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Good Things Come in Small Packages

USB Flash Drives

I bought a new 1GB USB Flash Drive yesterday for US $15.95.  I already had a 64MB Flash Drive that I got with my laptop in 2003.  I don’t recall exactly how much I paid for the 64MB drive, but I know it was a bit more than $15.95.  

So, I sat down and did some math.  Assuming the best case (i.e, that I paid $15.95 each for both drives), the cost per MB at the time I purchased them was:

  • 2003 – $0.250
  • 2006 – $0.016

On the surface, the $0.016 per MB may appear to be quite inexpensive. However, you can get a 160GB hard drive these days for $100.00 or less, which puts the cost per MB in the neighborhood of $0.0006.

So it appears that the cost of “no moving parts” flash memory has quite a ways to go before it becomes cost-competitive with rotating disk storage.  Or maybe it never will.  Wonder what the chances are that both flash and rotating disk storage will be rendered obsolete by some other yet to be discovered technology?

What do you think?

It’s Halloween!

The three witches

Fillet of a fenny snake, in the cauldron boil and bake: eye of newt and toe of frog, wool of bat and tongue of dog, adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting, lizard’s leg and howler’s wing, for a charm of pow’rful trouble, like a hell-broth boil and bubble. — Second Witch, “Macbeth,” IV:1

Enter here at your own risk!  You have been warned…we take no responsibility for any damage to your mental and/or physical state should you choose to enter!

Joomla 1.5 Template Beta Testing

Joomla! 1.5 TemplateI’ve been building web sites of one kind or another since around 1995. These days I do it mostly for fun and very occasionally for profit.

For the past year or so, I have been using an Open Source Content Management System (CMS) called Joomla! (or J! in my shorthand notation) to manage my personal web site. The price is right ($0.00) and it has most of the functionality that I need either out-of-the-box or by adding one or more of the many available third-party extensions.

The Joomla! Project released a beta of their latest software (J! 1.5) on 12 October 2006.  J! 1.5’s outward appearance is not much different than its predecessor (J! 1.0.x), but its internals have undergone radical changes.  And one of those changes was in the way templates are developed.  

J!’s notion of templates is a bit different than the norm.  Most systems define templates as the underlying mechanism that produces the theme, or layout, seen on the user’s screen.  In J!’s case, the term template is used interchangeably to describe both the layout and the logic that produces it.

Now to the point…I’ve been doing some testing of the new J! templating approach and figured as long as I was going to keep some notes about it, I might as well share it with you.  OK…if you look at right side panel, under the Local Stuff menu, the you will see a link to a page called Joomla! 1.5 Template Stuff.  That page and the child pages listed below it contain some stuff I learned about building templates for J! 1.5.

The Rabbit and the Ring – Part II

The neighbor kids rabbit was running amok again today. So once more into the breech I went. Using my recently acquired rabbit-wrangling skills, we herded the little guy into a corner of the neighbor’s backyard and threw a dirty sweatshirt of mine over him. Lucky for me, I picked him up by the end that doesn’t bite and into the cage he went.

And, this time, prior to engaging the elusive hare, I took off my ring and put it in a safe place…right next to my recently acquired metal detector!

I hope he never gets loose in my backyard…the “Terrible Terriers” would run him down in a “New York Minute” and make an appetizer out of him.

The Rabbit and the Ring

GMU RingTwo days ago, the the neighbor’s’ kids came knocking at my door. One of their pet rabbits had escaped and they asked if I could help corral it. Nice guy that I am, I said sure and joined the posse. Well, we finally caught the rabbit and all was well again. Or so I thought. During the chase, I lost my college class ring. The ring always was a bit loose on my finger and it slipped off during the chase. And of course, with all the fallen leaves covering the ground, trying to find it was like looking for the proverbial needle in the haystack.

I seached both their yard and mine to no avail and was about to give up when it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to try using a metal detector to find the ring. Well, I went out and bought one. Armed with this technology, I began sweeping the neighborhood. This went on for two days. And lo and behold, today I actually found the ring.

So, I guess the moral of this story is “Never chase a rabbit without a metal detector.”

What Can Brown Do For You Today?

Well, they did something for my wife yesterday. She had the unpleasant experience of getting her car bashed by one of Brown’s‘ trucks. She was about four blocks from home when she collided with a UPS Truck. Fortunately, it was a low-speed encounter and nobody was injured as a result of the accident. The truck ended up with a few dents on its bumper. My wife’s car (a Ford Escape) ended up with the front left side bashed in and had to be towed to the local body shop, where it now sits awaiting its fate at the hands of the insurance adjuster.