I use Skype for talking with my family and cheap long distance. But when I brought up my task list today I saw Skype hogging my memory. Sadly, there isn’t much you can do except restart Skype every so often.

What you can do is delete \Program Files\Skype\Plugin Manager\skypePM.exe because it does nothing and can eat up as much as 30MB of ram doing nothing. PM stands for Plug-in Manager but if you have never enabled or disabled plugins for Skype you don’t need it and can safely delete or rename the file.

If the blinking blue standby light on your Samsung 226bw is annoying then you aren’t alone. I find it extremely annoying to go to bed. I went through the documentation, I searched online and there isn’t a way to disable the light without damaging the monitor. The solution I came up with takes all of 5 seconds to do and can be reversed in the same amount of time.

Tape. Use tape, black electrical tape is probably the best choice, masking tape works too. The button still works through the tape and you no longer have to see the blinking blue strobe light up your office. I would avoid using heavy duty tape like duct tape because it will leave a sticky residue behind thats harder to remove.

My WordPress upgrade to version 2.3 was greeted by this error after running the update script:

WordPress database error: [Table 'wordpress.wp_terms' doesn't exist]

SELECT t.*, tt.*, tr.object_id FROM wp_terms AS t INNER JOIN wp_term_taxonomy AS tt ON tt.term_id = t.term_id INNER JOIN wp_term_relationships AS tr ON tr.term_taxonomy_id = tt.term_taxonomy_id WHERE tt.taxonomy IN ('category', 'post_tag') AND tr.object_id IN (214) ORDER BY t.name ASC

The problem fixed itself after I saved an edit to a post. I suspect any change to the categories would also fix the problem.

My lasik experience taught me how to use eye drops. The bad taste of Pred Forte comes from drainage through your tear ducts and then which empty down the back of your throat.

If you close your tear duct and tilt your head back for 2-3 minutes it should be enough to prevent or lessen the bad taste in your mouth. This will help prevent the drops escaping down the tear duct and leaving a bad taste in your mouth.

Your tear duct is located on the edge of your eye next to your nose. Almost no pressure is needed to close your tear duct, the act of placing your finger gently against the side of your nose should be enough to close it. It should feel like a small bulge.

A little disclaimer: I could be totally wrong because I’m still learning the ins and outs of CakePHP.

I don’t like the current solution for validation of unique fields in the 1.2 CakePHP AppModel mainly because I couldn’t get it to work so I created my own. Sorry about the formatting, I’ve never posted code in my blog before and not being able to properly indent the code isn’t a big concern for me. The code was inspired by the comments between speedmax and cakebaker on his blog.

// YourModel.php
var $validate = array( // validate our username and email
'username' => array('rule' => array('alphaNumeric')),
'email' => array('rule' => array('email'))
);
function beforeSave() {
$check = array('username','email'); // username and email are unique
return $this->checkUnique($check);
}

The code above specifies username and email as unique values and will check for them in the database before we save. Below is my modified app model.

// AppModel.php
class AppModel extends Model {
function checkUnique($myUnique) {
$sql = "";
foreach($myUnique as $name ) {
if($sql!="") $sql.=' OR ';
$sql .= $this->name.".$name=\"".$this->data[$this->name][$name].’”‘;
}
$found = $this->find($sql);
$same = isset($this->id) && $found[$this->name]['id'] == $this->id;
return !$found || $found && $same;
}
}

Now in the controller all you have to do is save your data.

if($this->YourModel->save($this->data)) {
// success
} else {
// failure
}

The code runs save() -> validate() -> beforeSave() -> checkUnique() and wont save to mysql if validate or beforeSave is false. I think the code is a little more strait-forward compared to making countless arrays within arrays.

World in Conflict launched on the 18th and while I’ve been really excited about the game but I held off on pre-ordering it due to my experience on getting burned with Command and Conquer 3. Based on my investigation, I have to say that the number of people who have appeared to buy the game and play it online is less than encouraging. Heading over to Massgate, the battle.net of Massive Entertainment you can see the number of players that have currently played the game online by scrolling through the ladder to the end. As of today, the number of players who own the game and have played online is roughly 5,200. ** edit(9/24): its now over 28,000 **

Call me jaded but after playing games like Counter-strike, Starcraft and World of Warcraft this number seems a little low for a game that got 93% in PC Gamer.When I played Command and Conquer 3 the game basically died when the number of active ladder players shrunk to below 10,000 due to the 1vs1 nature of the ladder. If 5-10% of the playerbase is online at any given time the number of people to play against is 260-520. The 5-10% of 5200 number is reinforced by going online with the demo and looking at the server list where I counted 360 people at 8am.

Don’t get me wrong I really want to play this game, I think its fun and its probably the perfect blend of action and strategy. I enjoyed the demo a lot but if the player base isn’t there to play against then I don’t really have much interest in investing money on the game. If the game doesn’t take off Massive should think about making the game free to play online with limited graphics so that the player base increases and makes the value added features of the game more appealing.

The multi-player aspect to the game appeals to me and I really want to try out the tug of war mode. Once you get used to the camera and can find a few people that know how to work together the game is a blast. If the user base increases to around 50,000-100,000 I will probably pickup the game but I don’t feel like paying 50 bucks to play on less than 20 active servers.

I noticed a few people were coming to my site looking for a way to remove the Trillian splash screen. Well you can do it and it requires a little editing of the configuration file. Open up the trillian.ini file located at:

C:/Program Files/Trillian/users/default/trillian.ini OR
C:/Documents and Settings/windows username/Trillian/trillian profile/trillian.ini

Now edit the line under [Setup] from Show Loading=1 to

Show Loading=0

If you don’t have these lines in your trillian.ini file you might want to upgrade to the latest version. You might also want to use these settings Minimize Buddies=1 and Show Closing=1 as well as removing useless Trillian plugins as it will speed up trillian loading time significantly.

I played around with Google Presentation today. The collaboration feature is amazing. No more having to meet with your group members to finish a Powerpoint presentation. I really think it can take out Powerpoint in its current state if they can reduce the CPU usage a little. The update feature is a beast and was using 20-40% of my cpu on a blank slide with one other person connected.

Presentations is lacking video and sound support which is a good thing IMO. I haven’t seen a Powerpoint yet where sound/video adds to the presentation. Each presentation has a 10 megabyte limit so movies are pretty much out of the question anyway.

Google could improve by adding the chat feature to the editor thats present in the presentation mode. Presentations also needs a way to lock down changes on slides and add commentary/notes that doesn’t show up in the presentation. The right click feature is also broken when you are clicking on selected text objects.

The good news is that its very simple to use. Sure it lacks some of the more powerful things that power users want but its probably easier to use for a beginner compared to Powerpoint.

Google has finally added search to the Reader product. I woke up and got this surprise.

Gotta love it. Now all they need to do is add better tasks to Google Calendar so that I can see whats due soon as well as set reminders. I wouldn’t mind better color coding too.