October 18, 2007
I have a compulsion to upgrade. Whenever there is new release of any software or driver that I use, I MUST upgrade. The problem is, most of these upgrades/updates just cause problems.
This classic situation arose last night. Excel 2007 has been crashing recently when I used the build in scroll function of my ThinkPad T60p. I figured it was worth downloading the most recent drivers from IBM (OK, Lenovo). I used their auto-update tool, which of course found tons of updates to run, including the BIOS, etc.
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October 2, 2007
Marc Andreessen is writing a series of blog posts about career planning. His second post discusses education. Reading this post I cannot stress enough how right Marc is. He pretty much nails what I believe to be the best approach to building your skills.
Starting with a college education, build a foundation for success. A degree in Science, Engineering, or Mathematics is highly valuable regardless of whether or not you pursue it as a career. General Liberal Arts degrees are just stepping stones to something else, and essentially a waste of time. Graduate degrees can be useful (or required) in certain fields but in general you will be better off launching yourself into the working world. PhD’s are nearly worthless unless you want to make a big impact in a very specific field.
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October 2, 2007
NetBank, was closed by the Office of Thrift Supervision and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) was named Receiver. My bank failed. Not something people think about on a regular basis, but it does happen.
Granted NetBank isn’t just any bank. As Internet’s oldest online only Bank (up until Friday at least), there is some inherent risk. However, NetBank had been around over 10 years and wasn’t some fly by night operation. See Wikipedia’s summary.
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September 27, 2007
Maybe the title is a bit sensational. The post is really about the day my HD DirecTiVo got traded in for a DirecTV HD DVR.
Up until Monday, DirecTV had been transmitting their HD signal using MPEG-2 encoding, which my HD DirecTiVo happily displayed. Yesterday DirecTV rolled out new HD channels using MPEG-4 encoding, which required me to update to the new model.
The new model, a DirecTV HR20-700 High Definition PVR, does not use the TiVo software, but instead uses DirecTV’s own software. From a capabilities standpoint, the boxes are pretty similar, with the HR20 probably having a few additional ‘future options’ included in the hardware.
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September 6, 2007
After a three year hiatus, a new version of Java Email Server (JES) is available.
The new version, 1.5, adds the ability to use a SMTP server that required authentication as the default gateway. As ISPs continue to crack down on spam (a good thing), they are instituting policies that can make it more difficult to run your own email server. One of these policies is to require all outbound email to go through their SMTP server, and requiring you to authenticate with that server. With this new addition JES can now work correctly in these environments.
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September 3, 2007
I’ve written a couple of open source applications that have achieved a modest level of success. Both iTunesExport and Java Email Server (JES) have had both staying power and regular level of interest.
I quantify ‘modest success’ with the following yardsticks:
Google Search
Both projects are the top ranks for intuitive search terms (OK, so their name helps):
‘itunes export’ and ‘java email server’
I think the JES rank here is especially impressive considering the second result is the Apache project JAMES, which is also an open source Java email server.
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September 2, 2007
The actual quote is: “The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA” (thanks IMDB).
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September 2, 2007
Not to turn this into a soccer blog but…
The U-20 team was sent home by an obviously superior German team. The US played well but were simply outmatched. Since they were lucky to escape group play with their poor performances in the first two games, I simply can’t criticize their result in the second round.
Beckham. He is out 6-8 weeks, which is most if not all of the remaining season, with a sprained knee. LA was a long short before the playoffs before Beckham showed up, and I have to said I’d be pretty surprised to see them in the post season now. I do know there will be a lot of disappointed ticket holders for the remaining LA games this season, home and away.
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August 27, 2007
It has been a while since I’ve posted, and the wealth of interesting Soccer recently has been partly to blame. The fact that my daughter was born this month may have had an impact as well.
U-20 World Cup
The US team made a disappointing showing in the U-19 world cup. They got through group play but lost to Austria 2-1 in the Quarterfinals. Freddy Adu and Josmer Altidore were exciting but didn’t have the consistent play necessary to really make run.
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July 31, 2007
I decided to play with Ruby on Rails a little more and was just reminded of the painful process to get Rails working at GoDaddy.
First, you can have Java or Rails, but not both. But as I posted earlier, Java is near useless at GoDaddy anyway.
So, the key steps to getting your Ruby on Rails app deployed at GoDaddy are:
Setup at GoDaddy:
- Log in to the GoDaddy Hosting Control Center
- Make sure Java is disabled (under Language Options). If it is enabled, you can’t deploy a Rails application. Change the setting to none (and you’ll need to wait 24 hours for your site(s) to be moved to a new server).
- Log into the CGI control panel and create a Rails application directory.
- Create a symbolic link to your newly created rails directory.
Local Edits:
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