It has been a while since I last used Flock.  In the past I stopped using it because I felt that the blogging editor needed a lot of improvements.  I would have liked to see a full WYSIWYG editor rather than the simple editor that they offered.  Today I decided that I would download the latest version 1.0.1 and see what improvements they had made.  To my surprise I found that they had actually done a lot with the browser.  There have been quite a bit of features added to it.

Flock has definately come a long way and I look forward to seeing where they go from here.  I will be using this browser again for a while and see if I can force myself to get used to the blogging editor.  If you have not tried Flock, I suggest you go download it and give it a test run, it is available for Windows, Mac and Linux.  Now let’s move on to discuss some of the cool new features.

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It was not that long ago that everyone was running around trying to figure out how to customize the Leopard dock.  Well the good guys over at Panic have released Candybar 3 which is for Leopard only.  It will allow you to change your dock, along with a ton of other icons such as hard drives, trash, etc.

There are also many free Candybar iContainers over at Icon Factory.  Although I do personally think Candybar Wrappers would have been a better name for them

I have been thinking about setting up a raid server in my closet that will run on Wi-Fi.  I would like to do this because any computer in the house would be able to access the share.  When I first started to think about getting a backup system I thought about getting a ReadyNAS NV+ which is a device you can put up to 4 hard drives in and have RAID 5 which is a great bonus.

I searched around and found that the ReadyNAS NV+ costs $1,049.00 (directly from NETGEAR) as an empty unit (meaning no hard drives).  I found this to be quite expensive for lack of growth that it offers.  You can only have 4 drives, they can be no larger than 750GB each.  You are limited to 3TB of storage space.

I have been pricing out all the hardware I would need to setup a massive RAID system and actually it’s a lot cheaper than I thought it was going to be.  The main PC components such as case, motherboard, processor, memory, power supply only run about $450.  The kicker though and what is stopping me right now is the fact that if I do this I want to do it right.  I have been looking at a 3ware SATA II RAID Controller card that will support up to 16 SATA II drives.  It is quite pricey though.  It is $749.99 just for the PCI-X card.

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Florida must have some really dumb residents.  Either the police force or just civilians.  I was reading this article and it is not funny because they found 60 pounds of marijuana on the side of the highway.  What is funny about the entire thing is the last paragraph.

Anyone missing their bags of marijuana or knows how these bags made their way onto the roadside is asked to contact the Florida Highway Patrol at (813) 631-4020.

Is this statement coming from history of people calling in and trying to claim illegal stuff? Are the cops just dumb enough to think that someone will call in and say "Dude You Found It, Thanks Man".

No disrespect to Florida residents but you have to see the funny side to this.

In Leopard we all know that you can open a finder window, select a file or folder and hit the space bar to enable Quick Look to get a preview of the file.  However by default if you have a folder selected it will show you an image of a folder.  This is not very useful.  I would like to see the contents of the folder when i enter Quick Look.  This is where Quick Look plug-ins come into play.  The developers over at Apple made Quick Look support an open architechture so that developers could create their own plug-ins to support more file types.

Taiyo (a Japanese developer) has written 2 such plug-ins.  They are both really useful.  The Folder Quick Look Plug-in will allow you to view the contents of a folder, I think Apple should have had this as the default behavior.  The Zip Quick Look Plug-in will allow you to see what files are contained in the zip file that you selected.  Very handy if you do not want to extract something when you are not sure if it is the correct archive.  All you have to do is download the zip files and place the *.qlgenerator files in the /Library/QuickLook/ folder and they should work automatically.

From the day I started this site I wondered if I would have to take any precautions for comment spam.  I installed the Askimet plug-in for wordpress and made all comments have to be moderated.  To this day I have received almost 10,000 spam comments which has led to a lot of work in reviewing the comments and making sure the ones marked spam really were spam.

I have decided to integrate a CAPTCHA program but not just any.  I am using reCAPTCHA which is a free system for everyone to use.  The difference between this system and others is that by using this you are actually helping digitize books that were written before they every thought of digitizing books.  Why not help a good cause at the same time as protecting my blog from spam?

I am not sure if integrating this will make the site get even less comments or not.  I know how people generally do not like these things but I am giving it a shot.  If comments slow down or it does not deem itself useful then I will remove it.
 

My roommate gave me the link to this and I thought I was going to die laughing.  It is a bit obscene so in order to see it you have to click on the title of this post.

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I ran across a blog posting today that I thought I would share.  The guy states that a friend bought him a $25 iTunes gift card.  When he removed it from the cardboard backing he noticed that both the cardbord holder and the card had places that you could scratch off.  He removed the coating from both the cardboard backing and the card and they contained different coupon codes.  He has successfully used both codes to make purchases from the iTunes store.  I am not sure if this is real or not and I don’t have the need to buy a card.  I think it’s pretty stupid mistake if Apple did do something like this.  Shall we say buy one get one free?

I am personally not an iPhone owner yet, however I received an e-mail from AT&T just now that told me the iTunes Wi-Fi store is now open on the iPhone.  You can go to any hot spot and are now able to buy your music from the iTunes store directly from your iPhone.  This is really cool, I wonder if it includes the purchase of movies and TV shows, one would hope.

THe only thing this leaves me to wonder is if this will work with an unlocked iPhone. My guess is that Apple has done something to make this only work with locked phones, but then again maybe they didn’t.  If anyone reading this has an unlocked iPhone please leave some comments as to whether or not this will work with the unlocked phones.

Before I begin you must know that I do not mean any disrespect to any woman who are out there working in a field that is saturated by men.  I too agree that women can do anything a man can and that there should be more female programmers.  The following is not geared only towards phpwomen.org but at others as well.  Ok time to start my rant.

When it comes to sexism and racism why must everything be segregated?  Women have been programming for years, in fact I know a few (yes i know i used the few word and not many).  We now need a site geared only towards women who are programming PHP?  If you want to be equal to men, why not join them rather than segregate yourself from them. 

Running into this site made me think of a conversation I had a long time ago about Black Entertainment Television (BET).  Granted it did have it’s time and place, back when the arrogant white folk would not let a black man be in movies or on TV.  Today however is it just as common to see a black person on TV as it is a white person so what is the need for a tv network like this, or an awards ceremony for this?  What do you think the response would be if some white guy started White Entertainment Television (WET).  Oh all the sudden we would be racist etc.  Recently my roommate stumbled across a forum post where someone called a black person articulate and they were tagged as a racist.  The explanation given was that because the black person was called articulate it implied that black people are stupid.  This thread made me wonder where things are going, what can you call someone without being racist?

Back to women programmers.  I understand the need to unite with each other and improve the female presence in the php community, I just do not understand why you feel the need to segregate yourself from the guys.  I see what you are doing trying to "unite" the women together to form a group, but why not unite with the guys rather than separating the two?

As I said before this is not meant to be directed solely at phpwomen.org but rather at today’s society.  Forget about race, gender, etc and unite as a whole.