In this eBay listing for a Canon 10D digital SLR, the seller mentions that he’s “upgrading” to a Nikon system. Would it be rude to send him a message asking him to correct his description to “downgrading”? 😉

My animosity towards Zend has really increased lately, due to a number of factors (the recent ZendCon, their character when dealing with open-source projects, etc.), so much so that I’ve sworn off Zend products. Which doesn’t really sound like a difficult task at first glance, since I only use one Zend product — but that one product just happens to be one of the only good PHP IDEs out there: Zend Studio.

Fortunately (and if you follow the PHP world, you’ve probably heard about this), Studio is receiving competent competition in the open-source world from the Eclipse platform in the guise of the PHP Developer Tools, or PDT. (And that’s competition in a very liberal sense of the word, since Zend is actually backing PDT — so they can rip it of– base future versions of Zend Studio on it.)

Anyways, the real goal here was just to talk about a quick PDT tip (now that I’ve switched), not rant and rave about how Zend seems to have a knack for positioning themselves in the middle of hugely conflicting interests.

The tip: Most people know that you can Ctrl+Click “into” a function call. What I didn’t know is that you can also Ctrl+Hover to get a tooltip containing the first ~10 lines of the function.

This can be immensely useful when you’re just trying to figure out what a piece of code does, without completely losing your train of thought and switching contexts.

Apparently my recent post on password-protected bittorrent downloads struck a chord with someone — a few people have left comments (currently awaiting moderation) requesting passwords for random things. Let’s just get this out of the way: I don’t know the password to [insert random downloaded file here]. Oh, and by the way, if you ask for one, I’ll delete your comment. 😉

I just discovered why Windows has the largest slice of the market share: it’s so darn helpful.

A few minutes ago, a little popup window appeared near my tray with a nice little message about updates that were ready. I clicked, scanned the list of updates and deselected “Internet Explorer 7.0 for Microsoft Windows”, as any self-respecting computer user should.

Another dialog appeared: “Updates that are not selected will not be installed.”

No duh… That’s why I deselected it. Thank you, Windows!

After days ago, I started reading up on carbon dating (or radiocarbon dating) because it was something I’d discussed with my atheist coworker. Neither of us knew any specifics. My brief research has only brought up more questions. Specifically, the Wikipedia page on radiometric dating claims:

The uranium-lead radiometric dating scheme is one of the oldest available, as well as one of the most highly respected. It has been refined to the point that the error in dates of rocks about three billion years old is no more than two million years.

How do you determine the average error of a device that is quantifying an unknown value?

The most obvious solution would be to derive the error by using the same device to simultaneously calculate a known value. But it would seem that there are far too many variables occurring between the known values (for instance, the oldest known trees are ~7,000 years old) and the unknown values (in this case, 3 billion years), especially given an outlook that the world has been undergoing near constant change for the past several billion years.

Back to the Google.

A coworker is a huge fan of Richard Dawkins, a vocal atheist. He’s pointed me towards a few books and even a video.

Yesterday, I was recommended to watch (and did) a talk that Dawkins gave at TED. Previously I’d only watched a few snippets of Dawkins that can be found on YouTube. I felt compelled to make a few comments.

First, I saw nothing more than the snickering and behind-the-back finger pointing (as someone makes a wisecrack about what “they” — the obviously mentally-anemic opposition, or they’d be with “us” — believe) that occurs in too many Christian circles. And so, even after a full 30 uninterrupted minutes in which to convince me that he might actually bring up an intelligent point, my impression remains unchanged: Richard Dawkins is nothing more than an atheism evangelist slash bigot. Why can’t the focus be logical arguments rather than insults?

Second, it seems that not only are Dawkins arguments often logically unsound, they are also often contradictory. As a specific example, in what I’ve watched Dawkins has repeatedly criticized Christians for only believing in Christianity/Creationism because that’s what they’ve been taught. However, while talking at TED, he triumphantly referenced studies in support of two points:

1. Evolution/atheism is heavily subscribed to among the “intelligentsia” and,
2. An inverse relationship exists between the amount of education one has and their belief in religion.

In other words, studies show that the more time one spends among the intelligentsia, the more likely it becomes that they’ll adopt the intelligentsia’s beliefs. Precisely what he criticized so vehemently.

I plan to watch The Blind Watchmaker in hopes of something worthwhile, but so far, I’ve been completely underwhelmed.