Take the Time
2010-01-08 19:21 by Ian
Lyrics to an amazing Dream Theater song.
An accessible introduction to PHP optimization
2009-09-07 22:09 by Ian
This was a ticket that I had from a customer who wanted us to increase the upper-limit on PHP script execution because his crappy script wouldn’t finish in time before our server-wide limit shut down his PHP process.
I’m posting it with the hope that it will be of help to someone new to PHP trying to write a cleaner script.
Mercury distillation
2009-08-26 20:30 by Ian
These are my lab notes and photos for the mercury distillation.
Comment [4]
Liquid metal
2009-08-20 10:44 by Ian
Picked up about 11.5kg of mercury yesterday and cleaned it up. This was my procedure and pictures of the results.
Cross-filed under photography because I took lots of photos of the mercury while I was cleaning it. The pictures can’t do it justice. The stuff is beautiful.
Comment [2]
Why I Have Two Names
2009-08-11 22:11 by Ian
I am often asked this these days.
More silly doodles
2009-07-05 21:58 by Ian
Stuff I drew. All idle doodles.
Hand Replacement of large non-BGA surface-mount IC's
2009-07-05 12:12 by Ian
This is another procedure I wrote while doing camera repair. Occasionally, there was an identifiable chip that would go bad, but which replacement was considered impossible at our small shop. The alternative was replacing the entire PCB that it was mounted on, which would be an order of magnitude more expensive.
Testing PHP_PDF.DLL on IIS6 and Win2K3
2009-07-02 08:40 by Ian
This is a component that I tested for installation on CrystalTech’s PHP4 servers (yes, we still offer PHP4). Each time a customer requests a component, we have to test it to ensure that it won’t kill the resources on the server. This is the report that I gave to the other server admins…
My first fractal poster
2009-06-25 22:10 by Ian
Made in one sitting using Photoshop and UltraFractal. Full-size version is 5 feet wide.
The coolant chiller
2009-06-25 19:52 by Ian
For doing distillations and extractions using solvents with low boiling points (such as diethyl ether or chloroform), the coolant in the condenser must be below the temperature of tap water.
This is my solution to the problem of reliable sub-zero cooling.