Mostly Harmless

Mostly about my amusement

Month: August 2006 (page 1 of 1)

August 27, 2006

Videotags this easy ought to be illegal

I frequent the WordPress support page to a) see if I can help someone and b) see if anything new is going on that might interest me.

Viper’s Video Quicktags is beyond interesting. It makes it ridiculously easy to add video to your post as so:

[ youtube width=”425″ height=”350″]wMwoexR1evo[ /youtube]

and

[ googlevideo width=”425″ height=”350″]4437565772125007816[ /googlevideo]

A space was added right after each [ so the plugin would ignore it. Without the spaces, this cheerfully produces

and

All into the posting. You can use the WYSIWYG editor that WordPress provides since Viper007Bond supplies you with easy buttons to produce a dialog box for inserting the codes.

This particular posting was made using BlogJet and not the built in editor. I used YouTube and Google Video but the plugin supports many more.

It’s well written, simple to use and works. Get it at Viper’s web page here.

August 20, 2006

Dirty window

FM RadioWe came back from Washington DC Sunday. It was an 8 hour painful, excruciating, non–stop lousy traffic, family trip up I-95. That’s not bad since Friday it took 10 hours to drive down there. Most of that was actually in New Jersey.

Around reaching NJ I turned on the radio. My 4½ year old boy suddenly says “that’s my favorite word! Open up the dirty window!” We asked him the usual “what? what did you say??” and he repeated himself.

The radio was playing Natasha Bedingfield’s song Unwritten. He pays more attention to the words than I do! We had to wait till the chorus repeated just to hear it.

Washington DC was fun and the GPS unit we got worked like a charm. The time driving was death and my son learned a new trick called “Car Sickness”.

August 9, 2006

VPS Servers

My domain is managed by me on my own name servers. When I moved to Long Island I lost my static IP addresses from my DSL line. So I moved both my DNS servers to Stefan’s house via his DSL line.

Not a good idea for availability. Since both DNS servers were there, any connectivity issues meant my domain disappeared. I had setup my basement server to queue up mail, but if the name servers became unreachable then no one could figure out to send mail to the other box.

Yesterday I went to http://www.tektonic.net/ and ordered a virtual private server from them. I picked the UM1 which is 10GB of disk space, 256MB RAM, on a Dual AMD Opteron 246. I selected SUSE 10.0 paid online and I’m good to go.

It’s a little different. I selected SUSE because that is what I use. Once I setup the yast repository I added bind, apache, php5, etc. and ran the online update. It’s very easy to forget that this is all virtual and on a shared box. The responsiveness is very good. I contacted my domain registrar, updated the record and poof all done.

Just for kicks I moved this blog onto this new server. I’ll see how it goes, but so far there have been no surprises.

August 1, 2006

Dell took care of my order

Good things do happen sometimes. Dell really did the right thing.

Last night at 7 pm the Dell rep left a voice mail on my work number. I called back this morning, some phone tag and spoke with the rep today.

The rep was really helpful and professional. In order to make it up to the customer (that’s me) they are offering me one of two options:

  1. A Dell $200 gift card which will arrive 4 to 6 weeks after my workstation arrives.
  2. An upgrade from my system’s Pentium D 960 to a Core 2 Duo E6700 with the understanding that the date will get pushed out into October.

I went for option number 2. My new ship date is October 17th.

The video card I ordered originally is not available so we swapped out the 1GB NVIDIA 7950 GX2 with a pair of SLI’ed 512MB 7900 cards. The old card was that in a single slot, so no real sacrifice there and performance ought to be about the same.

I received an e-mail from the rep with the new parts list. Pricing out the exact same system online is way more expensive than what I am paying. My discount comes out ~19% if I ordered the same system today.

That’s not bad and I can wait. If I get my system on or before October 17th I will be a really happy Dell customer.

August 1, 2006

Dell XPS 700 still no useful ETA

This morning checked my Dell XPS 700 status page. Originally it was supposed to ship last Tuesday July 25th but on that day it got bumped to today August 1st.

This morning I checked and the status now says August 8th. Any bets what it will say next week?

Still no call from Dell regarding the offer of a free upgrade to a Core 2 Duo.

Here’s the time line:

  1. Ordered the XPS 700 on June 18th.
  2. ETA was originally July 25th shipping.
  3. Updated July 25th to new ETA for shipping August 1st
  4. Update August 1st to August 8th

What’s really funny is that there is that the new status requires me to click on a “I agree to this delay” link for FTC reasons. The link does not work; it gets a nice error page of 404 – File not found.

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Jan Dembowski

Jan Dembowski

I am a software enthusiast who is easily amused and definitely mostly harmless.

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