For what it’s worth, I’ve been using Vista Ultimate x64 for about 4 months straight now. I am a very avid gamer with a very capable machine and a healthy handful of various peripherals, and I’ve yet to come across anything out of the ordinary that people who were using Vista x86 or XP x86/64 weren’t having problems with as well.

Actually, I take that back. I did run across one thing that did take me awhile to figure out, and that was getting a working TAP-x64 driver to use with OpenVPN. A little bit of Google searching and I managed to find a number of custom drivers some folks have built in the past.

And so ends my random thought of the morning.

I decided to cheat a little bit. I’m grabbing a blog post that’s somewhat infantile in scope compared to what I’ve been experiencing and thinking about lately, but it’s still relevant. It’s stolen my from OkCupid profile. (If you don’t know what OkCupid is, you most likely don’t want to)

Without further ado:

Agnosticism, Atheism, Neutrality, etc.

Originally posted May 18, 2007 - 10:11pm

By impulsive strike I’ve been bid by myself to write in my OkCupid journal for the first time. My brain is a bit of a mess of random ideas (only a few of those which surface and spread their taint/joy across the world).

So I figured I’d write about the one thing that I’ve been currently thinking about fairly regularly throughout the past few weeks. That would be my beliefs and how they fit into my overall view on life. Ah, the Internet and blogging, what a wonderful environment to spill entertaining drivel…

My major state of mind is something I can define fairly accurately as “Neutral”. But it’s not a neutrality in the sense that every single thought and idea I have is stuck in some gray area, but more that most of them are pushed far toward one absolute and stuck there, and that there are no gray areas. That is to say, that even the gray areas themselves are an absolute in and of themselves (contradictory? sure! but it’s the best way to put the little electric pulses going through my head into aural words)

So, that leads down into religion, beliefs, and faith in general. I used to try and consider myself an Atheist until I realized that Atheism is pretty much the exact same thing I wanted to avoid with Religion when I “denounced” my faith (read: phased out naturally as I started getting some concrete ideas about the humanity and the world). That thing is closed mindedness. Now, granted, most of my friends are Atheists, and save my step father and step brother, I am the only pronounced Agnostic I know…but I’m not trying to rub anyone the wrong way (unless you’re born-again Christian and want nothing more to send me to hell with just mentioning that I don’t believe in God…you suck and I think you should know it!)

I see Atheism as just another form of faith, except that instead of believing in a God and raging against the non believers, an Atheist’s faith lies in that there is no God spiced with some pretty hefty rage against the believers. (this is generalized I know, but work with me here…) Atheists are some of the most open minded people I’ve ever met in my life, but I’ll still say that the majority of them are hypocrites when they’re calling themselves Atheists and open minded in the same breath. Just because you don’t believe in any God doesn’t make your mindset any less monolithic than those of the strongest thumpers out there.

There’s more that I could go into than my attention span would ever allow, so before my train of thought takes a nose dive into the water, I’ll end this here and continue at a later date - preferably earlier in the day before my neurons are all fried and frayed.

Download Zend IDE Themes

For some reason over the course of this week, all three installations of this app I have stopped working. The problem was coming from PHP all of a sudden deciding that it wanted to wait for the execution of the program before finishing its process. I'm still not sure why all three machines stopped working (I haven't touched the code for ~5 days until today) especially given that one is a Vista Ultimate x64, another is XP SP2 x86, and the main one being a Server 2003 box.

Anyway, the original way I was handling sending commands was using the Windows 'start' command to pass the actual program call. Using 'start' allows you to run programs that won't necessarily close right after execution (ie foobar2000). Example of the old way:

But as I said, it wasn't working anymore as PHP would hang on that particular host until I would manually RDP into the server and kill the foobar2000 process from the task manager.

After I went through as many different ways to stop this from happening, including creating a batch file that just ran foobar2000 and having that called by 'cmd.exe' which is then in turn called by 'start', I finally came up with something that worked thanks to a Russian web site that I couldn't understand save for the PHP examples:

Basically, it uses popen() to actually open the program (as well as create a handle inside PHP) and then immediately release the handle with pclose(). Now I'm again happily sending commands to foobar2000.

After my switch I found out that it's either really difficult to do Google searches on Eclipse themes and styles, or that no one has really made much headway in that part of the IDE. (There is the TextMate theme for RadRails but I found it to be not exactly my cup of tea...I'm picky, sorry!). So I tasked myself with an attempt at manually migrating the pretty colors from ZDE into Eclipse, and wouldn't you know it, the transition went pretty damn smoothly.

To get these color styles into your own Eclipse, just download the .epf file and go to File -> Import in Eclipse, choose General -> Preferences, select the file, and import. I recommend making a backup of your own preferences by following the same steps, only selecting Export instead of Import. I stripped out some of the non-color related stuff, but in order to make sure I got everything, I left some of the stuff I wasn't sure about in there, so there may be a conflict if you have some of your own personal preferences (though I'm fairly sure I didn't do much to my settings besides changing tabs to spaces).

» Eclipse Preferences File

Also, there are settings for both Aptana's CSS/JS editor as well as the Webtools versions of those editors (as well as HTML for webtools).