I had to write a quick size calculator for a web site. I'm adding here for safe-keeping...

I have owned many PCs and Macs in my life, although my last several computers have all been PCs. It's not that I am a Windows fan, it just made most sens for my business.

After several years of hard service, it's almost time to replace my PC again. I must admit that I am very tempted to try out a Mac this time. Although I do think the Mac hardware is great, I am actually more interested in the OSX operating system.

Since my work does have significant hardware requirements, the announcement by Pystar Corporation about their PC Open Pro computer really caught my attention. This PCs is built with hardware that is all OSX compatible and you can buy it with OSX installed. I'll keep an eye on the reviews of this company... it may be the way to go.

http://www.psystar.com http://www.osx86project.org/

I'm really pretty amazed at what credit card companies are able to get away with these days and how easily they are able to flip you to an outrageous APR. They require constant monitoring and to be honest, I really want as little to do with them as possible.

I saw a news story today about the rise of personal lending sites like http://www.prosper.com. Essentially Prosper.com is in the business of making loans, but they the money is funded by individuals rather than a banking institution. Their lending requirements, at first glance, seem to be a little more straight forward than financial institutions.

The up side to these types of sites is that they certainly beat having to deal with the constant games that credit card companies play.

Unobfuscating Google Maps javascript isn't that hard. First, I copied two of Google's scripts to my server. You need the first one they have you link to, and also the script that the first one loads (this is the one in the upper-right box on Mapki). Using my text editor, I added line breaks to both after semicolons and end-braces. The first script isn't actually obfuscated, just minified, and it's not that long, so I actually went on to format the whole thing. Once I could read the first script, I only had to make two changes to it in order for both scripts to work from my server: I had to tweak the call to the second script from the first so it pointed to my version (in GLoadMapsScript at the bottom), and I had to comment out the key validation check (in GLoad). Then I linked to my version of the first script from my HTML page, and it worked like normal! Blam.

With Google's scripts under the reigns, Firebug's debugger made it trivial to isolate the function I wanted. I triggered a call to the function in a third script, and placed Firebug's special debugger keyword before the function call. That gave me a runtime debugger with which to simply step into Google's function. And with the script on my own server, I could then isolate the function in my text editor, format it, and poke it until it made sense.

http://javascript.about.com/library/blformat.htm

See how your site compares:

http://www.quantcast.com