2007 – Page 17 – Mostly Harmless

March 3, 2007

A real P-O-S

I always know it. Be careful what you say around kids.

Today I took out the kids remote control airplane (graphic from Amazon) and gave it a whirl. Santa got it for them for Christmas.

It sucks wind loudly. It’s rated for 8+ year olds so the kids really can’t work it. I’m almost 5 times that old and I can’t work it either.

So I tell Lily “Honey, it’s a real P O S”.

Now my 5 year old son is saying “Daddy can I play with the POS?” and the girl is also saying “Daddy can you get me a POS? Please? I want a POS!”

. . .

“Maybe when you are older sweetheart, you can have a P O S of your own.”

March 3, 2007

No need for Vista upgrade

no need to upgrade to vista I have been kicking around the Vista upgrade to Home Premium and it reminds me of the PS3; for now get an Xbox 360 instead.

Vista is like that. If it comes with your new PC great. But there is no need to upgrade.

Overall I like it, but I also like working with broken things.

The upgrade

When I first tried to run the upgrade it told me that I had to remove my Symantec System Works 2006, upgrade my driver for SCSI/RAID, and the firmware on one of my DVD writers.

Dell’s support web site did not have the updated nvidia drivers so I had to get the nforce one’s from Nvidia’s web site. They did have the firmware update for the DVD hardware.

I ran the upgrade and it rebooted. I left the DVD in the drive and naturally it booted up. I thought that it would continue the upgrade from there.

No such luck. After removing the DVD and rebooting the upgrade failed.

SCARY! I ended up turning of booting from the DVD drive in the BIOS but that was not good. I was afraid that the PC would be left unstable but it recovered well. Re-ran, waited, upgrade was successful.

Driver support is goofy. After all was done I went to Nvidia and Creative’s web sites for driver updates. The Nvidia one’s are good but the Creative drivers for the X-Fi sound card are beta and act like it.

Security

The User Account Control is annoy-ware and I suspect that anti-virus vendors will opt to have their users turn it off and let the anti-virus app do it’s work.

The increased security from UAC is IMHO not really increased security at all. It’s just “Well YOU selected to install that code, so WE’RE off the hook”.

If Vista had something such as sudo to escalate privileges then I might be inclined to like it. But that assumes an informed user who knows what privilege escalation is. That’s not Microsoft’s fault exactly but click through security is not really useful.

I’m not turning it off (yet) but comparisons to the TSA’s war on liquids comes to mind.

User interface

Well it sure is pretty and I’ll admit easier to use. It’s also a pretty blatant rip of OSX 🙂

The Start Menu has been revamped and takes some getting used to. The Start Search field is good, you type part of the name of the app and it locates it. The old Start -> All Programs always dissolves into a mess if you install lots of apps in the default location. This does not really fix a disorganized menu as much as makes it less obviously disorganized.

The Window effects are nice eye candy. If you use other video codecs then you should follow the instructions at Respect Sakura. I use the Media Player Classic all the time and this makes it work better (and look nicer) in Vista.

Built in gadgets side bar is cool. It’s naturally better integrated than Konfabulator but feels less developed.

Media Center

I have a Hauppauge PVR-350 card in my PC hooked up to my cable line. I like to watch TV in a window from time to time.

The Media Center is more responsive and does work better than the same one in MCE 2005. In MCE 2005 pausing live TV or re-winding always worked badly if at all. Now it is very responsive and works well.

Firefox, iTunes, Games oh my

No Firefox integration yet. Clicking on links runs Internet Explorer 7. Seriously annoying.

The iTunes works oddly. I ran the iTunes fix and that helped but iTunes get’s twitchy when I sync up my iPod and locks up a lot.

My games work well mostly. Every now and then the sound dies and I need to restart the PC. That will probably change once the sound drivers are no longer beta.

Conclusion

As I’ve said there is no reason to upgrade. A tuned Windows XP with good AV and utilities works better right now. I’m not going to roll back (can I?) but I think Vista is too immature to make the switch.

If I get a new PC it will have Vista but other than that Vista is a pass.

February 28, 2007

Upgraded the XPS 700 to Vista

Did the Vista upgrade tonight on the XPS 700. So far my reaction has been “very pretty, is that it?” I’ll go into detail after I find out if I like it or not.

February 26, 2007

RSS feed and Tarski Links Widget

Sidebar_arrangementt The RSS feed on this web site became broken and I tracked it down to the Tarski Links widget. I use the Tarski theme as one of my two themes. The regular links widget looks awful so the Tarski theme guys came up with a replacement that looks pretty good.

But it breaks my RSS feed. Enabling that plugin somehow caused a blank line to be inserted before my feed. I did not bother to report it to the Tarski or WordPress forums since I am sure that I somehow made a mistake when I copied the code.

While I was playing with the code and confirming that I am not a programmer, I realized that I wanted some of the widgets to go away when people look at a post. I came across Otto’s page and installed the Executable PHP Widget.

Before widgets became available, I would add to the sidebar.php file the functions I wanted to display, like the weather icon. Being able to run PHP code in a widget is pretty useful.

I removed the Tarski Links widget and copied the following code lifted from links.php in the Tarski theme. This was pasted into the PHP Code widget.

<?php
if (is_home()) :
echo “<div class=”bookmarks”>n”; wp_list_bookmarks(’category_before=&category_after=
&title_before=<h3>&title_after=</h3>
&show_images=0&show_description=0′);
echo “</div>n”;
endif;
?>

And poof the Blogroll links look good, my RSS feed works and I am happy. On the home page it appears, any other page it doesn’t. I repeated this a couple of times with other items on my sidebar.

The correct way would be to code this all as a widget, and include a check mark for “show on home page only” but I’m not a programmer and this works for me.

February 26, 2007

That was not so bad

Used the snow thrower on the driveway. The snow was actually not bad at all.

February 25, 2007

Snow thrower all ready to go

The snow thrower is all gassed up and ready to go. Supposed to get 2 to 4 inches of snow tomorrow.

February 18, 2007

Year of the Pig

Happy New Year to all!

Yesterday we went to Flushing to take the kids to see the dentist and have an early dinner with the family.

It was not a smooth ride. That was not a big surprise, it was Chinese new Year’s Eve after all. Lily’s brother called to give us a heads up; he could not get near Flushing. Main Street and College Point were not moving at all. So we came across Northern Boulevard hoping to turn south on Union Street. No joy there, the police closed Union in that direction.

We had to make a u-turn on Northern, drive to Parson’s, drive down to Roosevelt, just to turn up on Union Street. The graphic is close and does not reflect the joy of driving with so many other happy drivers.

Flushing Traffic on New Years Eve

The good news is that there were lots of parking spots since hardly anyone could get there. The bad news is we needed to be on the other side of town. Good exercise for everyone. It was so crowded on the street that I put my 36lb daughter on my shoulders.

One walk to the dentist, some shopping (my favorite hobby shop went out of business 🙁 ). Afterwards we had dinner near where we parked. It was all good.

February 14, 2007

Not your normal Valentines Day

I left work early before 11 this morning. I had to do something that you just can’t do remotely and as soon as it was done, I headed home.

We’ve been hit with an ice storm. Everything is covered in a layer snow and ice. I just got the mail and if it were not for the grass sticking out of the ice I’d have not gotten back to the house in one piece.

Lily’s on her way home. All the LIRR trains are messed up so she is headed to a station that normally we don’t go to. I’m going to get her and leave the kids with my folks.

This is not what I had in mind for Valentines Day! Oh well, Valentines Day really is everyday. Lily and I don’t get gifts for each other (18 years with her this year, there is no way I can surprise her anymore). It’s much more fun to get gifts outside of the holidays.

Wonder if she still wants those diamond earrings…

February 11, 2007

With the proper medication a productive life is possible…

This morning Lily saw the Toy’s R Us flyer with a Nintendo Wii bundle. It came with

One Wii Console (1 remote, nunchuk, and Wii Sports)
One Rayman: Raving Rabbids
One Mario or Zelda organizer stand and CD case

The store opened at 11 am. We were the sixth couple and we got two sets. We are giving one set to our niece and nephew.

So now in my living room I have an XBOX 360, a PS3, and soon a Nintendo Wii. On the Xbox I play Burnout Revenge, on the PS3 I’d love to play Call of Duty 3 (Sigh, can’t explain or play that one around the kids), and on the Wii Rayman is too cool to put down.

Can’t wait to get an additonal remote and nunchuk…

Image lifted from Kotaku.com

February 11, 2007

Virtual Private Servers

According to Wikipedia:

“A virtual private server (also referred to as virtual dedicated server or virtual server, and abbreviated VPS or VDS) is a server run through virtualization in tandem with other virtualized servers on one physical computer.”

Which is a pretty good description. I use TekTonic as my VPS provider and I don’t have a complaint about their service since I get a good uptime. I pay a really good fee and definitely get what I pay for.

But I think with any VPS there are things you need to check on. I notice that processes that I need (oh say, my apache web server) will inexplicably die without any reason in the log.

Lately I have not been getting my mailed database backups. I have a cron job that backs up all my blog data and files, and another one on my basement for pulling down the gpg encrypted file so no data has been lost. The mail process died (postfix, only listens on localhost) and a weeks worth of automated mail got queued up. I also need named since this host is a back DNS server for my domain.

I was thinking of doing uber script magic then I realized I should just put the following into root’s crontab.

0,15,30,45 * * * * /usr/sbin/rcapache2 start >/dev/null 2>&1
0,15,30,45 * * * * /usr/sbin/rcnamed start >/dev/null 2>&1
0,15,30,45 * * * * /sbin/rcpostfix start >/dev/null 2>&1

It’s not elegant but it works. I don’t need to know if it was successful or not and this was a quick fix.

Year: 2007 (page 17 of 18)