Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Displaying data from myTinyTodo somewhere else

For my project bug tracking I use myTinyTodo. One day I decided that it would be nice to show my todo list to the beta users of my project. So here's a simple class which is doing the job.

Monday, September 20, 2010

Three Prius Tricks

I'm am an owner of European Prius II (2006) and want to share some tips which I find useful, but which took me some time to grasp.

  1. You can go as fast as 182 km/h on Prius if you step on the accelerator (driving at 180) and then the road starts going downhill. It takes the system several seconds to adjust to reduced necessary torque and until then it keeps accelerating as if you're going up-hill leading to 182 (I did this several times already).
    You can get 181 km/h on the plain road by stepping on the accelerator, but that's not as interesting.
  2. Don't use "B" mode to regenerate more energy (I was doing it on every traffic light for half a year because of many contradicting posts in the forums). Read this and apply brakes gently to regenerate more. Use "B" mode only when going down-hill (that's the rare case when you should follow the manual and you will do it right).
  3. If you don't like Pulse&Glide technique then at least use Glide mode to reduce the breaking force when approaching a distant red light.
  4. Navigation without GPS applies to Prius II as well! I noticed it in the underground parking and the system information screen has some kind of bearing information (displayed in degrees) which, combined with distance traveled, can replace GPS for some short distances.
  5. How to get to the system information screen in Prius II - get to the display screen and follow the instructions here (it's not on the Navigation Voice screen, at least not in Prius II).

array_merge() vs array concatenation and array_merge_recursive_overwrite()

I never seem to remember all the differences and aspects of the array_merge() function and array concatenation (not even documented thoroughly). On top there is this array_merge_recursive() which behaves like array_merge() though.

To start with I’ll say that array() + array() (called array concatenation) is in general NOT the same as array_merge(). It may behave in the same way if your arrays have all keys different. In this case you get both function and operator return the same result: