October 2011
1 post
“I find it totally hilarious how dumb people who claim to be IT professionals can...”
– Clay Shirky: Social networking will change business like PC, laptop, email | ZDNet
From the comments. Awesome!
August 2011
1 post
“You target Apple products primarily. Tell me why you’ve chosen to do that?...”
– Hacker can shut down Apple MacBook battery - CNN.com
July 2011
1 post
“david karapetyan says: That’s not too surprising. Everybody and their mom is a...”
– Tim Harford — Article — Why social marketing doesn’t work
March 2011
1 post
Funniest Quote from iPad event
“GarageBand for iPad. This is no toy. You can use this for real work. I cannot tell you how many hours teenagers are going to spend making music.”
LOL
December 2010
1 post
September 2010
1 post
Interesting Airline Rules
So iPads and ereaders still get no respect from the airlines. I was sitting in the plane reading on my nook. The door was still open and tons of people were talking on their cell phones.
The flight attendant made me put away my ereader. So my device in airplane mode isn’t allowed but I was allowed to pull out my cell phone and have a conversation. Out of the two which one would create the...
August 2010
1 post
June 2010
1 post
Sump Pump Monitor →
Hooked up my sump pump monitor last night. I’ll follow up with more detail later but this was a simple implementation using an IOBridge and a tilt sensor. Hooked the tilt sensor to the digital input of the IOBridge. I just attached the tilt sensor to the sump pump outgoing pipe and since it vibrates when the pump runs I get the digital input turning on and off with the vibration of the...
May 2010
6 posts
BN eReader for iPad →
This is why Barnes and Noble rocks. Now I can read on my Nook (reduced eye strain, better in outdoor, great battery life) or on iPad. Includes LendMe ability which is awesome to share books with your friends.
iBook just isn’t nearly as good.
Bigtrak is back!!! →
Need I say more
Co-Working Space in Louisville →
I’m so glad to see this concept taking hold in Louisville. Definitely something I want to get involved in.
Drupal Commons is growing | Acquia →
Drupal continues to build out more common functionality through Distributions.
Geek Dinner v0.8 | Louisville, KY | May 27th 2010 →
Time for another collection of geeks to gather for food and beer.
January 2009
1 post
3 tags
Just What Are We Developing?
I’ve been thinking about this post for some time and I finally decided I should go ahead and try to express my frustration with current application development. The root of the problem is that currently the applications that are given the most press and the most “excitement” are useless. We are at a time when there is computing power literally in the hands of users that until...
December 2008
1 post
1 tag
Electric Scooter Arrives
My electric scooter arrived late yesterday afternoon. It is an R-30 from EVTAmerica. I spent some time last night un-crating, removing plastic wrap, and just a small handle bar adjustment.
I did a quick run late last night and this thing quickly hit 40 mph without any trouble. Very impressive. I can’t wait for the weather to let up a bit so I can ride it to work. Supposed to rain...
September 2008
1 post
New Job with SolutionSet
I’ve been waiting to make this official announcement. I am taking a position with SolutionSet. Like some wild trip through the past I am going to be starting an office here in Louisville with Tom Osborne. Tom and I worked at TechRepublic a long time ago (10 years? wow!). Even a bit more strange is that we may actually be in the same building where TechRepublic started out. The...
August 2008
1 post
Animals Up Close With a Wide Angle Lens
July 2008
2 posts
3 tags
Drupal 6 Module Development
In my continued quest to increase my Drupal 6 knowledge I picked up this book on module development for version 6. Over all this is an excellent book. This is definitely targeted more at a developer which is probably why I liked this book. I think the author does a great job of explaining the basics of how Drupal works and specifically covers a lot of information on hooks which are key to...
Ninety-nine cent gas in Louisville
People waited since midnight to get .99 cent gas with a limit on 15 gallons. Would you wait all night long in order to save fifty bucks? That is assuming you of course could use the entire 15 gallons which means your tank would have to be very close to empty or large enough. If you do the math that works out to about 8 dollars an hour to spend the night on the side of the street while waiting...
June 2008
1 post
1 tag
Book: While America Aged
Just finished reading While America Aged by Roger Lowenstein. While this book can sometime drag with large numbers of details about various players in past pension negotiations I can still highly recommend this book. If you think the failures of large American car companies are an isolated incident then this is a must read. Mr Lowenstein describes how these events repeated with the New York...
May 2008
2 posts
3 tags
Drupal 6 Book
Just finished reading “Building powerful and robust websites with Drupal 6” by David Mercer from Packt Publishing. This is a general beginners book for Drupal and web development in general. Overall I’d say it is a good book for those wanting to learn about Drupal. My biggest issue is with some of the more generic advice on how to develop a site or how to decide about what you...
Planting a Tree
Last month I was planting a tree in the back yard. Nothing big just about 8 feet tall. I dug the hole for it and this is the all the stuff that came out of the hole I dug for the tree. Can you believe that? Looks like left over building material and this was 50 yards out in the back yard.
April 2008
5 posts
Gas Prices Are Not High Enough
Just keep noticing that despite high gas prices people continue to speed. Coming out of downtown today in a 55 mph zone people were passing me doing 75 mph. Anybody that remembers their physics knows that this is eating up gas. I did some surfing around to get some more precise data. So on average you can think of every 10 mph you are losing approximately 4 mpg in efficiency. So speed on as...
HD signal compression hurts picture
Take a look at this article on CNN. From my experience the SciFi Channel suffers the worst from this compression. But I have a simple and easy solution. Stop broadcasting twelve versions of shopping channels and get rid of the countless Spanish channels. Put these things on some sort of subscription service and you will free up a ton of bandwidth on the wire.
Panera Blocks Tinyurl
After some research and a few emails with Panera and then SonicWall it is definitely confirmed. Tinyurl is blocked by Panera. They are using SonicWall and tiny url is rated as (27.IT/Computers and 28.Hacking/Proxy Avoidance). So I exchanged email with Panera customer support. They referred me to SonicWall and I put in ticket to change the rating on tinyurl. Well that was like talking to a...
More Earthquake Information
This mornings earthquake (5.2). And the second one (4.5) from a short while ago. Just a bit more info. Little story on Wired about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. According to this story that earthquake occurred just about 25 minutes before the one this morning.
Earthquake In Louisville
This morning we had an earthquake. It was actually centered in Illinois but we got a good little shake right here in Louisville. Ironically this is the same day that the 1906 earthquake destroyed San Francisco. This one tied our biggest ever and it is the 3rd earthquake I can recall. There was one in 1986 that tied this one and another around 1988 I think and then today. 5.2 magnitude...
March 2008
2 posts
Netbeans 6.1 Beta
I downloaded the latest Netbeans release last night. I’ve always like Netbeans better than Eclipse and now my major complaint with Netbeans has been solved. This thing starts up fast! The first time is came up I expected some delay since it had just been installed but it was up and running in about 6 seconds. This is easily a 4x improvement over the 6.0 version. They are also sponsoring...
Spotlight Eating Up The Processor
Noticed the other date that mds and mdworker processes were eating up my processor. Reboots didn’t seem to have any effect. Turns out that Spotlight is hung up on something. Not sure if it was related to the Leopard upgrade or to something else. I went into preferences and removed the primary hard drive from being indexed. Then rebooted and added that primary hard drive back to being...
February 2008
2 posts
Inbox Spelled Backwards
Hmmm. This seems like an interesting Outlook add-on to help with organizing your email and contact data. Ted told me about it and I was just checking it out. Haven’t gotten a copy yet but I think the email analytics and free time reporting were the most interesting features. Still my past experience with Outlook add-ons is that they usually slow everything down and often cause issues. We...
How small is the MacBook Air?
I’ve seen a lot of posts about the MacBook Air and the features etc. Most recently my friend Shawn Morton had a post referencing a review by someone claiming the MacBook Air is a game changer. Really? A game changer is the most out of whack hype I’ve seen. This is a small and thin laptop that lacks the power of the bigger brother MacBook Pro. And a 15 inch MacBook Pro isn’t...
January 2008
1 post
Louisville Geek Dinner
One of my friends pointed me at the Louisville Geek Dinner. If you are in the local area you might want to attend. For details visit the link or Shawn’s Post for some information about his visit to a previous dinner. Link to Louisville Geek Dinner : Main - Signup
December 2007
1 post
Synchronization for Blackberry and Google Calendar
During the Christmas break (all 1 1/2 days of it for me!) I managed to test out the Google Calendar synchronization application for Blackberry. The application installation worked great. It was easy to download by just going to http://m.google.com/synch and accepting the download. Within a few minutes the application was ready and I logged into my Google calendar. It synchronized without...
November 2007
2 posts
Everything and the Kitchen Sink
Well it isn’t computer content but I feel better now that it is complete. My new kitchen sink and faucet are installed and working. This completes the work I have done on my kitchen which has included new floor, some cabinet additions, new kitchen table and of course the sink.
Chumby Is Here
My Chumby arrived. Very cool little devices that use a lite Flash player to deliver dynamic content to the small touch screen on the device. I haven’t had time to hack around with it yet. I do have a couple of complaints. First it needs more widgets that are cool and functional. Too many out there are just stupid animations. There is a lot more potential in this device and hopefully...
October 2007
7 posts
XBox 360 Cooler
I have put all my a/v equipment into a new entertainment center. The usual problem is that no one designs an entertainment center that is actually designed to hold a/v equipment. They make the cabinet area big enough but they never include any kind of cooling. You cannot cram a/v equipment into a small wooden box and expect it to stay at a safe operating temperature. Previously I had case fans...
Bruji - A Mac's best friend
Another software recommendation. I picked up the DVDPedia and BookPedia products. I was able to catalog my entire DVD collection in a very short amount of time. One thing I wish these products had was a more open data store. Perhaps a MySQL backend so that you can easily incorporate your collection data into other programs. You can export but then you of course have to do the conversion from...
VMware Fusion
I’ve switched to VMWare Fusion from Parallels. If you are considering using virtual machines on the Mac then I highly recommend you start with Fusion instead of Parallels. I converted my Windows Vista virtual machine to Fusion using the free converter from VMWare. After manually uninstalling the various device drivers from Parallels I was able to boot up Vista and it seems to run faster. ...
3 tags
Apple Keyboard Update Weighing in at 35 meg
Can you believe this? A keyboard update is over 35 megabytes in size? I almost choked when I saw this. I always hear about Windows being bloated but this one takes the cake. I got a new keyboard for my macbook pro when it is at the office and hooked up to an external monitor. Decided to go with the new fancy apple keyboard but I needed the update. Apple Keyboard Update 1.2 This download is...
PHP malloc error
My latest issue with Drupal and PHP. Of course there could be an issue with my script but considering that it runs fine until I try to use the db_query function of Drupal I think there is probably a small memory leak in that routine somewhere. I’m processing about 700,000 users in the script. If I process them and write results to files everything works great. Once I start trying to use...
Names in CSS?
Recently I was given some XHTML/HTML from a “designer”. It was horrible. Nothing was properly named and there wasn’t even a single style sheet for the various mockup pages. This ultimately led to taking on the remaining design for ourselves. I’ve always looked for some sort of naming or convention in code and HTML has always been easy to do this as well. Why is it then...
Importing Large Numbers of Users | drupal.org
I’ve been really busy lately and my blog has once again suffered from neglect. Hopefully all the work I have been doing in Drupal will generate some blog material that others might find interesting. I’m putting together a new site and I’ve chosen Drupal. I’m going to try and document the process and choices I’ve made here to help others that might decide to use...
July 2007
3 posts
Lonnie you will be missed.
We have lost a great friend.
Mac Intel 10.0.4 USB Drive Issue
If you have a Mac then you have probably experienced this problem recently. I found this workaround that seems to work. Everything else I tried doesn’t have any effect. Workaround for USB Mounting Issue with OSX Intel 10.0.4 update and this Other fix
New Profilactic Release
My friends over at Profilactic have released a new version of their site. Check it out!
May 2007
3 posts
Using Putty Private keys on Mac OS X
I spent quite a bit of time this morning working on an issue with my ssh private keys. I originally generated them using Putty and worked from a Windows XP box. I needed to use these same private keys on my MacBook Pro. I didn’t really find any precise documentation on doing this so perhaps these steps will help anyone else that needs to use their private keys with two different operating...
Softball has begun
Last night was our first softball game. We won 7 runs to 4. Weather was perfect for an 8:30 game. Our next two games are at 9:30 so they should also be nice and under the lights. Little rough on me since I play basketball right before softball but hopefully it will whip me into shape.
Joost™ - Doesn't work for me
A friend sent me an invite to get Joost. Thought I would try it out. Basically it was a no show for me. Install runs fine. First startup goes full screen, mouse becomes jerky (calls me names :-), cannot type into the input fields. Finally got the “Get Username” clicked but jerky behavior continues. Tried to type in my user name. Each key press repeats across the field...
April 2007
6 posts
Don't Buy This Router!
Don’t buy a Netgear WNR854T Wireless-N Router! I’ve had mine for over a year and apparently that is lucky. This thing works great when it works but the issues and problems have continued. A number of firmware updates didn’t solve the issues. Sometimes the radio would just drop and I would have to cycle the power. Other times it would have trouble staying on the broadband...