Dodgy PSU + hoover = much quieter

I found over the last few days the psu (power supply) in my computer was getting noisier and noisier. This was normally solved by banging it with my hand. But even that had stopped working.

So today, I had finally had enough. I took the psu out and as I suspected it was chocked full of dust. I decided against taking the psu apart for fear of being electrocuted. Instead I poked out lose bits of dirt with a screwdriver. I could still see a load of lose dirt in there though. So I tried to shake it out, and then I got the hoover involved. I moved the hoover head around the holes of the psu and it sucked up a considerable amount of dirt. I then put the psu back in the system. And it is now much, much quieter.

Jpeg 2000.

I recently worked on a project that invovled resizing high quality images on the fly. To achieve this I used PHP with GD. All worked fine until I compared the resizes with the original images. The created images were somewhat washed out compared to the originals. This led me to believe there was a limitation in GD. A few hours later I discovered that the original image looked different in firefox than it does in windows image viewer. The reason for this is Jpeg2000. Jpeg2000 is an extension to jpeg that adds nice things like better compression and lighting effects etc. The problem is that Jpeg2000 is supported by photoshop and windows image viewer but not much else. The main reason for this is that it is patented technology that requires royalties (think of gif vs png). So Jpeg2000 looks like a bit of a lame duck, and a headache for developers like me!