JasonN.com - tech

Playing with Chrome (Google's new browser)

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 16:49:16 -0500

I spent a few minutes today playing with Chrome.

All your internets r working fine

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 17:42:47 -0500

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:

Host	%	Sent	Recv	Best	Avrg	Wrst	Last
76.89.0.1	68	1690	542	0	14	188	16
65.28.203.45	67	1690	570	0	12	140	15
65.28.203.69	69	1690	534	15	24	109	31
66.109.6.174	71	1690	497	15	24	172	31
66.109.6.33	68	1690	544	31	41	172	47
66.109.6.125	69	1689	533	31	41	453	47
24.30.192.206	71	1689	503	31	41	188	47
24.28.199.142	70	1689	513	31	42	407	78

Kill default Windows ding

Sat, 09 Aug 2008 14:32:52 -0500

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.

XP Service Pack 3 Troubles

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 10:15:15 -0500

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.

The power of blog/twitter/rss/friends

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 10:02:44 -0500

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.

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

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 23:17:19 -0500

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.

iTunes sync pain

Thu, 29 May 2008 11:33:07 -0500

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.

Firefox 3 is faster

Mon, 19 May 2008 10:23:50 -0500

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.

Unison

Fri, 16 May 2008 11:16:42 -0500

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.

Playing with Issuu

Thu, 15 May 2008 11:34:13 -0500

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.

Today's Essential Work and Play Tools

Fri, 09 May 2008 10:22:11 -0500

Well, it's that time :)

I'm tired of my sluggish PC and it's time to kill it. Often, folks will give me a litany of complaints with no real obvious problems meaning that their PC is cruddy. I've reloaded this one several times, run memory tests, checked the HD, and without really invasive time-consuming investigation I'm just abandoning it.

Before I blow it away, I've got to have an essential software list. This is different than my Essential Free Windows Software list.

Open Office and Versions in "Save As" Action

Sun, 03 Feb 2008 09:23:10 -0600

A friend emailed me saying:

I made a couple of small changes and saved the version. Then I did a save as to put the document where I store docs and it lost all the version information. Anyway, thanks for the edit. I am posting this up today and sending out to my news letter list.

I replied:

You didn't save it, you did a "save as." And, that's a completely new document. If you had copied it from place 1 to place 2, you'd have preserved your history. But, you told OO to save the document as a brand new document when you clicked "save as." Wouldn't you hate to have to go clean out the history manually if you didn't want to share those versions with a third party? That's not a bug, it's a feature, and one I understand and appreciate.

It may aught to ping you and say "Hey, you're going to lose your history if you save it this way." But, a trend in the Unix/Posix world is to read the docs and tell the product to shut up and leave us alone. Maybe it should have offered a button popup that said "Save with/without version history." But, I would find that incredibly annoying. Most Unix folks think the same way. Most of us would say "If you wanted to move the file, why didn't you just move the file? OO isn't a file manager, it's an editor." And, that's just how we work in the Unix world - you've been windozed!

Windows XP SP3 Killed IE6

Sat, 12 Jan 2008 11:00:13 -0600

Microsoft's Windows XP SP3 release candidate killed IE6 on a completely fresh installation with SP2. It did not check to ensure the browser was compatible or up to date before installation and broken its behavior substantially. Fortunately, a media installation (or use Firefox to download IE7's package from microsoft's Technet) solves any apparent problems.

64bit and Memory Hog Programs

Sat, 12 Jan 2008 01:48:59 -0600

Yep, 64bit means more memory. Ever since Bill pondered what someone would do with more than 640K we've been beating the doors down begging, pleading, and finally demanding more memory for our big bloaty cool programs. In 32bit we've just about max'd it out. Many of you are already complaining about the 4G limit of memory you can use in the Windows and OSX 32bit world.

First, let's check all the 64-bit hype at the door. Being a 64-bit program means, most simply, that pointers in an application are 64 bits wide, not 32 bits. A 32 bit pointer means that an application can address 2 ^ 32 bytes of memory, or 4GB, at the most. The operating system an application runs on slices that application address space up, so that the application can actually only allocate a part of that address space for itself. Thus, on Windows XP, an application can use 2GB of address space, on Macintosh OS X 10.4, an application gets 3GB, on Windows XP 64-bit edition, a 32-bit application gets nearly 4GB of address space. Applications don't allocate RAM on most modern operating systems - that's a common misconception and a gross oversimplification your computer geek friends tell you because they don't want to explain virtual memory, TLBs and the like.
- Living Photoshop

This article refers specifically to the nature of Adobe products in the 64bit world, but the answer applies universally. Being 64bit doesn't mean the program gets all that juicy power or RAM. It does, however, improve the chance the OS will allocate much more and allow multiple instances or different programs to operate with less competition for scarce resources.

Embedding Flickr, SmugMug, Video Services, etc. Into Your Website

Fri, 11 Jan 2008 12:18:28 -0600

A client recently asked me about embedding images from a free photo service into their website we manage. It's a great idea. I'd love to do it and like the service. So, I immediately started looking into the service, researching how we might embed their cool features into clients' websites.

I have a predisposition toward adding similar features to our own software so that the client retains property rights and centralizes their content in one location to avoid the eventual move/crash/change/downtime that comes with free services. For our own production services, we outsource nothing. We do that because we simply can't depend on service providers that don't share our consequence of downtime.