instead of 10-12 images.

Anyway, here is my Creepy Critters entry for the competition.

Lets see I haven’t updated this recently and because this is my personal blog I can write about whatever I want.

I recently bought a new laptop (Gateway E155c) with Wacom which makes the tablet a dream to use. I’m considering making my next post a video with all kinds of neat drawings and diagrams. Anyway, if you are looking for a portable laptop thats direct from gateway and really cheap on ebay, this is it.

I also have a new job. It has taken over a lot of my programming time for the three projects I want to complete and a new one I want to start. The money for the bandwidth has to come from somewhere and Adsense isnt doing so well while the market resets the prices for pay-per-click after the changes they made.

Anyway I plan to have the new Cool Pictures site out in about 5 weeks, complete with a full user authenticated system and new layout.

One of the problems I’ve had is how to push updates to static files like javascript and content style sheets. If you want to program for performance you have to use a far future expires header to cut down on HTTP requests. The downside to this is that when you update your script and it has the same file name, the users browser wont know that its updated. Entity tags still involve a HTTP request even though the cut down drastically on the data usage.

The tedious way to fix this is to put the version number in the filename and change every layout to link to the new file.

One of the ideas I brainstormed was to add a GET to the URL in each layout that prints out the build/version number. This is an OK fix in that I only have to update my app/config with the new version number but the downside is that the user has to redownload every static file again even if it hasn’t been updated. I could make version numbers for every static file. This is kind of tedious because I have to program a different version number into every layout.

Then it dawned on me that I could override the built in helpers like $javascript->link() and $html->metalink() combined with a simple array with the name of script and the build number to do version control for me.

so a config file like:

$versions = array(’myscript.js’=>’BUILDNUMBER’,'another.js’=>’BUILD2′);

In a layout:

$javascript->link(’my_script.js’)

becomes

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”/js/my_script.js?ver=BUILDNUMBER”></script>

By using a GET the browser is fooled into downloading the file without having to deal with a mess of older files which should be inside some sort of version control system anyway.

I’ll post the code I used later this week when I complete it. If something like this has already been created for CakePHP, I’d like to hear about it.

I haven’t messed around with my Google search history all that much but I saw a cool feature today that creates a heat map on a monthly calendar that tracked my search usage. If anything I still use Google way to much. These searches are also only from home desktop.

I think 150+ searches per day is a lot. I’m hoping I don’t hit 250+ any time soon. It would be nice if Google could provide this data in XML or some other downloadable format so I could play with it without having to drag it screaming out of their website.

And this is an embarrassing graph of my insomnia.