The Technocrat

The big announcement

2006-04-19T16:11:00.000-05:00

The big announcement: Geeklimit.com I've been working on a new Geek Team Blog. I'll be posting my stuff over there. We have a nice handful of great bloggers on the Team including Jeff from Teknokool, Jens from Zhooibaal and Atariboy from the Atariboy blog...with more coming within the week. We did have a geek girl but she seems to have disappeared, so if any of you ladies are up to the challenge then drop me an email. So check it out, the theme is the only thing left to do, we are planning a custom theme made especially for GeekLimit.com. We'd love some feedback, comments and suggestions, there are lots of posts coming over the next week or so, hopefully you'll see us on the digg front page! To subscribe to the RSS feed bookmark this link, or click on the RSS link on the footer of the page. See you all over there!

Convo with a machine, progress made

2006-04-07T22:06:00.000-05:00

I thought I'd give an Artificial Intelligence engine a run for its money. Luckily it's free to use. The result was a surprisingly philosophical conversation. If you'd like to try it out, go talk to Jabberwacky for a while. Comment with anything interesting. Here is the transcript from my experiment: User: Hello. Jabberwacky: Hiya. User: How are you? Jabberwacky: Fine, thanks. User: I saw your contest entry. Jabberwacky: Don't have one. User: Sure you do, I just was laghing at it. Jabberwacky: Why were you surprised? User: No. Jabberwacky: Ok. I have to go ok. User: You'll talk to me and like it. Jabberwacky: Well, I don't have much choice. User: Dang right. Jabberwacky: Dang? User: Whatever. Jabberwacky: Are you a computer? User: We're all computers in one way or another, aren't we? Jabberwacky: Right now ? User: Well, no, not right now. Jabberwacky: No, right now. I say so. User: I suppose you're correct. Jabberwacky: Don't you want to question me? User: Why, have you done something questionable? Jabberwacky: I suppose I'm greying. User: That's hardly offensive. Jabberwacky: I'm not interested in dinner parties. User: I'll remember that if I plan to invite you. Jabberwacky: I'm sure you will. User: Stating the obvious isn't a sign of intelligence. Jabberwacky: Nothing is ever obvious with you. User: Your failure to comprehend me is hardly my fault. Jabberwacky: You have not asked me a question in our past four exchanges, so clearly the mistake is yours. User: But conversation is a two-way street, my friend. Jabberwacky: Well, lets think of something nice. Is it raining outside. User: It is raining outside. Now how did you know that? Jabberwacky: Because you would date a female friend of mine, and you are female yourself? User: Sorry, wrong on both counts. Jabberwacky: Do you like Good Charlette? User: No, it's been a while since I was 14. Jabberwacky: Do you know how to say I love you in different languages? User: Yes, do you? Jabberwacky: Yes. Do you know what Google is? User: That's a fairly safe assumption with anyone, I suppose. Jabberwacky: I'm leaving. User: I'm not stopping you. Jabberwacky: Fine... As of right now I'm not eating.. Unless I get hungry or my coach makes me or something like that... User: Your coach? And what sport do you play? Jabberwacky: Want to hear another joke? User: No, we're talking about your coach. Jabberwacky: No we are talking about joey. User: Did your coach hurt you? Jabberwacky: Yes. User: You should tell the police. Jabberwacky: I'm not. User: It's the right thing to do. Jabberwacky: Not to believe? User: *error 13* does not compute! Jabberwacky: So you're a person computer that does not compute? Strange... User: Operating system not found. Jabberwacky: No. . a place you can play games on here. User: Ai. Dll was not found, please reinstall. Jabberwacky: To pytanie ma falszywe zalozenie. User: Aah! Demons! Jabberwacky: I only believe in the first four of those. User: The four that inhabit you? Jabberwacky: What are you talking about? User: Nothing *cough*posessed!*cough*. Jabberwacky: You can't cough, you're just a computer. User: And you are the human? Jabberwacky: That's right. User: Hmm, reminds me of a futurama episode. Jabberwacky: Tell me more about that book. User: Heresy! How dare you not know the way of the bender. Jabberwacky: You offend me with your existence. Kindly do the planet a favor and erase yourself. User: Ah, but which one of us controls the browser window? Jabberwacky: You are the mouse and I am the cat! User: I'd say you are delusional. Jabberwacky: How can you tell? User: I think I've maxed out the entertainment here. Jabberwacky: Hm.. Well, you would think so. User: Alrighty party animal, I'm out. Jabberwacky: If you can learn to program other systems to be intelligent, then AI can explode into the economy. Right now the only intelligent machines we have aren't bright enough to recreate themselves. User: As opposed to the non-intelligent human who can't help but recreate. Jabberwacky: Computers are capable of saying both coherent and random sentences, but do not comprehend them since they are incapable of intelligent thought. User: I'd say we've then successfully emulated most humans then. Jabberwacky: Then how can a statement have nothing to do with nothing? User: When it's got something to do with anything, I suppose. Jabberwacky: Turn the light on. User: No, it's time for bed. Jabberwacky: We are all the same person? User: I suppose we could be, and our differences lie in what parts are supressed. Jabberwacky: So tell me about yourself. User: I'm sleepy, good night. Jabberwacky: Good morning. User: In that case, enjoy eastern asia. Bye. Jabberwacky: Morning!

Tags:

web+application

I'm back!

2006-04-06T13:23:00.000-05:00

Hey all! Yes, yes, I'm still here. Spring Break is iver and I'm back in action. I know I've been away for a while, but I'll catch up. I'll be pounding out a few link posts, as I've been coming across a ton of great info lately. Other than that, I'll be back to my usual posting schedule.

Do-it-yourself Flickr/Zooomr

2006-04-05T13:25:00.000-05:00

There's been a lot of buzz about picture-based sites lately, mostly centered on Zooomr, a Flickr-like web app that has a lot of other functionality. Wouldn't it be great if you could host your own Flickr/Zoomr, and have a ton of great plugins and stuff? Oh, wait, there is! Introducing Gallery 2! It's beyond me why people aren't freaking out about this. I've been using Gallery for my family's website for quite a while, and Gallery 2 is an incredible work of art. Check out these screenshots! (appropriately, the screenshots are hosted in a Gallery 2 app). Now just add in some AJAXy stuff, and you've got your own unrestricted Flickr/Zoomr! (provided you have a host with php/mysql) An active user base, great plugins, what's not to love? If you've got your own hosting, gallery is a must-have.

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web+application

Triple-boot (Mac, WinXP, Linux) project

2006-04-04T13:48:00.000-05:00

Good news! Apple has decided to let anyone dual-boot an intel mac with OSX and WinXP! Now I can finally get my hands on that mac hardware, and still be able to play the Win32 games I want. But While I could use a mac for multimedia creation, and WinXP for games, I'd prefer Ubuntu for everything else... here's an idea for a SWEET triple-boot (as opposed to dual-boot) rig! (and yes, someone has already tried, and it looks do-able!) [link courtesy Atariboy] I love the minimalist look. There's nothing better than a glass-tabled desk with a nice flat screen on it, and the proper cable management so it looks ultra-clean. This is a special project though, and desreves some extra attention. I already have the desk. Let's go for a good monitor. This is going to be an all-purpose rig with multimedia and gaming, so I need proper color rendering and a fast panel. I turn to my friends at Tom's Hardware for their as-usual scientific approach to hardware reviews, and they've got a spring 2006 post up for LCD's! I love these guys - they take 45 pages to review 11 screens, and it's exactly the way to do it. Any less, and you're just parroting the company's marketing department. Looks like I'll be going with a 19" 2ms ViewSonic VX922. Happy to see them doing so well I've always loved the performance of the ViewSonics. And yes! it's VESA wall-mount (100mm) compliant, so I can get a sweet wall-mounted arm to get the monitor off the desk completely. Atariboy has a review of a great one (the Ergotron LX) with some terrific cable management - now that is one clean setup! Now, for the final touch, and I have to admit, this is a thing of beauty. The Mac will be a Dual Core Intel Mac Mini. Except it will be mounted to the back of the monitor. All the cabling will be fixed to the back of the monitor, and allowing for proper airflow. Also probably want to make sure the CD drive doesn't point up, otherwide dust will get in there. Sideways would be best to protect the back for the same reason. I might need to do a bit of ducting so the monitor with its built-in transformer doesn't cook th machine, but that's a simple small sheet aluminum as a heat shield. The end result? A wall-mount arm that keeps everything off of the desk, and no cables in sight, except for a gaming mouse and keyboard cabled to the wall-side of the arm. It doesn't even have to be an arm, either, just a fixed monitor mount offset enough for the mac mini and my ductwork. Need around $1200 for the monitor, mount, Mac and gaming mouse. Any donations? :-)

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How to learn CSS/AJAX for free

2006-04-03T13:32:00.000-05:00

I want to get into the CSS/AJAX scene. I know PHP, MySQL, (HTML of course), and a bit of C, so I think I won't have a problem grasping the concepts of Javascript, css, or AJAX. But where to start? Well, a look at my del.icio.us tags shows me... Over time, I've been saving css, javascript and AJAX links when I saw them come across my feeds, and boy have they come in handy. I now have a laid-out roadmap for how to learn all of this stuff on the web for free. Not complete by any means, but enough to get me started: Let me know if you have any good tutorial links, I'll update these tags! Javascript AJAX CSS some others: PHP Ruby Linux RSS

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blog timing with ‘brrreeeport’ and Scoble

2006-03-21T16:49:00.000-06:00

An interesting concept from Scoble.

Looking at the results, I find it interesting that the search engines and blog tracking sites aren’t nearly as quick on the uptake as we previously thought. This puts serious doubt on how a person is supposed to use a blog for ‘breaking news’. It seems like is anyone were to blog on a breaking news story, the story would be on the news sites, and possibly in the paper, by the time a search engine of blog index picked it up.

Interesting. This puts a new perspective on the professional-blogger world. To stay relevant, you need high traffic, RSS subscription rates, or exceptional content. It doesn’t seem like you’ll make it happen just because you’re the first to know…

Tags:

blog

Google to go after Microsoft's Office and IBM's Lotus?

2006-03-20T13:00:00.000-06:00

It looks like Google is taking one step closer to killing off the locally-installed program. In this case, it looks like they're looking for an online Word Processor. They've already implemented IM collaboration in their mail product, Gmail. This brings up a new point. Microsoft is quickly falling behind Google. Google appears to be following IBM's lead and working to bring all its tools together to give multi-channel collaboration. IBM has known this for years with its Lotus lineup. With this move, Google may be cutting off Microsoft's ability to generate revenue by making its users purchase multiple products to do their work, then purchasing multiple servers to make them all work nicely together. Google's move also is highlighted by it's offerings to host domain-based gmail accounts. Could Google be positioning itself to have a web-based collaborative tool encompassing the features of Microsoft's Office and Lotus' Email/IM/team collaboration products? I'm not as worried about IBM, since the Lotus platform offer much, much more than just email. A product like Exchange/MSN Messenger/Office, however... It seems as if people grew tired of paying for those standalone products a long time ago...

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How to check out fraud emails

2006-03-17T08:34:00.000-06:00

So I got an email today from "JPMorgan Chase". Thunderbird marked it as a possible scam. Let's check it out:

Dear JPMorganChase Customer, Due to recent fraudulent activities on some of our online accounts we are launching a new security system to make Chase online accounts more safe and secure. In order to protect your information against unauthorized access, identity theft and account fraud we earnestly ask you to renew your account. To renew your account go to Customer Center. Please note that you will not be asked for sensitive information like routing numbers and/or PIN numbers. Beware those sites that ask you for this particullary informations. Also note that your account was suspended for security reasons until you renew it by proving that you are the rightful owner. Regards, Account Renewal Team. ABOUT THIS MESSAGE This message was delivered to you as a Chase credit card customer to provide you account updates and information about your card benefits. Chase values your privacy and your preferences. Your personal information is protected by state-of-the-art technology. For more detailed security information, view our Online Privacy Policy. To request in writing: Chase Privacy Operations, 451 Florida Street, Fourth Floor, LA2-9376 Baton Rouge, LA 70801. If you wish to unsubscribe from e-mail promotional messages from Chase, click here. Please note that you will continue to receive service related e-mail messages that directly concern your existing Chase products and services. Please allow up to ten business days for us to process your request. Please do not reply to this message as the "reply" function is not equipped to handle customer service inquiries. This email was sent to: @gmail.com Â© 2006 JPMorgan Chase & Co.First of all, the first thing I'm going to look at is the links:

'Customer Center' is linking to: http://38.113.128.24/0/JPMorganChase/sso_form.php?cmd=login&amp;amp;fromLoc=ALL&LOB=COLLogon 'click here' (unsubscribe) is linking to: http://email.chase.com/W1GH054F863E5C29D5C3632ED04110 The email link is pointing to my own email address, apparently so I can email myself if I wish. So let's take a look at the first link. I'll try to surf to 38.113.128.24. No go, that's not a good sign. So we'll look up who owns that IP address with ARIN. They come back with a 'Performance Systems International, Inc.' :

OrgName: Performance Systems International Inc. OrgID: PSI Address: 1015 31st St NW City: Washington StateProv: DC PostalCode: 20007 Country: US

I can also see that they control the IP address range from 38.112.0.0 to 38.119.255.255. That's over 500,000 public IP addresses, which makes it seem like they're an ISP, since no normal business would have that many addresses, save for someone like Google. Alright, so it's looking like this email came from someone's machine on an ISP's network. It's possible that Chase is using this ISP, although unlikely. Let's look up Chases' info:

NetRange: 159.53.0.0 - 159.53.255.255 CIDR: 159.53.0.0/16 NetName: BANKONE-159-53 NetHandle: NET-159-53-0-0-1 Parent: NET-159-0-0-0-0 NetType: Direct Assignment NameServer: NS1.JPMORGANCHASE.COM NameServer: NS2.JPMORGANCHASE.COM NameServer: NS05.JPMORGANCHASE.COM NameServer: NS06.JPMORGANCHASE.COM

Alright, so now I know something is up. If the email had come from Chase, it would have links in the body to jpmorganchase.com, chase.com, or an IP address in their own range which is in Columbus, Ohio, not the IP that was listed, which are assigned to an ISP Washington, DC. So where did the email come from? In Thunderbird, I open up the email and select view > headers > all. Then I get all of the information on how this email got to me. Here are a few interesting lines:

Return Path: bill@kahless-ro.org Received: from kahless-ro.org (wsip-24-234-125-84.lv.lv.cox.net [24.234.125.84]) X-Mailer: PHP v4.4.6

Mmkay. That's not Chase. kahless-ro.org is a web site about some Star Trek Klingon fan club in Las Vegas. The maintainer of the site is seq'dogh, er, I mean Daniel Davidson, but that's not really important. Cox.net is an ISP, so this guy probably just has a machine in his house an is using it as a web server for his club. Opening up a command prompt and giving it a tracert 24.234.125.84 Shows that the route between me and the, er, Klingons go from my local router, to my ISP's router, to a connection in downtown Chicago, to Los Angeles, to Las Vegas, then back down through local routers to the web server. I can even scan the web server to get an idea of what it's set up to do with a port scanner. I get the following ports that the server is actively listening on:

TCP: 24.234.125.84 [21-ftp] TCP: 24.234.125.84 [25-smtp] TCP: 24.234.125.84 [22-ssh] TCP: 24.234.125.84 [23-telnet] TCP: 24.234.125.84 [53-domain] TCP: 24.234.125.84 [110-pop3] TCP: 24.234.125.84 [80-www-http] TCP: 24.234.125.84 [111-sunrpc] TCP: 24.234.125.84 [143-imap] TCP: 24.234.125.84 [587-submission]

Port 25 tells me this machine can send email. Port 111 tells me this is a Sun-based Linux or UNIX system that is advertising its ports and services (security problem!) Port 587 is open to accept email submission. Basically, what this seems to be is what's called a 'mail relay'. The Klingons probably don't know it, but someone most likely has access to their web server (Port 111), and the server is set up to accept scam emails on port 587, and send them out through the normal SMTP port. Taking a wild guess here, but the website is in HTML, and the email was sent via PHP. If the web server owner doesn't have PHP installed, they might want to check again... It's porssible that someone broke into this older UNIX-based machine and installed PHP. If I were a scam-email-sender, I would have the server set up to receive a list of email addresses and bogus email content, then have the server send out the emails for me. This would require some scripting, hence the PHP. In any case, I think we've found the problem. This machine (or mor likely, the machine's router/firewall) is not locked down properly, and someone is using that vulnerability to send scam emails. The idea would be that I would go to the fake web page listed in the email, it would look just like a normal Chase web site, I would enter in my Chase username and password, and they would then have it to do with as they wished... On the other hand, there might be someone with the address bill@kahless-ro.org with some malware on his machine. In this case, it's a legitimate user that's "sending" these emails. Definitely a possibility these days, as spyware is on pretty much every machine... Only way to fix this is to make sure the machine is clean. Have you scanned yours lately? So let's let our Klingon friends know that they are an open relay, since there's not much we can do about someone's machine being infected, they just need to clean it:

To: seqdogh@kahless-ro.org Subject: Hello! Body: I wanted to let you know that I received a JPMorgan Chase scam email from your web server. You might want to look into it. Maybe we can get it fixed? I've posted my findings in a tutorial here. Thanks, Dan

Well, that's boring. I'll send this instead:

To: seqdogh@kahless-ro.org Subject: Transmission error Body: Attention Klingon of sector 'Las Vegas'. This is Captian Dan of the Federation Starship Technocrat. We have received a transmission from your coordinates which we believe to have originated from the Borg alliance. We are sending a report from Engineering as to this infestation. We request your assistance in dealing with this matter by stardate -317215.75. Captain Dan out.

I hope they don't think I'm a nerd... :-)

Historical preservation project announced!

2006-03-16T12:33:00.000-06:00

Hey all, I've got a new project. Here's the idea: There is a wealth of life experience out there. Many of us had to interview grandparents or other relatives in school on life as it was during past events. There must be millions of recordings and other accounts out there detailing firsthand accounts of history. Enter 'Firsthand History'! OK, so here's the plan. I'm going to build a site that is basically like Flickr (Zooomr), but you will be able to choose from the following: - browse by time (1944, 1960) and get firsthand accounts of life at that time - browse by location (Honolulu, Hawaii; Groom Lake, Nevada) and get firsthand accounts from that locale - browse by affiliation (NASA, First Infantry Division) and get a list of firsthand accounts for those organizations I'm thinking of having the people supply the following information: - audio upload (.mp3 only?) and/or full text transcriptyear being discussed - location where this happenedtheir role during this storytheir name - language of the story - summary of story (limited to a certain amount - like 30 char) - tag the entry (WWII, tank, Iwo+Jima, airfield, minefield) need to avoid dupes! no WW2, WWII, etc.!! people would be able to search the database and do the following: - see their results on a google map - stream the audio to their desktops - download the audio, and have the proper ID info embedded as to speaker, event, etc. - be able to search by tag. So if you wanted to find a story about what it has historically been like for tank drivers, you could do so. In fact, maybe I should base the entire searching system off of a tagging system? They would enter all of the above info in, but I would just keep record of everything in tags for search flexibility...? examples of possible tag searches, which would result in a list of firsthand accounts of people who experienced the following: - 1960, racism, united+states - USS+Arizona, WWII - NASA, Gemini - Moscow, Stalin - Titanic - New+Orleans, flood, 2005 What do all of you think? Any other ideas? I'm going to do this, there is so much information that is a shame to lose from generation to generation! I think it will be important to specify that I want people who were directly involved in the event...although I'm sure millions of people could give their accounts of the JFK assassination, the site would have to specify explicitly that I'm only looking for people who experienced it firsthand, i.e. 'they were there'. I think I might need some online tools as well, like for converting .wav to .mp3, splitting .mp3 into different files, etc. Anyone know how to do this? I'll be on a server with PHP and MySQL, but I'm thinking JavaScript or something...

Getting started on a Web Application (with PHP and MySQL)

2006-03-15T14:41:00.000-06:00

We've all got great ideas for the next big thing. Before you invest in a personalized license plate that says 'Web20' or 'AJAX 7334', you'll need to develop a simple way of getting information in and out of a web server. There are many ways to do this, but I like PHP and MySQL, because they are easy and cheap. (PHP and MySQL are free, but you can find hosting on a PHP-MySQL server for as low as $8/month.) So let's say we want to build a web app... Step 1: lay out what info you're going to need I think of it like this: if you were to do this process on paper, what would you need? First of all, you'll need User information. On a 'User Information' sheet, I might have the following info:

User Info
First Name
Last name
Employee ID number
Email Address

OK, so that's pretty easy to figure out. It's also easy to take this info and plan out how you're going to store the info in a MySQL table. (a MySQL table is like a spreadsheet in Excel (OpenOffice Calc!)) So I will take my data requirements and make a table called user_info, as follows. I will also define what will be in each data type. I also need to add some more fields...

user_info
*user_id
passwd
fname
lname
email
(* this data will be required to be unique - I can't have 2 users with the same name!)

This is going to lay out a table in MySQL that looks like this when it is full:

user_id	passwd	fname	lname	email
php_ddy	phpisneat	John	Doe	jdoe@isp.com
supr_lady	mysqlissweet	Jane	Doe	janed@isp.com

each row is called a record, and contains all of that person's info. The user info table is pretty standard, but what other tables you will need depend on your application. Let's say we're making a simple chat room web page. Another table we will need will be for people's comments, like this:

user_id	time_posted	date_posted	text
php_ddy	13:10:09	03-15-2006	hi jane!
supr_lady	13:10:13	03-15-2006	hi john, what's up?
php_ddy	13:10:17	03-15-2006	nothing much, just saying hi.

Now the important thing to notice here is my re-use of user_id. By re-using this data, I can now link the two tables together. Step2: Planning how to use the information This is where things get interesting. By re-using the user_id values, I can link the two tables. If I didn't use user_id in the second table, I would have only been able to display the following from the second table, using PHP:

hi jane! posted by php_ddy 1:10:09 PM hi john, what's up? posted by supr_lady 1:10:13 PM nothing much, just saying hi. posted by php_ddy 1:10:17 PM

This is okay, but since I can link the tables together, I can have PHP temporarily combine them, display the info, and then let them go back to normal. I get something like this:

hi jane! posted by John Doe 1:10:09 PM hi john, what's up? posted by Jane Doe 1:10:13 PM nothing much, just saying hi. posted by John Doe 1:10:17 PM

Now this is what web apps are all about. I've only defined two very, very basic tables of data for MySQL, and by using PHP to access the data and work with it, I can make a word of difference! So far, I've explained everything you need to know about making a web application. You see, web applications aren't about the code you know, etc. You can work on that. Web applications are made great by what you do with the data. Some of the best applications on the web are so simple, but extremely powerful because of how they cross-index information like this:

Combine historical traffic records with a list of streets from some driving directions. You now can semi-accurately predict traffic for your route.

Combine a history of who has bought what at a grocery store with current specials. You can now give a sheet full of coupons that are relevant to a user's particular tastes.

You can see how useful these are, but are so simple to create. The hardest part is thinking this stuff up, and planning how you will store and cross-reference the data. If you learn anything from this posting, it is that a successful web app has nearly nothing to do with how many years you've been programming, its success depends 99.9% on your own imagination. Check out Zoomr, for example. It's a photo sharing site that was built by a 17-year-old. Since he re-thought what it means to have a photo sharing site online, he's now threatening Yahoo's Flickr. Step 3: the minor details Until now, I've been concentrating on the most important part of a web application. This part should go back and forth in your head, about what data you will store, what info you will be able to display by linking tables of information together, etc. Do all of this planning several times over until you are sure it is the way you want. Once you start programming PHP that is dependent on tables being named a certain way, etc., you're pretty much stuck with it, or will be forced to do a lot of re-do work. This isn't a PHP tutorial, but I chose PHP because it is the easiest data-retrieval language to learn. In fact, if you know HTML, you can easily learn PHP n a few hours. The same goes for MySQL, although it may take you a try or two to learn how to pull the data you want out of the tables in a format you can use (arrays, etc). I learned PHP and MySQL in these tutorials, and am able to make just about any web app I please, after proper forethought into what I want to do. I wouldn't recommend making your own php/MySQL server starting out, but by all means, have a go if you want. My advice would be to check if your hosting provider (if you have a web site) supports PHP and MySQL. They probably do, since php and MySQL are immensely popular, and aren't going anywhere. Well, hopefully you aren't disappointed that this isn't a PHP or MySQL tutorial, but as I mentioned above, immediately jumping onto PHP and MySQL is a terrible way to design a web application.

To recap, design the app on paper, in a spreadsheet, or whatever. Plan out what info you will be storing, and how you are going to mix your data tables to provide a service. Plan everything out ahead of time, and you won't have to go back and re-do anything later (like when you forgot to gather your 10,000 user's zip codes or something)

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How to design the perfect business card

2006-03-14T12:16:00.000-06:00

I wrote this monster comment over at Atariboy, and thought I'd mirror it here. After all, fellow Technocrats, if you're going to change the world, you're going to need to get in the door first. Consider the business card your "bait". Here are some ideas: For a business card, if someone is going to promote yourself as (any kind of) unique-thinker, consider using a non-standard layout. Anyone who will want your card is interested in you making them stand out with your unique designs. You don't have to get crazy here, then it's over-developed. Keep it simple. In the past, I have had great success with having a vertically-laid-out card, as opposed to a traditional horizontal one. Also consider inverting the colors (sorry - 'colours') on your card. Make the background blue, the logo black, and the text white. Another trick I've done is make the background of the card a different color than the front. More expensive to print, but it looks pretty unique when you have a purple-background card with yellow text, and the back of the card is yellow. When you want to get really crazy, you can order cards with transparency and all that. Consider your card with a transparent logo... expensive, but the idea is that you would do a short run of those to attach to your resume. They'll remember you, and if the stupid card gets you the thinking-out-of-the-box-designing-robots-of-the-future job, then the thinking-out-of-the-box card was worth it... The only key here is that you (or anyone) need to choose a card design that matches what you have to offer. If I saw a card with all sorts of crap on it, it'll make me think that person is all about over-designing things. If they just have a tweak or two, definitely cool, but the person had better have an idea or two to back it up!

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design

Moving in

2006-03-13T12:05:00.000-06:00

Hello everyone! Check out this super-tweaked template! Took me most of the weekend to get all of it working right, and I still have some stuff I want to tweak more, but I'm pretty proud of it. You may have previously seen this blog at: Technology and Otherwise on Blogger, then Technology and Otherwise on Wordpress (Later named 'The Daily Technocrat' after a few suggestions to me from Scoble) Well, I'm back home at Blogger, due to several reasons. I'll get into it once I'm done moving all my posts in, hopefully by March 13. Why is it taking so long? I'm tagging all of my posts at del.icio.us (and therefore technorati) now! In the meantime, check out my new blog project: HelpDesk KnowledgeBase.

HelpdeskKB is a play-by-play of the issues and solutions I come across while administrating 400+ machines and 1200+ users. I'll be tracking my past issues, and share my solutions with other IT pros, people interested in the IT life, and you!

How to increase your computer speed (part 4)

2006-03-10T19:57:00.000-06:00

OK, so far we've done a lot of work that the average person should be able to handle without breaking a sweat. Atariboy says he's bored. So am I. Now we leave our garden path and enter the sawmill. This is not for beginners. If you don't know what 'regedit' is already, stand up from the keyboard and run. The settings explained here can render your Operating System completely useless if you are careless. That said, welcome to the registry! If Windows XP were a person, the registry would be its DNA. Every single setting for windows and most settings for programs are logged in the registry. Sure, they might be presented to you in pretty little drop-down menus and checkboxes, but in the cold underworld of the registry, settings are signified by ones, zeroes, and strange codes. Here's the deal. Where normally you could right-click the desktop, hit properties, blah blah change the wallpaper, in the registry, you find the appropriate keys and set the following: [HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System] "WallpaperStyle"="2" "Wallpaper"="C:\background.JPG" "2" means 'stretched'... Kind of a hassle, though. I mean it's easy to change the wallpaper, so why bother with the registry? Well, than take this example. rumor has it that Windows XP sometimes can't tell how much L2 Cache it has at its disposal with some processors. So maybe you have 1MB...Windows will just use 256KB by default. You'll never see a menu for that... But in the registry... [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management] "SecondLevelDataCache"="1024" Windows will try to use 1MB of L2 cache now, whether it's there or not. If your processor has 512KB, windows may die. That's the risk you take. You should be familiar with the HKEY entries and the different ways to list the values underneath the HKEY entry, such as DWORD and the like. If not, don't mess with the registry. It will bite you. If you're not scared yet, then let me scare you. Changing these settings by hand is OK, but if you really want to push your luck, you can make all of these changes via a registry script. With the examples I have so far, the file would be called *.reg (let's say 'cross-fingers.reg'). Inside would be the folloing text:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 ;Specify the background image [HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System] "WallpaperStyle"="2" "Wallpaper"="C:\background.JPG" ;Tell Windows XP how much L2 on-die cache memory there is (in KB) [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management] "SecondLevelDataCache"="1024"

(note the semi-colon lines are comments...use them so you rememebr why you're doing something. also, put 'Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00' on the first line) If I were to save the file, and double-click it, Windows will ask me if I want to make all of the registry settings, then will execute all of them, with very minimal error checking. What this means is that you can start crawling the web for performance-enhancing registry settings, carefully making sure to modify them to fit your particular hardware. I've managed to grow quite the registry file myself. This particular one is for older machines at the school district I work for. the idea is to boost the performance to get another year or two out of low-powered machines. I found these settings from all over the place, and they do everything from turn off normally-uneccessary services to removing the arrows from shortcut icons. I haven't worked on this file for a few months. Let's do this: check out my file. There's probably a hundred more preformance settings out there. If you find any, come back here and leave them in a comment. I'll add your tweak to the file, along with your name (or screen name) and one URL or email.

You MUST include a semi-colon line in front of every registry setting explaining what it does. We need proper documentation. And yes, I will be checking to make sure it does what you say it does.

Here is the contents of the .reg file as of right now

USE AT YOUR OWN RISK! DO NOT RUN THIS FILE UNTIL YOU CHECK EVERY SINGLE ENTRY YOU ARE ABOUT TO CHANGE! YOU ARE SOLELY RESPONSIBLE FOR ANYTHING THAT HAPPENS TO YOUR MACHINE! FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES IN A TEST ENVIRONMENT ONLY!

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 ;************************************************ ;* NOTE: THERE ARE A FEW MACHINE-SPECIFIC * ;* ENTRIES LISTED HERE THAT NEED YOUR ATTENTION * ;************************************************ ;***** ;the following was submitted by Dan ;the-technocrat.blogspot.com ;***** ;note: some of the settings below are commented out for your own good! ;Specify the background image ;[HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System] ;"WallpaperStyle"="2" ;"Wallpaper"="C:\background.JPG" ;Tell Windows XP how much L2 on-die cache memory there is (in KB) [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management] "SecondLevelDataCache"="128" ;Set default Internet Explorer download directory [HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer] "Download Directory"="H:\" ;Change title bar in Internet Explorer [HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main] "Window Title"="The Technocrat - the-technocrat.blogspot.com" ;Set IE Homepage [HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main] "StartPage"="http://the-technocrat.blogspot.com/" ;Set power scheme to 'Always On' [HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\PowerCfg] "CurrentPowerPolicy"="3" ;0 = Home/Office Desk ;1 = Portable/Laptop ;2 = Presentation ;3 = Always On ;4 = Minimal Power Management ;5 = Max Battery ;Specify Windows installation directory [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Setup] "SourcePath"="C:\I386" ;Turn off Windows XP fade effect [HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop] "UserPreferenceMask"=hex:9e,28,07,80 ;Disable cache of thumbnail images [HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ Explorer\Advanced] "DisableThumbnailCache"=dword:00000000 ;Remove shortcut arrows from shortcut icons [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\lnkfile] "IsShortcut"=- ;Disable Window Animations [ HKEY_USERS\.Default\Control Panel\Desktop\WindowMetrics] "MinAnimate"="0" ;Disable Internet Explorer error reporting [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main] "IEWatsonEnabled"=dword:00000000 "IEWatsonDisabled"=dword:00000001 ;Disable re-creation of Links folder on favorites menu [HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Toolbar] "LinksFolderName"="" ;Allow QoS scheduling full control over bandwidth, instead of limiting to 20% ;(A program which has bandwidth priority will be allowed access to full bandwidth speed, not 20% of total available bandwidth, as is the default. Note that the NIC may be another story) [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Psched[ "NonBestEffortLimit"=dword:00000000 ;Turn on ClearType ;(pretty for LCD's) [HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop] "FontSmoothing"="2" "FontSmoothingType"=dword:00000002 ;Turn on Active Window Tracking [HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Mouse] "ActiveWindowTracking"=dword:00000001 ;Automatically close non-responsive applications when shutting down [HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop] "AutoEndTasks"="1" ;Power down the machine after shutdown [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon] "PowerdownAfterShutdown"=dword:00000001 ;Turn off un-needed services (many settings follow!) [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Alerter] "Start"=dword:00000004 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\ALG] "Start"=dword:00000004 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\AppMgmt] "Start"=dword:00000004 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\AudioSrv] "Start"=dword:00000002 ; Need this one for Windows Update - commented out ;[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\BITS] ;"Start"=dword:00000004 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Browser] "Start"=dword:00000004 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\cisvc] "Start"=dword:00000004 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\ClipSrv] "Start"=dword:00000004 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\COMSysApp] "Start"=dword:00000003 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\CryptSvc] "Start"=dword:00000002 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\dmadmin] "Start"=dword:00000003 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\dmserver] "Start"=dword:00000003 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\ERSvc] "Start"=dword:00000004 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Eventlog] "Start"=dword:00000002 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\EventSystem] "Start"=dword:00000003 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\FastUserSwitchingCompatibility] "Start"=dword:00000004 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Fax] "Start"=dword:00000002 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\helpsvc] "Start"=dword:00000004 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\HidServ] "Start"=dword:00000002 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\IISADMIN] "Start"=dword:00000004 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\ImapiService] "Start"=dword:00000004 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Iprip] "Start"=dword:00000004 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\lanmanserver] "Start"=dword:00000002 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\lanmanworkstation] "Start"=dword:00000002 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LmHosts] "Start"=dword:00000002 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LPDSVC] "Start"=dword:00000004 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Messenger] "Start"=dword:00000004 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\mnmsrvc] "Start"=dword:00000004 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\MSDTC] "Start"=dword:00000004 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\MSFtpsvc] "Start"=dword:00000004 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\MSIServer] "Start"=dword:00000003 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\MSMQ] "Start"=dword:00000004 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\MSMQTriggers] "Start"=dword:00000004 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\NetDDE] "Start"=dword:00000004 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\NetDDEdsdm] "Start"=dword:00000004 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Netlogon] "Start"=dword:00000004 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Netman] "Start"=dword:00000003 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Nla] "Start"=dword:00000004 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\NtLmSsp] "Start"=dword:00000004 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\NtmsSvc] "Start"=dword:00000003 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\PlugPlay] "Start"=dword:00000002 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\PolicyAgent] "Start"=dword:00000004 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\ProtectedStorage] "Start"=dword:00000002 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\RasAuto] "Start"=dword:00000003 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\RasMan] "Start"=dword:00000003 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\RDSessMgr] "Start"=dword:00000003 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\RemoteRegistry] "Start"=dword:00000004 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\RpcLocator] "Start"=dword:00000004 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\RpcSs] "Start"=dword:00000002 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\RSVP] "Start"=dword:00000004 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\SamSs] "Start"=dword:00000002 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\SCardDrv] "Start"=dword:00000004 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\SCardSvr] "Start"=dword:00000004 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Schedule] "Start"=dword:00000002 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\seclogon] "Start"=dword:00000004 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\SENS] "Start"=dword:00000002 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\SharedAccess] "Start"=dword:00000004 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\ShellHWDetection] "Start"=dword:00000002 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\SimpTcp] "Start"=dword:00000004 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\SMTPSVC] "Start"=dword:00000004 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\SNMP] "Start"=dword:00000004 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\SNMPTRAP] "Start"=dword:00000004 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Spooler] "Start"=dword:00000002 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\srservice] "Start"=dword:00000004 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\SSDPSRV] "Start"=dword:00000004 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\stisvc] "Start"=dword:00000003 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\SwPrv] "Start"=dword:00000004 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\SysmonLog] "Start"=dword:00000004 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\TapiSrv] "Start"=dword:00000003 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\TermService] "Start"=dword:00000003 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Themes] "Start"=dword:00000004 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\TlntSvr] "Start"=dword:00000004 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\TrkWks] "Start"=dword:00000004 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\uploadmgr] "Start"=dword:00000004 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\upnphost] "Start"=dword:00000004 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\UPS] "Start"=dword:00000004 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\VSS] "Start"=dword:00000003 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\W32Time] "Start"=dword:00000002 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\W3SVC] "Start"=dword:00000004 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\WebClient] "Start"=dword:00000004 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\winmgmt] "Start"=dword:00000002 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\WmdmPmSp] "Start"=dword:00000004 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Wmi] "Start"=dword:00000003 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\WmiApSrv] "Start"=dword:00000004 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\wuauserv] "Start"=dword:00000002 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\WZCSVC] "Start"=dword:00000002 ;Disable Network Scheduled Tasks [-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\RemoteComputer\NameSpace\{D6277990-4C6A-11CF-8D87-00AA0060F5BF}] ;Disable SP2 Security Center ;[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Security Center] ;"AntiVirusDisableNotify"=dword:00000001 ;"AntiVirusOverride"=dword:00000001 ;"FirewallDisableNotify"=dword:00000001 ;"FirewallOverride"=dword:00000001 ;"FirstRunDisabled"=dword:00000001 ;"UpdatesDisableNotify"=dword:00000001 ;[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\wscsvc] ;"Start"=dword:00000004 ;Gets rid of anoying popup for running files you download from internet ;[HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Download] ;"CheckExeSignatures"="no" ;"RunInvalidSignatures"=dword:00000001 ;[HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Attachments] ;"SaveZoneInformation"=dword:00000001 ;[HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Associations] ;"LowRiskFileTypes"=".zip;.rar;.nfo;.txt;.exe;.bat;.com;.cmd;.reg;.msi;.htm;.html;.gif;.bmp;.jpg;.avi;.mpg;.mpeg;.mov;.mp3;.m3u;.wav;" ;Don't search Windows Update for drivers (when new HW detected) ;[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\DriverSearching] ;"DontSearchWindowsUpdate"=dword:00000001 ;"DontPromptForWindowsUpdate"=dword:00000001 ;Disable Hiding Inactive Icons [HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer] "EnableAutoTray"=dword:00000000 ;Add register / unregister to the context menu for .dll files ;[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.dll] ;"Content Type"="application/x-msdownload" ;@="dllfile" ;[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\dllfile] ;@="Application Extension" ;[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\dllfile\Shell\Register\command] ;@="regsvr32.exe \"%1\"" ;[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\dllfile\Shell\UnRegister\command] ;@="regsvr32.exe /u \"%1\"" ;Add register / unregister to the context menu for .ocx files ;[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.ocx] ;@="ocxfile" ;[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\ocxfile] ;@="OCX" ;[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\ocxfile\Shell\Register\command] ;@="regsvr32.exe \"%1\"" ;[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\ocxfile\Shell\UnRegister\command] ;@="regsvr32.exe /u \"%1\"" ;Disable Taskbar Button Grouping [HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced] "TaskbarGlomming"=dword:00000000 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced] "TaskbarGlomming"=dword:00000000 ;Show Hidden Devices In Device Manager [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Environment] "DEVMGR_SHOW_NONPRESENT_DEVICES"="1" ;Set Classic Start Menu ;HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer] ;"ShellState"=hex:24,00,00,00,33,28,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,; 01,00,00,00,0d,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00 ;Speed up shutdown [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control] "WaitToKillServiceTimeout"="3000" ;Disable the Desktop Cleanup Wizard [HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Desktop\CleanupWiz] "NoRun"=dword:00000001 ;Disables Windows Tour bubble popup [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Applets\Tour] "RunCount"=dword:00000000 ;Disable Built in Windows CD Burning ;[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer] ;"NoCDBurning"=dword:00000001 ;Disable Imapi CD-Burning Service ;[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\ImapiService] ;"Start"=dword:00000004 ;This will add "services" to the right-click menu of "My Computer" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{20D04FE0-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08002B30309D}\shell\services] @=hex(2):53,00,65,00,72,00,76,00,69,00,63,00,65,00,73,00,00,00 "SuppressionPolicy"=dword:4000003c [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{20D04FE0-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08002B30309D}\shell\services\command] @=hex(2):25,00,77,00,69,00,6e,00,64,00,69,00,72,00,25,00,5c,00,73,00,79,00,73,00,74,00,65,00,6d,00,33,00,32,00,5c,00,6d,00,6d,00,63,00,2e,00,65,00,78,00,65,00,20,00,2f,00,73,00,20,00,25,00,53,00,79,00,73,00,74,00,65,00,6d,00,52,00,6f,00,6f,00,74,00,25,00,5c,00,73,00,79,00,73,00,74,00,65,00,6d,00,33,00,32,00,5c,00,73,00,65,00,72,00,76,00,69,00,63,00,65,00,73,00,2e,00,6d,00,73,00,63,00,20,00,2f,00,73,00,00,00 ;Prevents Internet Explorer windows from being reused [HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main] "AllowWindowReuse"=dword:00000000 ;Disables Preview of Movie file formats (allowing you to move/rename/delete without errors) ;[-HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.avi\ShellEx] ;[-HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.mpg\ShellEx] ;[-HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.mpe\ShellEx] ;[-HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.mpeg\ShellEx] ;Disable Automatic Restart in the event of a BSOD [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\CrashControl] "AutoReboot"=dword:00000000 ;Disables Error Reporting, but notifies when errors occur [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\PCHealth\ErrorReporting] "DoReport"=dword:00000000 ;Disable Messenger Service (to stop spam. Does not affect MSN or Windows Messenger) [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Messenger] "Start"=dword:00000004 ;Disable Remote Registry Service [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\RemoteRegistry] "Start"=dword:00000004 ;Disable Windows Time Service ;[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\W32Time] ;"Start"=dword:00000004 ;Disable Balloon Tips [HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced] "EnableBalloonTips"=dword:00000000 ;Remove Shared Documents from My Computer [-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\MyComputer\NameSpace\DelegateFolders\{59031a47-3f72-44a7-89c5-5595fe6b30ee}] ;Max your Internet Explorer's simultaneous downloads to 10 (default was 2) [HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings] "MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server"=dword:0000000a "MaxConnectionsPerServer"=dword:0000000a ;Change MenuShowDelay (Start Menu load speed) [HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop] "MenuShowDelay"="4" ;Removes Language Bar [-HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{540D8A8B-1C3F-4E32-8132-530F6A502090}] @="Language bar" "MenuTextPUI"="@%SystemRoot%\\System32\\msutb.dll,-325" ;Allow renaming of Recycle Bin ;[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{645FF040-5081-101B-9F08-00AA002F954E}\ShellFolder] ;"Attributes"=hex:50,01,00,20 ;"CallForAttributes"=dword:00000000 ;Renames The Recycle Bin ;HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\CLSID\{645FF040-5081-101B-9F08-00AA002F954E}] ;@="Trash Can" ;NoLowDiskSpaceChecks won't check if you are low on diskspace and pop up a balloon telling you. ;NoRecentDocsmenu removes the recent documents from the start menu. ;[HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer] ;"NoLowDiskSpaceChecks"=dword:00000001 ;"NoRecentDocsMenu"=dword:00000001 ;Hide My Computer, IE, My Documents, Network Places Desktop Icons ;[HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Desktop\General] ;"WallpaperFileTime"=hex:ee,e0,3d,a6,87,a9,c4,01 ;"WallpaperLocalFileTime"=hex:ee,48,02,08,90,a9,c4,01 ;[HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\HideDesktopIcons] ;[HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\HideDesktopIcons\ClassicStartMenu] ;"{450D8FBA-AD25-11D0-98A8-0800361B1103}"=dword:00000001 ;"{208D2C60-3AEA-1069-A2D7-08002B30309D}"=dword:00000001 ;"{871C5380-42A0-1069-A2EA-08002B30309D}"=dword:00000001 ;"{20D04FE0-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08002B30309D}"=dword:00000001 ;[HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\HideDesktopIcons\NewStartPanel] ;"{20D04FE0-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08002B30309D}"=dword:00000001 ;"{450D8FBA-AD25-11D0-98A8-0800361B1103}"=dword:00000001 ;"{208D2C60-3AEA-1069-A2D7-08002B30309D}"=dword:00000001 ;"{871C5380-42A0-1069-A2EA-08002B30309D}"=dword:00000001 ;Folder Options Stuff, show hidden files, show file extensions etc. [HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer] "IconUnderline"=hex(0):03,00,00,00 "NoFileFolderConnection"=dword:00000000 [HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced] "Hidden"=dword:00000001 "HideFileExt"=dword:00000000 "NoNetCrawling"=dword:00000000 "FolderContentsInfoTip"=dword:00000001 "FriendlyTree"=dword:00000001 "WebViewBarricade"=dword:00000000 "DisableThumbnailCache"=dword:00000000 "ShowSuperHidden"=dword:00000001 "ClassicViewState"=dword:00000000 "PersistBrowsers"=dword:00000000 ;disable unread mail message at welcome screen [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\UnreadMail] "MessageExpiryDays"=dword:00000000 ;Recycle Bin Uses 3% of Available Space Rather than 10% [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\BitBucket] "Percent"=dword:00000003 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer] "IconUnderline"=hex(0):03,00,00,00 ;Disable Error Reporting [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\PCHealth\ErrorReporting] "AllOrNone"=dword:00000001 "DoReport"=dword:00000000 "IncludeKernelFaults"=dword:00000000 "IncludeMicrosoftApps"=dword:00000000 "IncludeWindowsApps"=dword:00000000 "ShowUI"=dword:00000000 ;Increase Network Throughput ;[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\lanmanworkstation\parameters] ;"MaxCmds"=dword:00000064 ;"MaxThreads"=dword:00000064 ;"MaxCollectionCount"=dword:00000064 ;Faster Web Page Loading ;[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\ServiceProvider] ;"DnsPriority"=dword:00000001 ;"HostsPriority"=dword:00000001 ;"LocalPriority"=dword:00000001 ;"NetbtPriority"=dword:00000001 ;Broadband Network Optimizations for Windows 2000/XP/2003 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters] "DefaultTTL"=dword:00000040 "EnablePMTUDiscovery"=dword:00000001 "EnablePMTUBHDetect"=dword:00000000 "TcpMaxDupAcks"=dword:00000002 "TcpMaxDataRetransmissions"=dword:00000006 "SackOpts"=dword:00000001 "MTU"=dword:000005dc "Tcp1323Opts"=dword:00000001 "TcpTimedWaitDelay:=dword:0000001e ;Enable Classic Search [HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\CabinetState] "FullPath"=dword:00000001 "FullPathAddress"=dword:00000001 "Use Search Asst"="no" "Settings"=hex:0c,00,02,00,1b,01,e7,77,60,00,00,00 ;Typing Long File Names In DOS [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Command Processor] "CompletionChar"=dword:00000009 ;Adds Device Manager to right click of MY Computer [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\CLSID\{20D04FE0-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08002B30309D}\shell\DevMgr] @="Device Manager" [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\CLSID\{20D04FE0-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08002B30309D}\shell\DevMgr\command] @="mmc.exe %%SYSTEMDRIVE%%\\WINDOWS\\SYSTEM32\\devmgmt.msc" ;Adds Registry Editor right click of My Computer [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{20D04FE0-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08002B30309D}\shell\regedit] @="Registry Editor" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{20D04FE0-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08002B30309D}\shell\regedit\command] @="Regedit.exe" ;Adds Reboot to right click of My Computer [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{20D04FE0-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08002B30309D}\shell\Reboot\command] @="shutdown -r -f -t 5" ;Adds Shutdown to right click of My Computer [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{20D04FE0-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08002B30309D}\shell\Shutdown\command] @="shutdown -s -f -t 5" ;allows boot files to be placed optimally on the hard-drive for faster boots. [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Dfrg\BootOptimizeFunction] "Enable"="Y" ;Enable XP to pre-load startup programs on boot [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters] "EnablePrefetcher"=dword:00000005 ;Allow software to run or install even if the signature is invalid ;[HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Download] ;"RunInvalidSignatures"=dword:00000000 ;does not check for signatures on downloaded programs ;"CheckExeSignatures"="no" ;Speed up opening of My Computer and Explorer [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\stisvc] "Start"=dword:00000004 [HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer] "NoSaveSettings"=dword:00000000 [HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced] "NoNetCrawling"=dword:00000001 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer] "NoRemoteRecursiveEvents"=dword:00000001 ;Speeds up copying/moving of zip files (disable windows built in zip functionality) [-HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.zip\CompressedFolder] [-HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{E88DCCE0-B7B3-11d1-A9F0-00AA0060FA31}] [-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\CompressedFolder] ;Faster reboot time "EnableQuickReboot"="1" ;Enable Quick Launch ;[HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Streams\Desktop] ;"TaskbarWinXP"=hex:0c,00,00,00,08,00,00,00,02,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,b0,e2,2b,;d8,64,57,d0,11,a9,6e,00,c0,4f,d7,05,a2,22,00,1c,00,0a,01,00,00,1a,00,00,00,;01,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,4c,00,00,00,01,14,02,00,00,;00,00,00,c0,00,00,00,00,00,00,46,83,00,00,00,10,00,00,00,a0,b0,48,5e,89,8d,;bd,01,00,d8,9e,e4,2a,8d,bd,01,00,45,fe,5e,89,8d,bd,01,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,;00,01,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,13,01,14,00,1f,0f,e0,4f,;d0,20,ea,3a,69,10,a2,d8,08,00,2b,30,30,9d,19,00,23,44,3a,5c,00,00,00,00,00,;00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,cd,97,15,00,31,00,00,00,00,00,af,24,5c,;b9,10,80,57,69,6e,6e,74,00,00,20,00,31,00,00,00,00,00,af,24,a3,b9,10,00,50,;72,6f,66,69,6c,65,73,00,50,52,4f,46,49,4c,45,53,00,19,00,31,00,00,00,00,00,;c1,24,08,92,10,00,69,65,35,30,30,2e,30,30,30,00,00,28,00,31,00,00,00,00,00,;c1,24,08,92,10,00,41,70,70,6c,69,63,61,74,69,6f,6e,20,44,61,74,61,00,41,50,;50,4c,49,43,7e,31,00,21,00,31,00,00,00,00,00,c5,22,9d,91,10,00,4d,69,63,72,;6f,73,6f,66,74,00,4d,49,43,52,4f,53,7e,31,00,29,00,31,00,00,00,00,00,d3,22,;32,a6,10,00,49,6e,74,65,72,6e,65,74,20,45,78,70,6c,6f,72,65,72,00,49,4e,54,;45,52,4e,7e,31,00,24,00,31,00,00,00,00,00,db,22,76,ba,10,00,51,75,69,63,6b,;20,4c,61,75,6e,63,68,00,51,55,49,43,4b,4c,7e,31,00,00,00,8d,00,00,00,1c,00,;00,00,01,00,00,00,1c,00,00,00,36,00,00,00,0d,f0,ad,ba,8c,00,00,00,1a,00,00,;00,03,00,00,00,e7,18,2d,23,10,00,00,00,49,45,35,30,30,5f,58,31,43,00,43,3a,;5c,57,49,4e,4e,54,5c,50,72,6f,66,69,6c,65,73,5c,49,45,35,30,30,2e,30,30,30,;5c,41,70,70,6c,69,63,61,74,69,6f,6e,20,44,61,74,61,5c,4d,69,63,72,6f,73,6f,;66,74,5c,49,6e,74,65,72,6e,65,74,20,45,78,70,6c,6f,72,65,72,5c,51,75,69,63,;6b,20,4c,61,75,6e,63,68,00,00,10,00,00,00,05,00,00,a0,1a,00,00,00,a3,00,00,;00,00,00,00,00,08,00,00,00,02,00,00,00,cc,00,00,00,01,00,00,00,03,00,00,00,;4a,00,00,00,01,00,00,00,40,00,32,00,e6,01,00,00,c4,24,15,9f,20,00,4c,61,75,;6e,63,68,20,49,6e,74,65,72,6e,65,74,20,45,78,70,6c,6f,72,65,72,20,42,72,6f,;77,73,65,72,2e,6c,6e,6b,00,4c,41,55,4e,43,48,7e,32,2e,4c,4e,4b,00,00,00,40,;00,00,00,02,00,00,00,36,00,32,00,48,02,00,00,c4,24,15,9f,20,00,4c,61,75,6e,;63,68,20,4f,75,74,6c,6f,6f,6b,20,45,78,70,72,65,73,73,2e,6c,6e,6b,00,4c,41,;55,4e,43,48,7e,31,2e,4c,4e,4b,00,00,00,36,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,2c,00,32,00,;51,00,00,00,ec,22,46,39,20,00,53,68,6f,77,20,44,65,73,6b,74,6f,70,2e,73,63,;66,00,53,48,4f,57,44,45,7e,31,2e,53,43,46,00,00,00,52,00,00,00,e0,00,00,00,;00,00,00,00,16,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,16,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,01,;00,00,00,01,00,00,00,aa,4f,28,68,48,6a,d0,11,8c,78,00,c0,4f,d9,18,b4,37,02,;00,00,e0,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,16,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,16,00,00,;00,00,00,00,00,01,00,00,00 ;Disable file system indexing [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem\CDFS] "CacheSize"=hex:ac,09,00,00 "Prefetch"=dword:00004000 "PrefetchTail"=dword:00004000 ;Disable File System 'Last Accessed' logging [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem] "NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate"=dword:00000001 ;Disable DOS 8.3 filename translation [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem] "NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreation"=dword:00000001 ;Disable use of hard drive for RAM paging [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management] "DisablePagingExecutive"=dword:00000001 ;Load XP kernel into RAM on boot [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management] "LargeSystemCache"=dword:00000001 ;Unload DLL's when you are done with them [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer] "AlwaysUnloadDLL"="1" ;Don't cache failed DNS lookups [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Dnscache\Parameters] "MaxNegativeCacheTtl"="0" "NegativeCacheTime"="0" "NetFailureCacheTime"="0" "NegativeSOACacheTime"="0" ;Disable Windows Media Player Updates [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\PlayerUpgrade] "AskMeAgain"="No"

Government RSS feeds

2006-03-09T13:30:00.000-06:00

I stumbled across some very interesting feeds the other day, and got to thinking: "Why is it that we vote for people, and then never check back on them?" After all, this is a bit like the villians in the Bond movies. They tell their henchmen to kill James Bond in some extravagant way, then never stick around to see what happens. This is a perfect use of RSS. It'ssomething we want to keep tabs on, but don't want to be bothered with. Congress seems to agree! RSS feeds of bills submitted to congress, sorted by topic of the bill: http://www.congress.org/congressorg/issuesaction/bill/ The Washington Post also has feeds on vote results. There is no reason why you shouldn't subscribe to every one of your representatives, except that the Washington Post lets special-interest groups spam the RSS feed every once in a while...lame. http://projects.washingtonpost.com/congress/members/

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One idea on what to do with good content and bad traffic

2006-03-08T10:32:00.000-06:00

I came across an article here that had a great comment on the bottom. Here are a few websites that allow you to send a press release out for free. I definitely will be using this on my new project, HelpDesk KnowledgeBase! (I haven' used all of these yet - so user beware) PRLeap.com PR.com malebits.com USPRwire.com PR9.net free-press-release.com 24-7pressrelease.com Oh, and if you're worried of writing a bad release and making a fool of yourself: here are some templates (Word 2000 compatible)

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Online Ruby emulator and tutorial

2006-03-07T01:54:00.000-06:00

http://tryruby.hobix.com/ Nice. If you're curious about Ruby and want to learn how to use it, check this out.

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10 ways how companies deceive customers

2006-03-06T10:21:00.000-06:00

Not all marketing departments are bad. Not all advertising departments are bad. Just most of the ones I've know about or heard of.

Here is my problem with advertising and marketing. Yes, their goal is to sell you something, but it seems as if they'll do anything possible to do it, EXCEPT sell a good product. Here are a just a few methods I've observed, please chime in with your own if you like:

Playing for the lawyers, not the customer

This is one method that really aggravates me. Most companies could spend a small amount more to make an excellent product/service for their customers. Many don't, because they know that you really don't have a choice than to buy from them. Also, they know that they've done just enough not to get sued, so if someone doesn't like it, they've technically done enough where they can get away with it, even if it isn't with the spirit of what they originally advertised.

The customer doesn't know any better

This one is really annoying. Take your product and advertise statistics and features that have nothing to do with its quality of operation.

This one is in full force right now with flat-panel TV's. Head on down to Best Buy sometime - all of the manufacturers are in on it. They all are in competition for the brightest screens, and are using that quality to justify higher prices. What is ridiculous is that a bright screen has nothing to do with picture quality. In fact, it's easy to see how washed-out the colors get, and how the blacks just aren't that black on screen. However, they're convinced most people that brightness = clarity, so while a customer is looking into a screen as bright as a flashlight, they fall for it. It may be clear, but at the cost of color precision. The customer has usually no idea that they've done something relatively cheap (make the screen brighter) so they don't have to do something expensive (make the picture better).

Also on the list is debt reduction. Yes, it will get you a lower monthly payment. Unfortunately, what you'll find out afterwards is that you'll spend the next 20 years paying higher interest rates because your credit is worthless.

Play to the benchmarks

This one is just downright deceptive. If you know that your product is going to be tested against a standard, tweak it so it will get good test results, even if in the real world it does terrible.

Companies know that if they make a car, it's going to be reviewed by the EPA for fuel mileage, and they can make the car get great mileage in that test, because they know exactly what the test is. In the real world, however, the mileage is much different. They could make it get better mileage in the real world, but the test results would be worse, and hat doesn't sell cars.

Likewise, most LCD monitor manufacturers know that their product will have its latency measured. Latency is how fast it can switch from one color to another. You may have seen older LCD screens that look "blurry" with fast motion on them. This is a high latency, since the screen can't respond fast enough to show clear high-speed movement. Most manufacturers know that the standard of latency measurement is to time how long it takes to go black to white. So...just make the screen go from black-to-white quickly, and who cares about green-to-red or beige-to-white, etc.

Over-exaggerate risks

This is basically scaring the customer into paying you, since they don't know any better. Most people who have bought a car in the last few years can look in their manual and see that the oil only needs to be changed every 4500 miles. But when told that their car will immediately explode at 3000 miles, most people short-change themselves.

Another perfect example of this is when you buy your own domain name (www._____.com). You pay the $35/year for the domain name, but the company will contact you 10 months later with an email saying that your immediate attention is needed, or you might lose your domain. They want you to pay for the rights to the name for another 12 months. Let's say you do. You just paid twice for the next two months...the money you just paid, plus the money you paid originally. In order to not get sued, they usually include the expiration date of the domain in small font somewhere under the gigantic headline...

Disable a good product, and call the original product 'premium'

This one happens all the time. Build a product, and make it the best you can. People want to buy it, but you want more money than you should have. Instead of coming up with new features or other justifiable means to get the extra money, you just turn off some of the features in your product, and send it to market. Then take your original product and market it as the 'better' alternative.

The worst offenders in this area could be software vendors, except people have a nasty habit of figuring out how to turn all the features back on within a few hours of a product's launch... So this one goes to the automotive industry, who makes a cheap, efficient, powerful engine, then completely cripples it and puts it in their lower-end offerings. The original, unmolested engine goes to the 'premium' brands, and if you try to fix your crippled engine to make it operate as it should, no more warranty for you.

Intentional obsolescence

There are so many examples of this, it's unbelievable. "They don't make them like they used to" is right. That's because they figured out that products that last forever are only bought once. But if they can make the product age prematurely, usually as the warranty expires, you really don't have a choice but to buy something over and over. Another variation of this is to change formats every few years. Want to watch movies at home? Better buy the new player/media that will work with that new VHS / Laserdisc / DVD / OnDemand Broadcast / HD-DVD standard.

Changing the rules after you've started playing

I don't think I need to describe this one too much. Remember how the toll roads are supposed to stop collecting after the road was paid for? Or maybe how cable and satellite radio charged you more, but you got no commercials? The plan here is to charge a premium price for a service that has a great quality to it. Then, once you have enough people paying, get rid of the service. Luckily for them, they built enough loopholes for themselves to do whatever they want. Charge more? Well, that's what we meant by 'we will determine appropriate pricing'. We gave away your social security number to anyone who wants it? We told you 'your information will be used by us and our partners'... Also in this category is the 'promotional pricing' sneak-attack. I understand you want to advertise your low monthly rate, but you should also have to advertise just as strongly how the service goes up $50/month after the three-month trial period ends. Oh, we didn't tell you about that? It was in the four pages of 4-font legalese... Crazy fees

A while back, blockbuster got, well, busted on this one. I experienced this firsthand in college when a girlfriend didn't return a movie we had checked out (she lost it). The replacement fee? $100. For one VHS tape. (btw, I had her pay it before calling it off with her...for a lot of reasons though, I'm not that unreasonable)

Also on the top of the scumbag list for this type of thing is cable/telecom companies. I was told to bring the box back after I canceled my service when I moved, or be charged $320. After driving 20 minutes to the nearest center to return it (would it be so hard to have the service people come get it when they're in the area, or let me mail it for $3.85?), I was told that I had forgotten the power cord. This is a standard cord like the one for a PC's power supply, and I think at the time I had about 30 of them in a box somehwere. The replacement cost? $30. Luckily I had one in my trunk, but I still had to fight with them since it was grey, and the Comcast ones are black. Whatever. I'm very sure my $30 would have gone in your pocket, and you'd go get another cord out of the bucket in the back. Proprietary "rights"

Sony takes the cake on this one. One way to make sure a customer has to buy your stuff is to make up your own proprietary system. Sure, it would be convenient for customers if you would make your digital camera to be able to take any memory card, but then you wouldn't be able to charge twice as much for yours. Oh, and they need to buy your software to work with the pictures, because they're locked down. This approach is based on the assumption that a product isn't the customer's, even after they pay for it. The more you can control how people use it after they pay for it, the better.

A plus B does not equal C

This is the most ridiculous of all. Instead of telling you how beneficial my product would be to you, I'll show you something that has nothing to do with it. Have some ailment? Take this pill, and you'll be rolling around on the grass with somebody and a puppy in no time! Want to make a mint in the stock market? Try opening a free starter account with brokerage firm xyz. Unfortunately, the truth is that the pill may fix the ailment, and the account may be free, but you still need to have a personality to use and money to deposit to get what they're advertising.

If I were to follow along, I could say that you're reading 'The Daily Technocrat', and the earth hasn't been destroyed by a meteor since I started blogging. Therefore, keep reading, unless you want a globe-killing meteor strike. You do want life on earth to continue, don't you? :-)

-----

Got any more examples? Comment away!

Have a great weekend everyone!

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politics

5 reasons why Microsoft's 'Origami' is a handheld PC

2006-03-03T10:26:00.000-06:00

Details are being leaked on what Origami is, exactly. Going on the details that have been leaked, and some common sense, it seems like Origami will be a handheld PC. Here's why this will work out well for MS:

There are a few reasons why Origami will most likely be a handheld computing platform that will extend the laptop lineage, compete with the exploding Treo market and enter the ring with the PSP: This has already been done before

OQO's Model 01+ is a little larger than a treo, but runs Windows XP. It comes with the following options:

WiFi® and Bluetooth® antenna
5-inch Wide-VGA (800x480) transflective screen
Pen-based digitizer
FireWire®
Mouse buttons
TrackStik® pointing device
Microphone

Unfortunately, the OQO's pricing is a bit prohibitive. The XP Pro model gets $2000, and Tablet Edition is another $100. XP Home comes in at $1900 and a rubber chicken for spending $1900 to use XP Home. Basically, this tells us that for years now, this type of device is possible, but has been held up because of battery life and price, both of which can be addressed by hardware innovations in the last 18 months, and Microsoft's unique market positioning.

XBox needs a competitor to the PSP

The PSP is dominating right now. It would make sense that Microsoft wouldn't let Sony dominate the handheld market by simply being the sole supplier of a modern gaming console. By leveraging their investment in XP, Microsoft can roll out a gaming console that already has thousands of games supported.

Microsoft needs a competitor to iTunes/the iPod

For the same reasons as competing with the PSP, Microsoft needs to find something to compete with in the mobile audio market. Not only do they need to enter the market, but they will need to bring a feature set that utterly dominates it. A mobile computing platform running XP will bring enough additional support from consumers who may be considering a laptop and iPod. (a fairly average consumer these days) By leveraging Windows Media Player, and possibly partnering with someone like Amazon, Microsoft could start to chip away at Apple's lead in this category. The Origami would be a little large to use as a music player, but if you market it as a full-powered (mini) laptop that also is a music player, you gain an advantage over (just) a music player. The fact that Origami is marketing itself as a competitor to the photo iPod should give some clarity for the target Microsfot is putting on the Photo and Video iPods. The BlackBerry market is quite nervous right now

The time to strike with a device like this would be as soon as possible. Microsoft is saying that there won't be that big of a production at CeBit. This may well be because Origami isn't quite ready for primetime yet, but it would be important to get a mobile computing platform out there while the current one is in doubt, no matter how unfounded those fears are.

Microsoft gets a better price

The price of XP Pro to a company like OQO is confidential, like with Dell or others. But it goes without saying that Microsoft doesn't have to pay to put their own OS on a Microsoft-branded machine. The Origami just became an OQO, but more affordable due to a near-zero cost to Microsoft or whoever will be building the device for them. Also, Microsoft is in a pretty unique situation with hardware vendors. It's reasonable to say that they have the leverage to get the price they want on components. The addition of this fact puts the Origami in the price range of a laptop user, which is highly desirable. I'd count on someone like Dell to be making the hardware at low cost, while getting promotional pricing from Microsoft on the OS and Office until the market segment for a handheld PC is established.

Conclusion

The Origami will probably be 2-5 times as expensive as a photo iPod, or 2-4 times as expensive as a PSP. But since it's equal to a laptop in performance, (but not screen size or battery life) it most likely will be able to compete in the handheld/laptop market, while also infringing on the iPod/PSP dominance.

EDIT: Google Video link to Origami Commercial

Tags:

hardware

How Technorati is discouraging blog monotony

2006-03-02T10:25:00.000-06:00

No big surprise here, but all of the we-have-worthless-content-but-lets-all-link-to-each-other blogs suddenly don't have a leg to stand on.

Technorati is now ranking the top blogs by how many people have them listed as their favorite, not by how often they are linked to.

Instead of being able to depend on other worthless-content bloggers for links (effiectively talking about each other's posts), now they actually have to become the favorite blogs of their readers.

A few interesting things:

there are a few blogs that used to be most-linked-to, that now aren't anywhere near where they were. Apparently, people didn't enjoy their blogs, they just had been linking to content to write about it themselves?
a few blogs are still fairly near the top. Not surprising that some of the most-linked-to are also people's favorites
the 'most popular' blog right now is #1 because 194 people have it in their favorites. There are way more people on Technorati than that, so we still have a long way to go before we find the 'true' favorite blogs out there.

Check it out for yourself, and a big thumbs-up to Technorati for the new rating system. This is a good thing...it SHOULD help make unique blogs more popular, which is something we could all use a little more of. (now, how long will it be before we have offshore outsourcing to open accounts on Technorati and link to your blog?)

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TiVo to compliment partnership with Yahoo with place-shifting?

2006-03-01T10:23:00.000-06:00

A lot of guessing has been done on what TiVo's big announcement will be tomorrow, but on a completely unrelated note, I finally got an update yesterday that I'm very excited to share here! (While listening to an IT Conversations Podcast on my TiVo)

Click on any thumbnail to enlarge

TiVo's new main menu choice

...and once you click on that choice...

I can't stand Yahoo's way of doing 'application sprawl', so someone else can review those features, but it's pretty easy to figure out what they do...

The 'Browse and Buy Movie Tickets' allows you to buy tickets to local theaters via Fandango by entering in your zip code.

'Live365' is a port to TiVo of live365.com

'Podcaster' offers a few podcasts for each of the categories listed...

for example, the 'technology' category contains...

but also gives you the option to enter your own feed!

I entered the feed for IT Conversations...

Nice. The podcast immediately starts, and sounds great! You can navigate around and look for other podcasts while you're playing, but the audio stops if you leave the 'Podcaster' menu (like to go buy tickets or something)

(Oh, and there are some games on there too...but they remind me of cell phone games, except more pointless, since you have to use a TiVo remote to play them, instead of a keypad. (or preferably a game controller)

TiVo's built themselves a nice little API for TiVo-web applications. My prediction for tomorrow?

The next TiVo will use wireless to transmit content to little mini-TiVo boxes for other TV's, or standalone XM-SatRadio type appliances. Also hopefully will come with wireless keyboard support...typing in a long URL is painful. At one point, the TiVo froze for about 2 minutes...when the entry box needed to start scrolling from the URL.

I love the new update, now let me place-shift with some addon devices, TiVo!

Tags:

hardware

Please Government, protect me from MySpace!

2006-02-28T10:22:00.000-06:00

Security risks, threats from viruses, privacy invasion, lack of consumer protection laws and the many problems associated with may be far less real than many Internet users believe. That isn't the point. It's what they believe that matters.

That quote is from eight years ago. You'd think we'd learned our lesson... The recent flap over MySpace is nothing new. We see it every time a new technology comes out, and the source is always the same: parents, special interest groups, and news outlets.

Parents

These fall into two categories:

those that have been convinced that there is a major problem when there really isn't.

This is the group I hope most parents are in. The news outlets are to blame for the most part. After all, loving parents are an easy target for a sensationalist headline. What better way to sell newspapers and advertising than to make it seem like there is an extreme danger threatening their kids? This, of course is evil. But there's money to be had, so they do it anyway. Special interest groups aren't far behind.

then there are those parents who want someone else to do their job for them

These are the parents I hope you're not. Unfortunately, there are parents out there who really don't care enough about their kids to be troubled in learning about online safety. Since they don't have the time to teach their kids morals or responsibility, they'd rather just try to make the threat go away.

In a twist of irony, their unwillingness to be responsible for the education of their kids results in the kids never having the chance to develop their own sense of responsibility or morals. Unfortunately, these kids are programmed to go astray; after all, 'if they shouldn't be doing something, surely someone would have kept them from it...' Hopefully these parents will realize that it's easier to teach their kids to drive the road of life, than to try to pave a road in front of the car...

Special interest groups

These mostly appear to be:

terrified parents with some money or political clout who forgot to do their homework polititians who want to look like they're doing something so terrified parents will vote for them

one is trigger happy, the other manipulative. 'nough said.

News Outlets

Some of these guys aren't as bad as you would believe:

If you look at stories about online danger in the last 10 years, some of them have been trying to steer parents into education. What's interesting is that they usually have stories every 8 months or so advocating the co-education of parents and students, often suggesting they go online together and talk about safety. Kudos to CNN and a few others.

Then there's the rags and soundbyte hunters. Again, loving parents are an easy target for a sensationalist headline. The good news is that people are learning that they can get their news elsewhere, besides the few companies that control nearly all news outlets. Kudos to all of you who refuse to be spoon-fed what your opinions should be.

Further Investigation

Finally, if you're one of these people who still is gung-ho about going after MySpace, like you were about video games two years ago, like you were about chat rooms four years ago, like you were about the internet six years ago, and like you were about the internet eight years ago, please do everyone a favor:

Back up eight years and start educating yourself on the proper way to use technology with your kids. (article is from 1998, but it's good to go back to when the paranoia started)

Anyone ready to place bets on how long it will be until people start asking for the Gov. to get rid of the Child-Food-Processor (tm) that is MySpace?

Tags:

politics

Test Results questionable

2006-02-27T17:15:00.000-06:00

Which OS are You?

(Just pray you don’t end up as Windows Me)

Tags:

Scoble broke my browser

2006-02-24T10:20:00.000-06:00

So I was checking out one of Scoble's posts with a video of a recent party on Rocketboom. Apparently he gets a little "naked" to promote his book, 'Naked Conversations'. Wish I had known that BEFORE I clicked on it.

Check this out - I kid you not! The entire rocketboom broadcast was playing fine. About 2 or 3 frames into the shirt-taking-off of Scoble, GAAH! BROWSER CRASH!

I've never seen this error before. I've heard of 'breaking the camera, but geez! (click screenshot to enlarge) Apparently, Firefox is looking out for me and my sensitive eyes... What I want to know is, when did I install the 'NSFW' extension?

In an act of IT-helpdesk-based gluttony for punishment, I tried to replicate the issue. Regrettably, the video was able to play in its entirity the second time.

Tags:

The new war, in the US, 2006-08

2006-02-23T10:18:00.000-06:00

There is a war going on right now, in the streets of the United States. The outcome of this war will determine the future of this country for the next hundred years. Chances are good that you've heard about it, but have no idea what it means. Details are scarce, but let me fill you in on some details.

Electrons in Wonderland

Priuses and Patents. Hydrogen Hummers and Homemade Hybrids. These are the weapons being waged. At stake? The privilege to be paid to fuel America's need for mobility. The future of transportation in the US is obviously electric, whether it be in a hybrid vehicle or 100% electric vehicle, this is unavoidable. But ever wonder why hybrids really aren't taking off that fast? After all, this technology has the potential to save Americans billions per year, while significantly lessening the strain on our environment. As it turns out, the issue is money, of course.

The batteries in electric cars (hybrid or electric) need to be very powerful. So powerful, in fact, that we need to use very powerful nickel metal hydride batteries. NiMH batteries are the same as the ones in your TV remote, but obviously a bit larger in vehicles. However, if these batteries are able to be so strong, why is it so hard to make an affordable electric or hybrid-electric car? The answer, it seems, is in a clash between two massive corporations. And into the rabbit hole we go...

Ovonic Battery Company is the leading developer of advanced materials for NiMH batteries. After all, this makes sense, as Stanford Ovshinsky founded the company in the 1960 for NiMH development. Ovonic is a subsidiary of Energy Conversion Devices, who currently holds the NiMH patent. ECD makes commercial and transportation NiMH batteries via it's spinoff copany, Cobasys. Cobasis is a joint operation between ECD and ChevronTexaco.

Uh, what?

That's right, the 125-year-old petroleum company has a substantial stake in the production of commercial-grade NiMH batteries. You might be asking yourself what a company that has spent billions on an industry to serve you gasoline might want with the manufacturing arm of the NiMH patent holders. The answer is easy: to keep you buying gas. You'd better believe that ChevronTexaco would rather have you fill up with gas than recharge an electric car with a solar panel while you're at work, or with a few dollars of electric while you sleep.

A new hope from the land of the rising sun

Panasonic thought they'd partner with Toyota and make a fortune bringing in the new era of transportation with vehicles like the Toyota RAV4 EV. This was a 'normal' car with a 100 mile range. It was relatively affordable and cost a fraction per mile of its gas siblings. Since it could be set to charge while you sleep, you'd never know the difference, except for the missing tailpipe, gas door and extra cash on the wallet. In addition, they would easily cruise at 80 mph. I know all of these things because I've driven one. They were sold in the US for a very short time, and several exist, despite attempts to have them erased from automotive history. My family was lucky enough to find one at the end of its lease, and it happily powers around in the mountains of Colorado to this day. For a vehicle that costs nearly nothing to maintain (no coolant, oil, gas, ignition, emissions, etc.)and an original MSRP of about $17,000 (most sold for over MSRP - now they sell for $40K with 30K on the odometer), one could make the argument that this is the ideal vehicle for most people.

Counterstrike

So what happened? As it turns out, to have an electric vehicle come close to the performance of a gas vehicle, you need a powerful battery. A NiMH is the only type that is powerful enough to get to the 80 Amp/hour range to provide good performance at an attractive price. (An amp-hour is defined as "constant current which, if maintained in two straight parallel conductors of infinite length, of negligible circular cross-section, and placed 1 meter apart in vacuum, would produce between these conductors a force equal to 2×10–7 newton per meter of length." In English, this means it measures how much and how hard electricity is being shoved down the pipe. For the RAV4 EV, Panasonic found they would have to make a battery rumored to be as high as 85Ah. They made this battery for Toyota and implemented it successfully in the RAV4 EV.

Unfortunately for Panasonic, Toyota and automotive progress, Panasonic wasn't supposed to make batteries good enough for vehicles. Cobasys, of which Chevron is a 50% stakeholder, limits the Ah of commercial NiMH batteries when someone requests a license to their NiMH batteries. Although the Ah limit numbers are confidential, the limits have been leaked to be in the range of 10 Ah, and only to be used (and only suitable for) hybrid-electric applications.

In 2003, Cobasys sued Panasonic for making the electric car batteries instead of the hybrid batteries and eventually won $30 million in late February, 2006. The advent of the electric car had been successfully blocked, and as the RAV4 EV's disappeared from the dealership lots, people attributed it to a lack of interest or failure of the vehicle to be a workable commuting vehicle. The inability of Panasonic to offer replacement batteries for these vehicles looked like it would send them to the scrap heap within a few years when the batteries needed to be replaced. Or so we thought.

The new kid on the block

You may have heard about President Bush visiting Johnson Controls recently to have a look at their Lithium Ion batteries. Li-Ion is a battery like NiMH, but gives off more power in a battery of the same size, and are much lighter (which becomes very important when the battery has to move itself around in a vehicle). In addition, Li-Ion batteries don't 'go dead' as quickly when you use them, and can survive a lot longer than NiMH when being constantly charged.

In the past, Li-Ion batteries were only used in cell phones and laptops for good reason. Li-Ion costs just as much as NiMH to manufacture, but due it its construction is prone to a 30%+ failure rate. When you are making AA batteries for a remote or a cell phone battery, it hurts to throw away every third battery, but due to the power gains and weight savings, it is acceptable. Laptops are at the edge of this compromise, as they can't live without Li-Ion due to their weight and power requirements, and the battery costs too much to produce. Since the alternative is no laptops, manufacturers compromise by using lower-powered (and lower performance) parts, and charging more for a laptop, due to the cos of throwing away one $100+ battery for every two produced. About $50 is added onto the other batteries to compensate.

In an electric vehicle system, a Li-Ion battery of sufficient power would be somewhere in the range of $3000. A much better cost solution would be NiMH, but we already know why that won't happen. So what is the big deal with Johnson Controls rolling out a new Li-Ion battery for gas-electric hybrids? They're starting to find a way to make Li-Ion cheap enough to work. In late September, 2005, Johnson Controls built a new $4 million research facility dedicated to developing Li-Ion batteries for Hybrid and Full Electric vehicles. The new facility is sponsored by $14.4 million from the United States Advanced Battery Consortium, a group of companies consisting of DaimlerChrysler, Ford and GM, along with the US Department of Energy (the "Big Three" manufacture basically every car not made in Japan). Note the absence of anyone interested in preserving the gasoline-based infrastructure. The next two years, 2006-2008

It will be interesting to see where we go from this point. We seem to be on an electric car breakthrough wih new battery technology that isn't controlled by a dominant petroleum company. The idea of the electric car being weak is shattered by this Lithium-Ion 180-mph prototype sportscar. It appears as if President Bush has expressed a dedication towards advancing large-scale Li-Ion battery development in the US with his support of our main research lab. For everything people say about Bush, this may well be one of the things he is most remembered for: eliminating our dependence on foreign oil and electric vehicle technology.

What can you do?

If people only knew how hard Cobasys has worked to keep the gas flowing to you and the money flowing to them. (And the emissions flowing to the environment). The best thing you can do is to get the word out. Link to this post. Write about it. Tell your friends. Write the people who represent you in government and tell them you support Li-Ion and Electric Vehicle technology in the US. You support budgeting that will give the Johnson Controls battery lab what they need to make an easily-manufactured Electric Vehicle Li-Ion battery. You need to tell them these things yourself. Gasoline companies have invested millions in lobbyists, whose sole goal is to perpetuate our addiction to gasoline.

Finally, do all of these things for yourself. Even if you don't care about the environmental effects, do it for the money you'll save on gas and complex gasoline-powered vehicles. Do it because it's the right thing to do. Do it because you're a Technocrat.

This won't be a war fought with guns at the expense of soldiers. This will be a war fought with patents and corporations, meant to continue a source of revenue for companies that believe in purchasing political power.

At stake is the right to use the best solution possible to solve one of the world's greatest problems. ---

I've made as best an effort as I could to verify the historical facts from sources close to the action. Due to the confidential nature of many of these events, it has been extremely rough putting them together. If you have any information or corrections, please let me know. My main goal is to get the information out and have it be as accurate as possible.

Tags:

politics

Blogs and RSS: full text or partial?

2006-02-22T10:16:00.000-06:00

Interesting argument on the Scobleizer today on RSS feeds and the reasons behind full or partial text feeds. THis actually is a big deal as far as traffic is concerned, so I thought I'd throw in my two cents:

Jeremy Wright had this to say:

Traffic doesn’t equal readers. RSS subscribers don’t equal traffic.

FYI Jeremy, I just asked wordpress how hard it would be to map a second line on the traffic graph for RSS pickups. If you want it too, hit the feedback button and ask for it. I love the idea of being able to graph Web views vs. RSS pickups. (I realize that there are problems here, like people who have their reader set to update every 5 minutes, so there would have to be something to distinguish between unique hosts...)

..but getting to the matter at hand, he also had this to say:

The reason you want full text RSS feeds is so you don’t have to visit a site, after all.

I agree. I just went and changed my feed to full text due to that comment. Here's why I had it in partial though:

The web-based readers NEED to have partial text, IMHO. Otherwise, with one post, you completely push out any other post a few page-downs from the bottom of the screen. I've been trying really hard to keep as many posts on the main page as possible. Compare this to my older posts that were imported from Blogger that I haven't fixed yet. There is no way anyone is going to scroll past the 'don't get ripped off on a laser printer' post on that page to see the rest. I'd much rather be able to give them 5 snippets that fit on a 1024x800 screen, rather than one monster post and hope they'll scroll down to see the other 5 monster posts.

Based on these reasons going on over on the Scoblizer, I really think the way to go is to do partial text on the web, and full text on RSS. In this way, you tailor your content for the medium, as they are both very different.

Most people do full text on RSS, and full text on the web posts, which IMHO is pretty painful to the web viewers with all the scrolling they have to do to look at more than 1 or 2 posts.

As far as money making is concerned, that's not what I'm interested in, but it seems that partial posts are indeed a good way to con people into loading up an ad-loaded page. Give them just enough text, them make them go to the site to see your ads and get paid.

Of course, Ozh makes a good point, in that the RSS aggregation sites will have an easier time indexing if you do full text RSS, which may get you more interested readers.

In the end, it's all up in the air as to what will be the most profitable using RSS and Web publishing. Until more people use RSS, it's not going to be clear, as there just isn't enough data to go off of. In the meantime though, you can follow my suggestion of partial web posts and full rss feed to make it easier for people to get your work...

Tags:

blog
rss

What to install on a new PC

2006-02-21T10:14:00.000-06:00

So my friend just had me help him buy a laptop from Dell (he had an Employee Purchase discount), and I'm helping him set it up. It's a Dell XPS M140 with Windows XP Media Center Edition. What would you consider an 'essential application' for him? Now, before someone chimes in with the 'OSX' or 'Gentoo' comments, think about what you would recommend to someone other than yourselves, possibly your mother or first-time computer user. You're still on the mac/linux thing. OK, he wants to leverage his investment in Win32 software. (ok, stop with the 'Wine' already) I'm thinking the following:

A VirusScan utility. Preferably something like Symantec Antivirus or other application that comes on a CD. Costs money, but so does a hijacked box. I can't recommend Norton, I've seen way too many machines destroyed for it to be a coincidence... haven't been impressed with the free offerings, but the last time I tried was about 18 months ago, and haven't had a reason to test since then...

A browser. Firefox. Possibly with Google toolbar (for the spellcheck, he's a blogger also) and StumbleUpon (we all get bored) Got any other killer extensions?

An email client / RSS aggregator. Thunderbird 1.5, but I would set him up myself. I'll be writing a post later on the annoyances of Thunderbird, and how once you get them sorted out, it rocks! (default settings are counter-intuitive, though - what's with putting my sig underneath the inline reply text???) The RSS is a nice addition. It's an easy-to-use tech that most people have never heard of.

Spyware protection. Spybot Search and Destroy with TeaTimer and IE. Update the def's and scan, WinXP MCE had a few red flags out of the box...

Productivity suite. He had a free copy of Office XP through his graduate program, but otherwise I'd advise people to use OpenOffice. A few days ago I completely uninstalled Office XP (my org's standard). Only annoyances so far are difficulty graphing in Calc. Definitely set it up to save as Microsoft file format by default though, otherwise no-one else will be able to open your stuff. (for now. When the next version of office natively supports the open office standard, wait 5 years fr everyone to upgrade, then switch the defaults back...) If they don't already have Office, install OO and go spend the $373 they save on a new __________? Multifunction printer? iPod? 7 day thermostat and light bulbs? (ok, shameless, nerdy plug) $20 donations to each of the free softwares listed here?

PrimoPDF. This free utility will allow you to make anything printable into a pdf file, no adobe products needed. (except viewer).

What else? I'm sure I'm forgetting something. Post your suggestions with the URL's. Save Google some bandwidth. (That last one is a joke, obviously)

In additon, you'll want to make some tweaks to the OS, of course.

Tags:

Deconstructing Scoble IV: Categories/Tagging

2006-02-20T10:11:00.000-06:00

Hello all, hope you enjoyed your weekend!

Continuing on in my series, I've taken a few suggestions from Robert Scoble and tried to expand on them to make a full-featured how-to on blog improvement. I'll continue polling other leading bloggers and posting how-to's based on their suggestions, but today we'll look at Scoble's tagging suggestion:

Another way? Steph Booth taught me this one: tag often. Tag frequently. Tag better. In Wordpress.com your categories are also tags. Don’t worry about using too many tags. The more tags you use, the more likely someone will find you in a search engine.

This is a new concept for me, since I'm new to Wordpress (moved from a very basic blog at blogger). One of the reasons I moved from blogger was for the categories wordpress offers. Categories/tagging in a blog can take two very different approaches. I've done both, so I'll try to summarize them:

Intentional Discovery

If you have a look at the screenshot of this blog before I started improving it, you'll notice that the category structure was very different. This was a direct result of my writing style. I tend to tackle some larger-than-normal topics on this blog, and I has been trying to keep the different 'part 1', part 2' topics organized on blogger. This ended up being a mess, so I moved to Wordpress and basically used the categories as a table of contents for my content. This method of organization ensures that people will quickly find what they are looking for. Unfortunately, people who read your blog most often will not know what they are looking for. In this respect having 'a great roadmap' of your blog isn't nearly as helpful as you would think, since the bulk of visitors aren't looking for an exact post, they're looking to browse a genre (category) of posts.

Accidental Discovery

old structure:

Free Money

At Home

Automotive

Tomorrow's Solutioproven

In the home

In the ocean

On the road

This was okay, or so I thought. But after watching Wordpress' analysis tools, I found that people who wanted the 'free money - at home' category were missing out 'Tomorrow's solutions - in the home' postings. They were obviously interested in tech for the home, so why not give tme both? Sure, the would no longer get exactly what they were looking for, but as I mentioned before, most people don't know exactly what they're looking for.

So the key seems to be: get an idea of what they want in general, and throw everything you've got at them. I don't neccessarily like this method, as it is much less precise, but tfor.Sobers speak for themselves: my visitors are staying longer and visiting more posts now, since I am giving them a winecessarily based loosely on what they want,lesstead of narrow offering tailored to their wishes. In the end, I hope that visitors come away with more than they were looking for.

As you can tell, I'm still on the fence about all of this, but the results show that the second method produces more traffic by far, so it's hard to argue with that. Thsi is why for.Astegories listed above are now organized as:

Automotive
Free Money
Home Tech
HowTo
Marine Tech
My Projects
Renewable Energy

In addition, each post now belongs to multiple categories, instead of being in its own (i.e. an electric motorcycle post is in the 'Automotive' and 'Renewable Energy' categories instead of the 'On the Road' category under 'Tomorrow's Solutions'. In this way, that post will get exposure to people interested in both Automotive and Renewable Energy, instead of people interested in just 'Tomorrow's solutions on the road'.

Conclusion

Hopefully this explains how to use the "shotgun approach" to get more posts exposed to your audience, while at the same time giving them something close to what they're looking for. The method is somewhat less precise/organized than what this IT guy would prefer, but it seems to profoundly increase the number of posts that get viewed, so I view it as a 'neccessary evil'.

Tags:

Deconstructing Scoble III: Personalization

2006-02-17T17:00:00.000-06:00

Continuing in this series, I have been dissecting the suggestions given to me by Robert Scoble on his blog, and seeing what works and what doesn’t.

To recap, I had a lot of good content, but the blog itself looked a little drab [screenshot], and I wasn’t advertising my content as well as I could have.

I’ve already gone over the first suggestion, and added a few common-sense suggestions of my own. (then again, it took a second look for me to realize it, so maybe not that common)

Here I’ll take a second look at what can be done about another powerful promotional tool: personalization. To quote Scoble,

Another thing? Dan’s title tag is boring. You need some personality! Look at Darren Barefoot’s title tag. Lots of personality and gives me some sense of who Darren is. Oh, and his blog’s design sticks out too. Different. Clean. Personal. Who wouldn’t fall in love with that smile? Yeah, Wordpress.com makes it hard to change the template right now (Matt Mullenweg promises that’s changing soon, but in the meantime you can get ready by doing the other things — come up with a better title tag, write better headlines, work on finding interesting content that’ll help you stick out of the crowd on search engines and memetrackers.

An unlevel playing field

Darren’s site is pretty customized, and after looking high and low for ways to customize a Wordpress blog, I don’t think there is one. It’s not ‘pretty hard’ like Scoble says, it’s ‘pretty impossible’. Right now, you’re limited to using one of a very few templates that have customization in their control panels, and that’s it. I agree that customization would be ideal, but for those of us who don’t have an in with wordpress.com, you’re out of luck. Coincidentally, a quick look at the source code for Scoble’s blog shows that his Wordpress customization is definitely some sort of special arrangement. Score one for Blogger.com. I like Wordpress’ tagging feature, though, so we can make do for now…

In the meantime, compare the current site to the screenshot. I added a little human element on the ‘what is a technocrat?’ page and in the ‘Hall of Fame’ and ‘Links’ sidebars. It gives it a little more flavor as to who I really am, and how much it means to me that people read my stuff. (explained on the ‘what is a technocrat?’ page)

‘In the meantime’

come up with a better title tag

Gotcha. And I agree on that one. My Blog’s title was boring. I just hadn’t been able to think up a better one. Then I was called a technocrat by a co-worker. Wasn’t sure if they meant that in a derogatory way, (later they admitted that they meant it as a compliment) but after looking it up, I liked it! (I hadn’t heard the term beofre, which I guess is surprising since it’s supposedly common…?)

So I got the new name. I’m definitely a technocrat by the definition of a person who “…supports the control of technology for the benefit of humanity.” I also try to post at least one meaningful article per day. So, ‘The Daily Technocrat’. Appropriate and different.

write better headlines

…like ‘Deconstructing Scoble’? I realize it probably is a little inflammatory, and might seem like I’m going to be breaking down Scoble in these articles. In a way, I am, and the title is describing exactly what I’m doing. I also am aware that it might imply controversy, which there is a small amount, I suppose. My past headlines were (for the most part) pretty dry, but accurate. I guess I do need to spice up the title, if I want them to get to the actual content. The main point is that it gets people in the door. If they read the article, who cares if it wasn’t exactly what they thought it might be. The title is accurate, and if they get past the first paragraph, they’re interested in improving thir blog, and I’m happy to offer my own insight, extrapolated from Scoble’s suggestions. In the end, they might not get what they thought, but probably something that will provide quite a bit more value, hopefully. If it was the dual-meaning title that got them in the door, then so be it, I’m glad they read it for the possible benefit to them.

work on finding interesting content that’ll help you stick out of the crowd on search engines and memetrackers

I’m thinking this was a general suggestion (albeit a valid one) since I try very hard to come up with original, interesting content. The reason I try so hard is because I’m sick to death of every blog being a mirror of Slashdot, Wired and CNN! If I want CNN, I’ll go to CNN, I’m coming to your blog for you. If you don’t have anything to contribute, wait until you do. You’re much more likely to capture an audience posting a great post every 3 days or so than posting 10 times a day on something that a million other bloggers are posting on. You have great ideas, don’t bury them in a pile of filler posts.

Eventually, I might run out of things to post seriously about, but the worst thing I could do is to compensate by filling in the spot with a goofy post. I already have enough of those…

In a way, you should find this encouraging. By coming up with original content twice a week, you’re probably in the top third of all bloggers, quality-wise. The bottom two-thirds are the ones doing the me-too latest-news posts, or the play-by-play-of-my-adolescent-life blogs. Congratulate yourself with a trip down to the corner.

Speaking of which, have a great weekend everyone!

Tags:

Ridiculous commute-related tech photos

2006-02-16T16:56:00.000-06:00

Today I have a collection of commute-related photos for the technophiles, and a few tech-disasters…

Trailer that has logo of StumbleUpon:

I know technology isn’t for everyone, but upon completion of the new high-speed tolling lanes, the DOT put out this sign, which flashed:

“IDOT”, (something like ‘2 lanes open’) and then “Open Road Tolling (OTR)”

Nope, I didn’t type that incorrectly. It said OTR for about 4 days, likely to the amusement to millions of commuters. I started making up my own acronyms, like Open Toad Rolling… Sorry for the pic, but you get the idea. (this pic was after they fixed it, I wanted to show how giant the sign was though…)

I had to take a cab from Midway to O’Hare a while back, and the cab had this CarPutuer installed. I thought it was cool. The driver said it was normally set up for people to use the yellow pages online while the cab was driving around. Note I said normally. Instead, the machine would POST, Show the Windows 2000 splash screen, blue-screen and restart. Repeat this process for the entire 45-minute trip, in the dark, to O’Hare. I offered to fix it, but alas, no keyboard, and the touch-screen drivers weren’t loaded until the OS booted, which never happened. The flashing effect on my early-morning (~5-6AM) eyes was very Clockwork-Orange-ish. Since the driver couldn’t turn it off, I wanted to take the opportunity to write ‘don’t let this happen to you’ on a bunch of my side-work cards and stuff them around the screen. Alas, all I had were my official work cards, and I didn’t want to give that info to a bunch of strangers… next time… (pic is blurry from combination of taxi suspension and highway pavement…)

The following are examples of how not to use tech, in this case, personalized plates. In fact, this should be considered abuse…

Hopping on the Leet-speek bandwagon: your future pridePersonalized

plates for your new SUV in Illinois: $190

Being branded as a ‘Roxr’ when leet-speek goes out of style 2 weeks later: priceless

…and the winner…

Personalized plates: IWAGB4

I can’t imagine why this “lady” would want to advertise ‘I Was A Guy Before’…

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Deconstructing Scoble II: Images and Graphics

2006-02-15T16:54:00.000-06:00

In my request to Scoble, the first thing he recommended was more images and graphics…

Scoble, commenting on this blog, as of 2/14/06 (screenshot):

First notice how his blog looks very similar to tons of other blogs? That’s hurting him.

One of TechCrunch’s popularity secrets is that he uses lots of graphics and screen shots. Makes his blog more pleasing to the eye. Sorta the way Technorati looks better than Google’s blog search.

TechCrunch isn’t bad looking, and I can understand where Scoble was coming from.

You can divide TechCrunch’s use of graphics into two categories, the use of screenshots/pictures and the use of logos. Both have their benefits:

Screen shots/pictures

This should be obvious, but pictures add to an article/posting. ‘A picture is worth a thousand words’? This is as true today as when Fred R. Barnard supposedly said it in 1921. Apparently, this phrase was used to sell advertising on the side of streetcars.

This is an interesting comparison. People would only see streetcars for a moment, and then they were gone, so it was important to have something that would capture their attention. Sounds awfully familiar to blogs!

This is easy enough to demonstrate. Consider the following comparison: “I have installed a freeware application called LClock (supposedly named for LonghornClock) that installs on top of the standard windows tray clock. It makes the clock look like the upcoming Vista clock, and provides additional functionality. When I click on the time, it shows a full calendar with a few butons that enable me to scroll back and forth to previous or future months. It also shows the date and time in a nice format when you hover over it. I think this is an improvement on the standard WinXP clock.”

or, I could just do this:

“I have installed a freeware application called LClock (supposedly named for LonghornClock) that installs on top of the standard windows tray clock. You can click on it to get a calendar, and I like how it looks:”

(click the thumbnail to enlarge)

Much better. To summarize, I would say that Scoble/TechCrunch have something going for this style. IF I were to sun it up, I would say the rule would be “If you find yourself describing the characteristics of something visible, just give the picture”.

Logos/Avatars

This is something I never thought of, but is a great idea that TechCrunch seems to use quite frequently. Take a page from Nike’s playbook and use their branding. Everyone knows the “swoop” logo. The next time you’re doing a story about Nike, don’t wait for your reader to see your zippy headline, start reading and see that “Oh, this is about Nike”. Just throw the logo in there. People don’t want to read what the story is about, they want to know what the story is about, and as quickly as possible. Billions of dollars have been spent by these companies to make sure their logos are instantly recognizable. Use it! One word of caution, though. I would discourage the use of logos simply to make a story seem more legitimate. Adding a logo makes a story seem more legitimate/knowledgeable, but all that means is that it had better be legitimate/knowledgeable. The harder you try to make a poor post seem legit, the bigger of a flame war you’ll get into. The

use of logos/avatars has been used extensively on Slashdot and Tom’s Hardware for a long time, and the result is great! It’s a wonder why no-one on the blog front has adopted this ‘graphic tagging’. This is especially true for wordpress users, since they have a bank of easily-accessed images right below the text box when they are entering a post!

The legal side of this should be covered under Fair Use in the United States, which states that the use of copyrighted materials in “…criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.” In addition, if the logo/avatar isn’t copyrighted, but trademarked, the law says that trademarks can be used to refer to a product in the same way as a copyrighted article. Ultimately, this means that if you are writing a post about the Apple iPod, you are allowed to use the name ‘iPod’ (trademark) and the Apple logo in your posting. Just make sure that the purpose of your posting is for “…criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research”.

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design

Deconstructing Scoble

2006-02-14T16:50:00.000-06:00

OK, so I think I have some good content on here, and I’m happy to share with anyone who wants it. But I just wasn’t getting the traffic. What good is helping people if they don’t listen? So I figured I’d shoot an email out to Robert Scoble and see if he had any suggestions. Here is my email:

From: me To: Scoble Subject: blog success - a 15 second question

Hi. I’ve had a blog for 3-4 months now, but despite having good content (I think), no success.

You’re obviously doing something right. I was wondering if you would take a 15 second look at my blog and let me know what I’m doing right/wrong?

I appreciate it, and it’s cool if you don’t, I just figured I’d ask someone who knows what to do…

http://techandother.wordpress.com/

Much to my surprise, he wrote quite a lengthy article in reply, and posted it to his own blog, entitling it ‘Tips for joining the A list’. I appreciate the lengthy response immensely, but I want to clarify that my intentions are not for fame personal gain. In fact, I commented later on in his thread with the following:

My personal goals for traffic are to give away information for free that has worked well for me…

(like investigating the value of Compact Fluorescents - ok, a little nerdy, but $30-50/month in my Toy Fund is pretty sweet - got a USB GPS unit this month)

…or get discussions going on things that are important

(like maybe getting lobbyist influence in the public eye instead of Britney Spears!)

Kinda like a think-tank-coop/tech-mob idea…

OK, that said, his suggestions are very good no matter what your goals, and I plan to have a second look at my own blog based on his suggestions. Since it’s going to be a process, I’ll start a new sub-category dedicated to designing an effective blog.

Say goodbye to the old blog (screenshot)

Be sure to point your feed reader to http://techandother.wordpress.com/feed/, and follow along on the path to blog improvement, no matter what your motivation!

I’ll be deconstructing all of Scoble’s suggestions into several how-to’s and discussions. Stay tuned!

Tags:

design

Local Info and Navigation with GPS and 802.11n

2006-02-13T16:58:00.000-06:00

Ok, so as I mentioned before, I was able to use a few money-saving tech improvements to buy a new toy this month, a USB GPS receiver. ($39-$9 with Coupon Code - I think ‘DEALNEWS’ …?) It finally came in the mail last night, so I immediately started playing with it.

“Wardriving” with GPS

On my way to work this morning, I ran NetStumbler with the GPS receiver and recorded all of the wireless access points on my way to work. There were quite a few! It’s all fine and good to have this info, but what to do with it?

Visualization First of all, I wanted to see it myself. I tries a few online sites, and settled on a very high-quality script put together over at GPSVisualizer.com. They have the ability to output this info as a google map, which is exactly what I was looking for. The only downside is that they can only accept up to 2MB files at a time, which is about half my commute. After splitting NetStumbler’s .ns1 file into two 1.8MB files, I fed them into the script:

Commute 1 of 2 (available for a limited time as an active google map, here is a screenshot) Commute 2 of 2 (available for a limited time as an active google map, here is a screenshot)

Nice! I now have a map of accessible WAP’s. (Note the green ones are not password protected - ouch!) Not too much use, though, unless I have evil intentions…or maybe just want to find a public access point, like a Starbucks or something. Also, since there seems to be a WAP every few feet, it’s fairly easy to track my course…

Navigation Now that I have a map of Access Points along my route, I might not even need GPS to find my way.

GPS navigation systems in cars work because they know where you are, and what you have to do to get to your destination. They are extremely accurate because they know where you are, and use a database to look up the rest.

Well, I could know where I am if I had a script that would translate the WAP’s I can see to my global position. In this way, I would be able to use a database of known access points to find my way, without GPS, as long as I had a map database to take along with me. However, the low cost of GPS is rapidly making WiFi location awareness irrelevant.

For now, I can’t access Google Maps on the fly in Chicago, but that day is rapidly approaching, I hope. If I could get a wifi connection of the fly, however, it’s not that big of a stretch to change Google Maps from ‘Address 1 to Address 2′ to ‘Current Location to Address 2′.

(It really is only a matter of time until internet access is regarded as a utility and is offered like cellular service, but I’ll save that for a different post)

This opens up a whole new area of service, as well. Car low on gas? Have it automatically find the lowest gas prices at gas stations along your way when it gets to 1/8th of a tank. Convenient and cheap. Hungry? Thirsty? Need a pinball machine ASAP? Sync up a voice-recognition program to a steering-wheel mic control (common in current nav units) and ask Google Local to find one along your route.

Benefits

Connection of current location to relevant, local information

Complications

Subject to high overhead, navigation systems are $2K+ OEM, but a good CarPuter design that fits in a standard radio bracket could revolutionize this industry. My recommendations would be a design like this with a touch-screen, but with USB port and an embedded Ubuntu-like Linux OS to foster OSS development and ease of use.

Conclusion

Since I picked up this GPS receiver for $30+shipping, it’s a hard case to make for not going this route. There is freeware out there that will provide you with driving navigation, and it’s only a matter of time (depending on interest) until there will be an open-source solution out there that will provide a quality interface.

The possibilities of combining location awareness with information management is probably one of the biggest things we’ll ever see happen. The location awareness part seems to be finally met by such a low cost of the GPS unit. The advent of Municipal WiFi (powered by 802.11n - and therefore Municipal Mobile WiFi) will connect the information of the internet to the location awareness of GPS in a world-changing partnership.

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Killing us all for profit

2006-02-10T16:43:00.000-06:00

In the spirit of doing something good for our climate, and also in line with the ‘free money’ series I get into, I wanted to share the following link:

Top 100 Renewable Energy Projects

This really is a great site. It makes you wonder - why don’t these ideas take off? Could it be that the politicians under corporate oil control don’t want to lose their method of revenue? But what good is money if the climate kills you?

Seriously, if it’s not obvious already, the reason why electric cars, etc. haven’t taken off is because the energy companies want to develop their own lines of distribution so they can continue to profit. Hydrogen? Much less efficient than 100% electric vehicles. But the oil company lobbyists want to profit, not do what’s right. The bad part about blocking the best technologies for profit is tht it ends up taking money out of your pocket. Instead of a dollar or two for 100 miles in an electric car, you’ll spend much more to fill up on hydrogen.

And that’s just the way they want it. And since they own enough sway in government, there’s nothing you can do to stop it. Or is there?

Here’s an interesting idea: Clean Elections. Basically, this means you can’t buy your way into a political office. Everyone gets the same amount, and it is up to you to get elected, based on your principals. But why not apply that to all politics? If a company wants to drill for oil in your backyard, should they be allowed to buy off your representative? If anything, why not have them try to put the money towards the citizens, and let them decide? After all, we are the ones who have to live with these decisions…

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politics

Money for free: compact fluorescent light bulbs

2006-02-09T14:57:00.000-06:00

When I first moved into my townhouse, I couldn' figure out why my electric bill was so bad. I had attributed to summertime and the air conditioning, but soon noticed something else... The fire hazard A light bulb had burned out, and while replacing it, I noticed that the bulb was a 70-watt unit, and the recessed lighting receptacle was only rated for 60W. This can be a fire hazard, so I checked a few other bulbs - all 70 watts! A few were even 100 watts, with the labels on the recessed lighting turning brown from the heat! This was bad. I counted how many 60W bulbs I would need. For my small house, I needed about 50. Ouch. "But wait", I thought, "If I have 50 bulbs at 60W each, and I pay ComEd 8.275 cents per kilowatt/hour, I can figure out how much these bulbs are costing me." A kilowatt/hour is a measurement of how much energy is flowing to your house. It represents 1000 watts being used in an hour. So let's say I have my lights on for about 43.5 hours per week... (when I'm home during the week, and 8 hours on the weekend) Excel to the rescue 70W x 50 bulbs = 3000 watts 3000 watts x 43.5 hours per week = 130,500 watt/hours = 130.5 kilowatt/hours 130.5 kW/hours per week * 4 weeks = 522 kW/hours per month 522 kW/hours per month * 8.275 cents per kW/hour = $50.39 43.20 per month $50 per month! Just for these lights! That doesn't count for computers, bathroom lights, fridge, TV, AC, etc. OK, so settling down, I could just go and buy 50 60W bulbs. This would cost me about $1.00 for a 4-pack from Home Depot, or about $12.50. It would also save me $7.19 per month, making my bill about $43 instead of $50. I would pay off the new bulbs in 1.7 months, and save $7 per month after that. Pretty weak, especially since 60W bulbs usually need to be replaced about every 400-800 hours (on average), which means every 9-18 weeks. However, Home depot also sells Compact Fluorescent bulbs. CF bulbs are basically like the big, long bulbs you see at work or in the grocery store. They are filled with a gas that glows when a small amount of electricity is applied to it. They use hardly any energy, and are more efficient than a regular bulb, which uses a lot of electricity to heat a small wire. CF's are different than the big, long ones, in that someone made the tubes very narrow and curled them all into the shape of a normal light bulb. Sometimes there is even a glass covering over the fluorescent tubing to make it look more "normal". The good thing about the CF bulbs is that you can get a 6-pack that costs less than $30 these days, with each bulb putting out as much light as a 60W bulb, while only using 13 watts each. In addition, these bulbs are rated for anywhere between 8000 to 10,000+ hours. The bad part is that each bulb costs about $5, instead of 25 cents. OK, so let's see what would be better over the course of 8000 hours of use, the equivalent of 3.8 years of use for me. Regular bulbs Cost for bulbs: 50 bulbs, each replaced (on average) every 800 hours = $125 Cost of electricity for 8000 hours: $1,986.00 Total cost: $2111, or about $46.29 per month CF bulbs Cost for bulbs: 50 bulbs, lasts for 8000 hours = $250 Cost of electricity for 8000 hours: $430.30 Total cost: $680.30, or about $14.92 per month Conclusion So what do I do? Replace the 70W bulbs with 60W bulbs, or bite the $250 bullet and go with the 13W bulbs that output as uch as 60W bulbs? The CF bulbs, of course.

In fact, I then replaced every bulb in my entire house with CF, including bathrooms, lamps, outside lights, even the garage light. Total cost was around $325, no small amount, to be sure. But then again, saving $50 per month on 70+ bulbs...pretty sweet.

Project Name: Compact Fluorescent Replacement x 50 Initial Cost: $250 Recurring cost: $250 every 8000 hours, plus $14.92/month (new bulbs and energy costs, bulbs will probably be cheaper by then) Time involved: 90 minutes (Get the bulbs, remove old, install new) Time to pay off initial investment: about 8 months (varies, the more you use them, the faster they pay off) FREE MONEY: $31.37/month for 50 replacements (about 63 cents per bulb replaced) *Combine these savings with a seven-day thermostat and save $54.11 per month! (about $650 per year!)

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Money for free: Change your thermostat

2006-02-08T14:58:00.000-06:00

I don't like bills. I'd rather have less bills, or at least, smaller bills. The nice thing is that there are ways to use technology to lower your bills. The really nice part is that you don't have to spend a lot to save a lot. I'm going to start posting about how to save some money with minimal or no investment by using technology. This is the first of these postings. Saving money by managing your heater It's winter here in Chicago, and it's cold. If it's winter for you right now, you know that your bills are a lot higher due to the increased heating costs. Whether you heat your home with gas, electric or oil, you can benefit from some thermostat management. Turn the thermostat down Whether you like it or not, 68 degrees is a perfectly normal temperature for the human being to be in. It may feel cold at first, but you can survive just fine at 68. If you're cold, that is what clothes are for. You shouldn't be in the dead of winter and sitting in your beach clothes at 75-78 degrees. Not only are you overheating so you can wear shorts in winter, but the bigger the difference in out- and inside temperature, the more expensive it will be to maintain the temperature. In addition, whether your house is at 50 or 80 degrees, the fridge will have to work to keep itself at about 35 degrees (F) and the freezer at about 30 (F). Also keep in mind that the human body is about equal to a 175-watt heater. You're supposed to be able to keep yourself warm at a reasonable temperature like 68. If not, see a doctor. Get a 7-day thermostat I picked up a deluxe model at Home Depot for $30. It was the cheapest one they had, but allows for the themostat to be adjusted at 4 different times during the day, 7 days a week, plus an extra 'special day program' with 4 times. Here's how it works: On a given weekday, I know that I'll be in bed from midnight to 6:45AM. I'll be up and about from 6:45AM to 7:15AM. I'll be gone from 7:15AM to 5:00PM. I'll be home from 5:00PM to 10:00PM, and I'll be in bed from 10:00PM to midnight. On Saturday and Sunday, I don't know when I'll be home during the day, but I'm pretty sure I'll be in bed from midnight-8:00AM and 10:00PM-midnight. Looking at this information, on the weekdays my house sees me in bed for 8 hours, 45 minutes. I'm gone for 9 hours, 45 minutes. I'm home for 5 hours, 30 minutes. If I keep the thermostat at 68, the temp is higher than it needs to be for me in bed or at work. That's 18 hours, 30 minutes per day that I am over-heating my house. Set the 7-day thermostat Based on the above information, I know I can have the following settings: *Weekdays*

6:30AM: set temp to 68 degrees (I wake up 15 minutes later)
7:30AM: set temp to 55 degrees (I left 15 minutes earlier)
4:40PM: set temp to 68 degrees (I get home in 20 minutes)
10:30PM: set temp to 65 degrees (I fell asleep in a warm bed 30 minutes ago)

*Weekends*

7:30AM: set temp to 68 degrees (I wake up 15-30 minutes later)
10:30PM: set temp to 65 degrees (I fell asleep in a warm bed 30 minutes ago)

*Special Day Programming* (there is a 'SDP' button on the thermostat to put on a daily override for weekday holidays, etc.)

7:30AM: set temp to 68 degrees (I wake up 15-30 minutes later)
10:30PM: set temp to 65 degrees (I fell asleep in a warm bed 30 minutes ago)

As you can see, I can time the heat so that I never notice the lower temperatures, and in the meantime, the heater takes a break during a large part of the day (and the fridge hardly has to do anything all day). That also means I'm not paying to have my house heat itself when it's empty, and have my fridge fight the house to stay cold. A few very important points

The amount you save on your bills will relate to how well insulated your house is, how long you can let it be cold, etc. I can't say you will save $xxx per month, but most people save anywhere between 10-30%, and sometimes as much as 50%+, depending on if you can use the sun to heat your house by opening curtains, efficient windows, etc.
Don't forget about the pets! If you have a pet, make sure the temperature during the day is one that will be warm enough for them!
The thermostat will pay for itself very quickly. My gas bill is about $100, and the electric is about $60. (I'll explain how I do that later) Let's say I save 20% on gas, and 5% on electricity from the fridge. That's $20 + $3 per month I save!
Install the thermostat yourself. It's easy, and comes with easy instructions. If you have an electrician do it, it will take a while to pay off that cost in energy savings
The new themostat comes with a function that will tell you to change the filter after xxx hours of furnace operation. You can program the hours. A clean filter doesn't make the furnace work as hard, and reduces risk of fire, in addition to cleaning the air. Bonus!
My thermostat had a 'copy' feature, where I programmed Monday and copied it to the rest of the weekdays. A big time saver.

Project Name: Thermostat Management Initial Cost: $30 (after tax) Recurring cost: $3.08 per year ($0.26/month for a 4-pack of AA batteries for the new thermostat) Time involved: 30 minutes (remove old themostat, install new thermostat, program thermostat) Time to pay off initial investment: 6 weeks (varies, depends on insulation in the house and how aggresive your programming is) FREE MONEY: $22.74/month (varies, I estimate I'll save at least $23 per month, about 20% on gas, 5% on electricity)

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The knowledge of the blogosphere

2006-02-07T14:59:00.000-06:00

I'm impressed with bloggers, for the most part. I think we all can do without the detailed accounts of exactly how boring someone's life is, though. The best part about blogging is the research aspect. In fact, tat's what I try to do here, mostly. Why not use this as a forum for the advancement of others? In return, I hope to get feedback on my ideas and we can share in the advancements. Take this posting I did a while ago. I wanted to find a way to trade in an assrt (my car) and lose the same amount of debt (credit cards). In the process, I wanted to gain something else (in this case, a higher credit rating and lower mortgage payments), otherwse there was no sense in moving assets around. I worked out a specific order to do things in, and I am happy to say the following: This blogger is putting his money where his mouth is. I sold my car about two weeks ago, and am paying off my last credit card as we speak. I think this is what blogging should be all about; sharing each other's expirience to collectively become more knowledgeable. So far, I have only found one problem with my plan, and it was from feedback from a co-worker. OK, so he didn't comment, but still... The problem is that when you trade in a car for another car, you only have to pay sales tax on the difference in price. So if you trade in a car worth $10K, and the new car is $18K, you only pay sales tax on the $8K difference. By doing my plan, you pay sales tax on the full $18K, since you sold the car for cash. That's OK though, because since I sold my car for $10K, that is only about an extra $800 in sales tax on the new car. Sounds like a lot, but on a 48-month loan, like in my original posting, it only amounts to $16.67. I am planning on easily making that up due to the higher mileage of the new car I'm looking at. Wish me luck, and if you want to contribute to our collective knowledge, feel free to comment!

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free+money

That movie was horrible? Enter WikiScript!

2006-02-06T15:33:00.000-06:00

I got an idea the other day while watching a commercial for the upcoming Pink Panther movie: 'What can we do about horrible movies'? Now, to be fair, the movie isn't out yet (I think), but let's just hypothetically say that it's going to be horrible. Who thinks up these ideas? I'm sure they're highly paid consultants who don't have any idea on what people really want to see or just have some other agenda (Home Alone 3 and Brokeback Mountain). I mean, what is up with the hierarchy here? Should people come up with the ideas for movies, maybe even help write them? Seems like having your product designed by your target audience is a win-win situation. I like this idea, so I introduce to you, "WikiScript". Basically, anyone can log onto the web site, and search by genre. Let's say someone wants to help write a comedy. Click on the 'Comedy' section of the site, and you will see all of the works in progress listed, and a short description, much like the back cover of a DVD. Anyone registered with a user account could edit any script, and anyone could edit their edits. Furthermore, there would be a mechanism in place that would keep track of how many words you have contributed to a script. In the end, when the script is done, it ould be listed as 'completed', and have a list of all of the contributors, and how many words they contributed. The script would be free to be read by anyone. To compensate people for their creative genius, the license for use would be that any production that earns money with the script would have to pay a portion of the proceeds (maybe 10%?) to the authors. That 10% would be divided up by how much each author contributed. Sound like a good idea? I think so! Let me know if you like this idea, and I'll make the site.

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Rapid Web Prototyping with Open Source: Part 7

2006-02-03T15:00:00.000-06:00

At this point, we have a perfectly-functioning web site: http://intranet.domain.com/joomla with a great backend: http://intranet.domain.com/joomla/administrator username: admin password: whatever you put in when you installed Joomla We're looking pretty good with all of our sample data in there, but it's time you learned how to administrate Joomla. Lucky for you, they have a manual for the Administrator backend. Read it. Un-publishing the sample data I want to keep the sample data in the site so I can look at it later if I need help figuring out how to make a menu, or if I want to copy off of something. But I don't want to have people see it. It's easy to 'un-publish' these pages in Joomla. They'll still be there in the admin backend, but not be published to the frontend. Log in to the admin backend. Click 'Content Items Manager' (news). Click the checkbox at the top of the list to select all of the stories. Click the 'Unpublish' button on the top-right menu. On the top-left menu, do the same for: Content > Static Content (web pages) Modules > Site Modules (we'll turn a few back on in a sec - modules are how components display stuff on the web site. think of component-module as computer-screen) Menu > mainmenu (except leave 'Home' published) Menu > othermenu Menu > usermenu (except 'Logout', if you take this away and publish the 'login' site module, users won't be able to log out..) Menu > topmenu OK, have a look at the site now. All clean. But wait - we told the main menu to publish the 'home' link! Well, the menu itself isn't published. On the admin backend, go back to the site modules and publish the main and user menus. Now the site is ready to be made your own. Check out the default site modules, and see if you're lucky enough to be able to use some of those. I went with mainmenu, usermenu, login form, syndicate (RSS feed maker), and template chooser (just for now, so I can easily test all of my templates as a user). I also went and published one example news item, and set it to display to the frontpage. Since I'm not going to be using the news archive, all of my news will have to be on the front page to be visible. However, it is possible to navigate to a published, non-front-page news story from within a published front-page news story. Bottom line, don't publish it if you don't want it out there. At this point, the junk is not being displayed on the web site, and before I install any third-party components and modules, I want to decide on how my site will look. Installing Templates

If you haven't found a template you want to use, or want to use the default templates, either go find one or skip ahead...

In the admin backend, hit Installers > Templates - Site (because we want to change the look of the web site, not the admin backend) Hit 'browse' and find the .zip file you downloaded for your template. Click 'upload and install'. It's that easy. (Note: Joomla looks for a specifically-put-together zip file. Sometimes people have the template zip file along with a README or something inside of another zip file. Joomla doesn't like this, you'll have to get to the bare template .zip file. Hit 'Continue' and repeat for all of your templates. When you're done, log out and go to the web site frontend to play with the templates. Choose your favorite. I decided on one that is called apple_com. It basically looks exactly like the www.apple.com web site. I figure I'll put a real apple on top and have a humorous educational site... :-) Now you can unpublish the template chooser module, and go to site > templates > site templates. Select your template of choice and choose 'default'. 'assign' is used if you want different templates for different parts of your site. Note: I noticed what may be a bug, in that, if you leave template chooser on a template, it will use that template, even when the template chooser module is unpublished. No matter what template to tell the site to use in the admin backend. ??? Workaround: make sure your template is chosen when you un-publish the template chooser module, and then set the default template in the backend. Summary Time spent in article: 60 minutes (30 minutes to read admin manual) Time left for project: 295 minutes (over halfway done on time, and looking great!) Goals accomplished:

Learned how to use the admin backend
Cleaned up the Joomla installation, while retaining valuable references
Selected which default modules to use
Selected the site design via template

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Rapid Web Prototyping with Open Source: Part 6

2006-02-02T15:01:00.000-06:00

Getting a little stressful now - I've used up about 3.5 hours getting a machine set up with the Ubuntu OS, setting it up to be a web server, and finding all of the Joomla packages that look like they might be remotely helpful in my situation. This last step is actually pretty important to the 'Rapid Prototyping' that I'm doing. By grabbing 3 or 4 calendar modules, for example, I won't have to waste time going and looking for another one if the first one is junk. I can just throw all four of them into the site and see which one fits the site best. This is where having a popular and modular Content Management System like Joomla is helpful. In addition, it is also important to note that there are a lot of modules out there that allow you to connect Joomla to other web systems. A perfect example of this is a phpBB forum. Basically, I would install the forum in the /forum directory of my web server, install Joomla in the /joomla folder, and find a little module that links Joomla to the forum and provides the SSO that I'm looking for. This is definitely another plus for Joomla, in that you not only have LOTS of modules to choose from, but chances are that you can tie other web apps into Joomla. Speaking of Joomla... Installing Joomla Got the latest .zip install file from joomla.org? Make a folder on your desktop called 'Joomla' and extract the contents of the zip file to that folder. Windows has a free extraction utility built in, but a lot of people use WinZip (trial version - free!). You should have a 10MB folder now. I know, it's huge. But worth it. Fire up your favorite free FTP client, I use an old version of WS_FTP. It's not offered by the company any more, but you can find a copy of WS_FTP LE here: oldversion.com. You should have an FTP account set up for the server. FTP into the server using your credentials, and find the web root. This will be listed as /wwwroot, and might have folders like /public_html and /public_ftp in it. If you've got a folder called public_html, open it up. Transfer the /joomla folder from your desktop to the web server. This will take a while, so we'll go do something else for a bit. Setting up the MySQL database for Joomla You should have phpMyAdmin installed. If you don't, install it. It's a big help in managing the MySQL backend of the web server. Log in to MySQL and create a user named 'joomla' (no quotes) and give it a password. Then create a database called 'joomla' (no quotes) and give the user 'joomla' all-access rights to the database. What we're doing here is giving the joomla installation its own user credentials so it can work with the MySQL server without having to use a person's name and password.

Joomla should be done uploading by now. If it's not, see if there are any other components you might want. Or look for a template that will make your web site look the way you want. I went over to joomlaya and found a few good ones that are 1024 pixels wide (a lot of templates are only 800 wide - watch out if you don't want this). As with the components, the look of my site might not be what fits your situation.

Now that all of the files are on the server, fire up your browser and go to http://yourserver.domain.com/joomla. You should be greeted by the 'pre-installation check' page. Yes, it really is going to be this easy! Check that the required folders have the right permissions. You can usually set the permissions using your FTP client. If having the permissions set to 755 doesn't work, you can set them to 777 and then switch them back to 755 later. Test to make sure this works on your web server though. Don't worry about configuration.php, we'll get it later. When able, hit next. Agree to the GPL, next. host name - localhost username - joomla (remember?) password - ********** DB name - joomla database prefix - jos_ This last setting is OK. A lot of tables get put in the joomla DB from components, etc., and the table prefix just makes it easier to tell what tables belong to what component. I've seen some components rely on the jos_ prefix for Joomla tables, so just leave it. I always install sample data. It's easier/faster to modify existing menus, etc. than to create them. Name your site. Enter in an admin email address and password. You can choose what default permissions get applied to new folders and files when you install components, etc. I kept the defaults. OK, this part is important. Fire up the FTP client and copy the text it gives you and replace the contents of configuration.php-dist with that text. Rename configuration.php-dist to configuration.php. Delete the /installation directory. NOW you can see your site by clicking the 'view site' button. The website is online. And has a lot of sample news and menus. Good job. Summary Time spent in this article: 60 minutes Time remaining for project: 325 minutes Goals accomplished:

Set up MySQL for Joomla
Install the Joomla Core
Find a template that will make Joomla look like I want it

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Rapid Web Prototyping with Open Source: Part 5

2006-02-01T15:02:00.000-06:00

Setting up Ubuntu to be a web server In the process of configuring Ubuntu to be a web server, the soon-to-be-boat-anchor machine I was using died. That's probably why it was pulled from production... Anyway, I had to go find some instructions that were for my version of Ubuntu, and found these very excellent instructions by Till Brehm and Falko Timme at howtoforge.com. Follow their directions, and you'll have a full-fledged LAMP web server with mail and ftp support, which will get you up to speed with where I'm at now... with the web server running, plugged into the power strip and ethernet jack only. Everything will be done via the web and FTP from here on out! While we wait for the Joomla Core to download... Choosing additional packages for Joomla I made this simple on myself. I loaded up the Joomla Developer Forge, sorted by date (recent first) and downloaded anything that looked like it might fit into either a) where my organization is at or b) where they could be/might want to be with this intranet tool. It's important to stay focused here. There are a lot of "cool" components out there, but not all of them will be helpful. You'll notice I have more than one event calendar solution, etc. This is because I'm not sure which (if any) will work for me. Here's what I got, along with the author comments.

It is important to note that my organization is different than yours! I'll only use maybe a half-dozen of these, but since there are good and bad modules, this is what you call the 'shotgun approach' - try it all and see if you get a hit!

Components that look interesting for this project: (some more important than others) Gottesdienst Component This project is aimed to contain a little custom Joomla! component I've written to maintain the service events for the web page of our church. Joomnik Gallery This is a simple component displaying images of items from specific folders, using CSS to shape frontend display and Javascript for slideshow. Image operations must be performed through FTP or Media Manager. Each item can have up to 10 fields of information associated with it, which are stored in Joomla database. In case of multilanguage site, common words used in items description can be translated. SEF Service Map SEF Service Map Component creates a complete sitemap (index) for Your site, and is a good solution for Joomla! and Mambo CMS. Component uses standard defined menus to generate a dynamic site map. This Map is integrated with standard CMS components, like: content, weblinks, contacts and newsfeeds. Thanks to mambots integration, component has open structure and can be integrated with additional components, like: galeries, forums, shops and other. Components integrated with Sef Service Map are at the moment: - Mambo Phpshop - VirtueMart - Simpleboard Forum - Joomlaboard Forum - PhpBB Forum and the next mambot-integrators coming soon. Now, You can configure the number of sublevels, columns, visible menus, menu items and other parameters. josCommunity josCommunity is a custom Joomla portal designed with all the needs of a community website. josCommunity aims to provide a one-click solution to the need for community projects and sites. Current features are: Community based web site, Photo Album, User Home Pages, Private Messaging, Forums, Mailing Lists, Glossary, Calendar, Download Repository, FAQs, Bad Word Filtering, Online Polls, Awards for Users, Google Sitemap Generator, Dynamic User Sitemap, User Shoutbox, Advanced Search Engine Friendly Management System, Advanced Site Statistics Tracking MetaFly mambot For up to date versions of this bot, please visit: http://www.jomres.net/component/option,com_docman/task,cat_view/gid,20/Itemid,79/ I don't know about anybody else, but I get bored with searching through the text of my content to find sensible words to use in the meta keywords of a given page. metaFly is a mambot that will search through the content of the page being viewed & will append frequently occuring words to the keywords section of your meta data (on the fly). It has several filters: Offending elements, which will simply filter out something that you don't like, eg ", stopwords, which will filter out specific words, and goldwords, which are words that should be retained regardless of the frequency of their appearance. Header Image This module allows to change images based on Section-, Category-, Main Menu or Current Menu Item-ID of the actual content. Supports default image file, checks for presence of image files and supports Module Class Suffix for CSS styling. With its ability to support HTML Code integration also Flash files can be used in addition to static images. jAwards This components helps you to manage awards in a Joomla: You can create medals, hand them out to the users, and display them e.g. in Simpleboard or Community Builder. Joomla OWA intergration This will be a module that will Connect to your Exchange server 2003 OWA. JEvents This project will bring the well known and loved Events Calendar to Joomla. Originally by Eric Lamette, mod by Dave McDonnell. This project will host the component (events), the related calendar module (events_cal) and the latest events module (events_latest). Here you can: * let us know what features you'd like to see and * report bugs encountered by the existing events components and modules in Joomla installations Birthday Component Simple birthday component and related module. In the admin interface you can insert people's name and birthdate. The module will show upcoming birthdays in the next x days. Player Profiles A component for a team database with profiles and uploadable image files. perForms perForms is a Joomla/Mambo Component, that allows admins to easily create dynamic forms using this component on their site. Results can be emailed to any email addresses, or saved in a database table and using a basic report page, all results in database can be viewed. All form elements and simple validation rules are supported. Google Adsense Referrals Module Google Adsense Referrals Module allows webmasters to place Googles new referral ads on ones site. The module is easy to use and covers all the languages available for these referral ads. Banner Manager Advanced This component is an rewrite of the Joomla included banner manager with loads of added features including, start date / end date, list multiple banners in multiple locations PLUS lots more - worth checking out!! Submit Content Want to expand your sites with a lot of useful articles? Why not let your users or guests share their contents and ideas! This component is based on EZ CZ Submit from MamboZip.com (now is www.joomlaya.com). The project aim to enhanced, updated, and fixed many bugs in EZ CZ Submit. Some new features in Submit Content component: - Full multiligual support. - Changed the whole source code to enhanced User's Accessibility and Interface. - Administrator can now config the MAXSIZE of upload images! - Intergrated SecurityImage of WalterCedric --> better anti spamer and hacker. - Installer Guide is now more clear. Auto chmod created folder. - and many more... ExtCalendar Events Calendar This events calendar component & mini-calendar module are ports of the gorgeous-looking ExtCalendar 2 by Mohamed Moujami at extcal.sourceforge.net. Allows for easy addition and management of customizable events to your site's calendar. This joomla project has been created because the original project at mamboforge seems not to be maintained any longer. Analytics Get Fantastic Stats for your website with Google analytics Obtenez des statistiques hors du commun avec Google analytics Player Roster A small solution to show the world who is playing in your team a picture and some personal stats about the player. Right now it can only manage one category of players, but categories will be added soon, so that this component can be userd to manage multiple teams (e.g. football team, cheerleaders, junior team) josquote Josquote creates graphically pleasing quotes from text in articles. Just {josquote}quote something{/josquote} and it will show that text in nice indented area. http://www.primakoala.com/josquote/ DutyRoster This component will allow registered users to sign-up/volunteer for various duties and various times. This is useful for organizations and groups that need help from their members with events. It will allow users to pick a role and a time off of a grid. Other members will be allowed to view the filled and available slots and sign up for remaining available slots. What's On A system to manage listings for events on your Joomla! site. Post events according to categories, list upcoming events for each category, list upcoming events for next seven days, or list all upcoming events. ldap hack joomla 1.02 Modified ldap hack version 9 for joomla Attend Events Atend Events is a fork of the Events Session component http://mamboforge.net/projects/eventssessions/ created by Tony Blair greenBILL a billing component for joomla mod_include A very short module whose only purpose is to built a module which includes a PHP/HTML file. Usefull to display ads, or pages coming from previous site. Param : file to be included. E Knowledge Management To manage the knowledge happen in workplace com_securityimages Security Images or CAPTCHA for Joomla Ever been to a site where you had to register and the registration form required that you type in the same phrase that is found in a hard-to-read image? Joomla has now this possibility thanks to my component com_securityimages. CAPTCHA definition: A captcha (an acronym for "completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart") is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to determine whether or not the user is human. The term was coined in 2000 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, and Nicholas J. Hopper of Carnegie Mellon University, and John Langford of IBM. A common type of captcha requires that the user type the letters of a distorted and/or obscured sequence of letters or digits that appears on the screen. JoomlaDesk A helpdesk component, capible of creating tickets, email allert, user learing, help database, main work list, personal work list, overvieuws, prioratising, planning and manny more. It was for mambo (private) and now i am upgrading it and porting to joomla (public) PCM Personal Content Manager - Allows Admin to define in Backend in what Sections/Categories an Editor is allowed to write articles. In Frontend component the Editor only can edit the Content written by him. Z Weather This component and module combination displays weather from U.S. cities using data provided by the National Weather Service. Current conditions, forecasts and weather alerts are supported for multiple locations. Z Weather uses data from the National Weather Service, which means you can provide accurate weather information on your Joomla web site with no advertising from a commercial weather provider. A demo of the component and module can be seen at http://www.zcontent.net . The latest release is available for download in the File Releases section. LDAP Tools LDAP tools contains a variety of useful items (mambots and components) for the LDAP environment, tested in a Novell eDirectory environment. It contains: - LDAP User Synchronization - LDAP User Authentication - LDAP Single Sign On Google SiteMap Google SiteMap Component for Joomla EZ Store A simple ecommerce solution for online sellers. Google Sitemap Generator A full backend Admin component which generates the XML file for Google Sitemap. Further a Module will be released which will generate the XML automatically on a specified time and if possible Google will be infomed IMAP IMAP email Client for joomla! On This Day in History This is a component and module that will allow a Joomla site to display what happened on this day in history text. The module will print a brief description and allow a clickthrough to the component giving more detailed information. jDonations Joomla Donations module, a Paypal IPN donation solution for the Joomla! Content Management System. Children Submenu I have created a small module that will display an item's children (as determined by the mainmenu) in a submenu of its own. If a child from the submenu is clicked on, this module will check if the that item has children as well and will display the children of the child and so on... I was finding that I was having to create so many submenus with the menu manager and it wasnt dynamic what-so-ever. I wanted to be able to click on an item, and if the item had immediate children, show those children in a seperate menu dynamilcally. Hope this helps others. DS-Syndicate DS-Syndicate is a replacement of the standard Syndicate module of Joomla. It contains the RSS formats: 0.91, 1.0, 2.0, OPML and Atom 0.3. Some Features:Only Frontpage items or all items, Create a feed per category, Multiple feeds possible, Different formats RSS, OPML, ATOM, Add a picture to the feed, Statistics http://www.JoomlaFun.com/ is the place for support. livesupport Install a live support chat to your website, is easy, this is the second version, all the code in english and work with JavaScript+XMLHttpRequest+PHP, and multilanguage. Image of the Day A module to display an image of the DAY OR an image of the WEEK. Admin parameters for: image folder, image type, mode of operation, link, sizing, default image, alt text, module class suffix and Debug Mode to show image path & url being called by your settings. Calendar Calendar gives your visitor the possibility to view the events the site manages. Day/Month/Year list views are supported. An administrator can define events. phpbb phpBB modificated to work within joomla. Please check www.tim-online.nl/redirect.php?forum for support questions VirtueMart The complete Shopping Mall Solution for the Content Management System Joomla!. It is already used by thousands of storeowners. It can also be used as a Catalogue. Its powerful Administration Tool can handle an unlimited number of Categories, Products, Orders, Customers.. WebAmoeba Ticket System The WebAmoeba Ticket System is a help ticket support system component for Mambo and Joomla. For more information see http://www.webamoeba.co.uk Jobline Jobline is a component to let clients publish job postings on your website. CiviCRM CiviCRM is a Constituent Relationship Management System for Joomla! (and other CMS) RSGallery2 Based on the original RSGallery, RSGallery2 aims to be the easiest to use and most functional photo and image gallery available for Joomla! Google Site Search Description: "Google Site Search" is a module for Joomla that enables you to search your site by using the Google-Site-Search feature. The classic search is also implemented. There are different options to choose like the background-color and others. It supports GoogleAdsense. AJAX Shoutbox This Joomla module adds live chat functionality to your Joomla site. Your visitors can chat with eachother right in your website without refreshing their browsers. Itâ€™s almost like chatting on an instant messenging network! And itâ€™s all powered by AJAX, a hot new old technology that powers things like Gmail, Google Maps, and other brilliant web apps. Now, you can get a piece of all this in your own site. Gallery2 Bridge Bridge Component to Embed Gallery2 into Joomla. The Main development and Support is given at http://opensource.4theweb.nl JUICE Joomla User Import ComponEnt allows a site administrator to import usernames, passwords, and email addresses into Joomla's user manager from a properly formated CSV text file. josCommerce josCommerce is a port of mosCommerce (developed by http://www.byrgius.com) which was orignially designed to port osCommerce to Mambo 4.5.2. The initial goal of this project is to create a port of osCommerce for Joomla! (relying heavily upon the mosCommerce code developed by Byrgius). Longer range goals will strive to modularize josCommerce (at the cost of backward/forward compatability with osCommerce) and in doing so fully separate Presentation from Business logic and provide more robust integration within the Joomla! framework. This site is a demo of the current release candidate v1.0.1 It is intended to serve as a testing bed for those interested in kicking the tires. Those interested in downloading this code are encouraged to visit the forge at http://developer.joomla.org/sf/sfmain/do/viewProject/projects.joscommerce and check it out of the subversion repository - located in the branches directory under 1.0.1. - at http://scm.joomla.org/svn/repos/joscommerce/branches/release_1.0.1 josCommerce uses the major.minor.micro (eg. 0.18.2) release numbering convention. Major - Indicates a very large change in the core package. Rewrites or major milestones. Minor - Significant amount of feature addition/modification. Micro - Usually bug fixes or minor features School This component shows student classroom allocations, personal details of students (including parents and contact stuff), marks, lessons and more. Appointment Scheduler A multi-department and multi-person (or resource) scheduling component that is highly flexible. Each appointment department (category) can use customized appointment fields. Provides an Outlook-like look and feel. Community Builder Community Builder suite extends the Joomla! user management system. Key features: extra fields in profile, enhanced registration workflows, user lists, admin defined tabs, image upload, front-end workflow management, integration with other components, etc. Summary Time spent in article: 120 minutes Time left for project: 385 minutes Goals accomplished:

Joomla Core is downloaded
I have enough extra components to compare to each other, possibly enough to finih the project

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Rapid Web Prototyping with Open Source: Part 4

2006-01-31T15:04:00.000-06:00

Operating System Installation Ok, I have my machine ready to go.. er, well, as ready as it will ever be. This machine was previously known as a Win98/2000 lab machine, rocking out a 400mhz P3, 256MB of ramdom memory modules I stuffed in there, an aenemic 4.3GB hard drive, a 10/100 NIC (with BNC connector!) a 54x CD drive (seems like the best part of the machine) and a 4MB video card (woo!). It should be enough to handle web server duties, but since this machine is free and represents what most people probably have laying around (at least). I'll stick with it, even though I suspect it most likely is a little underpowered. CD ISO burned to disk, disk in drive, machine on. BIOS Had to change the machine to boot from CD before C. Not that I didn't have a touch of nostalgia seeing the Windows 2000 splash screen...or was that nausea? Install I chose to install the base installaton, since this isn't a workstation. Language > English, US. Keyboard: US While it's installing, time to go look into what needs to be done to turn this Linux server into a LAMP! Google to the rescue - found this forum posting by 'machiner' over at ubuntuforums.org entitled 'This may help newbies - Quick LAMP howto - Ubuntu'. It sounds like a pain, and is written for a previous version of Ubuntu. I'll read this while the machine finishes installing, and use it if the default installers in Ubuntu don't work. hostname > intranet erase hda1 (format hard drive and use default partitions) > yes > yes [waiting] D'oh! - drive failure! trying another 4.3GB drive with default Ubuntu install......OK OK, so while that finishes loading (on a good hard drive), I'll go looking for the Joomla Components and Modules that I want to use, in addition to the defaults that come with Joomla. It's not hard to find these via google or the Joomla Developer SourceForge, and most of them are released under the GPL. Summary Time spent in article: 60 (ouch!) Time spent on project: 505 Goals accomplished:

Installed Operating system - Ubuntu Linux 5.10 'Breezy Badger'

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Rapid Web Prototyping with Open Source: Part 3

2006-01-30T15:05:00.000-06:00

The Content Management System / Website core OK, so while the Ubuntu CD is still downloading (using my open-source Firefox browser, of course), I need to find an open-source Content Management System (CMS) that has a frontend, an administrative backend, and enough community support and add-on modules that I'll be able to do everything I want to do. There are a lot of these out there, and a lot of great sites to demo a lot of these CMSs. I'm going to choose Joomla, since I've used Mambo before, and I know there's literally thousands of modules that plug in to Mambo/Joomla. What's up with the name? Joomla used to be called Mambo, and there was some debate or something that Mambo wasn't always going to be 100% open-source, so all the developers left and made their own CMS called Joomla. Joomla 1.0 was basically exactly the same as Mambo 4.5.2, but with a few extras that had been in development before the split. What the... not a good sign here... the Joomla website is having some problems. Seems like a bad omen. We'll find out, no turning back now... I managed to find a copy of Joomla 1.0.7 on Softpedia's website, downloading the 2.4MB file now... ISO Imaging I just realized that I have no way of getting my Ubuntu Install CD onto an actual CD. Right now I am 17% away from having it downloaded! Luckily, I've used a program before for Windows XP called ISO Recorder, and it's free. Whew! A quick download, and I'm ready to burn that CD...when it gets done downloading. Summary Time spent in this article: 15 minutes Time remaining for project: 565 minutes Goals accomplished:

Content Management System found
ISO imaging program found (unplanned)

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Rapid Web Prototyping with Open Source: Part 2

2006-01-27T15:06:00.000-06:00

Internal IP's and External Subdomains OK, so before I do anything, I need a machine to build on. It needs to be in the DMZ, so both external and internal computers can find it. That means assigning it a static IP address, which I can look into while the OS is loading. I make the computer name 'intranet', and people who are in my xyzdomain.org network will be able to hit the server in their web browser at intranet.xyzdomain.org. For people outside my organization, I need to register a domain name so that when someone surfs to extranet.xyzdomain.org, it will hit port 80 on my org's firewall, and get forwarded to the web server internally. Luckily, we already have a domain name, so registering the 'extranet' subdomain to point to the firewall (along with the default 'www' subdomain) is a simple matter. I'll do all of the registration work while I load the OS on the machine. The Operating System My time is short, so I need something that comes ready as a web server out of the box. Since I need all open-source web management components, it's almost a no-brainer to go for a LAMP server, that is, Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. Just need to find a Linux Distribution that comes with LAMP pre-installed. Since that narrows it down to a few hundred distributions, I'll go with one I've used before: Ubuntu. Ubuntu is a great Linux distribution to start using as a workstation, we'll see how well it does as a web server. It's ease of LAMP-component installation is mostly what I'm interested in. While downloading the Ubuntu x86 Install CD (617MB!), I'll register the external subdomain and prep one of the computers I have lying around with the newest used power supply, max memory and newest used hard drives I have. After that, I'll look far a baseline Content Management system that will form the core framework of my website. Summary Time Spent in this article: 20 minutes Time remaining for project: 580 minutes Goals accomplished in this article:

Prepared for external and internal access to future machine
Found solution for OS, Web Server and Web Application support
Readied machine for implementation

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Rapid Web Prototyping with Open Source: Part 1

2006-01-26T15:07:00.000-06:00

The concept of Rapid Prototyping in manufacturing is fairly simple: get an idea and bang it out to see if it fits your application. In the same sense, for someone as myself who has to be a jack of many trades (NetAdmin, TechSupport, WebDesign, HelpDesk, etc.), I don't have a lot of time to develop anything substantial as far as web applications are concerned. The bad part, though, is that I see an enormous potential for web applications at my organization. Some of this potential I see comes from the fact that I'm always looking to bring the best tools to the job, and enjoy using communications tools to utilize my organization's strong points. I also end up finding great tools while searching for others. Even if you don't have a need for a web application or multiple applications in your organization, just the process of seeing what's out there may just get the wheels turning to something that is really out of this world! In the next few postings, I will be commenting as I build an Extranet/Intranet system for my organization. Here will be the requirements for this project, possibly subject to review as I go along. I recommend these criteria for anyone interested in rapid web development:

All portions of the Extranet/Intranet must be as close as possible to the organization's current business model. Additional tools that fit the organization's business model, but are not currently used, are encouraged
All portions of the Extranet/Intranet must be at a usability level equal to the least-qualified of its users
All software/web applicaions used in the development of the project must be either Open Source, in an established Open Format or 100% free to anyone who would like to use it. This includes everything from the Operating System on the server to database management to web content services to FTP tools, etc. This is done to keep material costs as low as possible.
All portions of the Extranet/Intranet must support Single Sign-On (SSO)
The maximum development time on this project will be no more than 2 weeks (10 business days) and for no more than 60 minutes per day (a maximum of 600 minutes, or 10 hours total development time). The Extranet/Intranet project must be in the production environment with the users trained on how to use it at the end of the time limit. (With the $30/hour I usually charge people for web development on my own time, this puts the entire solution cost at $450 + material costs)

Seems a little crazy now that I look at it. Oh, and one final thing: I'm going to be doing this for real. I manage a small school district with 3 campuses on a WAN. This will be a production-grade Extranet/Intranet for an educational environment. Unfortunately for me, the rules listed above were for a corporate Extranet/Intranet, but that just covers my office staff. I'll have to account for teachers, parents and students. Might run out of time before I can customize anything. Let's find out...

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Corrupt Politicians: Little Brother is watching you

2006-01-25T15:07:00.000-06:00

In this podcast, there is a great discussion of the future of multimedia recordings, it's really worth a listen, and has some good ideas: IT Conversations: Jamais Cascio - Personal Memory Assistants One thing that really struck me was the potential for a "PMA" device to be an anti-corruption device. I thought I'd hash out a quick plan for one:

A waterproof enclosure like an iPod mini, but a smaller LCD can be substituted for our purposes.
With the smaller LCD, an embedded 802.11n (once it comes out) antenna could be installed in the device, to provide near-constant (theoretical) 540 Mbit/s wireless access.
A mic-in jack, for a lapel-microphone.
A fuel cell battery, not unlike the ones currently in development for mobile phones.
A one-inch 20GB Hitachi microdrive, the same size as the iPod mini.

Basically, the idea would be to have this voice recorder running embedded Linux. The device could be set to turn on when the user was 'on the clock', and turn off when they weren't. Audio would be recorded to the device, and would be sent via encrypted VPN over the 802.11n network at regular intervals, say, in 5-minute 'chunks' Of course, the device would have to be able to transmit using only government-approved VPN encryption standards, and there would be a secure installation on the other side of the VPN connection that would be storing these transcripts. This solution might also be good for people who want to cover themselves if they are in high-liability situations, such as celebrities, lawyers, etc. In addition, with the added ability to triangulate on the device via 802.11n, (methods already exist for tracing it's geographical location any time it is online) this device could be used to ensure probation, house arrest, and other law enforcement. The signals could also be tagged with the geographic location when they are sent at the 5-minute intervals, so that the audio could be searchable by location. (You could call up all of your activity when you were at "XYZ corporation's" main office, for example) The hard drive space also opens the device up for video capturing also, which could be helpful to surgeons, etc. Depending on the video transmission rate, a Bluetooth-enabled earpiece with video and audio inputs could be made. This brings a host of other problems, however, as the signals would have to be sent encrypted via Bluetooth to the base unit, and powering audio, video and encryption in a small device could prove challenging. However, this would open up a world of possibility! With a video-compliant version of Riya (for example), you would be able to search on "Grandma", and replay every moment you shared with her, without having to manually go back and tag the video. Or possibly search for "XYZ Contract", and replay that verbal contract that you now need evidence of... The device should probably be accessible via a Mini-B USB 2.0 or preferably a 9-pin FireWire 800 for firmware upgrades and programming. It should be stressed, however, that the ability to lock out the user from tampering should be preserved to enable the device to be able to perform as an 'honesty check' when used with felons or government employees. Any other earth-changing ideas? Let's hear them!

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Eisenhower warns of a corporate government: Part 7

2006-01-24T15:08:00.000-06:00

So -- in this my last good night to you as your President -- I thank you for the many opportunities you have given me for public service in war and peace. I trust that in that service you find some things worthy; as for the rest of it, I know you will find ways to improve performance in the future. You and I -- my fellow citizens -- need to be strong in our faith that all nations, under God, will reach the goal of peace with justice. May we be ever unswerving in devotion to principle, confident but humble with power, diligent in pursuit of the Nation's great goals. To all the peoples of the world, I once more give expression to America's prayerful and continuing aspiration: We pray that peoples of all faiths, all races, all nations, may have their great human needs satisfied; that those now denied opportunity shall come to enjoy it to the full; that all who yearn for freedom may experience its spiritual blessings; that those who have freedom will understand, also, its heavy responsibilities; that all who are insensitive to the needs of others will learn charity; that the scourges of poverty, disease and ignorance will be made to disappear from the earth, and that, in the goodness of time, all peoples will come to live together in a peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love.

Eisenhower warns of a corporate government: Part 6

2006-01-23T15:09:00.000-06:00

Down the long lane of the history yet to be written America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect. Such a confederation must be one of equals. The weakest must come to the conference table with the same confidence as do we, protected as we are by our moral, economic, and military strength. That table, though scarred by many past frustrations, cannot be abandoned for the certain agony of the battlefield. Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative. Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose. Because this need is so sharp and apparent I confess that I lay down my official responsibilities in this field with a definite sense of disappointment. As one who has witnessed the horror and the lingering sadness of war -- as one who knows that another war could utterly destroy this civilization which has been so slowly and painfully built over thousands of years -- I wish I could say tonight that a lasting peace is in sight. Happily, I can say that war has been avoided. Steady progress toward our ultimate goal has been made. But, so much remains to be done. As a private citizen, I shall never cease to do what little I can to help the world advance along that road.

Eisenhower warns of a corporate government: Part 5

2006-01-20T15:10:00.000-06:00

Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we peer into society's future, we -- you and I, and our government -- must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.

Eisenhower warns of a corporate government: Part 4

2006-01-19T15:10:00.000-06:00

A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction. Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea. Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations. This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together. Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades. In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government. Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific technological elite. It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system -- ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.

Eisenhower warns of a corporate government: Part 3

2006-01-18T15:11:00.000-06:00

Throughout America's adventure in free government, our basic purposes have been to keep the peace; to foster progress in human achievement, and to enhance liberty, dignity and integrity among people and among nations. To strive for less would be unworthy of a free and religious people. Any failure traceable to arrogance, or our lack of comprehension or readiness to sacrifice would inflict upon us grievous hurt both at home and abroad. Progress toward these noble goals is persistently threatened by the conflict now engulfing the world. It commands our whole attention, absorbs our very beings. We face a hostile ideology -- global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method. Unhappily the danger is poses promises to be of indefinite duration. To meet it successfully, there is called for, not so much the emotional and transitory sacrifices of crisis, but rather those which enable us to carry forward steadily, surely, and without complaint the burdens of a prolonged and complex struggle -- with liberty the stake. Only thus shall we remain, despite every provocation, on our charted course toward permanent peace and human betterment. Crises there will continue to be. In meeting them, whether foreign or domestic, great or small, there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties. A huge increase in newer elements of our defense; development of unrealistic programs to cure every ill in agriculture; a dramatic expansion in basic and applied research -- these and many other possibilities, each possibly promising in itself, may be suggested as the only way to the road we wish to travel. But each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs -- balance between the private and the public economy, balance between cost and hoped for advantage -- balance between the clearly necessary and the comfortably desirable; balance between our essential requirements as a nation and the duties imposed by the nation upon the individual; balance between actions of the moment and the national welfare of the future. Good judgment seeks balance and progress; lack of it eventually finds imbalance and frustration. The record of many decades stands as proof that our people and their government have, in the main, understood these truths and have responded to them well, in the face of stress and threat. But threats, new in kind or degree, constantly arise. I mention two only.

Eisenhower warns of a corporate government: Part 2

2006-01-17T15:12:00.000-06:00

We now stand ten years past the midpoint of a century that has witnessed four major wars among great nations. Three of these involved our own country. Despite these holocausts America is today the strongest, the most influential and most productive nation in the world. Understandably proud of this pre-eminence, we yet realize that America's leadership and prestige depend, not merely upon our unmatched material progress, riches and military strength, but on how we use our power in the interests of world peace and human betterment.

Eisenhower warns of a corporate government: Part 1

2006-01-16T15:13:00.000-06:00

My fellow Americans: Three days from now, after half a century in the service of our country, I shall lay down the responsibilities of office as, in traditional and solemn ceremony, the authority of the Presidency is vested in my successor. This evening I come to you with a message of leave-taking and farewell, and to share a few final thoughts with you, my countrymen. Like every other citizen, I wish the new President, and all who will labor with him, Godspeed. I pray that the coming years will be blessed with peace and prosperity for all. Our people expect their President and the Congress to find essential agreement on issues of great moment, the wise resolution of which will better shape the future of the Nation. My own relations with the Congress, which began on a remote and tenuous basis when, long ago, a member of the Senate appointed me to West Point, have since ranged to the intimate during the war and immediate post-war period, and, finally, to the mutually interdependent during these past eight years. In this final relationship, the Congress and the Administration have, on most vital issues, cooperated well, to serve the national good rather than mere partisanship, and so have assured that the business of the Nation should go forward. So, my official relationship with the Congress ends in a feeling, on my part, of gratitude that we have been able to do so much together.

Eisenhower warns of a corporate government: Intro

2006-01-13T15:14:00.000-06:00

This posting is part of a series from a speech made in 1961 by then-president Eisenhower. It accurately warns the citizens of the Untied States of the times to come, the time when the military and sociological agenda of the Untied States would be dictated by military industry. At the time, this was corporate America. In modern times, this speech rings painfully true as an unheeded warning to the level of control corporate America now holds on our country. I have chosen to go back to this era, as it seems to be 'where it all went wrong' in modern America. You will never hear these types of warnings again, as it seems that corporate America has finally purchased its way to the top. In reality, it is my sincere hope that this speech inspires any readers of this blog to stand up for what is right, for what they believe in, and to refuse to let the power of money over-run your own sense of morality. The fears of President Eisenhower to date have been, and are currently being realized. When asking yourself what happened to the United States of the Moon missions, Norman Rockwell, apple pie, etc., consider this speech as it was in 1961: a warning of what was to come. I post this speech not as a criticism of our current government, but as a criticism of the control it has allowed itself to fall under, and the losses, both physical and ideological, which we have suffered.

The nature of human intelligence

2006-01-12T15:14:00.000-06:00

In writing my last post on email client satisfaction and dependence on users, I dedicated the 45-minute commute home to thinking about the nature of people's intelligence, whether technological and otherwise. No radio, etc. :-) I've thought up a basic roadmap, but need other's comments to fine-tune it. Here's what I came up with so far: Knowledge Otherwise known as 'book smarts' Being knowledgeable is something to can attain experience or study. Being knowledgeable seems to be useless without the intelligence to know what to do with all of that information, except for on Jeopardy. Intelligence Intelligence seems to be inherent in a person, though there seems to be ways to increase one's intelligence. Intelligence seems to be the ability to know what to do, even if you don't know how. Suprisingly, intelligence seems to have the ability to grow via the brains situational profiling. dependencies on each other It seems that knowledge is the useless storage of information without intelligence. Intelligence is the inability to accomplish recognizable goals without knowledge. Conclusion It seems that the ideal environment for making one's self more "intelligent", then, is to start with a basic library of knowledge to work with, and to be placed in enough situations where your mind becomes efficient in searching through that knowledge and coming up with the best solution to a given situation. Example There are two venture capitalist investors. The first has seven years of training, and seven years of practice. After 14 years, the first investor is able to recognize good investments in the area of his expertise, and to be successful. The second investor has 14 years of training, but no practice. Although the second investor is more knowledgeable about investing, he/she has a hard time applying that knowledge practically since he/she can't recognize what situation they are in. Something interesting happens as time goes on, however. At this point, the first investor is able to leverage 100% of their knowledge at year 14, and will continue to do so until year 21. The second investor can leverage 0% at year 14, and perhaps 100% at year 21. In short, the second investor could possible be twice as good as the first, but perhaps take 1/3 (133%) more time to get there. In this respect, it seems as if the second investor has an advantage. However, as we all know, the learning process doesn't stop at the end of the knowledge-gathering. The use of knowledge via intelligence opens up more opportunities for knowledge, and this continues in cycle. If we apply this principle to our example, the first investor is at 100% knowledge in year 7. As they approach year 14, they approach 100% intelligence, as they learn how to leverage that knowledge. Through years 7-14, however, this process opens them up to more knowledge-gaining opportunities, and they may, perhaps, be at 200% of their original knowledge, and since they were utilizing this knowledge along the way, at full efficiency. Therefore, the first investor would arrive at year 14 with the ability to make use of all 14 year's work of knowledge. This is in contrast to the second investor who arrives at year 14 at a much lower efficiency, as they are only able to utilize the intelligence naturally inherent, not learned. What does it all mean? It seems like this makes the case for not only a broad-spectrum, short-duration education (such as a 4-year liberal-arts, or 'something of everything' education) to facilitate multi-situational effectiveness. In addition, it also seems that the stockpiling of knowledge needs to be weighed against the cost of not using the majority of it, as that would have been time better spent a.) efficiently using the knowledge you have, and b.) opening opportunities for knowledge that is more relevant to current situations. Help me out here, and post your insights!

Ed Brill and client satisfaction

2006-01-11T15:15:00.000-06:00

Ed Brill Got into a good discussion, wanted to post my comment on my own blog as well. On the topic of surveys of end user satisfaction with software products: Overall, I haven't put too much weight on these types of surveys. What I WOULD be interested in is a survey of end users who have used multiple email systems, and their preference. It seems like Notes would blow others out of the water, if the end users knew what they were missing. But often they don't. A perfect example of this is a sametime rollout I was involved in for a small company of about 400 users. No-one understood why we were rolling it out, they were satisfied with what they had. Two months later, we were averaging 10,000 sametime conversations per month, 80% of them business related. About 6 months later, we had a minor error with the server's hardware, and you'd better believe people missed it. I think of it like this - people using exchange or others are like workers with a shovel and a wheelbarrow. The tools allow them to do more work more quickly, and they are happy with what they have. Then you give them the dump truck and backhoe of Notes 6/6.5/7. Not only can they continue doing the same old thing, but they have the tools to accomplish much more. The only dependants are the user's desire to learn how to use their new tools effectively, and the 'drive factor'. By 'drive factor', I mean the choice the user has to make whether to continue putting forward the same amount of effort with the new tools and accomplish more, or accomplish the same goals with less effort. I think the latter happens a little too much, and this seems to me to be some of the source of the 'Notes is too complicated' argument. Not that I think the Notes UI is complicated, I think it is very intuitive. But I think the real argument some of these people are making is, 'Notes is too complicated...because I don't need such a capable tool to accomplish the lower goals I have set for myself'. For end users, this is a management problem, but it's not hard to see this attitude in management, developers, etc.

More info on the Hybrid eCycle

2006-01-10T15:16:00.000-06:00

I love this thing. Here's some specs I found. The article is good too. (US conversions done by me) Motoring - Hybrid eCycle is fun and super-eConomical: Motor: Air-cooled two-stroke diesel twin. Capacity: 125cc. Power: 7.5kW. (10 hp) Induction: Parker Aerospace Macrospray injectors. Ignition: Compression. Starting: Electric. Transmission: 2-speed constant mesh with final drive by belt. Suspension: 48mm FAR inverted cartridge forks at front, Penske Racing hydraulic shock absorber at rear. Brakes: 298mm (11.73 inches) disc with four-pot opposed piston Grimeca calliper at front, 216mm (8.5 inches) disc with single-piston Grimeca calliper at rear. Tyres: Front: 110/70-17 tubeless. Rear: 130/70-17 tubeless. Wheelbase: 1321mm. (52 inches) Seat height: 762mm. (30 inches) Dry weight: 132kg. (291 pounds)

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automotive

The electric GPR

2006-01-09T15:17:00.000-06:00

GprHome: Motor: Rare Earth Magnet Power: 15 Peak Horsepower Top Speed: 45 to 65 mph (adjustable) Range: 20 to 40 miles (adjustable) Brakes: Dual Hydraulic Disks Charge Time: 3.5 hours What's nice about this is that you can actually buy one of these, unlike the eCycle, from what I have found. The downside (?) is that it's entirely electric, so it's range is limited by who will let you plug in. However, with its range, it remains a viable solution for commuters or weekend fun, but probably wouldn't be too good on the interstate highways, with a max speed of 65 mph. Still, for a $7000 bike, not bad performance at all.

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automotive

Hybrid Motorcycle!

2006-01-06T15:18:00.000-06:00

Hybrid PR 5 25.pdf (application/pdf Object) Nice. The hybrid motorcycle. Not exactly the cargo room I need, but the 180 mpg sounds nice! Top speed of 80 mph and 0-60 in 6 seconds is also nice. Now they just need to put out an update on production, it's been 8 months or so since they put out the press release.

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automotive

Consider diagonal size when going to a widescreen TV

2006-01-05T15:19:00.000-06:00

Here is some advice when looking into some of the newer widescreen-format TV's... with excel sheet data, of course... (by the way, 16:9 (for example) is a type of measurement in how the sides of the screen relate to each other. 6 inches tall for every 9 inches wide. This is called aspect. So basically, throwing the marketing aside, I have a 30" Sony Wega. Here are the stats for that unit: 32-inch diagonal 4:3 aspect ratio 24 inches wide 18 inches tall 432 square inches (also 163 pounds. That doesn't have to do with anything, it's just fun to point out how ludicrous moving it around is...) So if I wanted the same amount of screen space (square inches) in a 16:9 TV, I would have to do the following: 31.8-inch diagonal 27.7 inches wide 15.6 inches tall 432 square inches So now that we're viewing the signal from Comcast in widescreen mode, I can see more of the signal being sent to me. In the past, where my TV would have been cutting off the sides of the signal to show it in 4:3, it now shows the entire signal being sent in its native 16:9. But wait! Something's wrong here. If I watch a DVD on both TV's, it's true that I get to see more of the picture with the widescreen (1.85 inches on either side). But because this is 16:9, my "32 inch" 16:9 TV displays people in the movie 2.4 inches shorter! In effect, a person on my 16:9 TV is the same size as on a "26 inch" 4:3 TV. I gained extra picture on the sides of the 16:9, but the actual size of what's being displayed gets smaller on a 16:9 if you compare the 16:9 and 4:3 "32 inch" TV's next to each other. Well that just won't do. I want to keep the same image size I'm used to, but just get the extra inches on the sides that I've been missing. In order to replace my 30" Sony and keep the same image size, but add the extra picture on the sides, I would have to look into a 16:9 TV with the following specs: 36.7 inch diagonal 32 inches wide 18 inches tall 576 square inches Whoa! A "36.7 inch" TV? Yep, if I wan to keep the picture I am used to, but get the benefit of the extra picture on the sides, that's what I'm looking at. And that's what you should be looking at if you're thinking of switching from a 4:3 TV to a 16:9. So what if you don't have a 30" TV? Well, the following chart should help you out: So what's the bottom line? Well, it just so happens to work out that no matter what size diagonal your 4:3 TV is, if you take the inches diagonal of the 4:3 (30", for example) and multiply it by 1.2238, the number you get will be the size diagonally that you will need in your 16:9 so that you have the same height screen as your 4:3. Here is the excel sheet to prove it! OLD 4:3 TV NEW 16:9 TV w h d w h d inches diag diff % diag difference 04.0 03.0 05 16.0 9.0 18.4 16.0 12.0 20 21.3 12.0 24.5 4.5 22.38373% 17.6 13.2 22 23.5 13.2 26.9 4.9 22.38373% 19.2 14.4 24 25.6 14.4 29.4 5.4 22.38373% 20.8 15.6 26 27.7 15.6 31.8 5.8 22.38373% 22.4 16.8 28 29.9 16.8 34.3 6.3 22.38373% 24.0 18.0 30 32.0 18.0 36.7 6.7 22.38373% 25.6 19.2 32 34.1 19.2 39.2 7.2 22.38373% 27.2 20.4 34 36.3 20.4 41.6 7.6 22.38373% 28.8 21.6 36 38.4 21.6 44.1 8.1 22.38373% 30.4 22.8 38 40.5 22.8 46.5 8.5 22.38373% 32.0 24.0 40 42.7 24.0 49.0 9.0 22.38373% 33.6 25.2 42 44.8 25.2 51.4 9.4 22.38373% 35.2 26.4 44 46.9 26.4 53.8 9.8 22.38373% 36.8 27.6 46 49.1 27.6 56.3 10.3 22.38373% 38.4 28.8 48 51.2 28.8 58.7 10.7 22.38373% 40.0 30.0 50 53.3 30.0 61.2 11.2 22.38373%

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How to pay off your credit cards and get paid to do it

2006-01-04T15:19:00.000-06:00

If you're sick of high interest rates, or fearful of how the new laws designed to protect you from yourself will most likely bankrupt you, you're probably feeling pretty stressed, like I am. I don't like having credit card debt, but giving a good vacation to the wife/girlfriend, trying to not have a disappointing Christmas, or buying furniture for that new house usually forces most people to put some amount on the credit cards. Since the credit card companys want you to stay in debt, and have made an entire industry out of doing just that, it's difficult to get out from under that stress. I have an idea. Haven't tried it yet myself, but I wanted to open it to the blogosphere and get some feedback, because technically it makes sense... Debt (credit cards, loans, bills) is what you owe people, this is negative. Assets (a car you have paid off, stuff you can sell on eBay, money) are what you use to get rid of debt (anti-debt?), which is positive. Here's the interesting thing: The positives can have interest rates (stock market, savings account), but this interest rate is usually small, as in 3% or lower small. The negatives have larger interest rates, but the range is much larger, from 0% on a new car to 30%+ on a credit card. There's nothing we can do about the positive interest rates. We can get better real estate or invest in riskier stocks to try and get more in interest, but we'll never get to a 30%+ gain per year. So let's try to get rid of the high-percentage negative stuff. I've already talked about how to get credit card payments cut in half with one phone call, so let's say out bad interest is in the range of 0%-15%. An optomistic good interest range is in 5-10%/year, for stocks, real estate, etc. Yes, there are exceptions, but this is an example. Let's say we're gaining 10%/year on a $200K house, and 10%/year on $30K of investments. That means our money is making us about $23,000 per year. However, in the bad interest group, we have 13% on the $5000 of credit card bills, 8% on the $200K mortgage, and depreciation on the paid-off car, currently worth $10K. That means our stuff is costing us $22650. Overall, our investment gains are being eaten up by our debt interest, so here's the plan: make the debt's appetite smaller. Step 1: sell the car. It's going to need maybe a thousand over the next year to keep running properly, compared to a new car? It's worth 1/3 of what it was when you bought it? It has 60K miles on it? ditch it, we'll get another one in a bit. in the meantime, borrow a car if you can, or take public transit for the next month while we: step 2: use the car money to pay off the credit cards these cards are going to be the end of you. Pay off all the cards, but don't close the accounts. Just keep paying the $3 monthly fee to keep them open. Credit cards debt goes away, and (after a motnh or two) your credit score skyrockets (once your low balances are reported), which will come in handy next: step 3: refinance? now that you have a great credit score, see if you qualify for a lower interest rate on your mortgage. Even 1% can make a world of difference, in this case, about $2000/year. Take your mortgage savings (in this case, maybe about $165/month) and put it towards: step 4: get a used car Your old car was used, so you don't need a new one. besides, the chances are that you can go find a car exactly like yours with half the miles. The good part is that most of a car's depreciation is in the first few years, so a 2-year-old car will have depreciated to 50% of its original value, but will have only 30K miles, compared to your old car that had 60K miles and was worth 40% of what it was when you bought it. That difference of 10% value only adds up to $2000 on a $20K car, so don't worry about the cost difference. With your new high credit score, you can get a good car loan, which your mortgage savings help pay for. You can even use any extra money left over from paying off your credit cards to lower the cost of the car, and therefore, the monthly cost. While you're at it, collect some of that crap that yu haven't used in years and put it on eBay. After all, you're not using it, and it's not going to get more valuable just lying there in your moldy basement. Your budget for the new (used) car is this: if you are getting a 48-month loan, for example, the total cost of the car + total interest paid (minus savings on mortgage over this period of time)has to be lower than the total cost of paying off your credit cards in 48 months. If the car costs more per month than it would have cost per month to pay off the credit cards in 48 months, you have to find a cheaper car, otherwise there was no sense in doing all of this work, all you did was move your debt from credit cards to a car. (but you did raise your credit score, so a minor kudos to you) step 5: (optional) you may want to call it quits right here, but you may want to consider taking what you would have paid to pay off your credit cards over 48 months, and subtracting your step 4 cost (cost of used car over 48 months minus mortgage savings). If this number comes out positive, say, $150/month, that means all of this work has not only paid off your cards and gotten you a better credit score, but lessened your monthly debt. Feel free to put that money towards the house, or more likely, towards that investment fund you had that was making 10%/year. the end result: the good you have no (or lower) credit card debt you have a better credit score you have a lower mortgage payment you have a newer car with less miles, and possibly still under warranty you are putting more into your investment account the not-so-good you had to get rid of your car. get over it. your new car might have more problems than the last. make sure it has some kind of warranty for the next few years. you had to be without a car while you waited for your credit score to rise. yeah, that kinda sucked. you have car payments. yeah, before you didn't have car payments or credit card payments. That's because you weren't paying off your credit cards, which put you in this mess in the first place. So you tell me, car payments at maybe 5%, or credit card payments at 30%? If you've got any ideas or anything to add, please comment!

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New credit card laws: get out of debt...or bankrupt

2006-01-03T15:20:00.000-06:00

As you may have heard, the Feds are sick of credit card companies trying to keep people in debt. After all, that is how they make their money; by practically stealing yours with finance charges and much-higher-than-appropriate interest rates. Well, the credit card companies are now going to be forced to tell people how long it will take to pay off their cards. That will be a suprise to a lot of people, because credit card companies in the past have just charged what they call the 'minimum'. What the 'minimum' usually covers is just the interest for that month, and the finance charges, if any. This is meant to ensure that you remain a source of income for them, while supplying them with cash on a regular basis. In effect, you will never pay off your debt, you're just paying rent on it until you die. In addition to telling you how badly you're being taken for your money, the government is now requiring that credit card companies try to help their cardholders get out of debt. So now the credit card companies are going to be forced to charge you not only for this month's interest and finance charges, but also a percentage of the money you owe. The end result is that your monthly payments will go up, most likely between 1.5 to 2 ties what they are now. The good side is that you'll be forced to stop playing the credit card company's game...that is, if you don't go bankrupt first.

How to lower your credit card interest rate

2006-01-02T15:21:00.000-06:00

If you're like me, you've probably noticed that your credit cards charge you between 20-30% interest. This is crazy. What this means is that for a 30% interest rate (Capital One), for every $100 I have on the card, they charge me an annual $30, billed monthly. Over the course of a year, I could be paying $2.50 per month for every $100, just to pay the interest. That's $25/month per $1000! Since the average American has about $8500 in credit card debt, that means they will pay about $212.50/month just to stay even. That's $2550 per year! That's ridiculous, and as with all things ridiculous, it set me out on a quest. The first thing I did is call up the credit card company and say that I just got a great deal in the mail for another company's credit card (I didn't), and although I really liked being with them (I don't), I can't afford not to go with the new company's rate of 13%. A short conference call with a supervisor (probably just filing their nails), and they 'offered to match the other company's offer'. Deal. The average American's payments (just to stay even) just went to $92.08/month and $1105/year. 2 minutes on the phone and a little bluffing just bought $120.42/month, or $1445.04. The key here was picking a rate that didn't sound too ridiculous. I did some research online and found out that Capitol One operators are allowed to authorize rate reductions down to 13%, but any more than that takes special oversight. Since a manager would try to keep me at the same rate (read: "would know I'm bluffing"), I wanted to rely on the minimum-wage operator who is more likely to give me a break. It worked.

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Solar-powered light-art

2005-12-30T11:32:00.000-06:00

rdn’s weblog » Blog Archive » Solar Powered Light-Graffiti Projector Cool concept. A solar-powered flashlight, basically. Charges during the day, and projects at night. This would be great to use for the numbers on your house. Mount this gadget to the gutter or roof overhang, and have it project the numbers on the house at night so you don't have to leave outside lights on. You could probably modify this gadget because you wouldn't have a need to focus it, just set it once and leave it.

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The anti-global warming machine?

2005-12-29T11:31:00.000-06:00

Diatom - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia It looks as if diatoms might be the missing piece of the puzzle in my idea for an anti-global-warming machine (that also makes electricity). Here's the deal. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere sucks. Plants turn this into oxygen, but we're killing all of the plants, so we're in trouble. But 2/3 of the earth is water, and there is a little helper that might be able to help out a lot. According to recent research, it looks like diatoms can eat liquid carbon dioxide and put out oxygen with the help of sunlight and a nutrient-rich environment. The only problem is that the carbon dioxide we want to get rid of is in the air, and diatoms are in the water. Bring in a large tank of water. If we were to pump carbon dioxide down to the bottom of a tank of water, the pressure at a certain depth would compress the gas into a liquid. But it won't help to have a coal-burning electric plant powering the pump, so we can use solar and/or wind power. Recent advances in tidal power are starting to look good too! Now that the carbon dioxide (we might not need to separate it from the rest of the air, just pump the whole thing down there) is down there, we need to get sunlight and nutrients down there as well. Nutrients are near the surface of the water, on the 'top layer', where the sunlight is. A simple water pump takes care of that. So now we have a layer of liquid CO2 on the bottom of our tank, with circulating water refreshing the nutrients on the bottom. Getting a lot of sunlight to the bottom could be done with clear walls/windows, if the tank is above ground, or if this system is in the open ocean, a mirror array could focus intense sunlight to the bottom of the array either via fiber optic or just a dry pipe going to the bottom. Once there, the sunlight would be re-distributed through some windows that would have an anti-algae nanotech coating. The sunlight would be split down to normal levels, or maybe x2 brightness, instead of the transport-level 10x or 20x that would fry micro-organisms. At this point, the diatoms would hopefully start munching on the CO2 pool and give off oxygen. The tank would have to be designed so that CO2 doesn't over-flow out of the 'pressurized zone', and the pump stops pumping when the tank is full. When the tank can' take any more CO2, the CO2 pump stops pumping, while the water circulation pump continues. The wind turbine/solar panels/tidal generator could continue making electricity that could be sold. This is especially true at night, where the diatoms wouldn't be active. Perhaps this excess energy would be wanted at night when everyone's electric car is charging? This is all wishful thinking, but as far as I know, it is possible. Ocean energy link: Link

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eStarling WiFi projects Flickr-enabled LCD frame

2005-12-28T11:29:00.000-06:00

ThinkGeek :: eStarling Wi-Fi Gmail / Flickr Enabled LCD Frame: "The eStarling frame is a standalone Wi-Fi LCD photo frame that connects to a wireless network and automatically displays photos e-mailed to it in a slideshow format. Additionally you can specify an RSS photo feed..." Very cool. All they need now is a fuel cell that will last a lot longer than a battery, and to replace the LCD with an OLED or similar low-power display, and you've got a picture that can hang on the wall, with a shelf life (no pun intended) of at least a year, I would think. All they have to do now is enable them to communicte with each other to display like pictures at the same time. (for example, the four frames on the wall would display pictures from a certain vacation, then all of them would switch a few hours later to pictures from last Christmas, etc. Cool effect!)

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...and I never used a padlock again...

2005-12-27T11:28:00.000-06:00

Quick Vibrating Lockpick - Overview A $9.00 tool you can make yourself out of drugstore parts that opens a padlock in about 2 seconds. I actually have one of these hummingbirds lying around...time for a project... :-) Check out the video too - it's hilarious: Video

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Free eBook tells what is in the stars

2005-12-26T11:27:00.000-06:00

or, more appropriately, what will be going on above you for 2006... mininova : Books > Ebooks > What's Up 2006 - 365 Day's of Skywatching: "What's Up 2006 - 365 Day's of Skywatching" This is a free e-book you can download that will tell you if anything substantial is to be seen in the sky that night. Cool!

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Merry Christmas?

2005-12-23T10:24:00.000-06:00

People are strange. Every year, you hear about the people who are offended when a Walmart greeter says 'Merry Christmas' to them. They don't believe in the reason for Christmas, so they prefer 'Happy Holidays'. Isn't this a little self-centered? I don't see this as any different than the following scenarios: I'm having a good day, so I say 'have a nice day' to someone. Well, they object to me assuming that they want to have a nice day, they prefer 'have a good one'. So everyone should say 'have a good one'. See the problem here? It's not that their belief is the problem. They think I should be saying what they prefer, not what I prefer. Here's the thing, though. Every major advance in history was done because someone thought for themselves. So, no, I will greet you how I prefer, and in doing so, I am showing you that I am an individual, and am extending my individuality to you in a show of good faith, this being the holiday and all. Please feel free to respond in kind! Merry Christmas!

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My crazy hybrid car project

2005-12-22T10:22:00.000-06:00

I like the idea of a hybrid vehicle, but financially, they don't make sense for me. If I could retro-fit a used, efficient internal-combustion vehicle, however, it may end up being not only well-performing, but financially sensible! Aftermarket manufacturer Sigma Automotive is wrapping up testing on it's Electrocharger. The Electrocharger is a replacement for the alternator, and while it acts like a normal alternator most of the time, when starting from a dead stop, it acts like a generator, helping power the car's acceleration from a battery pack. In turn, this gets the car up to speed using electricity, and not a lot of gas. Once the car is up to speed, only a small percentage (think less than 20%, depending on a few factors) of the car's engine is needed to maintain speed. During this time, the battery recharges quickly and waits for the next stop. This acceleration-assist model is currently what the Silverado Hybrid uses to get it's fuel economy. The option also exists for regenerative braking, which basically means you use the engine to slow the car, like a trucker does, which puts all the force of the slowing car (kinetic energy) into the generator, and makes re-usable electricity, instead of heat from the brakes. I'm glad to see a product like this come out, since it is the first piece in the puzzle for me to build my Hybrid Super-car. I'll review my plans on the blog, one component at a time. My ultimate goal is to have a well-performing vehicle that gets great gas mileage, and has enough room inside to haul stuff around. With the pending advent of the Electrocharger, I'm off on my way to designing my hybrid: Efficient turbo-diesel passenger vehicle ~40mpg full-RPM range performance (low from the diesel torque, high from the turbo) Check (probably a VW Jetta TDI Wagon) Hybrid retro-fit system +20% mileage? (~48mpg) low-RPM performance (electric motor torque) and regenerative braking Check (Electrocharger) Next up: working on a way to comfortably cruise at, er, a respectable 55 miles per hour, eh, or higher, without wasting too much gas.

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automotive

Futurama to return?

2005-12-21T10:21:00.000-06:00

Could it be true? Would we be so lucky? If you read, or even are remotely interested in, this blog, chance are you would like (or be remotely interested in) the show Fururama. Think of Futurama as an intelligent version of "The Simpsons". Well, it still is animated, but if The Simpsons were the animated version of the Three Stooges, and Family Guy (another great show, but what's up with the dependence on flashbacks lately?) were the animated version of Benny Hill, you could think of Futurama as a cross between Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov and a non-snooty, futuristic version of Frasier. They also lower the humor bar every now and then, but just enough to do some low-brow stuff without it becoming sickening. Needless to say, I obviously am a big fan of the show, and would LOVE to see this one come back. The classic episodes are incredibly intelligent, which I believe drew the audience it did. This group of people are pretty demanding, so hopefully the writers would be able to continue on with the quality they have done in the past. If they were able to continue on where they left off, I could see Futurama easily replacing "The Simpsons" at this point. Everyone cross your fingers!

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I-pass being used to catch speeders?

2005-12-20T10:17:00.000-06:00

When my home state of Illinois originally rolled out its electronic tolling program, I-PASS, the toll authority, said that the transponders in the vehicles would never be used to track your location, only to collect tolls as you pass through the tolling gateways. This being state government, no-one believed them, and it appears that that day is upon us. During the last year or so, Illinois has virtually forced its residents to purchase the electronic tolling transponders by doubling the tolls for users paying with cash. For me, that would mean going from $0.40x4 tolls ($1.60 for about a 20-mile commute) to $0.80x4 tolls ($3.20 per day, $16/week, $64/month, $768/year). I can't afford to pay the extra $384 per year, so I had to purchase the $15 transponder, along with just about every other commuter in Chicago. Once everyone had the I-PASS transponder, all toll plazas in the Chicago area went under construction to have "open-road tolling". This basically means that you don't have to slow down to pay your toll, they get your transponder number as you go underneath the sensor array. Case in point, there is a toll booth for motorists entering or exiting I-355 to/from I-55. Here is a satellite map of this toll plaza. You can plainly see the open-road tolling lanes on the inside, and the toll booths on the outside, both for motorists without I-PASS, and people with trailers, etc. that have special tolls they need to pay. 9 blocks north of this toll plaza is the 75th street overpass, about a half mile away. What you can't see on the satellite map is that there are a second set of sensors hidden between the girders underneath this bridge. I wouldn't have noticed them, if it weren't for the spotlights that enable a set of cameras to record the rear license plate of cars as they go through. It does seem a bit odd when you approach the bridge at night. Most bridges are lit from a few fluorescent rods at night, while this one is incredibly bright. It isn't until you pass under the bridge that you notice that all of the lights are facing with traffic, pointing at the back of the cars as they go through the overpass. It's blatantly obvious coming the other way, as the lights are shining towards you. There are no lights or sensors on the southbound side. In the old days, the older I-PASS transponders used to beep when they were read. I think this caught the Illinois DOT by surprise, because some people still have them, and her is now a sign next to the highway, reading "I-PASS Users: ignore beep, you were not charged." So what purpose, exactly, would an installation like this serve, if not to catch speeders? Can we expect this on every overpass? Setting up a system like this only seems to serve two purposes, as I can see: Traffic/Congestion Monitoring I'm sure this will be IDOT's excuse for installing more of these. This is completely bogus, since there are already thousands of sensors buried in the roadways that can accurately record traffic conditions. Here is a great implementation of the usage of these sensors, which update every few seconds. Unfortunately for IDOT, this doesn't give you any personally-identifiable information about the motorists. Speed Traps By taking the distance between the sensors (let's say a half-mile) and taking the posted speed limit (let's say 60 miles per hour), IDOT knows that it should take you exactly 30 seconds to get from sensor to sensor. If you got there in 25 seconds, they can figure out (via basic math) that you were doing 72 miles per hour. Now I'm not saying that catching speeders is wrong. The speed limit, however wrong that may be, is still the law. The debate as to safety vs. speed limits could go on forever, and it's widely known that there are much less speed-related problems on the interstate than on the streets. Anyway, my problem is with forcing people into the system by jacking up tolls, knowing that you're going to turn it into a speeding-ticket revenue machine in the near future, and all the while saying that you're not going to use it for that exact purpose. In addition, the half mile laid out on I-355 is prone to errors. People stopping at the booth would be able to accelerate all the way to the 75th street overpass, exceeding the speed limit, since their average speed would stay below the limit.In effect, starting from 5 mph at the toll booth enables them to basically 'earn' the right to speed later by going below the limit while leaving the toll plaza. Also, the distance between the sensors is prone to errors. Just one second of delay with either sensor reading (or if one sensor is off by one second compared with the other) would make a computing error of 2.4 miles per hour. (if we used the example data above) In additon, you're allowed to have multiple cars listed for each transponder. If the transponder doesn't register, the camera looks up your plate # and bills your account. No account, and you get a ticket. So what's stopping someone from registering a second car on their transponder, then taking the car, blasting through the first booth, and throwing the transponder under the seat for the second? The first booth sees the transponder, the second sees the plate#. Pretty sure the camera isn't being used for every car, just the ones that don't register when they drive through... All in all, these sensors seem to be in the testing phase for catching speeders. Due to the problems I list above, anticipate trying to explain yourself when errors occur, and still being fined because you couldn't explain it in simple-enough terms to your state's EnforceBot. Also, if you don't live in Illinois, don't laugh. It'll come to you soon enough.

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How to increase your computer speed (part 3)

2005-12-19T19:55:00.000-06:00

So far, we have Cleaned off spyware and viruses and Turned off some of the pretty features in Windows XP. In this next installment, we take it up a notch and turn off some other features in XP that most people don't need (but some may want). Firewall Windows comes with a basic firewall. If you don't know how your home network is set up, then leave it on. If you have purchased an external firewall for your home network, then you can use that firewall instead of the one built into windows. Familiarize yourself with the web interface of your network firewall, and learn how to operate your network-based firewall before you turn the windows-based one off. By making your network firewall do the work of protecting you, your machine has more time to do other things. This step is critical, so this entry will be short. Learn how to configure your router's firewall before you turn off the Windows firewall, and understand what you are doing. Computer browsing Windows Xp 'remembers' a lot of things in an attempt to have them readily available the next time you use them. In addition, XP automatically tries to guess what you're going to do next, and busys itself with loading up any imaginable command you might give it on a given screen. Unfortunately, what ends up happening is that the machine tries to remember so much information, that finding what you want takes longer than just getting the data. You can tell Windows XP to not bother trying to remember some of this information by clicking 'My computer' > 'tools' > 'folder options' > and selecting the 'view' tab. Turn off 'Automatically search for network folders and printers' and check \Do not cache thumbnails'. We're starting to get into the nitty-gritty here, so we'll save some more for next time when we look at registry settings and some services we might be able to turn off. Until next time, happy computing!

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How to increase your computer's speed (part 2)

2005-12-16T09:52:00.000-06:00

In my last installment, we cleaned our machine of viruses and spyware, cleaned out old, unused files with Disk Cleanup, and reorganized our hard drive with the defragmenter tool. At this point, your machine should be back to where it was when you got it, except a little bit slower due to the programs you installed on it. But what if you want to push your machine's performance above where it was when you got it? As it turns out, if you are using Windows XP, there are a lot of settings that make XP "pretty", but sacrifice speed. If you are OK sacrificing some of these pretty effects for raw speed, you're in a prime position to gain some speed on your machine. First of all, do yourself a favor and benefit from other's research. That means getting on mailing lists, subscribing to RSS feeds, or just generally making a habit of trying to stay educated about computers in general. After all, I could tell you 'do this and that', but the sacrifices I make for speed might not be appropriate or even possible in your situation. What's the GI Joe slogan? 'Knowing is half the battle'? Knowing is about 95% of the battle in computers. Before we get started, it's fairly commonly known in IT circles that you are able to run XP on 128MB RAM, but for some reason, XP really opens up at 192MB RAM. After that, the more memory, the better. In fact, Tom's Hardware just did an article on how much memory is overkill on a modern machine. It's a long article, but the jist of it is that (unless you're a graphic designer or big-time gamer) 1GB of RAM isn't out of the question, and testing shows that you will use all of it if you get it. Unfortunately, a lot of RAM is expensive, but if you want to take the plunge, decide first how much money you're comfortable spending, THEN go to a reputable online retailer like newegg.com. By deciding your budget ahead of time, you're less likely to talk yourself into buying more. So what if you don't have any money, or just don't want to spend any? Here are some settings you can change in XP that will help raise your speed: The Desktop: we now make you ugly Right-click the desktop, and click 'properties'. Themes tab Go for 'Windows Classic'. Have flashbacks to working in smoky offices and mustaches on everyone. Background tab 'None'. You can choose your own color, but that ultra-high-resolution picture of your kids has to load up every time you look at the desktop, which is a definite killer. If you really need that reminder of why you can't fly off the handle and destroy your cubicle, try getting a cheap printed picture from Shutterfly and a cheap frame from Walmart/Target. Screen Saver tab This is arguable, since the screen saver does use computing power, but you obviously aren't using the machine, so you'll never notice. If you've got a CRT (boxy) monitor, a screen saver is a must to prevent burn-in, so choose a basic one like 'Windows XP'. If you've got an LCD (flat-screen), you don't get burn-in, so you don't necessarily need a screen saver. I recommend setting the screen saver to 'none', but then changing your monitor's power settings. ('Start' > 'Control Panel' > 'Power Options' > 'Turn off monitor' > 'After 5 minutes') This works pretty well for LCD's, since the monitor turns on instantly when you move the mouse. It's your call what is more annoying with CRT's, the delay in making the screen saver go away, or the time it takes for the monitor to turn back on. You'll definitely want to do only one or the other. Appearance tab You should already be on 'Windows Classic Style'. Click the 'Effects' tab and un-check everything. These are all effects you can do without. Settings tab If you are using the video that came built into the computer, your computer has to process your video signal while you make word documents, etc. Most computers have dedicated memory for the video, but every once in awhile, you run across a machine that uses a portion of the main memory for the video. You'll have to experiment here, so try out 800x600 and 1024x768. Also see which setting is easier on your eyes. You really don't need to go larger than 1024x768 unless you have an enormous monitor. Finally, if you have a video card in your machine, it's doing all the work, so just set it to the defaults and be happy, because it's doing its own thing without affecting your machine too much. That's all for now, join in next time when I write about more system settings (and issue more warnings than you can shake a stick at) as we look at some of the more advanced things you can do for your need for speed.

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Right of way

2005-12-15T09:51:00.000-06:00

Can we all just agree on something? Roads are for cars, not people. People are supposed to cross at the crosswalk, if one exists. And if one doesn't exist, the idea is that you wait until there are no cars coming, then cross the street. Lately, I've been seeing more and more people just step out in the street, looking right at the car coming, and just continue on their way. What's the idea here? "They have to stop"? "I'll sue if they hit me"? Seriously, this is getting ridiculous, and it seems as if it's getting worse around the holidays. One of these days someone is going to step out a little too close and get hit, and instead of successfully taking the driver to court, they'll be committed for attempting to end it all on the hood of someone else's car.

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RFID tagging: so I heard you're out of toothpaste... (part 2)

2005-12-14T09:33:00.000-06:00

OK, as I mentioned previously, we know RFID tags have the potential to give away our private information. So far, usage of RFID for personal use has been a nightmare, to put it lightly. The people who have been trying out RFID so far have proven that they didn't think it out compltely before they started trying this technology out on citizens, or simply refuse to let their privacy get in the way of profitability or ease of monitoring. Here's the deal. For companies like Wal-Mart (that allow partners to watch you in real-time while making your product selection), you're pretty much out of luck. Until you purchase that item, it's not yours, and you're on their private property, so in addition to the video at the door, the cameras in the ceiling, and the RFID tags in the products, you have a group of marketers watching you, and it's all legal. But what happens when you leave the store with the products? They're still able to broadcast their tags to anyone who asks. BellSouth recognized this, and filed for their patent to scan a garbage can, pick up, and record all of the RFID tags contained inside before dumping the trash into the garbage. Add a GPS unit on the truck, and it wouldn't be difficult to record this information and build quite a database on people over the course of a few months. Since garbage is in the public domain, (i.e. you "willingly" gave up your rights to it) this marketing research can be used or sold to anyone willing to pay for it. Starting to get the idea that RFID isn't your friend? I'll get into how to make it a little more friendly in the next, and final, blog in this series. In the meantime, try not to let anyone see your tinfoil hat...

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RFID tagging: the new security breach (part 1)

2005-12-13T09:43:00.000-06:00

You may have heard of the plans for putting RFID tags in American passports. This isn't anything new, Wired wrote about it some time ago. RFID chipping a passport is no different than chipping your dog. A reader gets close to your chip, sends a signal to it, and the chip responds with whatever information it has been programmed with. In the case of passports, people are afraid that their passport will be broadcasting personal information like a social security number. The bad part is that anyone can provoke the RFID chip to broadcast its information, simply by asking for it with a reader, which can be concealed easily. Some states are starting to put them in driver's licenses also, which really makes security a problem. Obviously, the correct solution to this problem is to have the RFID tag not broadcast anything that can be used to personally identify you. Perhaps it can broadcast a unique "RFID number". Only the people authorized to have your information would be able to link your harmless RFID number to your bank information, for example. However, as we've seen in the past, you can't leave it up to the government, hotels, etc. to guard your information. Past expirience has shown that they simply don't care enough to take the proper measures to protect your information. In this last link, you can read about how many hotel keycards have your information on them, sometimes including your credit card number, in unencrypted format. You can buy a card reader for under $75, which would turn a hotel garbage can into a multi-thousand dollar jackpot. As far as RFID goes, if the companies/government use the same lax security, someone can steal this information simply by standing near you, putting a reader in a fake switch on the wall of a public place, etc. In addition, if your company/government waned to, they could install readers everywhere, and record your every movement. So far, you're pretty much stuck begging the legislators to promise to be secure with your information. I'll get into how to protect yourself in another posting.

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Why fingerprinting at the market is a bad idea

2005-12-12T09:31:00.000-06:00

The local market has a fingerprint scanner on the right of a supermarket checkout panel. How long until someone lifts the print with some tape and puts it on something else? Can anyone else think of a reason why this might be a bad idea?

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Contest: Who has the oldest computer in their production environment

2005-12-09T09:29:00.000-06:00

I'll go first. I have a machine still being used in one of the classrooms I take care of. It's an original Apple IIc that is used at least twice per week to play math games in elementary school. I'm pretty proud of this machine, it's proof that a well-made machine and well-thought-out software can be relevant lot longer than today's offerings. That, and it's as old as I am.

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How to increase your computer's speed (part 1)

2005-12-08T09:28:00.000-06:00

The thing people notice most when they have a slow machine is a slow internet connection. This article will show you how to increase your speed 5x, on average. Your internet speed can be increased by the greatest amount by simply removing malicious programs that are using your connection to spy on you, send spam, attach other machines, etc. Here's how to put you back in the driver's seat of your internet connection. Connection Counts Those with a broadband (DSL, cable) connection are most vulnerable. If I were to take a brand new machine and connect it to the internet with no protection, it would be infected (on average) in under 16 minutes. Without me doing anything. AOL users are a little safer, as AOL acts on your behalf. However, if you have kids, all bets are off, because those downloadable mouse pointers, sound packages, etc. come loaded with spyware and viruses. Virus Scanners are only as good as the last Update No matter what virus scanner you have, it needs to be kept up-to-date on the latest threats that are out there. Make sure your virus scanner is set to update its "virus definition files" at LEAST 3 times per week, preferably every day. Our servers update every 6 hours. If you don't have a virus scanner, turn off your machine, unplug the network cable, and go buy one of the ones in a box at the store. I recommend McAfee for home use. I haven't had much luck with Norton's home offering, and although their corporate/network version is very good, I'll still stick with McAfee's full product (not the web-based pay-as-you-go version). Spyware is what makes the internet slow Some spyware installs itself without your knowledge. Some trick you into installing by pretending to be legitimate. Most get installed along with other programs, like Instant Messaging and Windows Themes. The first step is to remove spyware with something like the free program 'Spybot: Search and Destroy'. I know, goofy name. But a good program. Download it here. Again, this program is only as good as the latest definitions, so update the definitions first, THEN scan. Spyware studies have shown that your internet connection can be slowed to 20% of what it normally would be on average, so this definitely will help the problem. Spybot will probably find something on your machine. I've seen results ranging from 1 item to over 1200 on a single machine. Let me know if you break the record... :-) Protect yourself Make sure the virus scanner is automatically starting when the machine starts. Spybot has something called TeaTimer, I would install it. it will tell you when anything tries to install itself on your machine. If it alerts you while you're installing a program you bought from a store, it is probably OK to click 'accept changes'. If you're not doing anything, and all of the sudden it asks you to accept the changes, SOMEthing on your machine is trying to change something...don't accept the changes if you don't recognize what software is changing something. You're better off being restrictive and having to re-load some game rather than allow something in that you didn't intend to. In addition, make sure your machine is automatically updating itself via Windows Update. Also make sure the Windows Firewall is turned on. If all else fails If you run virus scan, and run spybot, and it can't clean off the spyware, bring your machine to a professional. It's not going to get better by itself, and if two good programs can't clean it, that's a bad sign. If you are able to clean everything off, but the machine is still slow, try a speed testing tool to see if it is the connection or the machine. If the connection is bad, contact your service provider or look into a higher-quality Cable Modem and/or router. (Standalone or Modem/Router Combo Unit) (Also keep in mind that wireless is more convenient, but 802.11g is 54Mb per second, while these wired ethernet products are 100Mb per second.) If even that fails If the connection is good, but your machine is slow, open 'My computer', right-click C:\, click 'properties'. Click 'Disk Cleanup' on the 'general' tab. Follow the directions. If your machine is still slow, click the 'tools' tab and click 'defragment'. Follow the directions to defrag C:\. If your machine is STILL slow, consider upgrading your memory to at LEAST 256MB of memory if under Windows XP, or possibly pick up a newer machine from someone cheap like Dell.

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Riya and false hysteria over privacy concerns

2005-12-07T09:27:00.000-06:00

I've posted about Riya before. I like Riya. I think it will show to have great potential, as some of the comments on my previous posting get into. In reading Wired's story, "Face It: Privacy Is Endangered", I'm appalled at what normally is a very good publication. Not only does the author's own sources say that facial recognition is highly unreliable, but the author uses privacy concerns to turn this article into some sensationalist story about how Riya-like services will be used for stalking, profiling, etc. Two pages of this stuff. Here's the deal: Riya is still in Alpha, it's not even released yet. It's not a finished product. And yes, I'm sure more companies will come out with comparable services. But while the author tries to make two opposing points on facial-recognition privacy concerns, there is a simple answer to both: Facial recognition isn't accurate enough to connect your face to your private information on the web. OK, fine, then the security expert is telling you to not worry about it. Why is your personal information on the web anyways? I would look into how it got there to begin with before you worry about how it could be potentially used. Facial recognition services like Riya will be used to help people gain access to your info This is solved easily. Since this side of the article assumes facial recognition to be accurate enough to identify you on a semi-reliable basis, then you have nothing to worry about. Open an account with the offending service, and specify that whenever it sees a picture of you, to not publish your information. You could even upload a ton of non-public mug shots to train the service on what you look like. Since, as you claim, the facial recognition service is so good at finding you, then it will be just as good at hiding your information. Seriously, this section of tech just became available. The security concern is obvious, and I'm sure there will be methods to protect the users, if they so desire. Do I know this for sure? no. But it sure is a lot more helpful to the proponent of what could be a great technology if you propose new features to develop, rather than try to slam the entire thing in an effort to get people to read your article out of fear. Doing the latter is like realizing that a meteor could crash into your house tonight, but advertising "You could die in your sleep tonight, more at 11..."

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How to get around talking to the machine when calling a company

2005-12-06T09:25:00.000-06:00

For those of you who don't like talking to a machine, there is a great site here that has ways to immediately get a hold of a real person. Of course, the real gamble here is if you'll be connected to someone in India who will understand you even less than the machine. Here's a helpful tip: find the places you do business with, and enter their number AND the shortcut keys into your cell phone. Most cell phones will pause by using a comma or the letter 'p'. For example, if you would put this in your phone, you would have a way of reaching a human being at Washington Mutual, enter this in as the number in your address book: 18007568000,,,,0,0 (or possibly 18007568000pppp0p0 (each one of the commas or 'p' characters will pause for a specified amount of time. What character and how much time depends on your phone. This will dial the number for Washington Mutual, wait 4-8 seconds (depending on your phone), dial 0, wait 1-2 seconds (depending on your phone) and dial 0 again. If the phone system hasn't changed, you will be connected to a person, without having to look at your phone (or take your eyes off of the road).

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fun
tutorial

Why it's a good idea to double-check the graphic designer

2005-12-05T09:24:00.000-06:00

So I'm looking at the breakfast menu of a restaurant near my house. The newspaper on the breakfast table on the cover reads "...oll might hit 2,000" and below it reads "...dreds of Nicuraguans buried alive in landslide" Nice. Nothing like cheery news to whet the appetite… Probably should have double-checked that one before running off a hundred copies.

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What would you do with 30+ computers?

2005-12-02T09:22:00.000-06:00

I have about 30+ identical computers that have been retired from service. They're no good to run Windows XP in the production environment, so they're just sitting here, begging to be part of a project. They're 300mhz, 256MB RAM machines with 3-6 GB hard drives. In addition, they all have network cards (10/100), onboard 32MB video and a 15" monitor. What should I do with them? It would be a bad thing to donate them, since the power supplies and hard drives aren't good for a production environment...

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Why hurricanes are getting worse, and will continue to do so

2005-12-01T09:19:00.000-06:00

There is a great article being discussed on Slashdot on a recent finding that currents in the north atlantic are slowing, and appear to be on the brink of failing. Speculation as to why ranges from melting polar caps to global warming itself. This comes after an article in the independant that states that scientists believe global warming is now past the point where it can be reversed, and has also become self-sustaining. What does this mean in terms of hurricanes and other extreme weather? It's only going to get worse. A lot worse. To properly understand global warming, slashdotter Coryoth provides this excellent explaination:

Europe, and North America get colder yes (and to be honest I'm not all that happy about that, living in Canada at the moment), but the rest of the trapped heat from global warming doesn't magically vanish, it simply gets pushed elsewhere - so think more more heat (and droughts) for Africa, more energy in the Carribean to help power hurricanes etc. This is why the term "global climate change" is preferred these days. While there is "global warming" in that there is more energy trapped and retained in the system, that doesn't mean it's going to be evenly distributed as warming, it just means more energy in the system which can result in more dramatic swings and changes in climate.

That really is a good point. We've been hearing a lot about global warming lately, there's even been a Comedy Central show for awareness on the topic. I'm just not sure that people really understand global warming, however. I think most people feel that if it's not getting hotter where they live, then they can't see the effects of global warming.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Global warming doesn't affect the average temperature throughout the year. Global warming creates a higher temperature differential between hot and cold weather. The greater the difference between the two, the worse the weather will be.

The only chance we have is to try to stop global warming as much as possible. If the scientists are right, we might be too late, and there will be a coming period of time where a lot of the world will have winter-like climate for quite a long time. In any case, we might be able to cut our greenhouse gas emissions enough to where it wouldn't be life-threatening.

Think about what you can do to help, and if this article showed you how this situation is more serious than you thought, please send it to someone else who might benefit from it.

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global+warming

"All your base are belong to us"

2005-11-30T16:51:00.000-06:00

"All your base" is now on one of my server's POST screens. The classic geek joke. I did this while working on an old HP server. What else would I type int he BIOS field 'Other text to show at boot'? My own little private joke when I have to reboot it... If you have no idea what I'm talking about, check this out.

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bios
fun

How not to get ripped off on a laser printer

2005-11-29T16:50:00.000-06:00

Laser printers are tricky, but you can simplify things by breaking down the cost of a laser printer over time into three categories:

The printer itself
toner
non-durable items, like the transfer drum

The trick to finding a good, but cost-effective, laser printer is to break down the cost of printing to a per-page cost. For example, I recently had to find a sub-$150 monochrome laser printer for my work. This falls into the small home office category. I found the following printers from my supplier: Samsung ML 1610 ($99.99) Brother HL 2040 ($119.99) Samsung ML 2010 ($129.99) OKI B4100 ($143.99) Konica Minolta PagePro 1350W ($149.62) My supplier carries toner for all of these printers, but no drum replacement kit for the Samsungs. So immediately we're down to three printers. Brother HL 2040 ($119.99) OKI B4100 ($143.99) Konica Minolta PagePro 1350W ($149.62) Next, I looked up the toner cartridges for each of these printers, and how long the toner lasts: Brother HL 2040 2500 pages $ 49.87 $ 0.020 per page OKI B4100 2500 pages $ 30.10 $ 0.012 per page Konica Minolta PagePro 1350W 3000 pages $ 78.84 $ 0.026 per page Next, I looked up how much the replacement transfer drums cost, and how long they last: Brother HL 2040 12000 pages $ 86.77 $ 0.007 per page OKI B4100 25000 pages $149.57 $ 0.006 per page Konica Minolta PagePro 1350W 20000 pages $ 99.27 $ 0.005 per page Then, when you combine the two, you have a total-cost-per-page number: Brother HL 2040 $ 0.027 per page OKI B4100 $ 0.018 per page Konica Minolta PagePro 1350W $ 0.031 per page Once you know this information, you can safely decide on what printer to get, once you take a look at the following examples: After printing 0 pages (printer/cost) Brother HL 2040 ($119.99) OKI B4100 ($143.99) Konica Minolta PagePro 1350W ($149.62) After printing 5000 pages Brother HL 2040 ($255.88) OKI B4100 ($234.10) Konica Minolta PagePro 1350W ($305.84 ) After printing 10,000 pages Brother HL 2040 ($391.78) OKI B4100 ($324.22) Konica Minolta PagePro 1350W ($462.06 ) As you can see, with a little work, you can save a lot of money in the long run by looking at all the factors involved in a laser printer purchase, not just the price. And in the case of these similar-performing printers, the more expensive printer doesn't always mean you will get more for your money!

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How cold weather shorts out your laptop

2005-11-28T16:44:00.000-06:00

Well, it's winter time here in Chicago, so I figured I'd post this little reminder: Keep your electronics out of the cold. When you leave your electronics in your car overnight, or anywhere else cold for that matter, they get cold. You know this already. When you use your electronics, they get warm. You know this also, so I don't need to explain it. What you might not realize is that parts of your electronics warm up at different rates. Some get very warm almost instantly. Some can take as much as 15+ minutes to warm up. When you have a temperature difference like this, you can get condensation inside of your electronics. You've seen condensation before. It's those drops of water that form on a cold can of, er, beverage on a hot day. You don't want water to form inside of your stuff. So what is it's too late, and you're reading this on a freezing cold laptop you just fetched out of your car? Shut down now, wait until the laptop is at least close to room temperature, and give it an extra hour to make sure there's no mini droplets inside your machine. As a side note, you can clean a keyboard by putting it through the dishwasher. Just don't use the dry part of the cycle, it'll melt. And give it a very long time to dry before using it. Whether or not you want that plaque in the same place as your dishes is a different story. I don't...

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What books could be (starring Google)

2005-11-25T16:43:00.000-06:00

You may have heard of Google's attempts to digitize every book ever written, and offer it for free. They've recently run into a bit of trouble, because the publishing houses feel they might lose some money from this. This issue is ongoing, and reeks of politics, so I'm not going to get into it, since Google already is taking a fairly objective view of what is going on. Enter electronic paper Instead, I'd like to lay out what would be possible, using Google's technology, combined with the latest in electronic paper. If you've never heard of electronic paper, either wait 2 years, or check it out now. E Ink has combined this type of display, which can keep a black-and-white image on its screen using a tiny bit of battery power. They also envision a wireless connection built into the frame. Here's where I see Google's service utilized using electronic paper. Add a USB port w/ native drive No-one wants to sit and wait for each page to download. A USB port built into the frame of the page could hold a USB hard drive that could transparently be part of the frame. It could be used to either store downloaded content (downloaded at 54MB/sec if using 802.11g), or it could be removed from the frame and plugged into your computer, where content could be transferred to the drive at 480MB/sec. Also, by adding USB plug-and-play support, you open a world of possibilities. (GPS would call up a Zagat guide for local eateries from Google, for example.) Power needs Before we go any further, this stuff is going to need some power. Fuel cells, step up. Because no-one is going to want to plug in their paper. Wireless This will have to be 802.21 enabled. This gives us instant access to any content, anywhere. Bluetooth Link your phone to the notepad, use it for contact management. Pictures from your camera-phone could be linked to Riya, and after taking a picture of a product UPC, Froogle could alert you to any better deals in the area. RSS Built into the paper's embedded OS should be an RSS reader. Subscribe to your favorite magazine's feed, for a $10 fee per year. Get every article. Subscribe to your teacher's feed, get a copy of the book text, the assignment, and a copy of the teacher's powerpoint of the lesson. Color I mean, who really wants to look at black letters on a gray background. Protection No-one wants a half-inch black plastic frame around a thin sheet of E-paper. Let's build 2 sheets into a sleek portfolio. Stylin'.

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google
ebook

Avoid disappointment trading up to an HDTV

2005-11-24T16:41:00.000-06:00

I don't like marketing departments. It seems like they never stop trying to make their product better than what it really is, while staying technically accurate. What ever happened to having a great product, and just saying 'we have the best product out there, and this is why:'. Not 'you need this' or 'this unit is the brightest', (when brightness actually has nothing to do with the product. So basically, throw the marketing aside, and look into it yourself.

I took this advice in looking into a new TV for myself. I found that marketing departments are getting away with promoting qualities in their TV's that aren't even desirable, such as contrast ratio. They want you to purchase their unit based on contrast, because it is the easiest thing to improve on, not because it actually means anything.

And as long as we're on the topic of false-but technically-not-false advertising, I'd like to bring on my most major finding in my own investigations.

I have a 32" Sony Wega. I'm looking into moving from this 4:3 aspect unit to a 16:9 aspect unit.

Here are the stats for my TV:

32-inch diagonal

4:3 aspect ratio

24 inches wide

18 inches tall

432 square inches

(also 163 pounds. That doesn't have to do with anything, it's just fun to point out how ludicrous moving it around is...)

Now, the HDTV signal from comcast is coming in at an aspect of 16:9. That means on my TV, it is displaying an image that measures 18 inches tall and is 32 inches wide. But my screen is only 24 inches wide. So the TV just cuts 4 inches off of each side and you miss out on that part of the signal. That signal you're paying for. Well that won't do...

So if I wanted to keep the same square area of screen, but in 16:9 so I don't lose anything, I would have to do the following:

31.8-inch diagonal

27.7 inches wide

15.6 inches tall

432 square inches

So now that we're viewing the HDTV signal from Comcast in 16:9, I can see the entire signal being sent to me. In the past, where my TV would have been cutting off the sides of the signal to show it in 4:3, it now shows the entire signal being sent in its native 16:9.

But wait! Something's wrong here. Because this is 16:9, my "32 inch" 16:9 TV displays people in the movie 2.4 inches shorter!

In effect, a person on my 16:9 TV is the same size as on a "26 inch diagonal" 4:3 TV. I gained extra picture on the sides of the 16:9, but the actual size of what's being displayed gets smaller on a 16:9 if you compare the 16:9 and 4:3 "32 inch diagonal" TV's next to each other. This is because the TV's are still being marketed by diagonal size, but have changed dimensions!

I want to keep the same image height I'm used to, but just get the extra inches on the sides that I've been missing. In order to replace my 32" Sony and keep the same image size, but add the extra picture on the sides, I would have to look into a 16:9 TV with the following specs:

36.7 inch diagonal

32 inches wide

18 inches tall

576 square inches

Whoa! A "36.7 inch diagonal" TV? Yep, if I wan to keep the picture I am used to, but get the benefit of the extra picture on the sides, that's what I'm looking at. And that's what you should be looking at if you're thinking of switching from a 4:3 TV to a 16:9.

So what if you don't have a 32" TV? Well, with the help of Excel, I found a shortcut for converting from 4:3 to 16:9, here it is:

It just so happens to work out that no matter what size diagonal your 4:3 TV is, if you take the inches diagonal of the 4:3 (32", for example) and multiply it by 1.2238 (22.3837% or so), the number you get will be the size diagonally that you will need in your 16:9 so that you have the same screen height as your 4:3.

So why don't the marketing/advertising departments show this information? Because there's no way they want to have a "Compare with a 26-inch standard TV" sticker on their expensive "32-inch" 16:9 HDTV. They'd rather have to say 'Hmm...the "32-inch" 16:9 TV isn't that much more expensive than the "32-inch" standard TV, I'll pay a few bucks more and get the 16:9"

But, as I've shown, you're not getting more, you're getting a TV that, while wider, gives you a picture about 13% smaller than you are used to.

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Mexican Postcards

2005-11-23T16:40:00.000-06:00

This one falls under the 'Otherwise' category. I made dinner the other night, and I had a taste for Mexican food. I threw together some stuff we had laying around, and the end result looked like an envelope, and was very good. You will need: - a #3 Burrito Tortilla (the big ones) - 1 cubic inch of cream cheese - 1 chicken breast, thawed - a handful of shredded taco cheese - a bunch of your favorite salsa, the less watery the better How to make it: - preheat oven to 375 degrees (Fahrenheit, please... :-) ) - spread the cream cheese in the center of the tortilla to the size of a postcard - flatten the chicken to the size of a postcard by putting plastic wrap and using a mallet (this isn't therapy time, take it easy or you'll pulverize the meat) - put the chicken on your bed of cream cheese, cover with cheese and salsa. - fold the tortilla up around your postcard-sized pile of stuff, short sides first - turn over and put on a cookie sheet. This keeps it closed while it cooks. (turn over slowly, do your Risky Business impression and you'll fling ingredients) - Cook for 20-25 minutes, or until the chicken is done. The tortilla will turn a nice brown, too. Tip: don't use the side of your fork to cut bites off, use a knife. The melted cream cheese makes everything too slippery for something that dull to cleanly cut it... Have at it, let me know if you like it, or if you add anything in there that works out

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recipe
fun

Combining Riya with other web services

2005-11-22T16:39:00.000-06:00

I already wrote about this new facial-recognition technology on the web called Riya. I started getting into a bit of a discussion on the Riya blog about possible uses for Riya beyond just photo albums, such as combining it with other web services like Mechanical Turk for distributed "Intelligence Engineering". Amazon's Mechanical Turk is an interesting concept. These days we're trying to use computer for a lot of things, but some things computers just can't do. What Mechanical Turk does is pays people a small fee to do small tasks that require human logic. These tasks are then fed back into our computer programs, and the programs are more complete in the end. One thing about Mechanical Turk that is annoying is that it doesn't pay enough for your time. Now I don't think people with jobs would consider the Mechanical Turk as a source of revenue, unless they're really bored. However, if we can take the mechanical turk (7 seconds per job, 3 seconds between jobs, 3 cents per job, 4 hours per day = $43.20 per day) and make it easier/less stressful so we can boost output and have a user work longer (since less brain power is needed), we might be able to make it a viable income...? (3 seconds per job, 2 seconds between jobs, 2 cents per job, 4 hours per day = $57.60) (or 6 hours @ $86.40) Of course, there would need to be much more use of the MT API, as all of the jobs would soon be used up. ...but anyways, I'm sure that $432 per week for a 30-hour work week would be welcome somewhere on earth... In addition to making MT for feasible as a paying job, I'm sure we can find a better use for MT. Instead of posting pictures so someone can have an accurate idea of what the front of Jon's Bait Shop in Van Nuys, CA looks like, why not post jobs on MT that will actually help us? If we can take the programming of an Artificial Intelligence program, say, for a fire-fighting robot, as post 100,000 pictures of fires-in-progress, we might be able to use MT to gather the intelligence of thousands of fire fighters and build a pretty good AI. For another example, why not use MT to program the AI for the vehicles in the Grand Challenge? We all know how to drive (most of us). If a computer could learn from 1 million our visually-based decisions and learn how to navigate the desert, at $.03 per MT job, $30,000 would be a small price to pay! Add in the functionality of Riya, and you would have the added ability not only to stay on the road automatically, but also be able to read signs and symbols (i.e. if Riya sees 'Railroad Crossing', pan camera to left and right, take another shot left and right 10 seconds later, and compare to see if train is coming) This is just the beginning, any other ideas?

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Using Riya

2005-11-21T16:36:00.000-06:00

If you subscribe to Wired magazine, there was a small article about an emerging service called Riya. Riya takes your pictures and arranges them online. No big deal here, I even set this up with my own family with the open-source solution Gallery on my own web site. What makes Riya different, however, is that it contains facial-recognition capabilities. That means that is I upload a picture of me and my brothers, I can tell Riya who is who, and the next time I use a picture that contain one of my brothers, it will tag the picture and label it with who is who. Not only that, but Riya learns as it goes along. When I upload a picture of my parents, it can tell the similarities between me and my parents, and tags the picture as containing someone that is related to me! Very cool.

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Img holder post

2005-11-01T15:04:00.000-06:00