CompleteFusion

Since we purchased our 8MP Olympus E-500 digital SLR camera, Leila and I have been taking a lot more pictures. Transferring pictures from the digital camera takes a long time, so we bought a card reader. After a bit of research, we decided on one of the slightly more expensive ones we found – the Atech Flash PROGear-G5 28-in-1.

High quality JPEGs from our camera are about 5MB each. The transfer rate from the camera to computer is about 0.5MB/s, but with the new card reader our 1GB "Ultra II" card and 2GB "Extreme III" card transfer at 10MB/s and 15-20MB/s respectively. Although it was slightly more expensive than other card readers, the performance is definitely worth it. To transfer pictures off the camera previously took 20-30 minutes, while it now takes about a minute.

Recently, the jQuery team released jQuery UI tools, a "fully themed interaction and widget library built on top of jQuery". I wanted to experiment with the new tools, and found tablesorter to be the most interesting initially. One thing I decided to create was a basic PHP search function on a MySQL database, with results able to be sorted by various field (column) elements with tablesorter.

MySQL has come a long way in its full-text boolean search capabilities, with v4.0+ having the most current feature set. Since I already had my data in MySQL, I simply had to run an ALTER statement on the table to add full-text indexing/searching: ALTER table ADD FULLTEXT(column1,column2,etc)

(Note: This works on MyISAM tables / VARCHAR, TEXT, and CHAR type fields)

To query the database and get boolean matches, you use WHERE MATCH(column1,column2,etc) AGAINST ('search text' IN BOOLEAN MODE) in your query.

If your desired search was in $search_string, the PHP code would look something like this:

$query = "SELECT * FROM table WHERE MATCH(column1,column2) AGAINST ('$search_string' IN BOOLEAN MODE)"
$result = mysql_query($query) or die("Query failed: " . mysql_error());


Our old wireless router was dying, so I took the opportunity to buy a new one. After shopping around, I decided on a Buffalo WHR-HP-G54, a dd-wrt compatible, high-power MIMO router/access point.

If you're not familiar with dd-wrt, it is replacement firmware for wireless routers with advanced functions and a terrific interface. In less than 10 minutes, you can also replace the default firmware on your Buffalo WHR-HP-G54, by following the 5 steps below.

1) Change the IP address of your computer to 192.168.11.2, with a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0
2) Connect your computer to one of the LAN ports on the WHR-HP-G54 with an ethernet cable
3) Download a TFTP client
4) Download the dd-wrt software and save it to the same directory as the TFTP client you just downloaded. I used the generic Broadcom standard build of dd-wrt v24 RC3.
5) Copy and paste the following into a file named install.bat in the same directory as the TFTP client and firmware, and run it by double clicking on it. Then just follow the instructions provided by the batch file.

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@echo off</code>
 
echo ============================================================================
echo Type or paste the firmware filename below and then press Enter.
echo.
set /p dd-wrt_fn=Firmware Filename:
echo.
if not exist %dd-wrt_fn% goto FNF_ERROR
echo ============================================================================
echo This batch file will upload %dd-wrt_fn% in the current
echo directory to 192.168.11.1 during the router's bootup.
echo.
echo * Set your ethernet card's settings to:
echo      IP:      192.168.11.2
echo      Mask:    255.255.255.0
echo      Gateway: 192.168.11.1.
echo * Unplug the router's power cable.
echo.
echo Press Ctrl+C to abort or any other key to continue . . .
pause &gt; nul
echo.
echo * Re-plug the router's power cable.
echo.
echo ============================================================================
echo Waiting for the router; Press Ctrl+C to abort . . .
echo.
:PING
ping -n 1 -w 50 192.168.11.1 &gt; nul
if errorlevel 1 goto PING
echo tftp -i 192.168.11.1 put %dd-wrt_fn%
tftp -i 192.168.11.1 put %dd-wrt_fn%
if errorlevel 1 goto PING
echo.
echo ============================================================================
echo * WAIT for about 2 minutes while the firmware is being flashed.
echo * Reset your ethernet card's settings back to DHCP.
echo * The default router address will be at 192.168.1.1.
echo.
pause
goto END
:FNF_ERROR
echo ============================================================================
echo ERROR: Make sure this batch file and the firmware are in the same directory!
echo.
pause
:END