tech
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.
Posted in tech jasonn's blog | read more
Submitted by jasonn on July 5, 2008 - 9:15am.
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.
Posted in life | tech jasonn's blog | read more
Submitted by jasonn on July 5, 2008 - 9:02am.
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
Submitted by jasonn on June 3, 2008 - 10:17pm.
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.
Posted in media | tech jasonn's blog | read more
Submitted by jasonn on May 29, 2008 - 10:33am.
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.
Posted in tech jasonn's blog | read more
Submitted by jasonn on May 19, 2008 - 9:23am.
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.
Posted in tech jasonn's blog
Submitted by jasonn on May 16, 2008 - 10:16am.
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.
Posted in culture | tech jasonn's blog | read more
Submitted by jasonn on May 15, 2008 - 10:34am.
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.
Posted in media | tech jasonn's blog | read more
Submitted by jasonn on May 9, 2008 - 9:22am.
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!
Posted in tech jasonn's blog | read more
Submitted by jasonn on February 3, 2008 - 9:23am.
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.
Posted in tech jasonn's blog
Submitted by jasonn on January 12, 2008 - 11:00am.
