Archive for January, 2007

A new build of Paper Plus is finally available (after two years). This new version has several new features, such as automatic wallpaper changing (on a time interval), auto-change on program start, minimize to the system tray, and more.

The official 1.0 release of Firebug is now available. If you are a web developer, be sure to pick up this super-ultra-mega-cool extension. You’ll thank me later.

Some time ago, my family tried out digital cable. We were thoroughly unimpressed at the ‘digital quality’ and subsequently dropped the service. But strangely enough, the digital artifacts that annoyed us so greatly are now showing up in the analog signal. We routinely see compression issues and dropped areas in the picture, and it only seems to be getting worse. Is Time Warner digitally encoding the signal before they send it out on the analog line? It sure seems like they are, but I don’t see the benefit in doing that. Maybe it’s cheaper on their end? Does anyone else with cable see this problem?

The new networking card that I ordered came in yesterday, and I installed it last night. I now get excellent signal strength in my room, compared to the ‘poor’ rating I was seeing before. Hopefully the slow down issues I’ve been seeing will disappear as a result. My computer boots way faster now, which seems encouraging (boot time had slowed to a crawl, and I correctly suspected that the wireless card was to blame).

An expansion pack for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion has been announced, which means bad things for my productivity later this year. After having not played the game for some time, I’ve gotten hooked again, thanks to the Knights of the Nine expansion that I recently picked up. A few screenshots are available over at 3D Gamers, and though there are only a few of them, they look awfully interesting. The environments appear to be quite different from the game’s current locales, which should be refreshing. I can’t wait!

While working on my rewrite of MonkeyAlbum, I ran into an interesting programming dilemma. In the past week or so, I’ve been introduced to the MySQLi extension in PHP. The current MonkeyAlbum implementation makes use of the PHP 4 mysql_*() calls, so I thought I’d try out the MySQLi interface to see how it works.

MySQLi includes support for what are known as “prepared statements” (only available in MySQL 4.1 and later). A prepared statement basically gives you three advantages: (1) SQL logic is separated from the data being supplied, (2) incoming data is sanitized for you which increases security, and (3) performance is increased, since a given statement only needs to be parsed a single time.

It seems to me that the performance benefit can only be seen in situations where the query is executed multiple times (in a loop, for example). In fact, an article on prepared statements confirms this suspicion; the author in fact mentions that prepared statements can be slower for queries executed only once.

So here’s the problem I face: the queries that get executed in MonkeyAlbum are, for the most part, only ever executed once. So, do I make use of prepared statements just to get the security benefit? It doesn’t seem worth it to me, since I can get the same security by escaping all user input (something I already do today). Does someone with more knowledge of this stuff have an opinion? If so, please share it.

I have finally gotten around to deploying a random image rotator here at this website. The one I chose is surprisingly simple, and comes from an article over at A List Apart. No longer will the “Little Pinnacle Overlook Trail” be the only image to grace the header of each page.

The pool of images consists of choice selections from the photography section of this site. At the moment, the pool is pitifully small (only 4 images). Over time, I will introduce new photographs to the set, to help keep things fresh.

You may have also noticed that I have tweaked the site style sheet (again). RSS feed links have been demoted to the side bar, and the header area has been tightened up a bit.