Anyhow, I was having terrible monitor flicker with my external monitor. I noticed that the flicker would appear anytime I hooked up my power brick to my laptop and it would magically stop anytime I unplugged it.

At first I just chalked it up to Dell’s shoddy construction as I never had a problem with my Viao. However, after crawling the web I finally stumbled across this solution:

Are you having problems with a flickering external monitor on your laptop?

Does the flicker go away if you remove the laptop charger?

If you answered yes to the above questions, you probably have a ground loop. Slimplified this is because the monitor is grounded (using a 3 prong coord) and the laptop is not grounded.

The power brick was grounded but I guess the laptop wasn’t ( which makes sense as the connector is one of those round jobbies which can only have two “prongs”.

I wrapped some tape around the ground prong and then like magic the flicker stopped I still don’t understand why I had no problems with the Viao though, so it could be a problem with the laptop’s construction … maybe the connectors aren’t shielded ( or something )

You can read the entire blog post that I quoted above on Mr. Gnome’s Blog.

Although there are a bunch of open-source mailing list managers out there, if email marketing is key to your business, you might want to consider using a email marketing service instead.

Feature Comparison

¹: Requires one time fee
²: Requires monthly fee / per-usage fee

Pricing Comparison

Information valid time of posting

Monthly Plans

subscribers vs. price per month

If anyone has experience with these vendors, I’d love to hear about them!

One of my clients wants to send out email newsletters and possibly get into the e-basting market. Being the LAMP, pro-open source person that I am, my first thought was to hit what I could find. The three major players that I found were:

• poMMo : The post modern mailer
• PHP List
• DaDa mail/DaDa mail Pro

Feature Comparison

¹: Via a plugin

Overall Thoughts

By far, poMMO had the best interface; everything was nicely laid out. I especially liked how you could adjust the throttling with AJAX-y slider. PoMMo also supports resume and sends all messages in the background, a very handy features of large lists. If you run into trouble, though, you’re on your own. The project is no longer under active development, it has some PHP5 compatibility problems, and its forums are overrun with spam.

PHP List has a lot of great features and is still being actively developed. It’s interface is very simple, with no frills. You’ll find yourself digging through a lot of configuration files, though (personally I love config files, but not everyone does ) as many of features cannot configured via the web interface. In addition, when mailing, a window pops up showing you the status of the current mailing. While this is nice, if the window goes poof, the mailing stops dead in its tracks, with no option to resume.

DaDa mail has two versions: free and Pro ($50). Both have the same feature set, but free has limits that Pro does not. The interface, like PHP List is very simple and plain Jane. There a bunch of plugins which build upon DaDa’s feature set, but the site choked up 404′s for some of the plugins (never a good sign). DaDa does have the options to pause and resume, but it’s unclear if it will resume in case of a crash.

Points to Ponder

Hosting your own system, while cheaper the short run, may not be the best option. As you send out more and more emails, your incur the frowns (and possibly the wrath) of your hosting provider. In addition, you run the risk of being marked as a spammer. The delivery success rate will probably not be as good as a service that specializes in mass email mailings. They build relationships with email providers, gaining their trust and work hard to keep their success rate at an optimum.

If you have a small list, grab one of the above projects and blast away. However, if this is going to be a critical part of your business strategy, you might want to opt for a email marketing service instead.

Thanks to everyone for your support and help!

Just 2.5 days to go

On a random side note, do you know what hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia means? The fear of long words, haha.

Testimonials

I add rotating testimonials using the quotator (I love that name!) I created a PHP backend to so that the testimonials are stored in an array and then shuffled before creating the JS data array.

Online Portfolio

I built an online portfolio using Slideshow 2. I also created a PHP frontend to store portfolio entries in an array. In addition, it also automatically resizes images and creates thumbnails ( after checking if they already exist first, of course ). I was also able to integrated lightbox into the slideshow, but it was kind of a pain.

If you want the code to any of these, just let me know and I can shoot them your way!

Anyhow, one of the things I don’t like about it, is that that Firefox’s spellchecker doesn’t work when composing a HTML message.

There are two ways to remedy this:

The quick way

1. CTRL-Right click in the editing field and check the “Check Spelling” option
2. You should see the red wavy lines under spelling errors. To get spelling suggestions, you’ll have to CTRL-Right click the errors

Please note that you’ll have to do this every time you want spell checking

A more permanent solution

1. First, open up a new tab and type in about:config
2. Search for layout.spellcheckDefault
3. Double click spellcheckDefault and change the value to 2

Note: You’ll still have to CTRL-Right click to get the spell check suggestions, but at least you’ll have the red wavy lines Also, this makes Firefox spell check every HTML field. If you decide you don’t like this, follow the instructions above and change the value back to 1.

Laura (as always) has been amazing and is constantly encouraging me. Without her I’d probably given up a while ago

Here are 10 things I love/missed about America (in no particular order)

1. I can understand the language!
2. The food: Wendy’s, Taco Bell, KFC Bicuits, good salads, etc…
3. Sporks!
4. People *gasp* actually get in lines
5. There is “personal space”
6. No hawking up loogies (ewww…)!
7. Water fountains (and that we can drink the tap water)
8. Milk and yogurt are in correct proportions at the supermarket
9. Websites are not blocked
10. Freedom of speech

The flight was nice and uneventful . If you’re traveling to and from China, Northwest is the way to go! They had hundreds of free on-demand movies and their food was actually quite tasty.

We’ve hit the ground running and every day has been packed to the gills and quite exhausting. Our wedding is quickly approaching and it’s crunch time as we figure out the venue, tuxes, food, times, pastors, invitation, wording, music … and even hair!

I told Laura that between China and planning a wedding, that if we can just get to the point of being married that we can weather anything .