OK, yesterday I was thinking about using Mythbuntu / MythTV as a PC-based media center (home theater PC). I didn't know, but it seems like Windows Vista Premium has a "media center" application which should be sufficient for my needs.

I don't want to put a lot of time into this (we don't watch that much TV), so we'll see what we get out of the box with Vista.

One problem -- our TVs are old (like I said - we don't watch much TV)!. We have a 1994-5 (??) big old Phillips TV, and a Dec 2004 Sony WEGA KV-24FS120. I'm going to try this experiment on the Sony.

While cleaning up things a bit, I realized we have some one-of-a-kind DVDs (wedding videos etc.), so having multiple "soft" backups of these on computer drives makes more sense than having DVDs that will scratch and fade with age. You can always buy another copy of a movie, but last time I checked, our wedding DVD wasn't on Netflix -- even in the comedy section ;-)

Here are the slides to an interesting talk about PHP frameworks, given by the "first" creator of PHP, Rasmus Lerdorf, who now works for Yahoo.

In PHP 3.0+, Rasmus kind of gave up control of PHP to a couple other guys who took it in much more of a Object-oriented way. I like the following slides where Rasmus questions how 10 years of OO haven't added much (except confusion) to the language :

http://talks.php.net/show/drupal08/4 PHP 1995 - short and simple
http://talks.php.net/show/drupal08/5 PHP 2005 - after 10 years of OO cruft added

A friend thought that updating to the latest version of PHP would "automatically" provide much better security. I'm skeptical.

I've heard that most of the "unintentional" PHP security issues over the past 2-3 years were only a risk if you were accessing PHP from the local file system (not via Apache). If somebody's already on your filesystem you're going to have problems regardless of the PHP version.

XMind is an Eclipse-based mind mapper (brainstorming) tool. I've found it to be quite adequate for brain dumps.

I still like Microsoft Word's outlining tool. It's one of the few reasons to still use Word.

But XMind provides a nice way to create and visualize "bubbles" or groups of ideas.

http://www.xmind.net

There are some videos which show how to use it. Each of these are about 1-2 minutes and a good way to try before you "buy".

Here's some information on XMLWriter.

It looks like popular XMLWriter implementations in PHP, Perl and Tcl just wrap the C library libxml2 (or older libxml) :
http://xmlsoft.org/index.html

For Perl, there's a CPAN XMLWriter :
http://search.cpan.org/~josephw/XML-Writer/

For PHP, there's an old PECL library that looks like it will work with older versions (4.x) of PHP :
http://pecl.php.net/package/xmlwriter

An associate of mine said he was thinking about getting an MBA, and wanted my opinion on it. Here are some of my thoughts on it.

My wife also has an MBA, and my father earned an MBA back when having one was a relative rarity.

I received the following question about my thoughts on becoming an IRS Enrolled Agent :

I am interested in taking the enrolled agent exam.

How has being an enrolled agent benefited you professionaly?

What course of study did you use to pass the exam.

Thanks for the question

I'm not a practicing EA, so it really hasn't directly helped me. I mostly took the exam quite a while ago to get some "certification" when I was thinking about being a financial planner.

Here are some Linux / Unix questions you might encounter during a technical interview.

Describe Unix run levels. What does run-level 3 mean?

A program is running slow. What do you do?

You want to schedule a process to run every Tuesday at 1:00 am. What do you do?

What do these shell variables mean?

* $$ - Process ID of self
* $! - Process ID of last background process
* $_ - Last argument

When I define an environment variable, what does EXPORT mean?

What is a journaling file system and why would I want to use one?

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