First of all, as a techie myself, this list is mainly just crap that i’d love to have but don’t want to pay for myself. That being said I think there’s some viable gift ideas for the techie on your list that has everything else they could want.

1. IronKey: The World’s Most Secure USB Flash Drive with Internet Protection Services

from $79 It’s a super-duper USB flash drive that offers a rugged military quality design, secured encryption and a ton of other high tech features. The best one of all is that it’ll self destruct after 10 incorrect password guesses or if someone tampers with the case. Obviously way over the top for the normal user but I must admit it’s pretty great to think of a place I can store anything without ANYONE else getting access even if they tried.

2. Optimus Maximus LED keyboard

~$1564.37 OK, this one is a bit of an overshot but it’s so damn cool that it has to be on the list. Each key of this fantastic keyboard has a tiny screen on it to show what the key is supposed to do, not only will it capitalize the letters and show the special characters across the number row when you hit shift, you can also program it to work with your favorite programs like shortcuts in Photoshop or even show graphical representations of the hotkeys for your games. But with a pricetag at almost $1600, i’m sure it’s not going to be on many people’s lists this Christmas.

3. Kidz-Med Thermofocus

$99.95 I don’t understand how, but someone made a device that finds your temperature without any kind of contact using totally harmless and safe infrared technology. Just move it close to the forehead and wham-o you got the temperature. I can imagine this being a supremely convenient and safe alternative to the conventional means of taking ones temperature.

4. VX Nano Cordless Laser Mouse

$69.99 I admit, this is something I actually already own, so I can say with confidence that it’s absolutely amazing because of one single feature i’ve never seen before. The Logitech peeps aptly call it ‘Hyper-fast scrolling’ and it’s amazingly awesome, basically it’s a scrollwheel without the tactile clicks at every turn. You can swipe the wheel and (depending on how hard you swiped) it’ll continue to spin for several seconds. This is perfect for scrolling quickly through webpages and documents once you get the hang of it. I swipe the wheel and then tap it to stop it ‘on a dime’ right where I want to. If that wasn’t enough you can click the wheel and bring it back to the familiar tactile precision scrolling. Because this is activated by clicking the wheel, they added another button right under it that can act as the action that normally happens when you click a scroll wheel (e.g. auto-scroll). Finish it off with a forward/back set of buttons, side scrolling capabilities and the fact that it’s a laser mouse and you can’t get much better. I must mention that there’s been a few comments on Amazon that this mouse is not as easy to set up on macs because apparently it’s not included on the provided CD.

5. InferPoint Slimouse SlimPad

N/A Everything you know about the design of the mouse has been turned on its ear, this thing is square in shape and super thin. It has a scroll ‘wheel’ but the wheel is nonexistent, it uses a sensor touch-scroll that apparently allows for greater precision.

BONUS Geeky Wrapping Paper

$5.99 With all the awesome geeky gifts listed above, you’re going to need something to wrap it in! Choose from 6 different designs including binary, equations and emoticons.

OK, so apparently i’ve been living under a rock for the past several months because this fairly large bit of news slipped past me. Google bought DoubleClick back in April for $3.1 Billion dollars, which is pretty big news but that’s not the reason for this article. You see, DoubleClick owns Performics a search engine marketing company. So Google purchased DoubleClick and Performics is a wholly owned subsidiary of DoubleClick, therefore, Google owns Performics. The largest and most popular search engine now owns a search engine marketing company whose sole purpose is to increase clients rankings in search engines. People paying Performics for this optimization is, at least by association, paying Google. I’m definitely not the first one to think this crosses some kind of line, conflict of interest at the very least. What do you think?

Saw an amazing web campaign for Diesel Clothes that blew me away. I wonder how long and how much that took to make! This is the kind of stuff i’d love to do, although the video portion would probably have to be done by someone else.

Found a cool blog-like resource of cool AJAX and ‘web2.0′ applications and tools over at ajaxFlakes. Looks like it’s only been around since August but it already has 6 pages of cool helpful tools. I’ve already added it to my del.icio.us, will you?

Finally, a friend turned me on to this freelance hub called freelance switch that I thought was a great implementation of a job listing database. There’s definitely no shortage of such sites out there these days but something about how this is laid out and organized really made it easy to use. I’m not much one to actively look for freelance gigs but if I did I’ll be sure to check out this site first!

Finally got a new laptop to replace the old Dell that crapped out on me back in March. Went with the powerhouse Satellite X205-SLi1 because not only do I need to have many large programs open to work but sometimes i’m going to want to play awesome games to blow off some steam. Who knows, maybe i’ll start getting back into learning video editing and 3D rendering. But another huge thing for me was to have the ability to take it with me occasionally on the go or even just to the couch. So here’s some photos of the awesome X205-SLi1, be prepared though because I don’t want to be the one responsible for you ruining your keyboard with all the drool.

I recently had the opportunity to delve deeper into MySQL and how to optimize and generally better my database structure and queries. There’s a lot of information on this topic so I thought i’d share the top ten things that matter to me when creating and querying databases.

1. Make the fields of your tables as small as possible, if you know a varchar field is never going to need a value more than 10 characters, set it to varchar(10).
2. Always use auto Increment IDs in your tables, even if you don’t expect you’ll need them now they always seem to come in handy.
3. Index all the fields you will be querying directly, especially those that you know an exact value for.
4. Normalize the data structure as much as possible, duplicate data is just more for the server to wade through when running a query.
5. If you’re querying something against a number e.g.( WHERE x = 12 ) there’s no need to use quotes around the number value, this actually slows down the query because it needs to convert from a string to a number.
6. Limit the use of LIKE and the % wildcard e.g.(WHERE userName LIKE %Woods%) as this slows the query considerably. If you know that the value is always going to be at the beginning of a field, be sure to only use the wildcard at the end to speed up the query e.g.(WHERE userName LIKE Woods%).
7. Multiple field indexes are good at speeding up queries but be aware that the first field in the index must be the first item from that index searched in the query or the whole thing won’t be used the way you intended.
8. Be aware that there is a cost to indexing, both in time and space. Indexes speed up select queries but slow down deletes and inserts and basically any other queries that involve writing to the DB. The more indexes a table has the slower these write queries will be because the indexes have to be changed with the data. The indexes also take up disk space which may cause a database to reach its disk limit more quickly. The practical implication of both these factors is that if you don’t need a particular index to help queries perform better, don’t create it.
9. Use the EXPLAIN keyword with your query to get important information on the query including the possible keys and estimated rows that will need to be searched to find a result. Especially handy with multiple table queries with joins.
10. Be careful with joins, if used incorrectly they can slow down a query considerably. Values from the preceding table (as listed in the output of EXPLAIN) are used to find rows in the current table. So if you have three tables each with 1000 rows to search you’re actually returning 1,000,000,000 rows of data. Obviously this is too many and indexes should be employed to reduce this number to something more manageable.

I came back to work today after the weekend “fall back” and noticed that my Dreamweaver CS3 was starting to act up. Ever since we got it it’s been running like a champ so I googled “dreamweaver CS3 crashes” and lo and behold one of the first results is a TechNote posted today on adobe.com that links the frequent crashes on the DST ending. Of all the things I thought it could be, changing the clocks back an hour wasn’t even considered. That’s why i’m posting this in the attempts to spread the word about this odd error. Here’s a quote of the Issue as explained in the Technote.

Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 crashes when working with certain PHP or ASP files in Code view or Design view after the clock goes back one hour, when Daylight Savings Time ends. The crashes only occur when selecting certain lines in Code view, or selecting certain objects in Design view. The crashes only occur in files that have PHP or ASP code, intermingled with HTML code. The crashes do not occur in Dreamweaver 8 or earlier (Ref. 229536).

Click Here to read more and to find out how to fix this issue.