So after doing some research, here is 1 of 3 cameras I’m going to mention:

The Canon powershot SD850 can be found online at $190 up to $300 in price. I imagine the lower priced ones are refurbished. Honestly, refurb is fine with me, if its already a decent camera. The Canon Powershot SD850 has image stabilization, a nice feature I wish I had in my old Olympus. Also, from what I can tell, the colors are very accurate, and it takes excellent photos inside and outside. This camera has 8.3 mega pixels - an incredible amount, and the processing is extremely fast, and suitable for low light conditions. So far, I really like this camera.

Here’s a video review I found for the Canon Powershot 850:

Flex 3 is very impressive, and I have decided to try at least creating prototype applications with it, and including them as movie clips in my Flash projects. If this works, I’ll do nothing else, but in some cases, I may just take the idea I initiated with Flex 3 and follow through to create the final product with Actionscript and Flash objects.

As for ExtJS, this is a great solution if you’re dealing with a website that has no initial Flash capabilities, and none are desired by the client, yet still allow you to do remote communications through the Ajax library it provides, which is very similar in syntax as Prototype - only some minor differences.

As for deciding which is best - I would say that Flex provides a really quick way to get a project done, once you’ve overcome the learning curve of putting things together and arranging the layouts. If you have a project started in Flash, Flex might be an option you can use to get some aspects of it completed. ExtJS is a good framework to get some simple, quick and dirty DOM manipulation functions done, along with some nicely styled windows and widgets (i.e. the calendar widget), but if you’re not familiar with JavaScript, learning ExtJS can be daunting and take more time than you have available to meet a deadline.

Its really a tough call as to which is best - I would have to say neither. Use the one you’re more suited for. Honestly, my work with ExtJS for the past year helped me understand more completely the workings of ActionScript, which in turn helped me understand how to use Flex. I honestly believe that the designer of ExtJS was an ActionScript programmer who knew Java and JavaScript, and borrowed the best ideas from these languages to put together a strong, consistent JavaScript framework that just makes sense, if you are familiar with the other languages I’ve mentioned here.

If you don’t have a designer available and really stink at PhotoShop, ExtJS provides a great way of providing a stylish solution for your customer’s project minimal design work needed on the programmer’s part.

Armed with the information I’ve provided here, hopefully it will help someone who is at a loss as to what he or she should use to begin. Personally, I wish someone had left a post with some clues which contrasted and compared these three technologies when I was starting out with various projects. Good luck!

Currently, I work at a company that is using an ancient PHP framework that existed long before CakePHP. AJAX wasn’t even a glimmer in anyone’s eyes, when this framework was released. Yet, I went forward with my first project and slowly developed a nice, AJAX powered GUI for one of our applications that was otherwise very unwieldy to use. Four months of development went into it. The other developer of the department noted that it could have been completed in half the time if I just stuck to using PHP.

I think while his argument would have been justified if this was holding up a function of our company, but it was not. Plus, I believe it was worth taking the extra time to develop a more perfect application, instead of dishing out the garbage the users are accustomed to seeing all the time. So I guess his argument was that the applications should have a cohesiveness to them. Sure, I agree with this, but as I see it, we’re going to have a struggle between applications I do, using the AJAX framework ( EXtJS ), and the applications he does, which are straightforward PHP with no thought of adding AJAX to them. I would rather meet him in the middle at this point, but sometime down the road, I would like to see him on board, using AJAX in a majority of his applications, rather than “rarely ever”. It is a skill web application developers need to have in this day and age in order to be competitive with applications that would otherwise be developed in ASP or Cold Fusion.

Anyway, my point - if there is time to make an application beautiful and perfect for the user, use that time and don’t rush the development. It will be time well spent, even if you have to learn as you go. If your employer decides to fault you because of it, don’t worry - there are plenty of other employers who would love to have your skills on board and you can apply your experience to their projects.

I had Windows Media Center 2005 preloaded, but was given the opportunity to upgrade to Windows fists home edition. I received the CD for Windows Vista from Microsoft, but I am quite content with Windows XP, and do not plan to upgrade any time soon. My DV 9000 Model did not come with the TV tuner included, but this is something I added later simply by purchasing a pinnacle TV tuner which plugs into my USB port. I will review this TV tuner and a future posting, but I must say it it has been an excellent tuner for the low price that I paid for it. In fact, most of the electronics I have purchased recently within the past three months have had some wonderful discounts on them when purchased at Best Buy - even beating out the competition on the Internet.

My one complaint about the HP DV 9000, a bit of a disappointment, is that one side of my widescreen has started separating at the seam, which started at the hinge and progressed upward. I suppose if I allowed it, the seam would break all around the whole screen, but I have been careful to hold the seam together, each time I close or open the laptop. From my experience, this is the type of defect that most laptop companies such as Dell refuse to repair under warranty, citing that this type of of damage is not normal wear and tear. I half to disagree, especially since this is a heavily used laptop.

Recently I purchased net Dragon NaturallySpeaking to help me with my blogging. I determine that this may help save me some time by allowing me to replay my recorded voice what as they travel to work so that it may be dictated into Dragon NaturallySpeaking later in the evening. Unfortunately, I’ve not been able to determine a good method of getting my voice heard by Dragon NaturallySpeaking in the in an easy manner especially since I’m using this standard version wished does not allow for import of MP3 or Windows media files. I am hoping that in time, I will be able to determine a good solution to this problem, because I would like to be able to get the most work from this version plus my recorder as both were on sale at a deep discount. Currently, I am using a Sansa e200 for my recordings. This is actually a media player that plays MP3 and video files, but also has a built-in microphone for recordings.

Until I determine a good solution, it will suffice for me to use the microphone that comes with Dragon NaturallySpeaking, and dictate the words for my blogs. I hope that my wife or son and at this dirt by my evening commentaries dictated to my computer late into the night.

If you go the route I did, to install Qmail on CentOS 4.4, you’re on the path of pain. I thought this qmailtoaster for some version of CentOS 4 would be great - the answer to my prayers. I proceeded to install the CentOS 4.3 version, while unknowingly, ignorantly using a CentOS 4.4 server. BIG MISTAKE! I was constantly in the logs, looking at tcpserver errors - “unable to allocate memory” blah blah blah. Damn! For two weeks I would clear up things with restorecon, only to find myself with libcrypto errors, and libc errors, and would try to reinstall glibc!!! It was maddening, and I found myself sinking deeper and deeper in some hole I dug, until finally…. a ray of light helped me see that I was fighting a battle that was not meant to be fought, and I had to REMOVE all remnants of Qmailtoaster and its dependencies and go with the manual, laborous instructions provided by Bill’s Qmail toaster…. if I had done this to being with, using his instructions to configure, make, and install all scripts manually, instead of using some RPM’s that came from who knows where and for whatever versions (probably CentOS 4.3….), i would have had this email setup on ONE DAY instead of 2.5 weeks!

So my point… if you have CentOS 4.4, or heck, any version of Linux, and you want to install Qmail with all the bells and whistles, use Bill’s Qmail Toaster… if you don’t, don’t go crying in the forums that something else you try isn’t working… Remember the Almo? Don’t fight that battle… go with what works!

Its a sad to see this happening, but I think that as the automobile industry suffers, the exit of CompUSA from Michigan is just a sign of the times - our state of Michigan is going to lose another outlet from which the public can turn to, to become more technilogically inclined. All that is left is BestBuy, which has done a great job at providing technical gadgets and gizmo’s, but they never have a complete collection - their product selection is still limited, in the stores.

CompUSA also used to be a resource for training. They are offered classes to corporations, small businesses, and the average new computer user. Now this is another central hub of training courses, gone from the area. I suppose if someone wanted to capitalize on this, they could open a chain of training centers to train people on computers, that would also be less expensive than New Horizon’s, whose courses are well outside the reach of the home computer user.

Anyway, good luck Michigan with your technology initiatives. Its too bad our governor couldn’t do more to help CompUSA stay, but even at the state level, they need to support education and build a base for people to learn technology in Michigan. Without a good base of techically savy, local customers, how is a store like CompUSA going to thrive? At least its good news for the smaller computer stores, and great news for Best Buy.

I have Norton Internet Protection suite running, and at least that didn’t freeze, as I was able to see if there had been a hack attempt - there was nothing. I opened up my process mananger and started shutting down unneeded processes - whatever I could shut down, I did. My applications were still frozen.

Finally, I had had enough. I had heard from friends that out of all the patches and rewrites Microsoft releases, it will never rewrite how it handles the registry. The registry just seems to be too complicated or too dangerous for them to attempt to fix with some utility they would release. Its like they created this monster robot, but its so out of control, thrashing about, whipping its tail, that they’d rather have an outside company handle its bad behaviour, while they continue developing it! Without the registry working right, and optimized, a computer you bought 3 months ago will start running like its 30 years old!

Thankfully, there’s a utility called XP Repair Pro (www.xprepairpro.com) which will eradicate any bad registry entries and tame that beast. I couldn’t believe how simple this program was to use - very intuitive. It also works for Windows Vista, which I was happy about, because I plan to upgrade, next month. Anyway, the program took about 15 minutes to run and reported all kinds of errors which it fixed. I then rebooted the system, and it finally runs like new again, as it should - its only 3 months old! Granted, I use this computer constantly, about 18-20 hours a day. I’m really putting it through its paces, and I need it to be performing efficiently at all times - I can’t afford any down time with it.

XP Repair Pro really came through for me,today, and at $39.95, and I get paid about $75 per hour, and I had to slow down my work and reboot 3 times this morning, wasting about 2 hours of time reloading my programs and getting back to where I started…. you do the math. Even if my system DOES start acting funny again, XP Repair Pro has the problem completely fixed in less than a half hour, and therefore save me $112.50 of my valuable time trying to reboot and fix it! I also didn’t have to run the system down to Geek Squad to do the same thing!

Check out XP Repair Pro here - you’ll love it: XP Repair Pro

So how does someone hack a site, you may ask. Well, I’m no expert on this, yet, but I have learned that when programming in PHP, you should always use htmlspecialchars on your form values being posted from a form, before sending it off to your database or redisplayed to your screen. Basically, its when that information is redisplayed, there is a way to fool the web server, through the use of certain escaped characters I believe, to start running the output as code!

For example, lets say you enter your name and email address, and other information in a form, and hit submit. The next page might be a page that says, “Here is what you entered… click Save to continue”. And sure enough, if there wasn’t any filtering going on, a hacker could easily do a form injection attack and start sending mail from your mail server, or in a worse case, tamper with your site and even get root access.

A friend told me about a security information site that teaches you how to hack, through a podcast. The author, Dan Kuykendall, an Internet security specialist, even provides a website “lab” that you can test with, as he talks about the techniques, step by step. To my knowledge, nothing else like this exists! It looks like he’s started doing this series starting in August of 2006, and the first tutorial is about XSS - Cross Site Scripting (which I just recently found a filtering routine for that I put on a client’s site). Here’s the link to the security tutorials.

This article sponsored by:

Anyway, after reading it, it sure looks like some great information, but its going to be crazy for Internet marketers who all try and follow it on the same products, at the same time. Its just like the stock market, when you have tons of people going for those IPOs, and suddenly, it all drops off… I can do a better analogy later, but this is definitely going to be something to study - the effects of these marketing strategies and what happens when you have so many trying to do the same thing… I think you end up with more losers and winners… So I can’t really recommend this book unless you plan to promote odd products on Amazon in foreign countries, and can make that your full time job… in fact, this plan is a “day job killer” alright, because the time you have to spend to learn it and get id done right to be profitable while the world has gone mad with it, will basically cause you to lose sleep and be a poor performer at the day job, and yeah… you’ll LOSE your day job trying to do it!

But if you’re not squemish about competition,and just a die-hard nut, thinking you can beat the system that everyone and his brother is going to use, have at it and click here to check it out>>>>check here

I think I might just stick to what I do best - freelance programming, developing products (programs) and writing articles for people. This affiliate marketing stuff is for the birds.