Archive for the 'Computers' Category

Google Video

Wednesday, January 3rd, 2007

Video on the Internet has really taken off over the last year (with Time basically featuring YouTube as Person of the Year).
One of the coolest collection of videos is the Google engEdu set of videos. They’re basically recordings of seminars/presentations given at Google. It’s like college all over again, except you can fast forward and [...]

Lessons in Backups

Thursday, December 7th, 2006

I recently had some filesystem issues on my “dev” server at home. I felt that it would be best for me to wipe out the system, reinstall, and restore user data from backups. It was a good excuse to upgrade the OS anyways. I find that every time I do a restore a learn a [...]

Firefox + OS X, Part II

Tuesday, November 28th, 2006

Weeks later of using Firefox as my primary browser, I find myself largely satisfied by the experience. Google Reader performs well, and Firefox doesn’t ever get to the point where I’m constantly getting beach balls like I get with Safari after days (weeks?) of usage.
Some little things:

Safari does seem a little snappier. I don’t know [...]

Firefox on OS X

Wednesday, November 8th, 2006

I’ve always preferred Safari over Firefox on OS X for a couple of random reasons.

Spellcheck!
Aqua widgets
Native GUI
Scrolling feels a little different.

However, one thing that has always kind of annoyed me with Safari is Javascript performance. And beachballs. And since I find myself using Google Reader more, it is becoming more annoying.
So I figured with Firefox [...]

Virtual Visual Studio

Thursday, October 5th, 2006

Since my ThinkPad doesn’t look like it can be easily fixed, would it be silly for me to install Visual Studio 2005 on my Virtual PC running on my 1.33 GHz PowerBook?
I think I meet the minimum requirements, except maybe the 600 MHz processor part.

Hardware

Thursday, September 28th, 2006

Weeee.
What’s up with hardware failing? Not cool at all. My ThinkPad started showing interference on the display and hard locking. And now it just beeps when POSTing. I’ll have to look up what the beeps mean.
If I’m lucky, it’ll be something stupid like the video card coming loose from beng jostled around in my bag.
Hrmm.. [...]

Bluetooth “DUN” for Blackberries and Macs?

Thursday, August 31st, 2006

I was planning on working on a solution for tethering Blackberries and Macs for Alex’s little bounty. There are some vagaries, so I’m not quite sure if the solution I’m going to propose would even qualify. The reason I’m not pursuing the bounty, is that (being honest with myself here) I barely have enough time [...]

Bluetooth and Windows XP

Monday, July 10th, 2006

I have Bluetooth on my Windows XP laptop.
It was one of the things I was wanted after having it on my PowerBook. So, now I have it. And I never use it. Because it sucks.
It sucks because of stupid driver issues. Should I use Microsoft’s drivers? No? Disable them. Use the Widcomm drivers. Find it [...]

Downtime

Tuesday, June 27th, 2006

Nothing like your server going down a couple of times to motivate you to touch up your backups.
I have automated backups running that back up all the users data (once a week currently). Unfortunately, I didn’t have backups of the configuration (stuff in /etc). Certainly, I could have done with out, but it would sure [...]

Office Inconsistencies

Thursday, March 30th, 2006

Mind numbingly stupid…
Say you’re using Microsft Word, you’ve got two documents open and two windows. And you’ve got two tabs on the.. err.. start bar thing. Clicking between the two switches you between the two windows. You click on the little X in the upper right corner. It closes the current window, and the other [...]