GO-Blog EN

You’ve bought your paint, you’ve got new brushes and rollers, you’ve spread out the drop cloths, and you’ve opened up the stepladder. You’re ready to paint. Whoa! Stop right there, Mr. or Ms. Inabighurry. You’ve forgotten the most important thing: surface preparation. The real secret to a beautiful, long-lasting paint job is making the walls and ceiling really clean and perfectly smooth.

• Prepare the room. Remove lamps, irreplaceable knick-knacks, and as much furniture as you can and then push whatever is left to the middle of the room. Remove anything attached to the walls, including pictures, window treatments, and switch and outlet plates. Loosen ceiling light fixtures and wrap them in plastic trash bags. Take off all the window and door hardware. Finally, cover every inch of everything—floor, furniture, and radiators—with canvas or heavy-plastic drop cloths.
• Clean the surface. You can wipe away fingerprints, crayon, pen marks, dirt, and dust from walls, trim, and doors with spray cleaner and a damp cloth.
• If your house is relatively new, make a bucket of soapy water and wipe the walls and ceiling with a damp sponge. If your house is older, you need something that cuts through the accumulated crud: a synthetic trisodium phosphate (TSP) solution.
• If you have mildew on the bathroom wall, you need to kill it and cover the remaining stain with a stain sealer primer made to hide stains.
• Prepare the surface. Fill nail holes, cracks, and other imperfections with patching compound. Scrape any loose or flaking paint on windows, sills, and woodwork. Sand patches and any bare areas on windows, sills, and woodwork. Lightly sand or use a deglosser to knock down the shine on glossy trim. Lightly sand walls if they are uneven, brushmarked, or bumpy. Fill gaps between the trim and the walls (especially along the baseboards and door trim) with caulk.
• Clean again. Vacuum the room to remove sanding dust and paint flakes (don’t forget to do the windowsills and trim). Then wipe down everything with a tack rag or barely damp cloth.
• Prime. Prime any bare wood, all patches, and any still-visible marks or stains.
• Mask the windows. Use wax paper, or a layer of thin plastic taped to the windows to prevent paint splatters on the glass.

Removing Old Paint from Exterior Surfaces

If the old paint is failing down to bare wood, you have to remove it all. You can hire professionals to remove the paint by using chemical removers or by sandblasting Amateurs are encouraged not to undertake either of these removal methods: The chemical removers that pros use are too dangerous for the novice to handle, and if the air pressure is set too high on sandblasting equipment, an inexperienced worker may blow the siding right off the house. If you decide to have the paint removed by sandblasting, choose an experienced pro who can offer referrals to satisfied customers, and call or visit those customers to check the references. We emphasize experienced pro, because not all professional painters have had much practice sandblasting wood.

More and all is discussed in this book:
Home Maintenance for Dummies

LONDON/AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Telecoms companies Vodafone and Telecom Italia will both sell Apple Inc’s iPhone in Italy, in an apparent break from previous exclusive carrier deals.

So far, Apple has struck exclusive deals with carriers to sell the phone, such as with AT&T in the United States, Telefonica’s O2 in Britain and Deutsche Telekom in Germany.

Neither Vodafone nor Telecom Italia provided many details.

“Telecom Italia announced today it has signed a deal with Apple to bring the iPhone to Italy later this year,” was all that the Italian group had to say on Tuesday.

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Just spotted this over at Mac Rumors, that there are a few cases reported Mac Pro users can boot into their 64-bit Windows Vista (GO confirms XP support still limited to 32-bit on Bootcamp).

From the manual, Page 4, the message said:

Important: You must use a single full-install Windows installation disc (Service Pack 2 is required for Windows XP installations). Do not use an upgrade version of Windows and do not install an earlier version of Windows XP and attempt to update it later to SP2 or later. Use only 32-bit versions of Windows. If you have a Mac Pro introduced in late 2007 or later, you can use a 64-bit version of Windows Vista.

Also, from your Mac Pro restore disk (on newer shipped models, apparently), you should be able to find a file “BookCamp64.exe” under “Drivers\Apple\”, under Windows. There a spread/file sharing of this file on the internet whom a forum member has kindly shared with other Mac Pro user. As I have never used Boot Camp and don’t have a Mac at all, I can’t say if this “BootCamp64″ will work with all other 64-bits processors used by Mac. It in understand that all Mac Pro are 64-bit capable.
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As a PHP contractor, consultant, and freelancer, Larry Truett from San Diego who goes by the alias Fluffycat had a fair number of interviews - and sometimes he’s been asked technical questions. Here are a few to help you prepare for your next PHP job interview.

=,==,=== - what is the difference between these?

= assigns a value, == checks if value is the same, === checks if value is the same and the variables are of the exact same type.

Echo, print, printf - what is the difference between these?

Print and echo both output what is passed to them. Print acts like a function, so you can use it in complex statements. Printf is used to format the output.

Include, include once, require - what is the difference between these?

Include will includes a file each time it is called. Include_once would only include a file one time, so if a php program has a file in two include_once statements only the first will be done. Requre is like include, but if the file included is not available a fatal error occurs and processing stops.

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Chris Soghoian reports on Facebook’s new privacy controls, which feature the ability to classify what kinds of people can view particular elements of their profiles:

“This sounds like a great idea, and should be a significant benefit to those students who find that their Facebook-advertised parties were busted by police who found out about the events through the social-networking site.

“The primary problem is that Facebook has no way of determining what someone’s university status is. The company is only able to verify that the user has a valid .edu e-mail address, which could mean that the person is a student, staff member, professor, or alumni. As a result, Facebook asks users to self-report this information.

“Given an example situation where a student doesn't wish for the Facebook-using professors at their university to be able to view their profile, it would be trivially easy for a professor to log in, and change his or her own status to that of an undergrad.”

Yoinks!

“This new system provides little in the way of real additional protection, yet may give users a false sense of security, leading the millions of users to post even more stupid and embarrassing things to the site than they currently do.”

Which gets us into the territory of encouraging people to just not put stuff up on Facebook that they wouldn’t want to put up on billboards all over town.

Source: http://www.opennetworkstoday.com/2008/03/facebook-shocke.html

Related link: http://www.cnet.com/8301-13739_1-9898098-46.html