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Airbrushing is always subject to a lot of discussion. Mostly the discussion ends up dividing people into two groups. Those who hate it, and those who simply love it!

In my opinion the last group of people is the worst :) Mostly because many in this group tend to 'over airbrush' their models.

The longer you work at creating things, whether it's software, websites, essays or paintings, the greater the odds you'll hit a day where you don't feel like doing it anymore. Up until then, you may have heard others describe burnout, but you just shrugged it off as superstition, or perhaps believed yourself immune. But the day it hits you, the world seems suddenly grey. What was once fun and challenging feel stupid and annoying. Or perhaps the things that used to motivate or move you don't resonate at all. You feel nothing for them. It all just seems like so much more crap to deal with. If this sounds familiar, or you fear that this day is in your future, this essay is for you.

If you are trying to track down why your computer is running so slooowwwly, try using this simple DOS command from Digital Inspiration to uncover a possible problem:

In my experience, what most people consider to be their "best" people are often the root of most problems. It's the difference between troubleshooters and troublepreventors.

Let me explain...

Here's an issue thats really bugged me as a web developer for so long. But not only me. You'll find numerous instances of where developers have ranted and criticised the diversity of rendering engines that are available. IE5, IE6, IE7, Firefox, Safari, Opera and Netscape are the main ones that come to mind, and each one is uniquely different. Sure, thats fine when it comes to functionality and UI of the program, but does it also have to extend to the way Hyper Text Markup Language is rendered in each browser?

There are many reasons to let geeks work the way they want to work. Today they work in every industry. They are the knowledge base, blood and sweat equity of many businesses. They work harder than most. They work longer than most. Their job isn't a separate "thing they do" while they look forward to going home and relaxing. Geeks *live* what they do. They eat, sleep and breathe it. They are your systems administrators, your IT team, your programmers, your web developers, your designers... and sometimes even your customer service and sales people. Anyone who understands how to leverage todays technology to increase intelligence, productivity and efficiency; anyone who stays up nights working to get better at what they do; anyone whose job is their life - is a geek. These are the most important asset your company has. For this reason, its important to give geeks what they want. Best part is, if you do, they most likely will not leave your company to work for someone who will.

There, I said it, now we have to live with it.

For those of you who know me, you know that I am a man of my word. I am not a good person, but I am honest and virtuous. Maybe, kinda and sorta don't exist in my vocabulary, and that's sorta one of my best features. Maybe it's why I'm kinda the best at what I do? Entirely possible.

Sometimes it takes a real man to listen to someone's pain. I get to do it on a daily basis, oftentimes not by my own admission. Today's life-threatening terrorist force comes not from the Middle East, but from your very own computer screen. It's called Facebook, and it's going to ruin your life - if it hasn't already.

I'll explain how Facebook works in the most honest terms you'll come across:

Four tips for getting yourself out of a design jam.

Your pencils are sharpened and the page is blank. You've spent the last half hour watching cars, pouring a cup of coffee, and cleaning your keyboard without a thing to show for it. You've got designer's block, my friend.

I have been working with web standards based design for many years now and I see many rookie mistakes. When newbies get started with CSS/XHTML based web design, most of their work is focused on just getting the page to look like the Photoshop comp. While this translation is important to keep the client happy, considerable thought process should be involved in creating the semantic markup and marrying that with CSS. CSS is not a collection of hacks to get the browsers to bend to your will. Style sheeting is more of an art form. The difference between choosing inline elements and background selectors is a delicate procedure. How will I manipulate the structure? What is the client brand and how does this work into the markup. Simply thinking through your process before starting each project will save you headaches as the site grows.

So as you might see to the left; if you have an iSight, you can see that it was turned on and can be viewed remotely locally. All i am doing is displaying it back to you but What could someone else do with this? It is actually very simple to do. If you have the development tools installed you open up the Quartz Composer, create a video input, and a billboard. Then you just drag a line from the video input to the image option on the billboard.

Export it to a QuickTime movie and embed it into your page. I am going to research this a bit more over the next few days to find out if there is a way to make your iSight block this sort of connection attempt.

I like the little icons next to hyperlinks that signify if that link will take me offsite, open a popup, or link to a file (as opposed to another html page). Here's how to do it in a way that's supported in IE7, Firefox, and Safari.

Customising Apache Functionality at the Directory Level

One of the most common needs Webmasters have is to cause the Web server to handle all the documents in a particular directory, or tree of directories, in the same way -- such as requiring a password before granting access to any file in the directory, or allowing (or disallowing) directory listings. However, this need often extends to more than just the Webmaster; consider students on a departmental Web server at a university, or individual customers of an ISP, or clients of a Web-hosting company. This article describes how the Webmaster can extend permission to tailor Apache's behaviour to users, allowing them to have some control over how it handles their own sub-areas of its total Web-space.

1. If a method can be static, declare it static. Speed improvement is by a factor of 4.
2. Avoid magic like __get, __set, __autoload
3. require_once() is expensive
4. Use full paths in includes and requires, less time spent on resolving the OS paths.
5. If you need to find out the time when the script started executing, $_SERVER['REQUEST_TIME'] is preferred to time()
6. See if you can use strncasecmp, strpbrk and stripos instead of regex
7. preg_replace is faster than str_replace, but strtr is faster than preg_replace by a factor of 4
8. If the function, such as string replacement function, accepts both arrays and single characters as arguments, and if your argument list is not too long, consider writing a few redundant replacement statements, passing one character at a time, instead of one line of code that accepts arrays as search and replace arguments.
9. Error suppression with @ is very slow.
10. $row['id'] is 7 times faster than $row[id]
11. Error messages are expensive
12. Do not use functions inside of for loop, such as for ($x=0; $x < count($array); $x) The count() function gets called each time.

I could have sworn that someone has already a great post or forum thread on this topic, but I can't seem to find it (no matter how advanced my operators). I'm sure Mr. Malicoat has it in his bookmarks, but since blog posts are one of my personal systems for public bookmarking, here goes.

Adobe - Came from name of the river Adobe Creek that ran behind the house of founder John Warnock.

Apache - It got its name because its founders got started by applying patches to code written for NCSA's httpd daemon. The result was 'A PAtCHy' server - thus, the name Apache.