It seems another uptight, ultra-conservative group is laying out the "homosexual card". This time it's on one Mr. SpongeBob SquarePants. It's a cartoon character folks, chill out. Don't make us send you to Abu Graib for some "reeducation"!
It all seemed so harmless… My "friend" Tim posted an entry in his blog about BlogShares. When I first read this I looked at the site, but I just didn't have the time to look into it. And Tim had already bought up most of my shares, so why bother, right? Well, I signed up yesterday and I'm not addicted thanks to my so called "friend".
Yesterday I played around a bit and bought some things. Today I got serious… I sold my stock in Tim's blog for a tidy profit, sold a chuck of my free 1000 shares for claiming my blog and then went on a shopping spree. Pump and dump baby!
So at this point I'd like to thank Tim for running up my stock price so I could enjoy a tidy windfall from his actions. I'd also like to point out that as of right now my blog is valued at B$1,552.71 to his B$1,000.00. Thus I'm worth 1-1/2 times what he is…so much for your thought control!
Ah, nothing like a brisk walk at lunchtime. During the other three seasons of the year I generally take about a 20 minute stroll around the city during lunch. But generally in the winter it is rather nasty because of the weather. But today I opted to venture out for a walk…and it was rather enjoyable. But then again, here it is mid-January in Buffalo and it's 66° right now! Had to go enjoy it because it's moving out overnight and then back into the 20's.
Anyone who really knows me surely know that I don't like Wal-Mart because of their "Always Low Prices (at any cost to supplier companies and exploited third-world workers)!" motto. But I have to take there side in this one. If a company follows the laws that govern gun sales, you can't sue them for selling your adult child a gun that they then used to kill themselves. I'm sorry. It's tragic, but Wal-Mart didn't shoot them! What's next? If some nut job jumps in front of my car and I run them over, do I get sued for "wrongful death" because I could have taken an alternate route to my destination? The only things I see coming out of this case are two parent who are prolonging the agony over the death of their child, and a group of lawyers with jinglier pockets!
If you run/code a PHP based sites, you owe it to yourself to check out jpcache. I've been using it here at PolarLava for at least the past year and a half. This bad boy will GZip compress your pages before they are sent to the browser, which cuts down on your bandwidth as well as speeds up your page loads. Additionally you can tell it to cache a page for a specified period of time. This makes those DB generated "static" pages into true static pages, thus making them much faster. And you have your choice of either storing your cached pages in flat files or a MySQL database, which is what I do.
Another alternative if you are distributing code but don't need caching, is my GZipContent class. It provides the benefit from GZipping compressing the output, but doesn't do any caching. If you are interested in this, just drop me a line.
Although it's not released as of this writing, GZContent will be part of PolarBlog beginning in V1.4.0. Although this blog actually doesn't nor will it be using that, as my whole site runs under jpcache. ;)
01/04/2005
A few weeks back I spent some time hacking on jpcache to implement a feature that I wanted, but it lacked. That being the ability to flush individual pages. I had added the ability to flush all pages, permanently cached pages or just expirable pages some time ago. But you still couldn't flush individual pages. Previously I had sent this basic flushing change to Jean-Pierre, the developer of this application for possible inclusion in a future release. Like all of us, he's busy and has not put out a new release in quite some time. Anyhow, I've pushed this modification a bit further now and have the ability to flush individually cached pages. Generally this is far more useful than flushing groups of pages, although sometimes that is useful too. I forwarded this latest change to Jean-Pierre who wrote me back to let me know that some form of this will make it into the next release of jpcache which he hopes to start on soon. Yeah!