Playing with Chrome (Google's new browser)

I spent a few minutes today playing with Chrome.

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All your internets r working fine

Many national ISPs designed their technical support in such a way to deflect competent users from reporting legitimate network failures. I should mention that I'm pretty sure they know about their problems. So, assuming they want my input is a tad egotistical. Trust me, whomever your ISP is they don't want to hear from you about their network problems.

Here's their problem:

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Kill default Windows ding

The Windows operating circumvents my will by throwing a ding in when I adjust the volume, even when I tell it I don't want any sounds. This effect may take place on several software behavior. When faced with no sound, the system throws a default ding in, because you obviously failed to see the importance of this notification. I've seen this complaint on many forums. There is an easy, though annoying, fix.

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XP Service Pack 3 Troubles

Two brand spanking new Dell laptops show up for some friends/clients and I'm updating them before I deliver the little buggers. A series of snags rear their collective ugly heads. It's called XP Service Pack 3. XP Service Pack 3, and it's implementation on the Microsoft Update website are still a bit unable to deal with fresh PCs with mere XP SP2, or your average not quite up to date PCs.

The question is, what are the necessary patches.

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The power of blog/twitter/rss/friends

Yesterday I blogged that I'm considering an ortho surgeon. I don't know if I need one or not, but my internist has suggested I probably do. So, I'm off to see a surgeon to determine whether or not I need surgery.

That's not the story here.

A friend of mine receives updates from my blog, and emailed me immediately suggesting a surgeon he knows of in my home state.

I just post a blog considering a surgeon and the power of friends and personal networks goes to work for me. I didn't email him personally, ask for advice from him or anyone in his local network, and poof -- I get his input anyway. That's extremely cool.

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It's 2008 and magic quotes just bit me again!

I should be embarrassed about this, and I am. I religiously complain about magic quotes, but code keeps coming back to me from developers who insist on ripping out good controls on illegal or dangerous characters (see SQL injection for example) and relying on magic quotes.

This is an old problem. And, fortunately PHP6 deprecates this feature. But, it won't stop the thousands of lines of code that rely on them from causing you headaches. Beware of PHP6 sorta compliant code when this goes away. It should go away, and I'm happy, and I spend more time dealing with the badly written code using magic quotes or the badly configured server environments that enable it than I do code that requires magic quotes breaking. One is really annoying, the other is quite dangerous.

Posted in tech jasonn's blog

iTunes sync pain

I spent a night trying to sync, clean, and organize my daughter's iTunes list so she could take her iPod Nano with her. Fortunately, it did yield some new approaches to using iTunes to manage my music for my players.

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Firefox 3 is faster

I am enjoying a faster, seemingly more stable Firefox experience. If you use the popular browser, you know about its shortcomings.

I've been using the first release candidate for Firefox3 and it's pretty clean - starts up in a mere fraction of the time it took to start up the previous version, and it's a bit better looking and behaving all around.

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Unison

Backups, backups, backups!

Theres a load of reasons to replicate data. And, often we need one side to back up the other, mirror, bidirectional.

Unison may serve some of these purposes. It's cross-platform which means I can replicate data on Unix, Windows, Mac, etc.

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Playing with Issuu

I just found Issuu, which is a great example of what so many publishing clients request: a web-based flash, page-turning version of their paper (PDF) publication.

So, I got an account: issuu.com/jasonn. I mean why not - just another social networking membership, right?

It has a miserably flashed up interface, but I bet most folks will consider this cool and desirable. And, to be fare, I can hardly make an argument against a purely flash interface when that is their core content.

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