March 4th, 2010
Steve Fox of PCWorld raised some timely questions in his March 2010 column Tech Products: Revolting not Not Rebelling :
… our state-of-the-art technology too often fails to work as it should. That’s why I have to reboot my Wi-Fi router at least once a week; why my fingerprint-recognition pad periodically forgets what my thumb looks like; and why my smartphone keeps dropping calls without provocation.
Mostly, I think the answer likes in our neglected software development process. In darker moments, many of us probably suspect that our software vendors hire besotted programmers to code their operating systems and mission-critical software in bars and back alleys. In truth, a coding project like a modern Mac-OS-X or Windows 7 may rival the Manhattan Project in resources and organizational complexity. When things go south, where did we go wrong?
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Tags: Programming, Quality Control, Software
Posted in Article, Programming, Software | No Comments »
February 16th, 2010
It sounded so simple. Wouldn’t it be fun to add smiley recognition to my own little web programs? WordPress does it automatically. They just can’t decide whether it’s spelled “smilie” or “smiley” – depends who did their coding.
Well, after all, every time you see the symbols “:-)” , you’d just replace the symbols with the image path to the appropriate smiley, wouldn’t you 
?
So you can see the manual smiley markups, I even had to enclose the symbols in quotes for this post, to prevent WordPress from converting them to their image equivalents.
Outside of WordPress, it turned out not to be so simple. You see, every symbol in the smiley “grin” markup is also a “special character” in Perl and most other programming languages. The coding to test for their presence will therefore match to symbols which, themselves, are program control characters. So the program thinks it sees a syntax error and blows up.
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Tags: Perl, Programming
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December 24th, 2009
I continue to enjoy my Mac Pro (under Snow Leopard) and my PC (with newly installed Windows 7-64). Following are some collected notes & observations.
- Music: for years I’ve been careful to select PC motherboards with the best onboard sound processors (DAC’s). I knew I would be interested in finding the results of A/B sound comparisons between Mac and PC playing the same iTunes tracks in synch.
- iTunes: “PC music” is a hot topic in the high-end audio magazines these days. The thinking is that you have to get an external DAC to wring true “hi-fi” stereo sound out of your PC – and the pros are often as not using iTunes to create their own state of the art music servers – something I’ve been doing for years, using just the onboard digital-to-analog logic.
- And the audio quality winner is: Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Hardware, Mac, music, PC, reviews, streaming
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December 2nd, 2009
I won’t pretend there was any urgent reason to upgrade from XP to Win 7. My XP installation was getting slower and slower, and that was only just reinstalled in July. My new Mac Pro (64 bit Snow Leopard) greatly increased my dissatisfaction with the PC side: if I’m going to live with Windows, and I am, I needed to do something!
A new motherboard and chip was financially out of the question. I’m running an ASUS M2N-SLI Deluxe with AMD 64 6000+ CPU. It’s not that old. By the time you add all the other stuff you always find you need, a slight upgrade turns into a major investment. I decided to go full bore with 8GB RAM, Windows 7 Pro (64-bit), and a better graphics card that would support “Windows Aero”.
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Tags: OS, reviews, Software
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November 13th, 2009
First test WordPress installation on local Mac machine. Click image for 1024x768 view.
Pictured above is a test WordPress installation running on a desktop Mac. It’s running under a free development environment for Mac called MAMP. No internet connection or remote server uploads are involved at all.
WordPress is the popular free web blog engine that evolved into an excellent website platform. If the page pictured above looks familiar, that’s because Summitlake.com (and thousands of other sites) are running under WordPress. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Apache, Hardware, Mac, music server, MySQL, Perl, PhP
Posted in Development, Solutions | No Comments »
November 2nd, 2009
I had seen mention on the internet that it was possible to use a wireless router on your home network without replacing the existing wired router-firewall and CAT5 installation. Most of my machines are already wired into my “blue cable” ethernet LAN (which is much faster).
Unlike an earlier experiment a few years back, this router had excellent range. It’s an ASUS WL-520GU broad range wireless router I picked up on the cheap on a whim at a NewEgg sale, but I never spent the time to try to work through the setup. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Hardware, Network, Software
Posted in Hardware, Network, Solutions | 1 Comment »
October 28th, 2009
After a week and a day with my new Mac Pro, I’m more delighted than ever. Highlights:
- More software added: BBEdit, Photoshop Elements 8 for Mac
- In the mail: Dreamweaver CS4 for Mac (crossgrade)
- Win-PC networking fixed (issue on PC side)
- Installed HP P1505N networked printer for all machines
- Upgraded memory to 7GB (+3[2GB] SIMMS + 1 existing 1GB) - removed two 1GB’s to fill 4 slots.
- Added 1TB Hitachi SATA for backups and music
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Tags: Hardware, Mac, reviews
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October 25th, 2009
Here’s how to use the universal vCard business card format to port your MS Outlook contacts over to Mac Address Book.
In theory, you should be able to export your MS Outlook Contacts file to tab-delimited text or *.csv. I wasted too much time trying to find an export format that Address Book could import – I tried about half a dozen. I researched it. This works:
- In MS Outlook (2007), open a single contact that you want to port to Mac.
- Using the “Office Button”, select Save As->Export to vCard File and save the contact. Default destination is C:\Documents and Settings\(user name)\Application Data\Microsoft\Signatures. Use that default to avoid renavigation on every Save. Windows doesn’t remember where you saved the last time.
- This creates a vCard
- Repeat for all the contacts you want to save. I did 97 contacts in less than half an hour. Look at all the folks I haven’t written for way too long!
- Open Signatures folder. Copy all of the signatures you want to port to Mac.
- If you are networking with the Mac, you can drop (paste) the files in the Drop Box or directly into a networked folder that you make. I made a Vcards subfolder in Mac’s Documents folder.
- If not networked, copy the folders to CD, USB drive or thumb drive and then mount on the Mac, copying to the directory of your choice.
- Now, open that folder in your Mac. Drag and drop the .vcf files into the Name column of the Mac’s Address Book.
You’ll usually get some XML garbage in the Notes field, but all of your legitimate Notes will also be preserved. Pictures in the Contact Picture field will be ported over!
Tags: Data conversion, Mac, PC
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October 24th, 2009
I’m really impressed. 
five stars. Let me state up front that this Mac exceeds my wildest expectations. It’s everything I wanted, runs incredibly faster than any PC I’ve ever owned or built, and the software is everything you expect from Apple, if not more.
Having jumped ship from a Mac Clone to PC’s in 1997, I have a lot of investment in home-built PC’s, a huge software environment, and considerable PC ”learning curve” acquired in the last 12 years.
But I’ve always wanted to install a test server right on my own box. I’ve been uploading drafts to test regions on my server for years and testing them there. Of course I do a lot of WordPress nowadays, a great, no-brainer web-based solution for blogs and entire websites. But, of course also , I still customize with Perl and HTML, I’m starting to use PhP, and I’m thinking about jumping into Ruby/RAILS.
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Tags: Hardware, Mac, reviews
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October 23rd, 2009
I can’t believe I fell for this. I received a fake email from Microsoft and clicked the link and started to install malware on Outlook. This malware goes after Outlook and Outlook Express. Something told me it was suspicious.
The malware reportedly redirects to a couple of bogus sites, but I haven’t learned exactly what the victim would have to do to trigger this action.
For more information, Google the phrase “officexp-kb910721-fullfile-enu.exe” or check some of the first listed links,
Microsoft doesn’t send email alerts. The web page didn’t look quite like the usual MS Update site. But they do change their page layouts from time to time, and the links at the bottom of the page (“Contact Us”) did connect to legitimate MS sites.
I clicked the link and chose the MS “Run” dialog option over “Download”. In a few seconds Zone Alarm was telling me it had identified a trojan malware, and that it couldn’t necessarily deactivate it. I clicked the ZA “Apply” button and nothing appears to happen.
I did a C drive scan on the .exe file name, supposedly residing in a subdirectory of Temporary Internet Files, but no subdirectory was found there. Perhaps ZA intercepted after all. Maybe this is because I still am doing scans and won’t restart until satisfied.
This trojan throws up a “must restart immediately to activate the protection” dialog. By this time I was wise enough not to do it.
I’m running all my scans now. I use Zone Alarm, and AdAware Free. ZA has been scanning for over 1:45 hours and has found nothing. Ad-Aware has been scanning for 55 minutes, and found nothing yet. I just downloaded Spybot. No one app catches them all. I’m still wondering if the MS Malicious Software Removal Tool was asleep at the wheel.
Tags: Malware, spam
Posted in Alerts | No Comments »
