I've been using apachefriends.org's XAMPP on Windows for dev servers for years now. A default install isn't secured for a production environment, but securing it is fairly easy, and it spares me the headaches of piecing together Apache, MySQL and PHP. On my previous lappy, I ran with XAMPP 1.7.3 (~2009-12-23, Apache 2.2.14, OpenSSL 0.9.8l, MySQL 5.1.41, PHP 5.3.1, phpMyAdmin 3.2.4). In the interim, phpMyAdmin in particular suffered some abysmal cosmetic fluffery, so outside my dev environment I several ... (...more)

1. "unable to connect network drive" task tray balloon tips. With WinXP, if you had a network drive persistently mapped in your office network environment, Windows didn't deem it necessary to pop up a warning message that it was unable to connect the network drive every time you started the computer outside the office. 2. 64-bit Internet Explorer explicitly refuses to be the default browser. What's the effing point of making a 64-bit port of your integral browser, and then saying "oh but anything that i... (...more)

Google "stop cats bringing animals" and you'll find a lot of near-miss articles. We KNOW basically "why" cats bring their catches home. People have a handful of overly anthropocentric theories, e.g. the cat thinks you're unable to provide for yourself, or the cat is showing "appreciation", "respect" or "affection". Nonsense. Felis domesticus simply is an instinctively social species, and fetching live prey back to the pride home territory is a prime example of the survival advantage of social animal behavi... (...more)

I remember when I was in high school, one of the gym teachers admonishing a class about public displays of affection, using the phrase "playing huggy bear kissy face". (Don't remember which teacher, oddly - maybe Mrs. Casey, Miss Provost or Mr. Hill.) I doubt the phrase originated with that teacher, or even in that school, because if you Google the exact phrase "huggy bear kissy face" now, it returns about 13,400 results.

Wouldn't it be great if running a full file repository backup took zero time and less space? Then we could just snapshot the whole data repository daily. (If it's critical that your data be recoverable faster than daily, then you probably need to start thinking of investment in a RAID-mirroring platform, or a continuous journalling system.) If we could snapshot the whole repository daily then in the event of total server failure, we could just copy the most recent backup onto a live stand-in server. Or ... (...more)