Bangor Daily News has an article out right now about how Republican Les Otten, exploring the possibility of running for governor of Maine in 2010, has ripped off Barack Obama’s “O” logo. However, what they fail to point is the fact that Otten’s entire website is a rip-off.

The website not only has the same layout (navigation placement aside), but the font colors, font sizes, placement of content, and content borders are almost 100% the same.

To really get the full impact of how horribly ripped off this site/logo is, let me show you some screen shots–you be the judge.

www.barackobama.com as of July 1st, 2009

www.lesotten.com as of July 1st, 2009

What’s worse is the blatant logo ripoff. I have compiled a progression from Obama’s logo to Otten’s, increasing Otten’s logo by 25% opacity until it was 100% opaque. I also blew up the image so you could see it in more detail. I apologize for the pixelation.

Obama/Otten logo overlay as of July 1st, 2009

After studying the logos on top of each other you notice a few things:

• The “O”s both have starbursts around them, Obama’s has 40 “arms,” Otten’s has 50
• The distance from the outer edge of the “O” to the beginning of the whitespace within is the same. The difference is that Otten’s has the stem that encircles his “O” making his border appear thicker.
• The stripes are in the same quadrant of the circle and have the same perspective–from left to right.

If you saw Otten’s logo independent of his web site/campaign, you might assume this was Obama 2.0, the launch of a new PR push within the Obama administration. It’s no coincidence that Obama’s campaign won a couple of advertising awards from Cannes Lion, those guys knew what they were doing–you see the “O”, you think “Obama.”

According to the Bangor Daily News, Edith Smith, Otten’s spokeswoman, explained that the web site design firm “used standard industry templates and colors found on political Web sites nationwide.”

Here’s a random list of other politicians’ sites that meet Smith’s “industry standards” without reusing Obama’s layout and logo. In fact, I can’t seem to find another site that does.

• Susan Collins
• John Kerry
• Olympia Snowe
• Michael Bennet
• Mitt Romney
• Sarah Palin

Today’s rant will be on coding examples:

Page 133.

function __autoload($class)
{
//Require PEAR-compatible classes
require_once str_replace("_", "/", $class);
}
$obj = new Some_Class();

At first glance this looks OK but the author goes on to state that the file, Some/Class.php will be included automagically. WRONG! Autoload passes in the name of the class, not the name of the class plus .php at the end (which is what he is thinking). $class is really Some_Class, so the code above should read:

function __autoload($class)
{
//Require PEAR-compatible classes
require_once str_replace("_", "/", $class) . '.php';
}
$obj = new Some_Class();

I’m annoyed not just because the code is wrong, but because he says “When instantiating Some_Class, __autoload() is called and passed “Some_Class.php” as its argument.” If Mr. Shafik took just a couple of minutes to read the documentation, he would have realized he was wrong, and I could avoid some frustration this book has (and still is) caused me.

According to Maine.gov delivery rates, it costs 6.76 cents per kWh (average residential rate). Right now my Kill-A-Watt has been running for about an hour and is registering 0.15 kWh and my computer is idle (minus my time right now posting this article).

All else equal, ($0.0676kWh * 0.15kWh) * 24hrs/day * 30days/month = $7.3008 or ~$7.30 a month. Of course I don’t run my computer 24×7 so my actual cost is a lot less.

What I want to do, to get a more accurate reading, is to plug my computer and LCD monitor into the same surge strip that will be plugged into the Kill-A-Watt and run Folding@Home 24×7 for a day or two. This would give me a good idea as to what it would cost per month under full computing load.

Just FYI, if you live in Maine and don’t want to shell out the cash for a Kill-A-Watt, go to your local library and check one out for free! This is a program being run by Efficiency Maine to help push Mainers to be more energy conscientious. My girlfriend was slightly irritated after she bought me one for Christmas and we found out about the Kill-A-Watts at the local library

* It is not just my computer that is plugged into this outlet. I also have Samsung 17″ wide screen LCD, a Cannon USB LIDE scanner, and a HP DeskJet color printer. My computer itself has the following hardware: AMD 5000+ BE (OC’d from 2.8Ghz to 3.01Ghz) w/2GB RAM, a 320GB Seagate HDD, and a nVidia 9600GT OC.

Basically the scenario starts out where I am making changes to a web page, save my changes, move over to Chrome and hit the refresh button (or F5) to see the changes. If I don’t see the changes on the web page I’ll hit Shift+F5 to reload a fresh copy of the page–this does not always work and this is where I get annoyed. I get annoyed because I’ll end up spending 5-10 minutes trying to figure out why my changes are not taking effect. I’ll double, triple, even quadruple check my changes to see why there was no change on the web page, thinking “maybe I screwed up or missed some logic somewhere.” I’ll bug my co-workers, read the documentation on the function(s) I have updated in the application, swear up and down, and finally, finally once I am at the brink of going insane I’ll load up FireFox, Safari, or IE to see if the page loads…usually it does. The only remedy is clearing Chrome’s cache or restarting the browser–annoying!

According to Google’s documentation, Crtl+F5 or Shift+F5 should work. As stated though, this doesn’t always work. What’s the deal?