Personal blog of Yzmir Ramirez

We continue our adventure in a safe house in the City of Westcrown.

The Party

Bort Taberd – Human [native Chelish] fighter. The son of wealthy merchants.
Toobufforu – Human [native Chelish] rogue. The son of the late famed opera singer (and known lover of young boys) Michelangelo.
Scarvend – Human [immigrant Khellid] sorcerer. Immigrant from the bizarre city of Starfall, he believes himself to be a prophet of the void beyond.
Max Blackstone – Dwarf cleric of Torag. Seeks to bring back open worship of deities other than Asmodeus to Westcrown.
Bindle – Gnome Illusionist. Seeks to allow art back into city.
Koa – Elven Monk of Zon Kuthon. Seeks to advance his deity’s influence in Westcrown.

The Adventure (more…)

Here are some modified 3.5 Initiative Combat Cards that were adapted from the Heroforg 3.5 Initiative Card:

D&D: 3.5 Initiative Combat Cards – for Players

D&D: 3.5 Initiative Combat Cards – for Monsters

D&D: 3.5 Initiative Combat Cards – Excel – this was used to make the above cards

The guys over at Hack a day found this computer hardware poster of pretty much all the connectors in use by the industry today.  Very useful especially for someone like me who really hasn’t been a hardware geek for quite some time.

You can also buy the print as a full-sized poster.

IE6, the bane of all web developers.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to code special cases just for the most non-compliant browser (since IE 5.5), of them all.

YouTube Will Be Next To Kiss IE6 Support Goodbye

High Performance MySQL

Well after my last book, I’m now reading High Performance MySQL.

My new job now has me working in a much larger server farm and so now instead of handling 10,000 users I’m handling many more times that.  This book will build on my background and make my queries work better in a distributed environment.

So I’m going though my Settings in my Gmail account and I notice a tab called “Labs”.  Interesting I think to myself and click on it and it seems the Gmail Gnomes have been slaving away at the nifty little options in their experimental features for Gmail.  Here are 6 Gmail Lab Features you should try:

YouTube previews in mail
Ever get a YouTube video in your email from a friend that asks you to  “Hey man, check this out!”?  Well now if you turn on this Gmail lab feature the link will expand inside the Gmail page.  You won’t have to navigate away from your message and have to wait for Gmail to reload your Inbox, its all right there in your message.

Flickr previews in mail
Just like the YouTube video in your message if you have photophiles that are always sending you their newest photos in their favorite Photo Streams then this is for you.  Expands Flickr links inside your message for you to preview.

Fixed width font
Are you old school and hate the default Ariel font?  Can’t align your ‘text tables’ right?  Well then this Gmail Lab feature is for you.  You can now have an option to view your messages in fixed with font like Courier.  Great ready for some ASCII art!

Default ‘Reply to all’
Always find yourself having to select the ‘Reply to all’ option at the bottom of a message because the top right button in each message is plane plane ol’ ‘Reply’?  Well, now you can change that option to be ‘Reply to all’ to the enjoyment of all your friends and family I’m sure.

Mail Goggles
Have you ever sent a message late at night to your friends or co-workers after a long night of drinking?  Are you an alcoholic?  Well then this Gmail Lab feature maybe for you.  When you have this feature activated you’ll be prompted to do basic math when sending a message during predefined time periods (customizable).  If you are inebriated that message won’t go out because you’re too smashed to know what 8 x 7 is.

Undo Send
OOPS did I just send that…unsend unsend unsend!!!  If you find yourself sending a message and needed to unsend that last message because of a misspelling, bad link, or accidentally sending it to the wrong person then you can turn on this little nifty Gmail Lab feature to give yourself 5 seconds to undo that sent message.

So in a recent symfony-zone article about “the best Symfony IDE: PHPEdit“, the author recommended using PHPEdit.   Problem is PHPEdit doesn’t have a Mac OS X version according to their requirements page as of this date.

So for now using Zend Studio or BBEdit is probably your best bet.  Haven’t tried Netbeans, but at least one developer I know still uses it.  Of course you could just use vi if all else fails.

One last thing, Zend Studio probably won’t ever have any first party support for symfony being that Zend Studio’s parent company has their own framework; so I would’t hold my breath for that.

When US Airways 1549 went down in the Hudson River yesterday, some of the first pictures of the event were posted via Twitter, the online and mobile messaging system that allows users to instantly post 140-character missives as well as hyperlinks to pictures and web pages. Twitter has, in effect, given anyone with a cell phone the ability to send immediate, eyewitness news updates out over a public wire.

Now, Yahoo is using the immediacy of Twitter to make its own news service better: the company’s researchers have launched a simple search engine called TweetNews that ranks Yahoo News stories by using information about the most recent, frequently-tweeted topics on Twitter.

Source: Yahoo Uses Twitter To Filter The News

With nearly all the major cell phone carriers supporting some kind of Twitter integration and nearly every mobile phone having video and audio capabilities it really is no surprise.  How soon will major news agencies start using these tweets of live new events?  Will the audacious reporter on the scene be replaced with the happless bystander?

Its only a matter of time live video feeds will be common place especially with 4G coming around the corner.

Don’t download from these other sites tools that claim to remove probably the most prevalent virus in computer history.  Go to this site on Microsoft’s website:

http://www.microsoft.com/protect/computer/viruses/worms/conficker.mspx

CampaignMonitor has a great article they host summarizing the CSS in email clients.  If you ever find yourself needing to know what CSS styles you can or cannot use when creating emails this is the definitive source.  They update this page often as new versions of the browsers are released.