New netbook or upgrade old one?

Well, after doing some market research i've decided to stick with my >1y old Acer Aspire One and upgrade the memory to 1.5GB.
Sometimes you don't have to be ahead of the flock to enjoy what you have, actually the Acer is a fine little machine, one of the main features i like about it is its solid state hdd, which enables me to use it even in more bumpy circumstances.

Awell, here are a few links:
Upgrading the memory:
http://www.crunchgear.com/2008/08/28/how-to-add-ram-to-the-acer-aspire-one-netbook/

And replacing the (very shortly lived) dead accu:
http://store.acer-euro.com/home/aspire-one-6-cels-accu-zwart.html?s=6&l=en&p=3&i=36107

Using nouveau on openSUSE 11.3

Nouveau, for those unknowing souls, is the next generation open source nvidia display driver.

Starting to use it however, after an openSUSE 11.1 -> 11.2 -> 11.3 upgrade, could be cumbersome.
Especially resolutions tend to be not resolved correctly.

To try and polish things up, try the following console command:
mv /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.bak

then restart X (ctrl+alt+backspace or the nicer way of logging out).
Everything will be detected automagically then

openSUSE on a stick

The release of 11.3 is a good opportunity to perform some sweeping, swooping and swapping off the depricated 11.1 and 11.2 versions of my infrastructure, therefor it comes in very handy when one just needs to run around carrying an usb stick instead of having to burn/reburn rewritables....
Anyway, follow the following steps and you should be right as rain (mostly copied from http://en.opensuse.org/Live_USB_stick):

• Insert the usb stick into a free usb (yeah, really) port
• Check if it shows up after issuing the following console command: ls -l /dev/disk/by-id/*usb*
• If it does, then unmount it: umount /dev/sdX (X being the disks id)
• Now write the iso onto the stick: dd if=/path/to/iso/NameOf.iso of=/dev/sdX
• After a few moments something reassuring (like how many bites were written) should appear and your good to go!
  

Using PHP to insert blobs in a MSSQL database

Is a very straightforward job, once you've figured out how MSSQL wants the data supplied....

As hex....

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.unpack.php#54910

MySQL datatype for PHP microtime()

Ok, this has probably been already solved by just about everyone on the world-wide-web.... Well, count me out then....

Until just now i was trying to put a microtime(true) result in a float(20.4) field....

Which simply doesnt work on MySQL 5.1 (at least not in my case, since all values after the decimalseparationcharacter are .0000)....

Try a field type named double(20,4) and it works like a charm....

And out.

Christmas came early this year?

For Helios is here!!!!

http://eclipse.org/helios/

PDT never worked faster!

XDebug + Php5 + openSUSE 11.2

Apart from the XDebug routine (which should be installed thru openSUSE's build service: http://software.opensuse.org/search?q=xdebug&baseproject=openSUSE%3A11.2&exclude_filter=home%3A&exclude_debuginfo=true ) this looks really useful:

http://bogdan-albei.blogspot.com/2010/06/php-remote-debugging-with-xdebug-and.html

Much fun reading! (and/or implementing?)