Friday, September 19, 2003

Eolas says it would settle over IE

Excerpt: Microsoft values intellectual property protection...when it's their intellectual property. When it's someone elses they'd prefer to take their toys and go home: Eolas says it would settle over IE | CNET News.com In response to newly revealed details of Microsoft's potential plans to redesign its browser, Eolas founder Mike Doyle urged the software giant to leave Internet Explorer alone and pay his company a...

Thursday, September 25, 2003

Making a video screen out of thin air

Excerpt: This is pretty cool: CNN.com - Making a video screen out of thin air - Sep. 15, 2003 SAN FRANCISCO, California (Reuters) -- In a museum in Tampere, Finland, Ismo Rakkolainen's fog machine conjures up the Mona Lisa on an invisible sheet of water particles. Thousands of miles away in Hermosa Beach, California, a graduate student passes his hand through an image of a...

Saturday, September 27, 2003

GraphViz Site Map Generator with SVG output

Excerpt: Must look into this: ia/ GraphViz Site Map Generator with SVG output. I’ve been intrigued by automatic graph layouts for a bizarrely long time. In college I sat in on a lecture on Hamiltonian circuits (aka the travelling salesman problem and bane of many comp sci students). In my early career at IBM I played around with some graphing routines for visualizing code trees...

Tuesday, October 7, 2003

Gender Genie

Excerpt: The Gender Genie purports to analyze text that you paste in and determine the gender of the author. So far it's 3-0 on my blog entries....

An open letter to "tableless" recoders

Excerpt: CSS has been around for years but its utility has yet to be fully realized. Part of the problem is that there are no CSS compliant browsers. Content developers, designers, etc should not have to make up for the crap that software developers put out. There is a CSS spec, there are multiple test suites, there is no legitimate reason to code alternative style sheets to get around browser inconsistencies.

Wednesday, October 15, 2003

Funding open source projects

Excerpt: jwz asks: Jeremy Zawodny's blog: Which Open Source Projects Would You Sponsor?. I'd probably give money to projects that are attempting something technically difficult, or taking on the beast of Redmond head-on. Much of the internet runs on open source. Most of the internet and internet related technologies derive from open source projects of the past....

Trackback whinging from The Register

Excerpt: The Register: trackback bad, google good. epc: Trackback good, google needs fixing. Discuss.

The Digital Imprimatur

Excerpt: I started working my way through The Digital Imprimatur by John Walker and it's a good read. I don't necessarily agree with all of his points but it's certainly thought provoking. Walker founded Autodesk in the 1980s....

Saturday, October 25, 2003

Cringely on Microsoft's (mis)understanding of open source

Excerpt: Unplugged: How Microsoft's Misunderstanding of Open Source Hurts Us All This week, speaking at a Gartner conference in Orlando, Florida, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said some fascinating things about Linux and about Open Source software in general. And thanks to those remarks and the blinding realization they caused for me, I finally understand exactly why Microsoft doesn't understand Open Source. Ballmer asked, "Should there...

Tuesday, November 11, 2003

Hot Stuff

Excerpt: In Why Heat is the Enemy of Server Farms and Sometimes Less Power Means More, Cringely writes: For a few years back in the early 1980s, I had in my cellar a Digital PDP-8 minicomputer. Didn't everyone? I bought the computer from a college for one dollar, and my labor to remove the thing from their computer room. Once set up in the cellar,...

Thursday, November 13, 2003

cmuSKY: realtime visualization of wifi users at CMU

Excerpt: I could have used WiFi when I was at CMU (instead I worked out of a pit of a grad student office in Baker 168). cmuSKY: A Wireless Andrew System is a graphical near-realtime presentation of CMU's wifi users and access points. It's just the main academic campus, none of the dorms are shown, nor the Mellon Institute....

Sunday, November 16, 2003

Rant on blog spam

Excerpt: weblog spam: Weblog spam is not the sort of thing that’s going to hit the front page of CNN anytime soon, but it has been a minor annoyance for some webloggers, and it has been my experience that these things can escalate from “minor annoyance” to “Usenet-level catastrophe” in record time. [...] The first thing that the anti-weblogging-spam advocates need to realize is that...

Thursday, November 20, 2003

Hackers Live by Own Code

Excerpt: Hackers Live by Own Code The confrontational style of Davidson's hacker isn't unusual. As they troll through other people's computer networks, hackers abide by their own quirky rules of etiquette. What would strike most folks in corporate America as bad manners or worse may be considered the height of courtesy in hackerdom....

Deconstructing OS X reviews

Excerpt: Daring Fireball has an excellent deconstruction of an excellent review of Mac OS X: What Siracusa does so well ? year after year, with each review ? is to examine nearly everything that?s most notable about the latest version. He writes about what deserves to be written about, both good and bad. So many times with reviews of any nature, one gets the sense...

Saturday, November 22, 2003

Interesting piece on a performance problem

Excerpt: In Teal Sunglasses, Chuq von Rospach writes of a performance problem encountered when upgrading a system. See, the code didn't change, but it did change what it was doing, and as a result performance dropped like a rock: First bottleneck was fairly easy, some relatively CPU-intense code in a key loop that happened to be invariant. Moving it out of the loop got us...

Friday, November 28, 2003

Haggis: vicious fox-like creature of Scotland

Excerpt: Tourists dream of hunting haggis: A third of US tourists who were quizzed about their trip to Scotland said they believed the haggis was a creature. The survey also revealed that almost a quarter of those questioned thought that they could hunt and catch the country's most famous dish....

Yahoo! Sets Up Christmas Tree With Internet Receiver

Excerpt: Yahoo! Sets Up Christmas Tree With Internet Receiver: Yahoo.com has set up a Christmas tree in Herald Square with a wireless Internet receiver on top. New Yorkers walking by with a laptop can set it down and log on via the tree's receiver. Or they can use one of the computers set up next to the tree. It's meant to help holiday shoppers compare...

Sunday, November 30, 2003

Archive of 1980s era computer books

Excerpt: Found AtariArchives.org - archiving vintage computer books, information, and software via /.. Even has The Best of Creative Computing volumes 1-3 (I have the print versions of 1 and 2)....

Saturday, December 6, 2003

Information Overload?

Excerpt: Something to read later when I have more time: Jonathon Delacour: Overloaded Self-employment, a constant Internet connection, a weblog, and a mildly addictive personality turn out to be a killer combination—even for someone who no longer feels compelled to post regularly, let alone every day....

Tuesday, December 23, 2003

An I/A disaster

Excerpt: I am neither an I/A nor a designer. In some states it's even illegal for me to even attempt graphic design. This website is a demonstration of my design techniques. In that context and with those caveats, will someone who is an I/A please pound down the doors at Hold Everything? Their site uses Flash to present their products. Not an evil thing of...

Thursday, January 1, 2004

AirGen fuel cell generator

Excerpt: This could be very cool, if I had a few $$$ lying around: Ballard Power Systems - AirGen™ fuel cell generator The AirGen™ fuel cell generator is the world's first portable fuel cell generator for indoor operation. Powered by Ballard's leading fuel cell technology, the AirGen™ system delivers electricity for as long as fuel is supplied....

Friday, January 23, 2004

Excerpt: Lessons from the Campaign Pressure Cooker I've been on a mission lately: to see what IT workers in the pressure-cooker conditions of political campaigns might teach IT professionals everywhere about the resourceful use of Linux, free software and open-source development methods. What works best? What doesn't work at all? How do you develop and apply solutions to problems all over the country with widely...

Tuesday, February 3, 2004

Stacking the Deck Against Science

Excerpt: Wired News: Stacking the Deck Against Science The White House says it wants to make sure big policy changes are backed by "sound science." Opponents call the proposal a wolf in sheep's clothing....

Friday, February 13, 2004

When things become portable, they become marketable

Excerpt: In Collision Detection, Clive writes: On Ebay today, someone is auctioning their mobile number "867-5309" -- which was, of course, made hummably famous by the Tommy TuTone hit "Jenny (867-5309)". It's available in the 212 area code. When I checked in, the bids had already hit $730. When it became easy to register domain names, a new market appeared in domain name swapping and...

Wednesday, March 31, 2004

Apache Gump

Excerpt: Apache Gump: Gump is a social experiment. The primary goal of Gump is to get diverse projects to communicate early and often about integration, dependencies, and versioning management. One way to think about it is that some of the concepts of Extreme programming applied to Continuous Integration on an unprecedented scale....

Blogdex

Excerpt: blogdex - about blogdex: Blogdex is a research project of the MIT Media Laboratory tracking the diffusion of information through the weblog community. Ideas can have very similar properties to a disease, spreading through the population like wildfire. The goal of Blogdex is to explore what it is about information, people, and their relationships that allows for this contagious media....

social circles: mailing list social visualization

Excerpt: social circles - marcos weskamp:Social Circles intends to partially reveal the social networks that emerge in mailing lists. The idea was to visualize in near real-time the social hierarchies and the main subjects they address. When subscribing to a mailing you never know who the principals are, how many people are listening or what subjects they are talking about. It's like entering a meeting...

Ad-hoc vs Managed software development

Excerpt: Alex writes about our shared experiences at IBM.com in the 1995-1997 era while commenting on an essay by Clay Shirky. I'd add that one downside to the ad-hoc, small group developed software is that it didn't always scale on a variety of axes (sometimes traffic, sometimes amount of data, sometimes maintenance). Too often the executive overlords would see how cheaply some solution had been...

Saturday, April 3, 2004

Usability: not just for windows and Macs

Excerpt: This is a great essay Ronco Spray-On Usability on usability in Linux and open source applications. I love open source. But most of my experience has been in using server side code like Apache. In the past few months I've started using (or trying to use) PHP based applications and...have yet to find one I've liked. They are all quite technically functional, but the...

Tuesday, April 13, 2004

IBM to Acquire Schlumberger Unit [WSJ]

Excerpt: WSJ.com - IBM to Acquire Schlumberger Unit International Business Machines Corp. agreed to acquire the business continuity services unit of Schlumberger Ltd. as it continues to strengthen its information technology services offerings. I wonder if this puts IBM in the weird position of providing services to the Olympic Games again (since Schlumberger owns SEMA which replaced IBM as one of the I/T partners)....

Thursday, May 6, 2004

Breadcrumb Navigation: Further Investigation of Usage

Excerpt: Found this via diveintomark.org: Usability News - 5.2 2003 -- Breadcrumb Navigation: Further Investigation of Usage. It looks interesting, I need to reread it a couple of times. In this study, we designed the tasks such that navigational efficiency would be optimized through the use of a breadcrumb trail. Despite this, only 6% of the page clicks were accounted for by the breadcrumb. While...

Saturday, May 8, 2004

CIDR SUBNET MASK CHEATSHEET

Excerpt: CIDR SUBNET MASK CHEATSHEET

Wednesday, May 12, 2004

dodgeball: yet another social networking thing (for cellphones)

Excerpt: dodgeball.com :: location-based social software for mobile devices. Basically, you get yourself and a bunch of people you know to sign up with their cellphones and then, when you're somewhere and you want others in your clicque to know where you are, you sms to an address @dodgeball.com and it will broadcast to everyone in your network. One handy feature I'm sure I'll use:...

Monday, June 21, 2004

torrentocracy

Excerpt: torrentocracy ... combining RSS, BitTorrent and PVRs. I've been waiting for Tivo to open up the Series 2 a bit and allow us to play MPEG video from our home a/v server (you know, of our dog, not pirated movies of course)....

Thursday, June 24, 2004

Florida to Tax Home Networks

Excerpt: Wired News: Florida to Tax Home NetworksThe tax language is so broad that virtually any communication technologies in your home or office could be subject to this tax, said Chris Hart, spokesman for ITFlorida, a not-for-profit industry organization for the state's technology professionals. It's difficult to imagine a more anti-technology, anti-business tax. It directly attacks the efficient use of information technology....

Tuesday, August 3, 2004

Slashdot: 503

Excerpt: So, what's the deal with /. these days? For the past couple of days I’ve been getting 500 and 503 errors from the site? DDOS attack?...

Thursday, August 12, 2004

ecto for blogging

Excerpt: I'm liking ecto...am using it on my mac for now, there's a version available for Windows as well. One wish: I'd like to be able to just write like it's a word processor, like a WYSIWYG mode. Sure, it wouldn't be as powerful as being able to enter all HTML by hand but most of my entries don't have sophisticated HTML.

gmodeler: UML modelling online

Excerpt: gModeler is an online UML modeller (in Flash).

Saturday, August 21, 2004

Stunning example of CSS

Excerpt: Via CSS Vault ďż˝ The Web's CSS Site, I came across Version 2, a writeup of the redesign for 1976design.com. I know nothing about design, except that I know nothing about design, but this site is a great example of what you can do by combining css, javascript and clean xhtml. (no, not this site, the 1876design.com site)....

Sunday, September 5, 2004

Bloglines supports gzip encoding

Excerpt: Just a quick note: Bloglines appears to support gzip encoding of feeds....

Sunday, October 3, 2004

Americans misjudge online risks

Excerpt: American computer users know far more about Janet Jackson's <em>wardrobe malfunction</em> than the security of their personal computers.

Thursday, October 7, 2004

Google does SMS

Excerpt: From the Google Blog, Google is now supporting SMS queries. Eek...

Friday, October 29, 2004

Useful visio how-to

Excerpt: I thought this was really useful, and I've been using Visio for years: Boxes and Arrows: Wireframe Annotations in Visio : Special Deliverable #11...

Sunday, October 31, 2004

Desiging for failure...

Excerpt: I watched a History Channel series on engineering disasters in September and posted my thoughts about the shows here, this is a followup pointer to two essays I read this weekend by Dan Bricklin: Software That Lasts 200 Years and Learning from Accidents and A Terrorist Attack. I have no insights to post (yet) except that assuming successful operations at all times seems to...

Wednesday, November 3, 2004

New phishing scam: rewrite hosts file from email

Excerpt: According to Covert phishing scam lies in wait for its victim - silicon.com, there's a new phishing scam floating around the net which works by rewriting your hosts file to redirect requests to the scammers' servers. What's a hosts file? Long, long ago in an internet far far away, one had to refer to remote systems using their IP address, eg: 127.0.0.1. Thing was,...

Thursday, November 4, 2004

Corporate governance goals impossible - RSA

Excerpt: SecurityFocus HOME News: Corporate governance goals impossible - RSA

Friday, November 5, 2004

Permalinks for Tivo shows

Excerpt: Via 90% Crud: Dear TiVo... a discussion about permalinks for shows in Tivo (actually, permalinks to the listing at tivo.com). Seems like Tivo has this or added it very quickly on reading of this discussion. Next: RSS feeds for Tivo recordings. Update 11/24/04: via engadget.com I found How-To: BroadCatching using RSS + BitTorrent to automatically download TV shows by Phillip Torrone and How to...

Sunday, November 7, 2004

Cities Without Borders: Digital Culture and Decentralization

Excerpt: Mindjack - Cities Without Borders: Digital Culture and Decentralization...

Thursday, November 11, 2004

Putting services to use

Excerpt: Putting services to use - Loosely Coupled weblog, Nov 11th 2004 3:48pm...

Saturday, November 13, 2004

Wanted by the Police: A Good Interface

Excerpt: Wanted by the Police: A Good Interface: Since June, the [San Jose, CA] police department has been using a new mobile dispatch system that includes a Windows-based touch-screen computer in every patrol car. But officers have said the system is so complex and difficult to use that it is jeopardizing their ability to do their jobs....

Monday, November 15, 2004

Dark Side of the Band

Excerpt: Wired News: Dark Side of the Band: Across the world, high-powered transmitters with global reach are broadcasting seemingly meaningless strings of numbers or letters, along with a lot of buzzing and beeping noises....

Wednesday, November 24, 2004

Blog Torrent

Excerpt: Blog Torrent - Simplified bittorrent by Downhill Battle: What is Blog Torrent? Blog Torrent is software that makes it much easier to share and download files using the bittorrent protocol. Blog Torrent is easy to install on your website: we don't use MySQL so installation is as easy as uploading a folder to your web host, and all administration happens in the web interface....

Saturday, November 27, 2004

Florida twisters dial up a fortune from Brits

Excerpt: Florida twisters dial up a fortune from Brits: Internet 'rogue dialler' swindles have caught out as many as 80,000 home computer users. Rupert Jones reports What's the link between trade union official Alan Scrimgour, his telephone bill, a mysterious "cyber-porn" company called Edvan Solutions, and the US president's brother, Jeb Bush? The answer is that they have all found themselves involved in the strange...

Tuesday, January 4, 2005

Flickr b/w probs, needs rolling utilization period

Excerpt: I started using Flickr in November and almost immediately upgraded to the "pro" account. So far, no complaints, though it has been slow uploading as described here, but I've written much of that off to being in Sydney. One solution to their problems is to gate bandwidth upload on a rolling period (28 days?) instead of on a calendar month period. Would even out...

Wednesday, January 12, 2005

Massive Privacy Breach at t-mobile: Hacker penetrates T-Mobile systems

Excerpt: Article about a guy who penetrated t-mobile's systems and offered to sell a variety of personal data to others including Secret Service documents: SecurityFocus HOME News: Hacker penetrates T-Mobile systems. Now, personally, the US Secret Service has some answering to do if it's allowing agents to use unsecured third-party servers for apparently confidential information, I mean, that's just dumb....

MSDN disappointment

Excerpt: Suppose you're in a mad dash to finish up some work on Microsoft Windows Servers and realize you need additional resources from the MSDN site to complete the work. You don''t have an MSDN account, and the person who does have the account is somewhere between here and not-here. So, you bite the bullet and sign up for MSDN at the lowest level that...

Monday, February 21, 2005

Flickr + Tivo

Excerpt: Via Jeremy Zawodny: Flickr/TiVo: a Tivo HME application which connects to Flickr for photos....

Sunday, April 24, 2005

t-mobile local coverage check

Excerpt: T-Mobile has released an application which allows you to see the GSM coverage for a specific area in the US: T-Mobile Personal Coverage Check. Here's the map for our neighborhood:...

Saturday, May 21, 2005

Excerpt: Just FYI, the Hotel Marlowe has an open access point in the lobby with great signal strength. The Marlowe is on the far side of the CambridgeSide Galleria, opposite IBM's Rogers Street building....

Monday, July 11, 2005

Plazes...not firewall aware

Excerpt: In April Lisa and I met up with some family friends in Paris. They mentioned that they travel a lot and it'd be nice if they could know when people they know are in the area with area being vaguely defined as the same metropolitan area. So, instead of building something myself, I've been keeping an eye out for such things. I have the...

Tuesday, July 12, 2005

ebay...now in a different shade of blue

Excerpt: Someone on echo pointed out that eBay has switched from IBM technology (servers + WebSphere as I recall) to Sun. The URL for the powered by link still reads http&#58;&#47;&#47;pages&#46;ebay&#46;com&#47;ebay_IBM&#46;html but it links to a page reading: eBay is Java&#169; Powered Running on powerful Sun Solaris&#169; SPARC&#174; servers Supported by Sun services and solutions eBay has chosen Sun&#8217;s Solaris Operating System, the most advanced...

Quicken...please, please, isn't there an alternative?

Excerpt: I was just talking about Quicken with my friend Pete today. Unbeknownst to me it was wreaking havoc on my laptop as I ate lunch with him and Cameron Ferstat. See, I got to lunch early. Stop laughing, it does happen occasionally, usually when I'm so late for my last thing I end up early for the next one. Anyway, I get to the...

Tuesday, August 2, 2005

Punch This!

Excerpt: Via BoingBoing: how many punch cards would be needed to store a 3 minute mp3 file? Answer: 40,960 (assuming you add the 8 digit sequence number). Wonder how long it would take an IBM-029 to read through that stack? I started coding on an IBM 3270 terminal, missing using an 029 by about three feet (it was next to the terminal but I could...

Drat

Excerpt: I've been in the ACM since 1986, though not very active, I mostly let my CACMs pile up in a corner and skim through them once a year. Today, though, I got invited (as I'm guessing every ACM member within 75 miles of Philadephia did) to the 2005 Turing lecture by Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn. And...I'll be in Chicago, or on the road...

Wednesday, August 3, 2005

Speakeasy Speedtest

Excerpt: Speakeasy, our ISP, offers a nifty little speedometer test to show your upload/download speeds. Nifty, except that it rated our link as 4.6Mbs and we're suppose to have 6Mbs down. I'll blame the heat. I have no complaints about Speakeasy, they're much more flexible than the typical RBOC and the cost is reasonable. Via collision detection: Vrooom...

Sunday, August 7, 2005

The Rise of the Digital Thugs

Excerpt: The NYT has an article today about the rise in online extortion, where someone contacts a business with threats to disrupt the business via online activities unless a payment is made: The Rise of the Digital Thugs - New York Times. EARLY last year, the corporate stalker made his move. He sent more than a dozen menacing e-mail messages to Daniel I. Videtto, the...

Skype

Excerpt: Nice article at Bloomberg Markets about Skype, a peer-to-peer, voice-over-IP telephone system which runs on Microsoft Windows, and Apple OS X (and I believe other platforms). I first started using Skype at Azaleos and thought the call quality was good, and generally was satisfied with it. Occasionally though it would totally freak out, which may have been due as much to the vagaries of...

Monday, August 8, 2005

netomat 2.0

Excerpt: Spent part of the afternoon with Kris Ramanathan and Maciej Wisniewski of netomat. Maciej demoed a very cool update to the netomat technology which I'm going to hold off on describing since they're quietly launching it over the next several weeks. But it has me wondering if I should junk the Nokia 6820 I have for something better....

Tuesday, August 9, 2005

A wormhole for the Internet

Excerpt: Interesting post on a company called Netli and its product/service to speed up content delivery by creating a new protocol layer on top of IP (eg, creating Netli/IP instead of TCP/IP): Who Has Time For This?: The Wormhole Factory: Netli's wormhole is an Internet Protocol (IP) router that speaks both TCP and the Netli Protcol--a layer 4 replacement that transfers a web page in...

Tuesday, September 20, 2005

magpierss and google desktop don't cache

Excerpt: Checking through my web stats I noticed a large number of requests for the feed for this site. Checking around, I discovered two IPs ([24.16.107.1xx] and [129.33.1.3x]) which were slamming the feeds, requesting over and over again, and not using modified-GET requests. What? You don't know what a modified-GET request is? Ok, briefly: modified-GET request in essence occurs when a web user agent (basically:...

Thursday, November 3, 2005

Attention Massachusetts Residents: Your State Senate is Selling You Out

Excerpt: The Massachusetts state I/T department decided recently to standardize all documents on something called Open Document Format or ODF, replacing a defacto standard of various Microsoft product formats. Microsoft has, understandably, been upset about this and has pulled out all the stops to stop this from going forward. Totally coincidentally (right), a State Senator added a line to a recent appropriations bill which would...

Friday, November 18, 2005

!@&$&@# iPod

Excerpt: So, just after writing the previous post, I undocked my iPod from the Mac and proceeded to walk out of my office with it and some other things. I placed it in my black computer bag. A few minutes later, I stuck my cellphone into the same bag, and noticed an eery white light. The iPod was all lit up. Huh I thought...wasn't it...

Thursday, January 5, 2006

Wow...upgrade to Firefox 1.5

Excerpt: I held off upgrading my copy of Firefox for a couple of months, hoping that my favorite plugins would get upgraded. Today I tried to install the new blog editing tool Performancing and it failed because it was only available for 1.5. So I finally upgraded and: wow! This is only after a few minutes of use, and no crashes yet, but the speed...

Wednesday, January 18, 2006

Fixing Bluetooth on an IBM Thinkpad

Excerpt: Last week I did a massive update on my Thinkpad, hoping to catch the appropriate updates for Bluetooth so that I could use a headset with the computer. No go. At the time I did not know that Microsoft's Windows XP implementation of Bluetooth is braindead and overrides whatever the OEM supplies. David Singer had already run into this and reminded me of it...

Thursday, July 13, 2006

A question for the ibm.com audience: Roller & ecto?

Excerpt: A member of the peanut gallery blogs for ibm.com using the developerworks blogging tools. Said peanut is attempting to switch from w.bloggar to ecto but can't figure out what API to tell ecto to use to post to Roller. As an ex-IBMer I can't really help since I don't know Roller and don't feel inclined to set up my own installation just now. If...

Thursday, September 14, 2006

Dear bozo at Harvard: Please turn off your bot

Excerpt: Someone with Harvard's eecs group learned how to download the rome client today and, oh joy, ran it against my site. Again, and again. Still running as far as I can tell. It's attempted to fetch feeds off the site slightly over 700 times since mid-afternoon. Most of the requests are being redirected, using 301's, to feedburner.com, but it's still annoying. If you get...

Tuesday, October 10, 2006

CR2032

Excerpt: Some years ago I was on a consulting gig involving Windows Server 2003 performing in a cluster. I got very frustrated at some point at access to systems to do my work and went out and bought three custom built PCs to try to mimic the cluster run by the client. I figured I'd earn back the cost of the systems over the next...

Friday, October 27, 2006

Ask not to Google, lest ye be a Yahoo!

Excerpt: Google are trying to get people to cease using google as a generic term for search (though I'd ask: if these yahoos are actually using Google to perform the search, is referring to the search task as googling really a genericization of the trademark Google?) and posted a blog post on the 25th October titled: Do you "Google?" educating the general public (neither General...

Friday, November 17, 2006

A possible reason for Lenovo's troubles

Excerpt: Wherein I whine about Lenovo's outdated web ordering system, caution readers that planning for my big stupid birthday next year has begun, and advise of recent purchases at the Palisades Center Mall

Sunday, January 21, 2007

Oops, Internet Explorer is still brain dead

Excerpt: The previous two entries here use the object tag which was added to HTML about ten years ago. Microsoft continues to fly off in another direction and as a result, even MSIE 7.0 does not display the PNG graphics used to display the walking route Frisket, Sailor and I took, nor the video clip of Frisket playing with Varla and Sailor sort of hovering...

Thursday, February 1, 2007

epc: prescient to know something will happen but not smart enough to do anything about it

Excerpt: Yesterday I wrote a post on the new timezone changes for the U.S. coming up in March over here: Changing Times at my "work" blog. It's also covered in today's Washington Post: Clocks' Early Spring Forward May Bring About a Few Falls. Net: in 2005 the U.S. Congress shifted the start and end of Daylight Savings Time by four weeks (starting three weeks earlier...

Sunday, February 18, 2007

Is Vista Microsoft's OS/2?

Excerpt: Many years ago, I spent countless nights downloading disk images over the internal SNA network, burning the images to actual 3.5 inch floppy disks, and installing the latest build of OS/2 2.0. It was exciting to be part of something which seemed to be a genuine jump forward in technology. Windows had stagnated at 3.1, Apple had released System 7 in 1990–1991, compared to...

Monday, April 16, 2007

Easter 1997

Excerpt: A long rambling essay about April 1997, involving a trip to Denham, Indiana, Tiger Woods, Garry Kasparov, and a collection of webmaster reminiscences.

Tuesday, August 7, 2007

IBM ServicePac: worth it?

Excerpt: I need to figure out whether it's worth the risk to ship my laptop off for repairs just before heading to Australia for two weeks.

Adobe: Still learning that whole updating software thing

Excerpt: For reasons that are beyond me, I licensed Adobe Acrobat Professional 7.0 a couple of years ago. Perhaps because I thought I'd be doing a lot of work with PDFs, or because I didn't know of an easier option to print to PDF on Windows. Out of the box I should have known that this Acrobat was different all previous Acrobats. It was big....

Friday, September 28, 2007

Lotus Mobile Connect

Excerpt: p. I am aware that there are at least two or more IBM employees who peruse this feed, so I'm sending this out to the innertubes: WTF is up with Lotus Mobile Connect that when installed on a perfectly good Mac OS X installation kills the networking component? A guest of Frisket's installed Lotus Mobile Connect on our Mac Mini because it was not...

Wednesday, October 3, 2007

Declaring Chap. 13 Data Bankruptcy

Excerpt: In which the author gives up on restoring a trashed Windows installation, concedes defeat, and moves on.

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Please Wait

Excerpt: Another entry in the continuing tale of epc's attempts to restore his laptop, alternately: don't delete c:\windows\system32\iomdisk.sys

Friday, October 19, 2007

Ethernet vs. Token Ring

Excerpt: Todd wrote a post today about Chris Anderson of Wired magazine using two Ethernet cables at his desk: one went to the Conde-Nast internal network, the other goes out to the wild internet, without the corporate firewall intervening. I tried to leave this as a comment to Todd's blog, but comments seem to be hosed on multiple levels (starting with using style="visibility:hidden" in a...

Thursday, October 25, 2007

Just what I wanted in an email application

Excerpt: In my youth, about every six months someone would pitch me a 3D application for use on www.ibm.com. They'd tell me it'd be revolutionary, it would dramatically change user interaction with the site, it would set IBM apart. People would interact via avatars (though I had difficulty picturing an avatar for RETAIN or IBMLink). Oddly, I was never pitched about how 3D would increase...