I’ve been experimenting with the development environment of my Linux setup recently. I’m running two virtual machines via VMWare Workstation from my Windows 7 PC. One is an Ubuntu 10.10 install using the Gnome desktop, and the other is openSUSE 11.4 using the KDE Plasma desktop.
I’ve been doing some research on storage options for a media company who are in desperate need of an easy-to-use, safe and large capacity storage solution. I spent the best part of a week looking at various offerings, when it became clear that LTO and LTFS were going to hit the sweet spot. The LTO specification is currently at LTO-5 – which provides 1.5 TB of uncompressed storage to the linear tape format and data transfer speeds of up to 140MB per second. Impressive.
I wouldn’t normally post a rant article on my blog – but iTunes – grrrrr. I really wish I wasn’t forced to use iTunes to sync my Outlook Contacts and Calendar with my iPhone 3GS. For the last few days I’ve been unable to sync my Outlook 2007 Contacts with my iPhone – and it was driving me nuts. I tried reinstalling iTunes 9.1, tried the Edit –> Preferences –> Devices – Reset Sync History option. I tried checking all my recurring dates in Outlook – since this was reported in the past as a problem. In the end – the answer was to roll back to iTunes 9.03 – by doing the following. As per http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1923 … Use the Control Panel to uninstall iTunes and related software components in the following order:
LINQ to Objects in C# has been around for a while now – and yet I’m regularly amazed at how easy LINQ has made it to perform what would have previously been fairly tedious tasks (well unless you were very clever and had written your own set of IEnumerable helper methods) - like the following – where I needed to synchronise a list of records in a database…
Well after several visits, as well as the kind co-operation of Jill Bays, her family, and her students – I’ve finally managed to complete my short story on Jill.
It’s been educational in many ways. Jill’s life story is fascinating and I feel very lucky to have met her. But then that also contributed to the difficulty of producing a short piece like this since I had over 40 minutes of recorded material. Reducing all of that to just 3 minutes and 44 seconds was a challenge.
For a while now I’ve been jumping between IE8, Firefox, and Google Chrome. The browser that’s pulling me in – is definitely Chrome. For starters it’s fast. I mean really fast – even after a solid couple of months of use with a large local cache.
Other sticky features include being able to just type my search terms into the address bar – and execute a search (not unique to Chrome of course IE8 and Firefox both do this). And then the little details – like the screen shot shown here. While visiting one of my regular podcasts with Chrome – just clicking on the MP3 file – from what I’m assuming is a progressive download – launched a very nice little audio player. I don’t know why it’s there – or what ‘auto-magical’ stuff happened under the hood – it just worked. I also like the dark theme I found for Chrome and just ‘clicked’ and it was in – nice and dark and less painful to the eye – just like my dev IDE.
There are bigger issues and tectonic industry shifts at work here. I couldn’t write about them all with enough zest or knowledge to be of interest in this short post (like the future of Firefox now that the Mozilla Foundation’s largest funding organisation – Google – has their own browser) – suffice to say that for me at least- Chrome is sticky – and I’m using it more and more.
Update: 30 Aug 2019 - My Shot is now called National Geographic Your Shot, however, the terms are the same and can be found here. under section 10. Your Proprietary Rights in and License to Your User Content.
Original post: I've been meaning to post this for a while now. You know that warm and friendly yellow rectangle? Well before joining their photo sharing site at National Geographic My Shot – be sure to read the Rules and in particular – the Terms of Use.
Here’s the clause you need to be aware of, and what you’re effectively giving to National Geographic if you upload ‘any’ content to their site - important bits in red-italic-bold.
A project I’ve been working on recently required a search feature. After a quick look around I thought I’d give a hosted solution a try – using Google Site Search. After almost a full day of banging my head against the wall – here’s what I discovered… I) The only difference between Site Search and Google Custom Search – is that you pay for Site Search and you get on-demand indexing – so you’re guaranteed (in theory) to have all of the pages in your site indexed. II) Once you’ve paid for Site Search – the control panel is effectively the Custom Search Engine Search control panel – with the on-demand option present. III) There are three ‘levels’ of control you have over the results on your site. Here’s a quick tour of each – assuming you’ve read just enough of the docs
When the desired death of a browser makes it into a full-page editorial of IEEE Spectrum – you know that the issue is finally starting to gain some traction.
I posted my views earlier on Nikon software – and I’m now pretty sure that Nikon ViewNX is broken on Windows 7. Below is a link to the native Process Monitor log file – filtered for ViewNX after a complete uninstall and re-install to the latest version of ViewNX 1.5.0 – running on the RTM of Windows 7. ViewNX was still performing an endless loop of I/O and registry requests. I stopped recording after 1.7 million events (a 182MB log file – compressed to 21MB below).
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