Computers « Soil from Stone

Archive for the ‘Computers’ Category

WordPress Comments

Sunday, December 27th, 2009

The native WordPress commenting system is back online for now on a trial basis. I asked js-kit to make me pay to keep Haloscan, but they declined. Then I tried to upgrade to Echo, but they said my blog didn’t have Haloscan installed. Whatever. I didn’t like WordPress’ comment system when I tried it years ago, but maybe it works better now. We’ll see, eh?

(“Eh?” What is that? You Canadians must be rubbing off on me.)

Anyway, I exported my Haloscan comments to an xml file, but I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to import them into another system. Too bad. We had a couple of good conversations over the last couple of months.

If you had an account on this site before, it is still there, but you shouldn’t need an account to post.

Posted in Computers, Personal | 2 Comments »

Near Disaster

Sunday, December 27th, 2009

I upgraded php, Perl, MySQL, WordPress, and other applications on my server and discovered that the upgrades had completely wiped out all my SQL databases. No blog. Sweet mother of pearl.

Fortunately, I had backed everything up just before the upgrade.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the restore to work.

As you can see, I did finally get everything working again with the help of the excellent tech support people at WestHost. For a while I thought I was going to have to put everything back in manually. I still have some serious cleanup and repairs to do, but it’s not nearly as bad as it could have been.

Posted in Computers, Personal | No Comments »

Google Is Watching out for You

Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009

“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” -Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. (The Register, Dec 7, 2009.)

In case you need a review of why Schmidt’s opinion matters, see my previous blog post about Google. Everybody thinks everybody else is doing something they shouldn’t. Privacy is essential to freedom.

Posted in Computers, Men's Rights, Politics | No Comments »

New Commenting System Coming

Monday, December 14th, 2009

JS-Kit, the company that owns HaloScan says that they are going to start shutting it down at the end of this month. I don’t like WordPress’ commenting system, but I might have to go back to it anyway. If you want to suggest a good alternative, let me know.

Posted in Computers | No Comments »

Paranoid Fantasies?

Thursday, November 12th, 2009

What if your free email provider indexed every email you sent or received for keywords?
What if they provided a free search engine that remembered every search?
What if they also owned a great video sharing site and remembered every video you watched?
What if they offered free blogging sites, remembered every visit, and indexed every post and comment?
What if the same company offered free maps and directions with satellite or even street-level views and remembered every location you viewed?
What if they made the maps really easy by linking them to the GPS device in your phone?
What if you could use their on-line productivity software to create all your documents and financial records.
What if they let you store backup copies of all your computer files on their servers for safe keeping and kept a copy of your encryption key?
What if they cross-referenced all these different data points and shared them with others?

George Orwell? 1984? The real thing could be so much worse.

Posted in Computers, History, Men's Rights, Politics, Science | 2 Comments »

Google Has Become Almost Useless

Thursday, October 1st, 2009

Google is so bogged down with bogus search results that it has become almost useless. It was great when every search was hyper-literal. If you knew how to use a boolean search string, you could find anything. Now, you tell Google that you only want such and such four words, and it returns pages of links that don’t contain one or more of your terms. Suggesting alternate spellings is helpful, but it shouldn’t assume you typed your search wrong. Returning hits for “finding” when you typed in “find” is also helpful, but returning hits with no form of the word “find” at all is worse than unhelpful. Bing and Yahoo are no better. The same thing happened to Infoseek once upon a time. Go.com bought it, and it became completely useless almost overnight, just another Internet commercial. Surely someone can find a way to make a search engine financially profitable without turning it into a corporate wasteland.

Posted in Computers | No Comments »

Windows 7

Friday, May 8th, 2009

I just installed Windows 7 into a virtual machine on VMware Workstation. In fact, I’m blogging from it right now. I’m going to try to do everything I need from Windows 7 for a while. So far I like it, but it hasn’t been an hour yet. That’s not bad. I ditched�Vista after about 10 minutes.

Posted in Computers | 1 Comment »

Transferring DNS Registration

Wednesday, April 15th, 2009

Hopefully I won’t be down for too long while DNS records are updated. It shouldn’t be more than a day or two.

Posted in Computers | Comments Off

Personal Soundtrack Wardrobe

Thursday, April 2nd, 2009

Last year ThinkGeek came out with the Personal Soundtrack Shirt. The built in speaker plays mp3 files from an SD memory card.

Now, combine that with Warwick Audio’s Flat Flexible Loudspeaker, a lightweight, flexible membrane-like speaker. Instead of wearing a speaker on your chest, your entire outfit could be made to play your music.

With some ultra-thin solar cells painted onto your sideways, Marky Mark ballcap and parasitic power-harvesting sneakers, you could be the life of your perpetually very own party.

Woohoo! I can finally ditch the 125 lb boombox I’ve been carrying on my shoulders since 1984!

Posted in Computers, Science | Comments Off

New Computer

Tuesday, March 31st, 2009

I just built a new computer for myself. It’s my first new computer in more than ten years. I’ve been buying my old employer’s hand-me-downs for so long that it feels like Christmas! LOL It has an AMD Phenom 64 Quad-core w/ 4GB RAM and a 320GB SATA HDD (7200rpm 16mb cache). I pirated a CD-RW and floppy from an older computer.

Final cost: $311.

No fancy graphics or sound cards, but I’m not much of a gamer. It should have a DVD drive, but I don’t need it right away. I should have bought a better case, too. This one is ugly, has terrible airflow, and is loud! It works, though, and it was cheap. I’m happy.