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Oops… they did it again.

By In Technology0 Comments2,150 Views

Well it seems my faithful cell provider sadly broke the Internet on their cellular network  again*sigh*. I’m referring back to the previous problem I had with accessing any streaming services on the mobile browser on my Samsung u740 about a year or so ago. They eventually fixed the previous problem after about 1-2 months of me acquiring the phone and reporting the problem. This time around however they’re blaming it on their recent separation from a sister company and that they no longer support streaming on their network. Of course after mowing through several Customer Service Monkeys I eventually discovered that they no longer support their paid streaming, which I could care less about. But the fact that I cannot access current streaming services on the Internet is in fact a problem on their network, but not that they don’t support streaming. At any rate, I was finally able to submit a ticket to their data analysts about a week ago… still no response.

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T.

Toshiba M200 and a Solid State Drive

By In Technology0 Comments2,260 Views

So I decided to amp up the performance of my Toshiba Protege M200 tablet by installing a Transcend 64GB SSD into the already awesome device. And I must say: Wow! So quiet! And it got a huge boost to hard drive performance all the way from 4.4 to 5.8 in the Windows Experience Index. On top of that it’s a lot cooler now but did I mention quiet???

I have my power options in Windows to allow the processor to lower it’s speed even on full power so the fan barely comes on. Even while I type this post, the fan it totally silent so this computer is emanating NO SOUND what so ever and holding steady at 55c for the processor temp. Now of course compared to my new 45nm quad core AMD which is 45c at full load, doesn’t come close. But for a 90nm processor in a 5 year old tablet laptop, I’m doing pretty damn good.

Q: Does it really boot faster with SSD?

A: I’d say it shaves about 2-3 seconds off the boot time of mine*.

Q: Does your profile and applications load faster?

A: Definitely seems more responsive, yes. For both loading my profile and applications.

Q: Is Aero any more stable with the SSD?

A: Not really.

Q: Do games play better with the SSD?

A: I may see a bit better on loading screens but overall frame rates will probably remain the same.**

Q: Has your battery life improved a lot?

A: Solid State Drives require far less power than traditional hard drives, but how much they actually draw on the battery I can’t really say (verses the cpu or gfx). Presumably I should, but I haven’t had the chance to test it yet well yet. So far Vista estimates about 2:30 hours on the battery with my current setup. I’ll know more when classes return.

*Specs: 1.8 GHz, 2GB PC2700, Clean Vista Ultimate Install

**No games installed yet

R.

Regex and Anchor tags

By In Technology0 Comments2,275 Views

I had been looking on the Internet for a solution to a program I had be working on and sadly didn’t come up with one. I was trying to find a way to use regular expressions to find all the html anchor tags in a string along with matching a wild card URL (ie: secnem.com.*test.html). And after many hours of thrusting my head into my keyboard I came up with:

/<a [^><]*href=[\”\’][^\”\’><]*<rule>[^\”\’><]*[\”\’][^>]*>\s*.*\s*<\/a>/iU

You’d replace <rule> with what ever url rule you want, except for any wild cards in the url I needed to use [^\”\’><]* instead of just .* . This would prevent it from matching outside of the anchor. Bascially [^\”\’><]*  means: match any character except a double quote, single quote, greater than sign, or less than sign. All of which should not be in the href field to begin with.

If you wanted to see what the content of the anchor tag was or the matched href, simply put some brackets around like so:

/<a [^><]*href=[\”\’]([^\”\’><]*<rule>[^\”\’><]*)[\”\’][^>]*>(\s*.*\s*)<\/a>/iU

Hope this helps someone. You can of course adapt this to other html tags by replacing ‘a’ for ‘table’ or w/e. Same with the href. larsolavtorvik.com has a great resource for testing regex in real time and addedbytes.com has a great cheat sheet as well.