Arrrrrgh. There's two thing I hate when registering with a new website or service.

First one is when they ask for logins longer than 3 letters. When I'd like to keep things simple and use the same 'Ozh' as a login across a thousand websites, I end up registering (and forgetting) gazillions of ozhy, ozhozh, ozh1, ozhozhozh, MrOzh and such variations.

But what infuriates me even more is when I try a new service, 3 letters are ok with them… and some jackass has already signed-up using my name. Because, well, yes, it's MY name, you see. Die, jackass.

w00t ! A 3 figure Technorati rank was one of my meaningless goals for this year, and it just happened. Thanks everybody :)

Situation : You want to insert some simple content into a DOM element. Since you happen to be a javascript n00b like me who always forget how to do it, and you don't want to use a 60 kb prototype.js for your 10 javascript lines project, you thought it would be useful to write down once for all how this is done. Right ? Hmmkey.
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Did you know it ? PHP GD's imagecolorallocate() can only allocate 255 colors in a palette based image created by imagecreate() (no such limitation when you use function imagecreatetruecolors() by the way).

This sounds pretty stupid as well as rather undocumented, but anyway, here is a new version of my GD Gradient Fill PHP class, which now produces correct colors for images larger than 256 pixels (hence containing gradients with more than 256 colors)

I thought, and had been told, that using constants instead of variables in PHP was mostly a matter of speed : at run time, the engine replaces every occurrence of a constant with its hard-coded value, making code presumably faster than using variables that must be evaluated each time they are encountered. Or something like this.

Wondering how big or meaningless the incidence would be, and being the anal retentive useless benchmarks & statistics fan I am, I ran a few tests. With a surprise for me at the end. Bottom line : variables are faster ?!
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