I made this mistake years back, and now my friend made the same just this week. He bought us an air conditioning unit for our apartment due to the scorching (spring!?) heat. Unfortunately, he didn’t know that you cannot use an outdoor (window mounted) A/C unit for indoor use (I wasn’t informed about the purchase until I saw the unit at home).

Not only that, it’s impossible to mount the thing since the width of the window is smaller than the width of the unit itself.

So, I want to inform you about why there is a huge difference between an indoor and an outdoor unit.

Outdoor Unit

The outdoor unit, aka the window mounted unit, is meant to be mounted through a window (1/2 of the unit sticks out the window) so the heat generated by the unit can exhaust outside.

My friend and I tried running the outdoor unit, indoors, to discover that more heat was generated from the unit compared to the cool, conditioned air. So, rather than the room temperature going down, it actually rose a few degrees before I decided it wasn’t a good idea to keep running it.

Basically, an outdoor (window-mounted) A/C unit requires outside exposure to exhaust the heat generated from generating cool air.

When you go out to buy an A/C unit for the first time, you’ll be tempted to buy the outdoor unit and assume it can be used indoors because it’s significantly cheaper (outdoor vs indoor) compared to the indoor units.

Indoor Unit

The indoor unit (aka portable A/C unit) does not require window-mounting at all. The unit still does generate heat as it makes the cool air, but there is a flexible pipe that goes out from the unit which routes the heat to the outside through your window.

Notice the hose in the picture, you just drop the hose through your window for the heat to go out.

Anyways, I hope this article will serve you well on your A/C purchases. Don’t repeat our mistakes!

I recently bought a Fujitzu u810 mini (review) with the AT&T WWAN (which I must say is fast, but startup -> online is quirky). Anyways, online friends have been asking for some pictures of it, and I took a snapshot with my cellphone. It’s sitting on top of my work laptop, a Dell XPS M1530 (15″ LCD):

Some initial protips:

- Buy the dock. I regret not buying it.

- You do not have to buy the LAN/VGA cable accessory. It comes with one already (I made that mistake)

- If you have the WWAN option and is activating it, expose the SIM slot by removing the battery. To activate, set up your account with AT&T first, then do not run the activation checker. If it’s running, kill the activation checker and launch the AT&T Wireless Manager. Make sure to add into the profiles GSM > New Profile, and just do AT&T Internet. Close the program, re-launch and just wait for 3-4 minutes. This is the quirky part: The manager needs to disable some component of the WWAN device and activate another component for the Manager to register it. If you put your computer on suspend, it has to go through the same process, which can take up to a minute or two. I have no idea why it’s like that, but regardless, the speeds have been quite fast (1800 down, 1000 up avg) so far.

- Lastly, do not buy the screen protector accessory. It’s absolute crap and will hurt your eyes if you view the screen with it on. There’s better brands out there that does not blur your screen to protect it. Unfortunately I don’t remember where I bought my other one at the moment.

My work wanted an image carousel implemented into the website, and I could barely find any decent carousel implementations out there until I came across iCarousel by Fabio Zendhi Nagao.

I loved the examples on his website of how to use and implement it, but unfortunately the code examples do not work at all. Reading the comments section of the website, I came to realize that it’s not just me who can’t get this stuff to work the first time.

Anyways, after spending a few hours tinkering with it, I finally figured out how to do the horizontal example, and I’m placing a working package here so you can also download it if you’d like:

http://journal.suteki.nu/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/icarouselh.zip

Edit: I am not taking any requests to fix any part of iCarousel. Fabio’s scripts are completely broken; he should just take down his page because there is no indication that he cares about fixing his script at all.

It took me awhile to figure out how to parse an Oracle date type with Propel 1.3. The easiest way to do it would be this:

define(“DATE_FORMAT”, ‘M j, Y g:i a’);

< ?=date(DATE_FORMAT, $event->getStartDate(null)->format(“U”));?>

Assume there is an Event that stores the date and time of when the event begins. The code above basically translates the Oracle date to UNIX time, where you can then use the PHP date function to parse it out.