Icon 74 (Scanners & Cameras) So it turns out, I'm not dead. I have just been missing in action for a month. For those of you who do not know, but were wondering, the reasons why the Icon-A-Day icons came to a screeching halt last month, I will explain. Well at least sum up. Reason # 1. I just moved, and as it turns out, moving seems to take up some time. Getting my studio set up the way I like, as well as all the piles of boxes and piles of crap ordered and placed in to new boxes of crap took way longer than I thought it would. Reason # 2. I HAD NO INTERNET. I know it is hard to imagine, but thanks to Charter Cable, those bastards who just sent me a bill for a service that I never actually got, I was without Internet access for 3 weeks. I have Internet at work, but was very busy with the Galactic Civilizations II Beta and so could never make time to get anything else done there. Reason # 3. (This one I think was subconscious) I was very tired and needed a break. Well I got my break, so I can get my ass cracking and we can finish this pack now. Now that that's over, lets make an icon. When I left we had stepped away form the folder icons and were finishing up the "start" icons. Now that I'm back, let us dive back into the folder icons and push on through to the end. Today we will take care of "Scanners & Cameras" or "Imaging" or whatever it is called these days. This is the folder in the control panel that contains all your imaging devices and their preferences. We will do it how windows does; with a picture of a scanner and a camera. Sadly today's tutorial will be pretty vague since it is about 90% mesh fills, but I will try and be as helpful as possible with my descriptions.
Step 1: First step is to take some mesh rectangles and mockup what we are looking for, keeping in mind the perspective and style of the rest of the pack.	Step 2: Now we start "sculpting" the meshes to give our scanner some details. If you look close you will see that the top of the scanner is quite simple. Four mesh points on each edge, to give it a bit of a bevel, and two in the center for the glass.	Step 3:   Now I do almost the same thing with the lid, except I make the center white, and give it a bit of a bevel to make it seem like it is coming out of the bottom of the lid.
Step 4: By editing the bottom 2 meshes on the scanner I give it a bottom, making sure the top edge color of both the meshes match the edge color of the top piece. This helps it all look like one. I also give the scanner glass a little gloss. To top it all off, using our much used texture techniques I give all the exposed grey areas a brush texture.	Step 5: Now we move on to the camera. This is done in almost the same way. Each mesh rectangle is given 3 points along the edges and by adding black and white I give it a bit of a rounded edge, making all 3 pieces look like one block of metal.	Step 6: Now I use 2 more mesh rectangles to make the eye piece and several circles using regular radial gradients fills to make the lens. To polish them off I give them both a bit of gloss.
Step 7: To make this match our existing style of metal in this pack, I go in with the mesh tool and give the camera a few panels. I also add a button to the top of the camera with one new mesh rectangle.	Step 8: Now to give us that "Icon-A-Day" look we need to make sure we have the reflections. Using our "Reflection Techniques" we go in and add a reflection of the camera and the lid to the scanner glass.	Finished Icon Image. Today we used a lot of mesh fills; make sure you check out the Mesh Fill Tutorials 101 & 201 to get a better idea of how the mesh fill works.
Click here to download the finished icon.
Tomorrow we will push on through the folders. We only have a few left, then we will get down to polishing up the pack for the final release in about 20 or 30 icons. Don't worry, I have not forgotten the Recycler icons, but I am saving them for last. So sit tight and enjoy the ride. Read the other Icon-A-Day Articles: (Icon-A-Day Index) Check out the CorelDRAW for Skinner Index, for links to all the related Video Tutorials. And don't forget to check for all the Icon-A-Day icons as they get made, in the Miscellaneous Icons Gallery at Wincustomize.com All Images and Text in this tutorial are © Paul Boyer, and may not be reused without written permission.

Hello All,

Well, this week has been a decent week in that not too many pressing things were slammed onto my plate which was great!

Still, did some bug fixes and am in the middle of a project with Andrew_ to speed up those personal pages!

Bug Fixes:

1. Posts on WC would duplicate the linetext of the articles! Bad bug! This was fixed by updating one of our stored procedures
2. Some Posts were being saved with blank lines within the articles DB
3. If a skin author who owns a personal page creates his first skin within a particular skin category and the skin goes into moderation and/or processing, that skin is no where to be found within his personal page. This has been fixed.
4. Within the Gallery Section of each personal page, there exists a drop down list and if that author has skins in moderation, there should is an item of the drop down list that says “In Moderation” that you can select to see skins that have not yet been approved. Well, Skins’ status can also be “In Processing”, so I added that entry within that drop down list so you can also see skins that are in processing
5. In the MySkins.aspx page, if a skin author doesn’t have any approved skins, but has skins in moderation or in processing, there was no way to view these skins. This bug has been fixed.

MISC Things worked on this week.
1. Andrew_ and I have tag teamed on making the personal pages faster. First let me say I love when things work smoothly between co-workers. By Splitting the duties, this little project will get done a bit faster, but most importantly, it will be done in a way that is much more expandable because there is twice the man power to implement the correct system!
The duties were split as follows:
a. Andrew_ is in charge of all the usercontrols we want to make static. He has created a system such that they will inherit from this nice little class and will create static files from these controls to save from db activity as well as server side processing. That system, in tandem with implementing them with all the controls is a tall task, and he basically finished it by wed which was awesome.
b. What I’m in charge with is setting up the proper tables within the DB and also some internal things that interact with his system such that if a control needs to refresh itself, the system I created will send a message to his control, and the control will refresh itself.

The system should be done by Monday or Tuesday and the team will Test and debug it, and hopefully the system will be in place live by wed or thurs.
I’ve learned a few things from this project that I can carry over to my next project which is implementing moderators for our forums. Once this project is done with, that is the next beast to tackle! Oh fun it will be let me tell you!

Well, have a great weekend all!!

Flyin

In news.com's article An early peek at Longhorn, there was an interesting bit of information:

But while the OS bears plenty of similarities to Tiger, Allchin stressed that Microsoft has broken new ground in Longhorn. For example, document icons are no longer a hint of the type of file, but rather a small picture of the file itself. The icon for a Word document, for example, is a tiny iteration of the first page of the file. Folders, too, show glimpses of what's inside. Such images can be rather small, but they offer a visual cue that aids in the searching process, Allchin said.

Now, I wonder how that will affect the iconists out there. I assume that icons we are used to is still usable depending how high ou set the graphics setting, but what will this new icon system work? Do you think that we will be able to customize how the preview is rendered?

Update: yum makes life easier. To install a package, for exaple, The GIMP, you would go ito terminal and type 'yum install gimp' or for Firefox, 'yum install firefox' etc. No more web searching!!

Something prompted by a recent upload....probably worthy of a general post.....

Just a 'gentle reminder'..skinning started long before XP came along.  It has always been a personal process.  Someone who 'could do it' 'would do it'.  Then, they may, or may not subsequently choose to share it with others and upload it.

Because they were 'personal creations' they may suit the author admirably, with or without 'issues' that others may perceive on their own systems.

[Case in point...my WB skins were all designed for Litestep and, to the XP Explorer shell user they are not just 'buggy', they are very incomplete....yet on an LS system they work just fine.]

When suggesting there are errors, etc...and the author remarks 'I don't use IE so it doesn't affect me'...you are left with 2 options.  Either adjust it yourself, or POLITELY suggest it could benefit with/from amendments.

There really are only two rules to remember.

1. The skins are given freely...appreciate that.

and

2. Fellow site members deserve consideration and respect.

Remember...skinning is supposed to be fun.  There IS no room for 'attitude'....

Part 2 - Readjusting to the MacOS Interface

Welcome back! This is the second part in a five part series examining the Macintosh to see whether it has come far enough to seriously entice PC users to jump the fence and try living the Steve Jobs way. Part 1 was meant to establish a bit of background so you know where I'm coming from in these articles. Essentially I started on Macs, made the jump to PCs in 1996 and have just recently returned to the Mac fold so-to-speak. This segment will focus on the User Interface of MacOS X.

My Powerbook's Desktop

The Hard Adjustments

It's never easy switching between Operating Systems, they all do things differently. While many features are at least similar in location and behavior between platforms, some changes just toss you for a loop. Several times in OS X, both my knowledge of the old Mac world as well as Windows completely failed me.

1) The New Apple Menu

The new and improved Apple Menu

The new Apple Menu is something that took me a while to get used to. Under the old MacOS, it was a sort of catch-all space for you to place shortcuts, get quick access to system configs etc. Think of it as a disorganized Start Menu. The new Apple Menu is streamlined and you can no longer hide shortcuts within it for quick access. Now, the menu is meant for quick access to the core system tools. You can get to the System Preferences (Formerly called Control Panels), make changes to the Dock, determine which location you are at so your computer can utilize the proper network settings (I have configs for my apartment here in CT as well as for my parents home in PA whenever I visit), access to recent items, system software updates and the core Shutdown/Restart/Sleep options as well as a logout choice. So basically, out of the box you have nothing in OS X that comes close to the Start Menu in Windows, or the old Apple Menu from days long gone. This meant I had to relearn where a lot of system tools were hiding. This led me to my second adjustment problem...

2) Where the (&$#@ are the printers?!!?

Ok, if you are familiar with the old MacOS, you know that the printers are handled through the Chooser, which you get to from the Apple Menu. The Chooser was sort of a swiss army knife as it was where they threw in all the system functionality they couldn't fit somewhere else. This was where you handled printers as well as connecting to network drives etc... Well problem number one is the Apple Menu as I knew it was gone, so I had to find out where they went and hid them. First I went running off to see if they were hidden in the System Preferences (Control Panels)... nope. I was left to dig through the directory structure manually to find it. I finally found it as a Printer application within the Utilities directory under Applications. Now in retrospect this is a logical place for a Printer tool to be kept, but it is counterintuitive to what Mac and Windows has done in the past. Once I got used to where it was, I found the Printer tool to be incredibly useful and very easy to use!

3) Why won't it sort the icons how I want them sorted?

I'm accustomed to the Windows way of sorting items within a folder. Folders first, sorted alphabetically, then files sorted alphabetically. This allowed me to quickly find a folder if I was looking for a folder, or a file if I was quickly looking for a file. Unfortunately, in OS X it seems to want to force me to always list in pure alphabetical form, mixing folders with files. This is such a disconnect to how I'm used to working that I *still* haven't grown accustomed to it in the year I've been back on the Mac. This is one of those cases where I butt up against the Apple mindset that they know best how I should use my machine, and lock away certain customizations. There HAS to be a hidden config somewhere that changes this, so I can get things sorted the way I like, but I've yet to find it.

Old vs New - The Old MacOS to the New OS X

When you look at the older versions of MacOS and then at the new OS X, it looks like you're dealing with a completely different interface that holds little in common with the old version. In some cases, that's certainly true, but in many cases it's the same functionality with a new, pretty set of graphics over it.

	Pre MacOS X	MacOS X
Desktop	Contains Macintosh Hard Drive Displays external media Contains Trash Can (Recycling Bin)	Contains Macintosh Hard Drive Displays external media Contains Dock
Folder Navigation	Available Display Modes: List, Icon, Column, Tree Sorts all items alphabetically Defaults to open new folders in existing window	Available Display Modes: List, Icon, Tree Sorts all items alphabetically Defaults to open new folders in new windows
System Configuration	Each system component managed by individual control panels accessable by drop-down from the AppleMenu	All system components rolled into a single System Preferences application. Accessable from the AppleMenu or the Dock
Accessing Open Applications	Could select Application from the App Menu on the top right corner of the screen. Once in an application you could then flip through windows	All open Applications listed on the dock, click-and-hold on an icon to get a pull-out menu listing all open windows.
File Sharing	Activated through the File Sharing Control Panel Connect to other shares over AppleTalk through the Chooser	Activated from the Sharing panel within System Configuration Connect to other shares on the network (AppleTalk, Windows, Samba, any major standard) through the "Go" menu

There are a multitude of other common activities that map between the two systems, but the above suffice to show the differences and how, while different, remain pretty similar in form. It's not too hard to figure out the new way of doing things if you're used to the old way.

But comparing the how the two are similar and accomplish the same tasks is pretty boring, and since most people reading this are pretty computer saavy this is all painfully obvious stuff. The real fun with OS X is what it brings to the table in terms of NEW stuff...

New Toys!

So what new and flashy things does MacOS X bring to the OS world that have been sorely lacking from other standard Operating Systems? Well, lots of stuff actually. Now, some of these, such as the Dock, have been recreated by other developers for the Windows platform. I'm not looking at these as features that are necesarily EXCLUSIVE to the Mac, just ones that are bundled as standard features. It's all well and good to be able to add functionality through third party software, but it's at times preferable to have some functions built into the system, allowing for greater stability, as well as interesting hooks into other applications. I don't need a flood of comments like "Oh you can get that functionality with Software XYZ!" That's not the point here.

There are four new aspects to the User Interface that I particularly like. These are by no means the ONLY UI improvements you'll find in OS X, as there is a LOT of functionality built right into the Finder (such as CD Burning), these are just my favorite ones.

1) Exposé

Exposé is probably one of the neater features bundled with MacOSX as of 10.3 (Panther) It allows you to quickly gain access to several views of your system with just the press of a key. This is a function I don't think I've seen in any version of Windows, MacOS or Linux, but I bet we'll start seeing it in the next major versions in the coming years. There are three views you can activate with Exposé, the first being the ability to essentially "Zoom Out" and view every window of every application you have open on your computer by pressing the F9 key. You are presented with a series of thumbnails of your currently open windows, mousing over them gives you a little bit of information on the window such as the application and document title. Clicking on an item will zoom it to the forefront. This is great if you regularly have a dozen windows open and become confused or forget what else you have running, or whether or not you already have a file or web page open in the background. The second view you can access by hitting F10. This will show you all open windows within the current application. This is nice when you have multiple word documents, or multiple browser windows open. Once again, clicking on a thumbnail will zoom that window to the forefront. The third and most familiar mode to Windows users would be the Show Desktop mode. By hitting F11, all windows zoom off to the edges of the screen, clearing the way back to your desktop so you can quickly access your hard drive, any disks, or downloaded files you may have sitting on the Desktop. In this mode, along the edges of the screen you'll see a darkened region, sometimes with the edges of windows showing. You can just click on the darkened regions to bring back all the windows that were hidden. To de-activate any view, you can also hit the corresponding function key again. It will return you to the window you were previously in.

Exposé screenshots and captions taken from Apple.com

2) Dock

This is the one part that most people visiting this article (either through JoeUser or WinCustomize) are the most familiar with. Apple added a "dock" to the system that acts much like the task bar does on the Windows side of life. Active applications reside here, as well as shortcuts to commonly used programs and games (or whatever you want to put on there). This is also where they've decided to place the Trash Can, removing it from the desktop where I'm used to it being. The dock can be customized a number of ways. You can position it on any side of the screen. It defaults to the bottom, but I have it aligned to the right of the screen. You can also scale the Dock to any size you like, turn icon maginification on or off, add or remove shortcut items as you like etc... If you've ever used Stardock's Object Dock (free or Plus) you know how the Dock works, and you know how useful it can be. It fits in with the entire OS X motif in ways that the old AppleMenu or a taskbar from Windows would not.

3) Spring Loaded Folders

This is one of those features that once you use it you think to yourself "This is just so obvious!" I'm sure everyone has had to drag and drop a file from one folder to another, but first had to click through a ton of folders in between to find the destination, then, with both the destination folder and the origin folder open, drag and drop. Seems simple because that's how we're used to things working. Well, OS X does it much better! You have an application on your desktop that you want to move to your Applications directory. Click and hold on the file, drag it over the Macintosh HD icon, it will automatically open the Hard Drive in a window. Continue to hold down the mouse, and now drag the file over your Applications folder icon, it will then open that directory and you can just release the item in the window. Ta-da! It's incredibly easy and intuitive to move files and folders around, reducing the amount of clicking you have to do.

Notes for Windows Users

There are a few points that are going to confuse life-long Windows users about the UI. I'll try and address them now...

	Windows	MacOS X
Program List	Start Menu -> Programs	Macintosh HD -> Applications
Active Applications	Taskbar & System Tray	Dock
System Configuration	Control Panels	System Preferences
Delete Files	Recycling Bin on the Desktop	Trash Can on the Dock
Printers	Start -> Settings -> Printers & Faxes	Macintosh HD -> Applications -> Utilities -> Printer Setup Utility
Mouse Menu	Right Click	Control-Click Plug in a 2 button mouse and right click
Kill Frozen Application	Ctrl-Alt-Del -> Task Manager -> Select Process -> End Task	Cmd-Opt-Q -> Select App to Force Quit
Quit Program	Alt-F4	Cmd-Q

Those are the big-difference items that every user new to Macs coming from the Windows world should know.

---

Ok, that's it for this fast-and-furious tour of the main UI features to MacOS X. I could have spent days just examining this aspect of the Operating System, but I just wanted to hit on the high points, compare and contrast it to the older systems and to Windows. The UI for OS X is clean, well laid out and good looking. It doesn't allow you the same sort of customization many will be used to from having used WindowBlinds and the rest of the ObjectDesktop suite, but I've found little need to tweak the default appearance of my Mac. In fact I've picked up Steve's MacOS X Tiger theme suite for my PC to make my experience a bit more uniform as I move back and forth from Mac to PC.

Part 3 will focus on Software for OS X, taking a look at the bundled apps you get with the system, what major software packages are available from third party vendors, as well as what sorts of games you can expect to be able to play on the platform. Keep an eye out for that article around the end of the week.

 

Hello all,

This week was one that I desparately needed. Our sites have been it's most stable this week since our move to chicago.
Still things to do to help with that, but that will be discussed later

Bugs Fixed:
1. Cannot Edit or delete posts
2. Editing and/or setting article's status is too slow
3. Within the libraries, the "Top Authors" Section of the right bar wasn't showing correctly.
4. Page Count for article comments was displaying incorrectly. For Example, if there are 4 pages of article replies, it was only showing as having 3, you would actually have to manually type in the url the 4th page.
5. Users could not move his/her posts from one forum to another in certain cases.

These are all bugs i had a chance to get to this week and now are currently SQUISHED!

MISC things done to help with site/server performance:
1. Did some profiling of our sites as usual, and just made sure our key queries weren't taken longer than usual, and noted others that need some TLC
2. Created some stored procedures to help with syncing articles from one db to another so that the process would be much more zippy when editing/deleting/setting status of articles.
3. When creating/editing/deleting an article from your blogsite of JU, it now queue's a job to sync that particular to our articles DB.
4. This task took most of the time this week, but i feel will help us in the long run.
Late last week, one of our external developers who is a whiz at Databases made a suggestion on how to structure a few of our intense queries. Well, Here are a few "things" that his suggestion has made an impact with:
a. Article Comments. Our methods of retrieving article comments wasn't bad, but was very average. this change made a 300% improvement in speed and efficiency.
b. Skin Comments. Similiar to the skin comments, it has made a significant impact in change.
c. Viewing and paging through featured articles
In all, i updated roughly 21 stored procedures to benefit from Alberto's suggestion. I figure i mine as well do it now before it becomes a major issue.

Some Key things that need to be addressed next week:
1. When a skin is created or approved, it doesn't always show up properly throughout the WC Main site as well as that author's personal page.
2. Personal pages!!!! Three key words - "Faster" "Faster" "Faster
we will be concentrating alot on using the new static page system t-man created this week and implementing it within the personal pages so that the browsing experience is much much better.

Well, i'm sure i forgot a few items, but that is it for the week. Have a great weekend! the weather in detroit is beautiful!

Flyin

WindowBlinds 4.51 has been reviewed on the Extended64 web site.

The conclusions?

* Installation: 10/10
* Ease of use: 9/10
* Performance 10/10
* x64 Compatibility: 10/10
Extended64.com Application Overall Rating: 9.75/10

Extended64 is "the first community website devoted to the Windows x64 Platform."

According to Administrator Ryan Hoffman "Our goal is to provide you with the latest news, tweaks, tips, and guides for Windows x64." And now Extended64 has done an in depth review of WindowBlinds 4.51.

IBM's latest power user ThinkPad is the T42.  The T series of ThinkPads provide the best combination between raw performance and portability.  The ThinkPad T series is what I use when I travel to demonstrate our latest software.  It's portable enough that I can lug it around but still powerful enough to show off our various programs.

The T42 I received from IBM is a bit heavier than the T40 it is replacing (about a pound -- 5.7 pounds).  While a relatively small difference, it is something I am definitely noticing as I lug it around.  But I am amply rewarded with a 15 inch display (instead of 14.1 inches).  Other details include a 1.8Ghz Pentium M processor.  The M series of processors aren't like other processors. The Ghz doesn't really tell the story.  In terms of every day usage, it "feels" about as fast as my 3Ghz desktop in terms of computing power. With the larger battery installed, it gets around 5 hours of real world battery use which means I can watch movies and what not on a cross-country trip.

My configuration also includes the IBM Multi-Burner DVD/CD-ROM drive burner drive which lets me make both CDs and DVDs.  The native display resolution is 1400x1050 which is quite useful when doing development, video work, or graphics design. Bundled software allows me to hit the Fn-Space bar to toggle between its maximum display and various lower "zoomed" displays for when I browsing or writing an article (such as this one).  The actual adapter is an ATI Radeon 9600 Mobility which translates to meaning I can play most of the latest games just fine on it if I want and this is also important for me since I'm coding parts of Galactic Civilizations II on it.

One feature I didn't really notice when I ordered it but am finding I really like is the new Finger Print reader (see #9 in the shot to the left). Instead of using a UserID and password to logon, I just put my index finger the finger print reader and it logs me in.  It's well, it's pretty damn cool.

The bundled software IBM has included has finally reached the point where I don't immediately try to scrub it all off.  I still remove most of it as it makes the default boot time take forever (IBM take note, IBM Messages is annoying!).  One piece of bundled software in particular I like --  IBM Active Protection.  Basically it monitors the stability of the machine in real time. I mean the physical stability. So any jarring or rapid movement and it'll instantly turn off the hard drive. 

One feature I've noticed other reviews haven't mentioned that is very important is the new way the battery is handled. In previous versions of the ThinkPad, the battery would keep charging even when plugged in. So IBM batteries tended to die out after around a year. But now the "Improve Battery Health" feature lets you turn that behavior off.

The included 802.11g connectivity has very impressive range (much the same as the T40's 802.11b).  IBM also includes a lot (arguably too much) wireless network software to make it "easy" to connect to a wide variety of networks.  In practice, I don't find this to be that useful as Windows XP SP2's wireless network features are more than enough.

In terms of usage, the ThinkPad T42 keyboard has keys that are spaced and sized the same as a desktop keyboard. The result is that moving from your desktop to the ThinkPad is a smooth transition.

There's not much to complain about here, overall it's a fantastic laptop for the power user. If you need a workhorse laptop that works both as a desktop and is quite portable, you can't do much better than IBM's ThinkPad T42.  Now how things will go with Chinese PC vendor, Lenova in charge remains to be seen. I have been using ThinkPads since 1994 and can't even imagine using any other laptop (particularly one without a trackpoint).  But for now, the ThinkPad T42 is my laptop of choice.

IBM ThinkPad T42 Configuration: memory: 1.5 Gigs Display: 15 inch CPU: 1.8Ghz Video: ATI M9600 Drive: 50GB Price: $2,498 www.thinkpad.com

It's been a short week, but have made a few big strides!

Optimization was the name of the game this week.

As you guys and gals know, our sites haven't been as happy as we all would like them to be lately which is due in part to alot of things, but which has raised

a very very large red flag.

Now on to the Updates:

1. We learned a little bit ago, for all you .net web developers out there, that when you use an SQLDataReader that it does not get closed naturally after it is done doing a databind rather it holds the connection to the database open until the garbage collector comes by and does the proper actions for the datareader.  Well, This fix took me a while!  I went through all of our Wincustomize based code, which as you can imagine is large and made sure that all instances of SQLDataReader are opneing and closing the datareaders in a proper fashion with the proper exception handling to wrap around each code block.
2. One of our developers emailed T-man and I today with something he has seen us do alot of which apperently isn't the most effective way to page through mounds and mounds of records.  Take for instance our Marathon thread, for quite some time now the thread has been unreadable and unmanageable on our part because the query to populate that bad boy has just been flat out painful.  Well, with the suggestions by Alberto, we have cut that query down to be over 6 times faster now than before, and although still not as fast as you guys want, it does the job much more efficiently and most of all doesn't take as much server processing to complete!
3. Our database that is currently serving up articles was very dependant on our huge master DB for information, so, if the master DB was slow in responding, articles would also be slow to respond obviously.  Well, we thought it over, and the articles DB should be independant of the master database in such a way that if the master were to go down, the community should be able to still browse articles in most circumstances, well, we have made a large stride in doing so which didn't take much time at all.  Basically, T-man setup replication on a few tables from the master DB to be copied over to the Articles DB so if need be, it can run the forum lists independently.  All i had to do on my part was change some queries so that it would no longer look at the master for some information, but would look locally within it's own DB and now things seem to respond much better.  We will see just how well.
4. I assisted Andrew_ in the forums he is writing that will soon be up for public use.  I wrote some cache callbacks for him so that when a forum listing expires from cache, it will refresh itself so that the next user will get a "faster" copy of the data and not have to wait for a call to the database.  I also did cache callbacks for the subtopic dropdownlists, and the forum bookmarks.
5. BUG: User was able to obtain the "Admin" Honorific!  Little rascal, well, i make a check to see when you change your honorific, the code checks to see if you have the proper access and if so, gives you the honorific, else, STOP HACKING THE SITE!   

Yes, if you can see i had my DBA hat on this week, well for the last few weeks profiling and such to see what is bringing down our sites.  This weekend will tell alot about the strides we have made this week.  Let's just now cross our fingers and hope for a solid weekend of sites running the way they were first intended to!

Have a great weekend all, and i don't have any good jokes, but APRIL FOOLS ANYWAYS!   

Peace out

Flyin