The wonderful government of British Columbia decided back in 1992 that it would require mandatory emmisions testing of all vehicles before allowing them to be insured. Since my insurance was up on Saturday, it was time for me to take the oh-so-enjoyable AirCare test again. (To be honest - there are more beater cars elsewhere in the province that make up for all the “emissions savings” that AirCare has helped with)

(Read the article)

Comments(0)

I picked up a Vantec3 enclosure for one of my spare WD5000AAKS drives (see My Computers for updates), and made sure that it was one of the versions that included eSATA support. I’ve dealt with USB enclosures for a long time, and the transfer speeds are just painful. I took a couple of benchmarks using HDTach - one with the drive connected via eSATA (on the left), the other using USB (on the right).

(Read the article)

Comments(0)

I’ve been working for the past while to figure out how to create a custom page within Drupal for a conference that we’re hoping to setup.

Here’s what I want (I don’t think this is too unreasonable):
- Text
- A picture
- Selected polls (not the most recent)

I’ve got the text and the picture down pat, but getting the selected polls to show up in the page is getting to be a major PITA. If anyone has any tips on how to… I’m all ears.

Comments(0)

You may have noticed a new icon on the sidebar of this site linking to the No-www.org site. It’s something I was recently told about by a friend (the admin for the Lunarsoft website and forums) and once you think about it, makes perfect sense. The WWW mindframe came about back when the web was growing, and becoming more familiar to all of us, but actually represents a subdomain of your main domain (in my case, zxian.org). This subdomain look up requires more work by the servers that send you the website you’re seeing now. This added work means that the site lookups are not only slower for you, but for all the other people accessing that server.

Go ahead and remove that www from your websites. You can do this with a simple .htaccess rewrite rule as described on the No-www website.

Comments(1)

This is actually something I’ve been having my computers do for a while now, but I’ve only decided to post about it now. If you’re like me, and you leave your computer(s) on all the time, why not let them do something useful while they’re just sitting there. You can help various research projects by crunching some data for them. All it takes is a little bit of setup on your part and your computer.

(Read the article)

Comments(0)