Technology Head

Four Monitors, Anyone? A PCIe Card for X1, X4, or X8 Lane Slots

2011-05-26T00:35:00.002-04:00

After several dead ends (PCI cards with unresolved PCI-to-PCI bridge issues, x16 extender cards that didn't work in the form factor of the chassis, interrupt conflicts with NIC hardware), one solution has been found that works in my Dell PowerEdge 2900. This is a low end server being used as a workstation. It wasn't designed to support an x16 PCIe card, so it's been difficult finding a substitution. The AMD ATI FirePro 2270 x1 version nicely supported dual monitors and installed without a hitch. Others with older machines where PCIe x1, x4 or x8 lanes are needed may wish to consider this alternative. Note: A "pro" not a "gamer" class device, but you can use two or more to support more than two monitors. Very tempting.

p.s. Another viable option for Nvidia users may be the PNY NVS Quadro 440 x1.

Update on Elitebook Windows Event 17: HP HW Repair Process Insights

2011-05-14T11:25:00.003-04:00

Update 19 May 2011 Laptop was repaired after 2 working days. The fan problem was corrected, but the Event 17 errors have returned. The rep from the team handling repairs in progress insisted on dialing into the machine and reading the event log messages herself, then issued another RMA number. She indicated this would be "priority" (what is that?). Another box was shipped and the laptop has been returned to the depot.

Update 14 May 2011 As reported earlier, an HP Elitebook (c. 2010) was returned for repair after much investigation. The laptop was returned by overnight service from HP Depot repair with a new Nvidia 5100M graphics card. Impressively, a technician phoned form the depot facility to verify the nature of the complaints and to understand whether WLAN problems were also being experienced (Answer: Unclear). Unfortunately, the machine turns itself off a few minutes into the HP run-in test. Maybe fan or fan sensor disconnected or failed? The machine was returned to the depot the next day.

Internal Repair Processes Interestingly, HP hands off duties for repairs in progress to a different team. The chat channel used for triage is seemingly abandoned, though it can be assumed that transcripts are available for downstream technicians to read. Also, HP sends a new box for shipping rather than simply having customers print a new prepaid shipping label. Odd, considering that a day is lost while the box is shipped, and there's another box to be disposed of (the packing material used is not recyclable).

Gotcha! Different Notch Offset for Fully Buffered DIMMs (FB-DIMMs)

2011-05-06T19:01:00.000-04:00

An aging Dell 2900 server needed more RAM to extend its life. The used marketplace for RAM seemed like the right place to go. The specification called for ECC buffered, 555 or 667mhz PC2-5300 DIMMs, deployed in pairs. Straightforward enough. Or so it seemed. After reading the Wikipedia entry on DIMMs to refresh my memory of standards in effect at the time that this machine was new, a pair of 4GB DIMMs was purchased.

What was immediately apparent, but which presales research had failed to discover, is that PC2-5300 FB-DIMMs have their single notch in a different location than otherwise identical PC2-DIMMs. To avoid this mistake in the future, refer to the photo above, which shows the offset position of the FB-DIMM notch.

When a PC is not Point-and-Shoot: WHEA-Logger EventID 17

2011-05-06T18:50:00.001-04:00

When everything's working smoothly, a PC seems a simple device, like a toaster, or, to use a better example, like a digital camera. Turn it on, launch an application, do work, and turn it off. A smoothly working PC offers its own quietly efficient version of Point and Shoot.

Beneath the covers, with both devices, but more so with today's PC, a lot needs to go right to produce the appearance of a carefree toaster-like experience. Some problems are comparatively common (if not frequent) but straightforward to diagnose and correct. Disk drives still fail, and for most, while SMART doesn't generally provide warning of pending failure, it's usually obvious when it happens and the corrective action is also obvious. But once in awhile, problems arise that are a reminder of how much complexity lies beneath that ever-thinner chassis.

An incident in this latter category has been occurring with an HP Elitebook 8540p laptop. Several times a minute, Windows 7 throws this exception to the event log:

Event 17, WHEA-Logger
Component: PCI Express Root Port
Error Source: Advanced Error Reporting (PCI Express)
Bus: Device:Function: 0x0:0x3:0x0
Vendor ID:Device ID: 0x8086:0xd138
Class Code: 0x30400

More details are provided by Windows in the full WMI-interfaced Windows Hardware Error Architecture (WHEA) message. There were several problems with the laptop that could have been related to this error, which was thrown at least several times a minute, and sometimes more often depending on what processing was occurring. These included infrequent blue screens, fairly frequent glitching in pro audio devices (e.g., Echo AudioFire Pre8 and Ableton Live, as well as various USB audio devices), and an unsatisfactory rating by the Echo-recommended DPC Latency Checker.

Over several months, HP support and I worked on this issue. New device drivers were tried, USB device drivers were removed and added, self-tests and diagnostics were run. Nothing turned up. Finally, the hated "reinstall Windows" suggestion reared its head. Since everything else had been tried, the partition was erased and Windows 7 x64 was reinstalled. Result? Even before all the HP utilities were reinstalled, the problem recurred.

The last HP technician suggested it could be an issue with the Nvidia NVS 5100M discrete graphics card. There are two related threads in forums that illustrate the scope and diligence of some users in trying to resolve this error. One is in NotebookReview (more related to Asus motherboard problems) and the other in an Intel Community forum (where most of the blame was laid at the feet of AMD ATI graphics cards.

The laptop is off to HP for a repair attempt. Stay tuned. In the meantime, should this post have appeared in TechnologyHead.com or in ErrorProcessing.com? Arguing in favor of the later, for instance, were several remarks by hardware technicians consulted by worried forum posters that "these problems didn't used to be reported anyway, and can easily be ignored." Arguing in favor of TechnologyHead was the aspect of complexity; after all, the error message was close to what passes for best practice these days in error reporting (if not recovery).

Acrobat Pro #Fail: Why Software Standards Matter for Accessibility

2011-03-01T21:46:00.003-05:00

Acrobat Pro Resolution-dependent Window

Acrobat Pro 9 -- not just the Reader, but the commercial off-the-shelf product -- is a mainstay product of Adobe. Adobe is a publicly held company with more than 7,000 employees. It's Fortune rank in 2009 was 601. It is reasonable to expect that Adobe has in place solid standards for its products. These standards make Adobe products similar across platforms, consistent with each other, and consistent with platform-specific standards -- that is, Windows, Apple or Linux platforms.

For these reasons, coupled with the maturity of Acrobat 9 Pro, when a customer contacted me with a Windows problem, the working assumption is that the user had accidentally clicked on some setting. The symptom was that a dialog box used to control automatic insertion of headers and footers, such as Bates numbering, was partly off screen. There was no scroll bar for this dialog box, which had apparently been coded using the Multiple Document Interface (MDI) standard. Unlike some daughter windows in Acrobat, this window could not be maximized, minimized or resized. The standard Microsoft Windows "Move" command worked, but the "Size" commands did nothing. As a result, the user couldn't see all the settings available, nor even click OK to invoke what few settings were visible.

A little casual research showed that my customer was not alone. There is no solution for customers who use 800 x 600 resolution, single monitor displays. The "fix" is to increase resolution.

Not only is this a major nuisance, but for visually impaired and some netbook users, it creates a serious obstacle. Adding to the annoyance factor are the abundant comments in various forums which show that this problem must be known to Adobe. I don't know whether it's been "fixed" in Acrobat Pro X, which specifies a minimum resolution of 1024 x 576 (a bit odd, but there are a few netbooks that use this resolution), but the analyst producing requirements for the Acrobat Pro developer team should have either specified that all dialog boxes must operate within 800 x 600, or alternatively, since this is by today's standards a low resolution, provide an Acrobat startup warning that the resolution was below the minimum required.

Update I cross-posted this message to the aforementioned Adobe forum, and a user requested an explanation. One was received. In essence, no patch for the V9 problem was ever produced, but Adobe did address the problem in version X. The message as relayed by user cyberbiker1 follows. I'm not fully convinced that the accessibility issue has been addressed:

"Unfortunately the 9.4.2 patch did not address anything relating to screen resolution. The system requirements for Acrobat 9 on Windows operating systems includes a minimum resolution of 1024x768. Simply put, Acrobat 9 and previous versions weren't designed for netbooks. During the Acrobat 9 development cycle, netbooks were in their infancy. Acrobat X however, was designed with netbooks in mind, supporting a minimum resolution of 1024x576."

Windows 7 Self-Lockout Feature: "User Profile Service Failed to Load"

2011-01-12T20:41:00.000-05:00

Being locked out of one's own computer is a proven precursor to madness. It's now happened to me several times on several different machines -- both under Vista x64 and now twice under Win7 x64. Windows is restarted, and either user desktop fails to restore, or, on this occasion, Windows refuses to log in the user, because "User Profile Service Failed to Load." When this happens, you'll be left dumbfounded at the Windows login screen.

From what I've seen, chances are good that you didn't do anything wrong.

There was a recent set of Windows Updates in the last 48 hours that I am tempted to blame for this, but there's no proven connection.

Some tips:

If the "locked-out" account is the only account on the machine, you will have to create 1-2 new ones, depending on how you decide to try to recover your data.
It's unlikely that a heavily used account (lots of customization and licensed software installed) will get back 100%. Prepare expectations.
You'll need to boot into safe mode to gain control long enough to create a new account if one isn't already available.
Remember that if F8 during startup to get to Windows safe mode option isn't working, it could be because Windows won't recognize F8 over USB or wireless. Use a regular wired keyboard or the main keyboard on a laptop.

Microsoft suggests several possible solutions to correct "a corrupted user profile." The first option is to restart -- which of course had been tried several times before reading their tip. Then the FixIt solution was attempted, after creating a new admin account in Safe Mode. No love there, either.

That left a third option. This is a messy process of creating a third account from which to copy profile data from the stranded profile to a new one. That is, a User3 is needed to copy stranded User1 data to a new User2. The details are in the Microsoft prescription. However, you'll be mildly unsatisfied with the results, depending on the situation. In my example, the user profile directory was 3.6GB which had to be copied to User2's directories. The "corrupted profile" files and registry remnants remain to be disposed of.

How do things work out with new User2? While most apps will launch, many will have to be reauthorized, which took several hours in my case. Further, many had lost settings and these had to be relearned, rediscovered and painstakingly restored.

A quick search for Windows or third party backup/restore processes specifically addressing a Windows user profile didn't turn up anything specific; the goal would be to address this specific failure which it's fairly clear is likely to recur. Ideally, one would want a backup/restore solution that addresses any registry changes as well as the files associated with %USERPROFILE%.

I am fairly certain that users aren't doing anything especially unusual when the "corruption" occurs. I fully expect that it will recur unless the underlying causes are addressed.

Yahoo Mail: Object Lesson in Failed Scalability?

2010-12-09T02:21:00.001-05:00

Elsewhere I had begun a lengthly blog post detailing my often unsavory history of interactions with customer service at Yahoo! Mail. A paying customer who intentionally accumulated considerable mail, increasingly that mail could not be searched or retrieved. The symptoms varied, so in the beginning it seemed to be a flaw rather than a design problem. The example below was typical of the initial symptoms.

After several months of back and forth with level 1 and 2 support, I began to question the initial assessment of "bug." During this time period, Yahoo developed a new, nicer interface. There was good functionality in this new work, but my problems persisted.

I'll post more details here later as time permits (I'm in the middle of a tedious migration to escape all this), but it's become clear that Yahoo does not intend for its users to keep large quantities of mail online. Or perhaps its testing environment is insufficient.

Gmail? Gmail is so far scaling nicely, though I have only a fifth as much mail there.

Single-track Playback for WMP and MediaMonkey

2010-08-08T21:37:00.000-04:00

Cause unknown, but some MP3 files play back only one track in Windows Media Player 11.0.6002.18111 and MediaMonkey 3.2.1.1297, Songbird 1.7.3 Build 1700 and VideoLan 1.1.2 are fine. I found myself looking for pan controls (are there any in these tools?). Platform: Vista x64. (Not mono; one of the stereo tracks won't play.)

Stuxnet: SCADA System Threat Real This Time

2010-07-21T11:23:00.000-04:00

TechRepublic is running my blog post on the SCADA worm that was publicized last week. The incident takes place after considerable alarmist rhetoric. As I wrote in the piece, my biggest concern is the Dependency Syndrome, which I've consciously lifted from the film China Syndrome.

Zope Plone and Apache Rewrite Rules

2010-07-08T17:13:00.010-04:00

This post is simply a list of links that were consulted when solving a problem with Apache rewrite rules. Apache can be used in front of a Plone - Zope web server.

Note 1: This stuff is the opposite of friendly and resilient to human error.
Note 2: Plone Redirection Tool. (I haven't gotten this product to load in Plone 2.5, but its author indicated to me that it should -- though it was replaced by a plone.app.redirector in Plone 3).

http://plone.org/documentation/kb/plone-apache/virtualhost

http://wiki.zope.org/zope2/ZopeAndApache

http://www.chrisabernethy.com/force-lower-case-urls-with-mod_rewrite/

http://www.zope.org/Documentation/Books/ZopeBook/2_6Edition/VirtualHosting.stx

Not Plone/Zope-Specific

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/misc/rewriteguide.html

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/mod/mod_rewrite.html

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/misc/rewriteguide.html

http://hotware.wordpress.com/2008/10/13/using-mod_rewrite-to-rewrite-a-url-to-lowercase/

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/rewrite/rewrite_guide.html
http://www.makina-corpus.org/blog/use-rewritemap-prevent-proxying-some-static-contents
http://corz.org/serv/tricks/htaccess2.php
http://www.makina-corpus.org/blog/use-rewritemap-prevent-proxying-some-static-contents
http://articles.sitepoint.com/article/apache-mod_rewrite-examples
http://www.addedbytes.com/cheat-sheets/mod_rewrite-cheat-sheet/

Yahoo! Mail Problems (and CRM Workflow) Worsen

2010-05-28T18:45:00.003-04:00

Sometime over the past couple of years, I sought out Yahoo's customer service for premium mail users. The problem at that time was an annoying false positive from the Norton AV scanner Yahoo was using. It got me nowhere. Because of that experience, I avoided contacting Yahoo service for ongoing problems with mail search. But this week I decided I needed help, as I was unable to sort through the mail volume that had accumulated without using the search / filtering facility.

This time, there seemed to be better, more courteous staffing in greater numbers. As for effectiveness -- well, read on.

As the screenshot shows, the mail service would throw an error when asked to return more than headers for a sizeable search result (say, a few thousand emails). I'm now on the seventh contact with the Yahoo Mail help crew. It seems that level 1 support has been given one tweak they are permitted to try before escalating. For 2-3 of the calls, that's pretty much what was attempted, to no avail. Once it was escalated to "Engineering," the problem seemed to get worse, not better. After contacting Level 1 support again, as of this afternoon, I was told to try again in 24-48 hours (but only I had received a "We fixed it" message from Engineering).

I'll be back on the chat line as suggested, but I thought I'd mention this error in case others have run into it. There are some variations, but the symptom is either that the search fails, or that the result set will not fully load; all the emails must be "retrieved" before one can, for example, move them to a folder.

I'll update this post once it's resolved.

Error #5:
Method: SearchMessages
FAULT: SOAP-ENV:Server.MailboxOpenFailed.Busy
DESC: Error opening mailbox: mailbox busy
VER: 2.10.0 Build:374.4 04/28/2010 02:05 AM
HOST: cg1.c902.mail.ac4.yahoo.com
CBK: Converting circular structure to JSON
REQ: {

Update ~ noon eastern 30 May 2010: Same CBK error, but now Error #20. I.e., still not working.

Update ~ 8 July 2010. Still not working. There have been more than 15 contacts with Customer Service and/or Engineering, including three purported Engineering escalations.

Unauthorized Changes to Windows 7 Automatic Update Settings

2010-05-13T10:59:00.001-04:00

It's happened again. Periodically, and it's not often, but often enough to be memorable, Windows Update decides to reset the settings from "Download updates but let me choose whether to install them" to "Install Updates Automatically (recommended)." Yes, I understand the risks; Microsoft may have detected a flaw that needs urgent patching. My machine is vulnerable until I get around to launching the update. But what I'm consciously trading off is productivity. What's lost is a complex desktop of settings --with Office applications, browser windows and specialized applications in particular states not easily reconstructed. It takes 30-45 minutes to restore the desktop back to something resembling its previous state -- and sometimes that isn't feasible due to the dynamic nature of the applications and associated web content.

When researching this on previous occasions, I recall that Microsoft insisted that users must have been changing other settings. This was certainly not the case here. And there was no message from Windows Update to be responded to, and the machine was left in an idle state overnight. No scripts were scheduled. There should have been little unscheduled activity other than backup scripts running on servers, and those backup scripts do not touch local drives.

I acknowledge that Windows Update is a complex beast and that sorting out dependencies and update sequencing is anything but trivial. Based on previous responses, I don't expect a solution, only denials. But I thought I'd post this message so that you know you're not imagining that the settings "changed themselves" again.

24-MAR-2011 Happened again on today's updates to Windows 2008 Standard.

Best Kept Secrets of Windows Explorer Iconographers

2010-03-14T16:13:00.005-04:00

It was happening after every backup. The files in one folder were consistently being skipped, even though they weren't in use at the time the backup ran. The only thing I noticed was that the color of the file name was different - red, I think (not sure as I have red-green color blindness) -- certainly not the default Windows Explorer color. Usually a short trip to one's favorite search engine (Bing is sometimes better at Microsoft.com search) results is all that's needed. No such luck this time. I tried:

Windows explorer file name coloring - windows explorer icons
Windows explorer icon colors
Windows explorer color changes

and variations too numerous to mention. Nothing.

After many right clicks into the properties tab, at last I observed that the checkbox for encryption was was checked. Encryption wasn't used intentionally anywhere on this Vista system, but there it was. Uncheck the box, and Ouila, it's normal. The only helpful piece of evidence I can offer here is that the folder originally came from another system on the local network -- though encryption wasn't used there, either. If there is a legend for Windows Explorer iconography, the secret remains with its creator, as it remained undiscovered by this adventurer.

Posted via email from knowlengr

CiteULike Offers Synch w/ Delicious

2010-03-06T23:55:00.001-05:00

CiteULike is now offering a bookmark synch service with Yahoo's Delicious.

Keywords: reference; bibliographic tools.

Posted via email from knowlengr quips and tips

"NLP" -- Disambiguating an Overloaded Expression

2010-03-06T23:39:00.001-05:00

My acronym dictionary doesn't list "NLP" as "Neurolinguistic Programming," though it does for some. Instead, it's "Natural Language Processing." I notice that the HiveFire NLP Site has subtitled their posts to clarify this as well, no doubt encountering the same ambiguity. Unfortunate, as both topics possess an academic sheen, but only one is invested in the usual rigors of research.

Posted via email from knowlengr quips and tips

After SALT 2010

2010-03-06T23:09:00.001-05:00

The SALT 2010 conference ended Friday, but the ideas were still actively swimming around when their lanes converged in the NYT Magazine story on teacher education.

Posted via email from knowlengr's posterous

Why is a Padlock Icon Appearing on a MediaWiki Page?

2010-01-21T16:22:00.000-05:00

Anyone know why some URLs have padlocks next to them in MediaWiki pages?

Use What You Already Know: "Drive" Qlikview QVD's from Excel

2010-01-12T12:48:00.001-05:00

Leverage tools you already know how to use. That should be maxim one for decking out one's analytics toolbox. (It's more important than any single piece of advice from usability specialist Jacob Nielsen). An example of this principle is the product Vizubi. Vizubi provides an Excel front end to Qlikview's highly optimized and super-efficient native "database" structure, a QVD.

I haven't tried it, and have read no reviews of it, but it has one laudable feature. It leverages a tool for which skillsets are abundant: Excel. It has other reported capabilities, such as natively understanding what to do with time variables, and itself using in-memory resources, but that one feature may be worth the price of admission.

The idea of using Excel as a front-end has a time-honored tradition (e.g., Arbor Software's Essbase). It's no accident.

Plone 2.5 Browser-specific Issues Understood (Not Solved)

2010-01-07T13:44:00.005-05:00

I'm administering a few Plone 2.5 sites under Windows. Sometime over the past two months, I noticed that when I tried to use Kupu, the rich text editor, to edit the content type Rich Topic, the body of the topic text was blank. No editing was possible. After looking into this further, I was reminded that this feature (which is now standard in Plone 3 and 4) was provided via a third party "product" (Plone team's notion of a plug-in of sorts) simply called RichTopic and I think originated with Jon Stahl. In later versions, the feature is referred to as rich text fields on collections.

But nothing had changed in the site configurations -- except, of course, the browsers, which had undergone numerous upgrades since the original Plone 2.5 deployment. After painstaking testing, I was able to determine that the symptoms persisted in Firefox 3, Safari (to the extent that Safari Win could be used for testing), and IE 7 and 8. In Opera, I was able to see the HTML, but the editor wasn't using its toolbar properly so I was reluctant to use Opera to update the content. Here's the surprise: SeaMonkey (v2.0.1) which I use as an HTML editor, worked fine.

Updated 8 January 2010 It's some complex caching problem, as pages visited for the first time for a browser work properly. After repeated edit visits, they stop working.

Perhaps it was my browser plugs, or security, or the Plone skin being used -- unclear. But perhaps this will save someone else a little time. My "solution" will be to ignore this problem and to upgrade to Plone 3, though that is not a trivial process.

Perfect #Qlikview / #Gemini Iron: #SGI Octane III?

2009-10-06T11:04:00.000-04:00

How about a terabyte of RAM? Would that change your notion about how a database ought to behave on your platform? If your platform is SGI's Octane III, capable of hosting almost 1TB of RAM along with up to 80 cores, the notion of in-memory data processing for analytics might be worth another look. Industry veterans won't be surprised by this evolution -- not revolution -- in technology. Balancing slower memory stores (typically disk-based) against higher speed stores (not only RAM, historically speaking, but higher performance drives) is an old challenge dating back to the 70's if not before. This 2008 ACM paper by A. Leventhal is one of several pointing to flash memory as just the lastest element in the long tradition of storage hierarchy juggling. Lower prices and newer technology have simply moved the problem into a larger interest group. Business analytics and database processing, typified by Qlikview and Microsoft's Gemini project among others, are just two obvious candidates.

Virtual Machine Disk Failures - Problem in Progress

2009-10-04T10:18:00.001-04:00

ENVIRONMENT

Supermicro X8DAL-i, Vista x64 (host), Windows Home Server (Windows 2003-like guest), Parallels/Virtualbox VM, 3Ware 9650 RAID-5 1TB-3, Intel IHC10R, SATA drives (1TB X2, 500GB X3), 6GB RAM, Intel 5520 (Xeon),PNY Nvidia 9600GT, PC Power 910W.

GUEST OS EVENT LOG ERRORS

event 11 - driver detected a controller error on \device\ide\IdePort1
event 9 - device \Device\Ide\IdePort1 did not respond within the timeout period (6X)
event 51 - An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk1 during a paging operation 5X
event 50 - Delayed write failed . . . 5X
event 51 - the device Virtual HDD '0' IDE\DiskVirtual__HDD(0) FWR10003 . . . disappeared from the system w/o being first prepared for removal.

HOST OS ERRORS

None

More details on the Virtualbox forum.

WORKING HYPOTHESES

3Ware battery backup unit failure (But timeouts happen or appear to happen on the non-3Ware drive)
Firmware issue with SMC MBO
VM over 3Ware RAID instability
Special circumstance with VM and WHS
Special circumstance with WHS

Like No Cost Contracts? Help out the US Patent Office

2009-09-24T00:16:00.000-04:00

The U.S. Patent Office might not have the budget, but they're scratching their heads to find a way to fund eLearning projects. Called the "Intellectual Property E-Learning Initiative," the USPO is calling upon you to host and port their learning content for use within the USPO. In exchange, under this possible scenario under consideration, you can repackage the content, add value, and sell it commercially.

The USPO says they have authored more than 150 modules on intellectual property topics (patents, trademarks, international IP rights). This work would form the basis of any "repackaging" and remarketing effort.

Who's the potential audience? "The scale could be all interested law firms to all worldwide IP offices to 6000 patent examiners or 700 trademark attorneys." Just how "valuable" and "interactive" the "rich content" is might determine the ultimate value of this proposition, and hosting a large LMS infrastructure would be a nontrivial espense.

But the proposal is, at the least, inventive.

Vista: Best Startup Technique for S/W Needing Admin Rights

2009-07-11T16:34:00.007-04:00

An audio driver and ftp server are two applications that are in my Vista Ultimate startup group. Both require admin authorization to start up. Nothing serious, but a nuisance, as they appear as "blocked" programs and must be manually launched.

Microsoft's Help suggests using Windows Defender to block the startup applications from running. This probably works fine, but didn't sit well, essentially "leave it broken."

Several solutions are possible. The one settled on, described in a forum post, utilizes the task scheduler to launch these applications instead of the startup folder. The task scheduler allows for setting the "run as admin" feature ahead of time. (The Vista task scheduler has a well-thought out UI and may be useful for you for other purposes).

But one of the tasks stubbornly refused to be removed from Startup. Unclear why, but by using the Sysinternals Autoruns utility, which has other benefits as well, the audio driver item could be cleared from the startup registry --without a tedious browse of the registry. (If you're on XP, try Mike Lin's utility).

Commodity Disk Drives May Fail in RAID

2009-07-10T18:02:00.004-04:00

Upgrading disk capacity seems to be an ongoing nuisance. More music and video content ensures that most of us will run out of space sooner or later -- and that doesn't even begin to consider what happens with backup space.

If you're using RAID to improve reliability, there's cause for concern with ordinary commodity drives, e.g., your garden variety 1TB drive. Take a look at one Newegg commentary for a report from Western Digital about the difference between their RAID-suitable and ordinary desktop 1TB drives. It must be a big difference, because the same capacity RE3 Western Digital drive is close to 2X the price.

On the Promise TX4660 Compatibility List, a number of commodity "non-enterprise" drives can be found, but this statement accompanies the list: "In RAID storage system, we recommend user to use [sic] enterprise level hard drive, which has much better command timeout control and more reliable to vibration for critical application [sic]."

It seems one can't simply shop for the least cost drive and throw it on your Intel ICH10R LSI, 3Ware or Promise RAID controller.

On the other hand, this is a plus for the architecture of Microsoft's Home Server, which doesn't use RAID to accomplish its own sort of redundancy. The commodity drives would probably be fine for MHS.

Discovered: Source of Mysterious Musical non-POST Beeps

2009-07-08T18:30:00.005-04:00

It's emblematic of how far we haven't come: signalling computer system problems with beeps instead of intelligible messages.

Yes, I know the excuse - no UI, compatibility with older hardware, and so on. But consider this brief story.

Take a Windows XP machine with Intel D865GBF motherboard. Running fine since 2006. The plan is to convert the boot disk to RAID 1. An existing controller already running in the machine was suitable for the task. Its firmware was out of date and incompatible with the Windows-based "PAM" management tool for the controller. The firmware was updated, the PAM applications and Windows driver to accompany moving from JBOD to RAID 1. The drives were updated to RAID 1 and files restored to it preliminary to making it the boot disk.

Windows booted fine from the old boot disk. After about two minutes, a repeated low - high beep pattern began - using a perfect fourth or fifth. No POST codes matched this symptom. The Intel desktop tools showed nothing out of the ordinary with power levels, temperature or fan settings. The pattern was ceaseless. Some POST codes seemed somewhat plausible, suggesting that the CPU detected a problem with itself, but under light test the O.S. behaved well except for the beeping. The system was rebooted and memory tests run for an hour. No errors were detected.

After much investigation and fruitless web searches, the culprit, if it can be called that, turned out to be the presence of the Promise TX2300 controller, which had been in the system for years. When it was removed, the beeping stopped. The ultimate cause is unclear - possibly there was an indirect consequence of changing to RAID 1, but there were no messages anywhere, not in the event log or in the directory where the Promise driver was installed.

The absurdity of troubleshooting beeps with the full Windows UI present should not be lost on anyone.

Recipe for Removing Latest Adobe Shockwave (Win) Vulnerability

2009-06-29T18:55:00.001-04:00

Adobe Shockwave has a critical vulnerability (APSB09-08) that doesn't update itself a la Microsoft's push updates. The instructions found hither and yon surrounding this update seemed a bit vague, so here is a simple attempt.

Although it might seem otherwise, Adobe doesn't have a standard patch push mechanism, so this recent critical vulnerability in Shockwave is probably not being fixed on your machine. It wasn't on mine.

http://www.adobe.com/support/security/bulletins/apsb09-08.html

Shockwave may not be on all machines. If it's not in your Add or Install Programs list (XP) or Programs and Features (Vista), you don't have it, and haven't needed it in your web travels.

Adobe's advice (echoed elsewhere) is to first uninstall and reboot (! - this is not obvious, as the uninstaller does not automatically recommend this for you) and then replace it with the current version. Shockwave Player 11.5.0.596 and earlier versions are affected. (The version Adobe offered as of this writing was 11.5.0.600). To optionally check the installed version manually -- since this is a bit of a fuss -- manually, see Properties Version tab here:

C:\WINDOWS\system32\Adobe\Shockwave 11\SwHelper_1150600.exe

-- or your equivalent system path, as c:\windows\system32 is just a default location.

Get the new version of Shockwave here:http://get.adobe.com/shockwave/

A minor warning: When Shockwave installed for me, Adobe wanted to push a Norton scanning tool. Uncheck the box if you don't want this; it defaulted to yes.

Adobe indicated that this advisory applies to Windows only.

Facebook's Toilet Paper Model for Post Search and Recall

2009-06-27T22:59:00.010-04:00

When Mark Bahti asked me to resend an old Facebook post made from a third party content provider, this seemed like a modest request, requiring trivial effort. Wrong! While there's work underway to remedy this, Facebook doesn't provide an easy to search status posts to retrieve previous content -- neither one's own, or the posts of others. Nor are such posts readily disgorged from Google or Bing.

The screenshot at right shows the result of thirty minutes' effort at retrieving posts, one painful scroll at a time, only to learn that FB would cease showing posts older than a few weeks.

Facebook's limitless single-page scroll model has seemed lame from day 1. In a recent fit of annoyed clairvoyance, the underlying analog became clear: a Facebook post is torn from a continuous roll of HTML toilet paper -- not intended for reuse.

Win "Access Denied Write Protected" Caused by Simple File Sharing Feature

2009-06-26T20:36:00.008-04:00

As with many computer-related symptoms, the long-lived expression "Access Denied" has multiple causes for Windows users. A review of several alternative and equally plausible causes did not fit my scenario, hence this post.

What was puzzling about this incident was that it occurred while a large backup was being restored. The backup originated on a RAID subsystem. The controller card and drives were moved to a system after a machine had been put out to pasture. The restore using a simply copy-and-paste operation was moving along nicely until certain files and folders exhibited the "Access Denied" messages shown in the screenshots.

To solve this version of the problem in Windows XP at least, two Microsoft tips from the Microsoft.com maze are needed.

The first tip disables Simple File Sharing. Simple File Sharing does not allow for changing ownership of files and folders, which is essential to the cure. It's obvious that Simple File Sharing is in effect if the Windows Explorer does not have a Security tab to allow for changing ownership. XP Pro is needed in order to disable Simple File Sharing.

The second Microsoft tip, which is only helpful after Simple File Sharing has been disabled for the system, is to change ownership to a local administrator account. Once this has been done, file attributes can be changed using the ATTRIB command. (While a single recursion through all subfolders should reset everything, this didn't seem to work if certain source directories had a mix of different owners and permissions; this was not investigated further).

An unrelated, but possibly useful note, is that restores of this kind, that do not use native Windows backup file formats, work best with Robocopy, which will restore folder and file timestamps as originally recorded. Lastly, it should be noted that Robocopy may not copy files such as PST that are thought by it to be in use.

Psychology: Still an IT Stepchild

2009-06-10T10:52:00.008-04:00

Coworker Anita D'Amico testified on June 10th before the House Committee on Science and Technology. The subject was Cyber Security R&D, but a subject worthy of broader attention was the role of psychology as an information technology discipline. Perhaps because of its uncertain standing as a science (everyone thinks they already "know" human behavior), psychology has for several generations of scholarship pushed ever -- well, harder -- to present itself as "hard science." Whether such striving is worth the effort, and whether it succeeds in this struggle matters little to the role that psychology should be playing in information technology.

Psychology has had a supporting role in the Human Computer Interactions (HCI), artificial intelligence, program understanding, semantics, and more recently social networks. These are all important, large subjects, but, as Dr. D'Amico observed, very few psychologists are employed in cybersecurity, or IT generally, it must be conceded.

While gifted Silicon Valley engineers are credited with user-friendly designs like the iPhone, some psychology-friendly advocates believe that many effective designs could have been made available long ago. They believe that such design thinking should follow a path parallel to other technical innovations, rather than being seen as just another expression of armchair technical innovation by "engineers."

The House Committee provides a RealMedia archive of today's webcast. (Link to be provided later).

A copy of her full testimony (PDF) before the Committee is publicly available from the official House site. Anita leads the Secure Decisions division of Applied Visions, Inc.

Views expressed in this or any other post are my own and not necessarily those of the Company.

Seven Reasons Twitter is Important but not Innovative

2009-05-23T03:44:00.001-04:00

Twitter is mostly warmed-over email. Don't misunderstand. This isn't coming from a naysayer; I've always thought that email was a killer app, albeit a mature one. Here are seven reasons why Twitter isn't innovative, though it is important as a highly successful medium. Twitter will morph. In the meantime, in significant ways, it's more business as usual than transformational.

Twitter's core component is not radically different from a short broadcast email. Text. Retro. Not that text is bad!.

Short messaging itself isn't new. Forget SMS -- remember text paging?

Instant isn't new. Forums, email, wikis --even Sharepoint -- allow for messages to be received within seconds of being posted. Not as fast as Twitter, but fast.

Followers and Friends may grow with the speed of a California wildfire, but social networks originated with listservs and shared email lists.

Twitter's notion of discourse threads is still emerging. Consider what effort it takes to follow a reply to a reply, especially if some time ("older") has passed between the posts. Twitter's instantaneity can be offset by intervening content clutter.

Twitter's succeptibility to spam is similar to email. Follower lists at this stage of Twitter's evolution are easy for bots to harvest.

Like email, Twitter hasn't found a better way than the hyperlink to connect to the broader net. The hyperlink takes you to the browser, which puts you back in Google's sweet spot, such as it did for email/Gmail.

Marketing Edge for eHealth Automation?

2009-05-12T12:02:00.005-04:00

The debate over the magnitude of savings that could be realizing by automating medical records is at a, ahem, fever pitch. At least one medical group in Long Island has taken to the radio waves touting its fully integrated electronic medical records system. In one ad broadcast in May 2009, the Queens Long Island Medical Group (QLIMG) tells listeners that a patient's records will be visible to any health practitioner across their network.

Separately, QLIMG announced in an undated news story on their website that the National Committee for Quality Assurance awarded the QLIMP Flushing North medical office "a Level 3 recognition as a Physician Practice Connections®–Patient‐Centered Medical Home (PPC‐PCMH™)." More on this certification program is available from NCQA, though details appear to be, at first glance, a bit sketchy. (ASQ, what say you about NCQA metrics?)

Godaddy DNS settings for Blogger

2009-05-05T19:25:00.004-04:00

If you're setting up DNS at Godaddy to point to your Blogger Blogspot.com website, follow these Godaddy instructions. Google's indexing doesn't make this Godaddy.com page very visible.

A more expansive discussion (not limited to Godaddy in scope) is provided by The Real Blogger Status.

Plone vs Joomla, Drupal, DNN, Community Server

2009-04-28T14:58:00.011-04:00

A fellow Twitterer (@visualmatters) is considering several CMS platforms. The subject is much discussed elsewhere, so what is shared here represents some personal experiences that may be under-reported elsewhere. Principally I compare the options for Plone vs. non-Plone, but throw in a couple additional observations.

Among this group Plone, and possibly DotNetNuke are the most polished from an engineering point of view. This means they tend to have better managed open source community volunteers behind them, and exercise more control over the contributed code.
Unlike the other CMS's, Plone comes with its own Python-based object database system, Zope. This is a plus and a minus. Best plus: Zope's system features a rollback, because it can maintain versions of updates made to the content. A great feature. Worst minus: it requires a long-running application server-like process (a la JBOSS) and many hosting companies won't touch it with standard (cheap) hosting plans.
Hosting plan alternatives for a newbie include shared ($5-20/mo) in which you are one of hundreds of other websites on a "server," or semi-dedicated (VPS), in which only a few share the server resource, or a dedicated server (rent the hardware for yourself). Most everyone starts out with shared because it's bundled with DNS services, email and webserver administration functions. With VPS and dedicated options, in addition to costing more since more resources are dedicated to you, you must also administer them, such as deal patches, firewall security and maintaining system software. This can be routine, but sometimes isn't. Definitely not for someone who wants to stay focused on the content.
Plone is especially strong for group editing and mid-sized projects because it features a well-thought out plan for editorial workflow. The other packages have this feature to a greater or lesser extent, but it's fairly recent, and has a tacked-on feel.
Plone runs over Zope, which is an object oriented database. The practical benefit of this is that if you suffer a major problem, it's possible to roll back the database -- easily. This can be a life-saver; the job it saves may be your own.
Plone is less well known, less widely adopted (for the reasons mentioned here, perhaps) and thus it has a smaller ecosystem. This means there is vastly less free / commercial add-on alternatives. E.g., if ecommerce options for Plone are more limited.
DotNetNuke requires a Windows server, which for some hosting companies costs a bit more because the associated Microsoft stack (complement of software dependencies) is more costly to them.
Plone can be reskinned, but it's far more difficult to do so than with Joomla, DNN or Drupal. There are also much fewer third party skins, so it's a DIY affair involving some CSS work. The CSS tasking is well managed, but you'll find yourself less well supported in existing forum posts as you go down that road.
With the possible exception of DNN, scalability can be an issue for each of these products, though it can be managed with effort. Scalability will required unshared resources -- i.e., not hosted.
If you're going to perform lots of Flash hacking on the site and use lots of third party widgets, it's harder to do with Plone, but not impossible.
I found Community Server a bit more difficult to reskin, but it's been awhile.
Newbies are well served to sign up with Godaddy, or a hosting firm like them, because they offer preconfigured setups for Joomla, Drupal, Community and DNN. You can try each of them and switch them out pretty much on demand. Opinion varies, but I've found their customer service to be mostly adequate, and certainly they're well staffed compared to some. For Windows, you might look at Alentus or Aerohost.
Drupal has market momentum because some recent high profile sites were built to support White House initiatives.
I found the volunteer management behind Joomla and Drupal to be somewhat less disciplined than Plone's.
The LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PhP) used for most Joomla and Drupal implementations is increasingly stable, but has a history of security issues not dissimilar to Windows. Because it's widely used, it's got a bulls-eye on its back. In addition, the CMS's themselves have experienced some vulnerabilities. One needs to monitor this and ensure patches are applied quickly.
DotNetNuke has probably the most economically viable third party add-on ecosystem. This means that, as a very general rule of thumb, the add-on offerings are deep, diverse, better supported overall, and less likely to be free.
In this group, I found Joomla to have the fastest implementation cycle. I was able to build a creditable multipage website with decent practical functionality using a low cost skin and a number of free plug-ins -- in 2 comfortable days. It worked, I was generally satisfied, but I came away from the experience shaking my head at some of the components' documentation and uneven quality.
This might seem counterintuitive, but take a look at the add-on packages for the CMS's under consideration. You might find something indispensible there that will save you lots of time. It's possible switch CMS's later when requirements become clearer.
I use Sharepoint on a daily basis, but for various reasons that are a bit involved, it's typically more suitable for corporate enterprise situations (though there are several things that it does extremely well that no other CMS I am aware of can do yet).
I have also started to use Google Sites. Google sites is quite economical at $50/yr, but is too new to recommend for anything but a very simple site. This most certainly won't be true a year or two from now, but for now it's somewhat difficult to make Google Sites look as good as even a Blogspot page.

Since posting this message, @cchodnicki pointed me to the R2I.ntegrated comparison project, which if nothing else will get you thinking more exhaustively about what capabilities might be needed in a CMS for your application. There are numerous other comparison sites worth visiting when the choices are less numerous.

Bigger not Better? Extended Chase Outage

2009-04-05T08:43:00.008-04:00

I have a credit card account that has been migrated through bank acquisitions twice (Providian to WAMU, WAMU to Chase). I have no idea what the SLA objective for this Chase operation is, and perhaps the site has been up at times during the night, but an apparent full-shift outage of more than eight hours seems excessive.

The timing is unfortunate. Because of tax season, the need for weekend consumer access to transaction detail is higher than usual

If there was any notification, it was not through email, a channel that generally survives outages (Comcast's reported outages yesterday notwithstanding)

The outage comes at a time when WAMU customers are just beginning their experiences with Chase

If the outage is as long as it appears to have been, I would not certainly not accept this SLA as an IT manager for a world class bank that has been given preferential treatment during the bailout. But, speaking as a pragmatic customer, ordinarily, a one-shift outage is manageable. Planned outages should be accompanied by email notifications. I could live with that, though I'd be grumbling.

Investors and pundits seem to accept as gospel that consolidation leads to economy of scale, which leads to better service per unit cost to consumers and businesses. There are many reasons to question that. Normally I would point to deteriorated customer service as the principal indicator of Company size, but perhaps there are technology deficits as well. Entrenched IT enclaves may be less likely to demand SLA improvements during periods of consolidation and service coverage expansion.

For example, the Chase system stores much less transaction data online than did WAMU. Is it unreasonable in today's world of 7GB Gmail, unlimited Yahoo email, and unlimited Godaddy website disk space, to ask for a couple of years' detail online? Rather than telling WAMU customers that they would be upgrading their systems to match WAMU's online level, instead WAMU customers were merely told to download their data before the consolidation.

The consolidator's mandate --backed by investors and managers willing to accept the nonproductive capital consumed during many consolidations -- Do More With Less, seems to mean unapologetically telling customers to accept less.

IE8 Tab Save/Restore workarounds

2009-04-01T21:46:00.006-04:00

A handy feature seemingly removed from my current version of IE8 is save/restore of tabs between sessions. This blog entry from tipandtrick.net (and I'm sure there are other posts addressing this) suggests some workarounds. The built-in solution is Tools Restore Last Browsing Session. The workarounds aren't as convenient as the feature as implemented in other browsers, but it's better than relaunching 20 tabs.

Update My colleague Mark Sowul observes that he likes Tools => Restore tabs "much better since you don’t need to proactively choose to save the session (plus the restore when crashing which was a big problem for me in IE7) but I set my homepage to about:tabs and there’s a link right there to restore session. Also if it ever “forgets” as is the case from time to time you can go to user\app data\local\microsoft\internet explorer\ and restore a previous version of the “recovery” folder."

Microsoft Access: Azure Database I/O coming?

2009-03-08T19:00:00.007-04:00

A friend recently asked me how far Microsoft had gotten with its Office cloud (Azure) initiative. Specifically, he wanted to know whether Microsoft Access was headed skyward. So far as I can learn, according to this Microsoft post, the plan is to leverage SQL Data Services and the Sync Framework to make this happen. There's talk in this post of a beta in 2009. The posted Q&A is also worth skimming. Microsoft's calling this part of Project Huron.

Unclear how much developer labor will be required to make use of the proposed functionality, but some videos are posted (mainly showing Access desktop sync) and a "Try It" link are pending as of today.

Microsoft update breaks Intel MBO Audio Driver (D945PVS)

2009-02-22T10:41:00.018-05:00

After an unidentified Microsoft XP SP3 update, my audio driver has stopped working. My MBO is several years old, but not ancient.

According to Intel's Desktop Utility (from Avocent) this board uses the Intel Azalia audio device, which was originally based on Sigmatel hardware.

Symptoms: Audio is garbled and the Sonic Focus drivers are not loaded ("Sonic Focus drivers must be loaded for this application to work"). The symptom is that level is not manageable and that noise is introduced into the stream. WMP plays nothing.

Likely immediate cause is the failure of the Sonic Focus drivers:

Sonic Focus itself only provides OEM product support and passes the buck back to Intel.

A Microsoft forum pointed to this web page now managed by IDT (company that bought Sigmatel assets).

Luckily (and this is why I try to stick to Intel or Supermicro motherboards) the relevant drivers and documentation are archived efficiently by Intel. I downloaded the new Intel driver sets from:
http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspxProductID=2374&DwnldID=15520&lang=eng
The audio driver is described as follows:

"Installs the Windows XP integrated audio driver version 5790.3v22 for Intel® Desktop Boards with IDT* 9220, 9221, 9221D, 9223, 9227 or 9274D and a software application that allows you to configure your audio settings. (WHQL certified)

This driver includes the Intel® Audio Studio software.

Media Center XP v 5.1.2600 SP3
English: AUD_allXP_5790.3_PV_IAS_v22.exe DownloadVer:5790.3v22 Date:5/22/2008 Size:24366 (KB) Time @56Kbps:56.40 min
OS:Windows* XP Home Edition, Windows* XP Media Center Edition, Windows* XP Professional, Windows* XP Professional x64 Edition"

Warning: In fact there are two Intel binaries supplied. One provides the drivers and utility, the other provides the GUI needed to manage the drivers. Both are needed.

The Intel Audio studios cannot be uninstalled from Control Panel but Sigmatel drivers can be uninstalled. This is important.

Then install the IDT driver (not the GUI installer ) followed by the GUI.

The install script behaved oddly. It tries to install by running a batch script and start up the service (via a batch file) and the UI (shown below) before the driver is installed. Undaunted, I pointed the installer to the driver in the WDM folder created during the unzip and install process, and then allowed the install to complete. I suggest you do not allow the installer to search the web or elsewhere on the local machine to pick up the driver.

Reboot.

The new (to me) IDT-branded logo will appear with what, if memory serves, is a slightly different version of the GUI that follows.

Note that the IDT Audio Control panel is not available from the Start menu, but rather from the Control Panel. Reconfigure this panel (settings were lost after the reinstall).

Art Exceeds Vision of Would-Be Web 3.0 Visionary

2009-02-01T22:37:00.004-05:00

It may not have been his intention, but T.V. Taman in CACM's "Toward 2W, Beyond Web 2.0" offers accompanying art work by Jared Tarbell (shown here) and Scott Draves that hints at what Taman himself is not quite able to envision. We know the basics: RSS, SSO, MDA, personalization, mashups, social networks (little more than Arpanet-envisioned collaboration) -- but Taman isn't onto anything resembling a paradigm shift. The art he offers up with his analysis speaks to a different set of possibilities, but only teasingly.

DARPA/Lockheed Martin's Submarine-Launched UAV

2009-01-30T17:56:00.001-05:00

LMI's Skunkworks, funded by DARPA, has been at work putting some meat on the bones of a submarine-launched UAV. One can't help but speculate whether gamers put to the same task might come up with better ideas than engineers steeped in the military-industrial complex.

Question Software Maintenance? You bet.

2009-01-28T00:15:00.002-05:00

A cover story in Information Week (January 26, 2009) poses the radical question, "What if I don't pay maintenance?" Or, at least, what if I go to a third party for software maintenance instead of the manufacturer? Oracle and SAP are moving to an annual maintenance fee of 22%. The software life cycle cost has been growing steadily since the "standard" rate of 18% was exceeded by some major players. What irks many who might otherwise be willing to pony up is that customers have little control over how the maintenance revenues are spent. Author Mary Hayes Weier suggests the alternatives include open source, SaaS, third party support, renegotiation, or moving to self-service maintenance. Whether any of these are feasible for your scenario is unclear, but it is clear that few companies offer much transparency about where your maintenance revenues are being spent -- though those same firms will be the first to make claims to Wall Street about how those revenues account for bottom line results.

Discovery Is The New Cocaine - Going Beyond Engagement

2009-01-14T19:10:00.001-05:00

Ng and Fung's "Discovery" distinguishes active vs. passive web interaction. Both modalities will flourish.

Discovery Is The New Cocaine - Going Beyond Engagement

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: discovery twitter)

ZDNet: Twitter's CEO Predicts Utility's Future

2009-01-14T14:07:00.005-05:00

The CEO of Twitter, seen (http://tinyurl.com/9o6cvu) on a video clip at ZDNet, says he isn't sure why people use Twitter at all. That doesn't stop him forecasting more and "favorite" uses. Sure to further stir up Twitter-haters.

Verizon Wireless Honors DNC Lists for Business Accounts

2009-01-14T11:31:00.004-05:00

In yesterday's post on Do Not Call Lists, I mentioned that B2B DNC list management is not mandated but is often done as a courtesy. It is instructive to read the Verizon Wireless web message regarding its business account DNC practices.

Microsoft Compact .NET Framework vCard Success Story

2009-01-14T09:47:00.008-05:00

Recently I purchased a special purpose Windows Mobile tool that allows for import and export of contacts using the VCard standard. Produced by PocketKai, this utility makes excellent use of the Microsoft .NET compact framework. In fact, the installer footprint for the application is only 192KB, and the \Program Files\vCard Manager folder is only 114KB. (On my HTC PPC6700 device, memory is at a nuisance premium).

My requirements Before email became the killer app that it now is, and before spam mandated the presence of marketing email addresses in the address book, Activesync and other synchronizing tools were adequate. Now my address book is huge, with 2715 contacts (and counting). I need a small subset on the phone. Further, I have a different set of requirements for work vs. home contact management. The vCard is perfect for this. I can mark contacts by category, import/export by category and then synchronize a selected folder between mobile, desktop and cloud locations. On the mobile device, a zip of all 2800 contacts, in vCard format, can be stored in removeable flash memory (not subtracting from precious main memory). Then I can draw from that folder to insert / export a contact from Windows Mobile as needed. PocketKai, at the attractive price point of $8, does the trick.

Do Not Call (DNC) Lists for Business

2009-01-13T15:36:00.009-05:00

I've been asked to discuss ways put a business number on a telemarketer's DNC list.

While there is no regulatory protection covering unsolicited B2B telemarketing , most reputable U.S. firms will add business phone numbers to their DNC lists if requested. To get on such a list, you'll need to find a number into the proper call center, or, failing that, someone in marketing who manages the call center contract. Since outsourcing is common, this may take some investigation. Working back from the outbound number, if you have a number from Caller ID, assume that there are multiple trunk lines identifying the caller. The numbers may or may not be contiguous. I've found that other people are very likely to have posted a complaint about the number and have discovered the firm behind the call -- so try your favorite search engine, and include the phone number in the search terms. Once you figure out the sponsoring caller, you may need to speak to an intermediate supervisor (It's not necessary to speak with the boss of the whole operation), since the call center rep is likely on a timer and may not be permitted to take out time, if they even have the capability / permissions, to add your number to the list.

In larger call centers, outbound calling is automated, and the numbers are compared to the DNC list by the autodial software. For full automated one-way (i.e., robot) telemarketing, widely used during political campaigns, the same process is involved, but there is obviously no way to pick up the phone and request to be put on the DNC list.

TIP The issue of trunk lines is important. If your organization has multiple inbound lines, you may need to request to have all of them individually added.

TIP Note that charities and nonprofits are exempt from DNC regulations, but they also will generally try to honor DNC lists -- if they are big enough to have sensible systems in place.

TIP In some organizations, the DNC list maintenance is semi-manual -- often there is less automation in the call center than one imagines. It could take more than one attempt to be placed successfully on the list.

TIP The phone number to successfully reach the call center may not be the same one that is provided in the Caller ID to your answering machine.

While practices may vary widely, most telemarketing firms are concerned about reputation and best practices. Because even the threat of federal or state fines can cause the loss of telemarketing firms' customers, and because state regulators tend not to be interested in the finer points of a defense ("We thought it was a business line"), telemarketing firms find it in their best interest to add your number to the DNC lists they manage.

DISCLAIMER My experience in these matters is based upon my work supporting DNC list management for a publicly held US company in the Northeast.

Image hosted by VisualDatasoft.com.

Windows 7 purchase planning for consumers

2009-01-13T13:49:00.002-05:00

ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley reports that a "free" migration path to the new Windows version may be offered to purchasers of new PC's.

Bad Documentation - Not Just Software and Music Electronica

2009-01-10T13:16:00.014-05:00

As a (very) part time guitarist who does a fair amount of playing on nylon string instruments, strong nails are helpful. For a decade or more now, I've had aged-related ridges that can tear longitudinally. I took a long shot. In trying a product called "Total NailRx," I noticed that the manufacturer (who is unknown -- the product is distributed by Dermactiv Research Group, but their website is silent about the product; how about a little transparency?) has no instructions on usage. Not only that, but if your local Walgreens happens to have the product I'm describing, they might have other nail treatment products by this manufacturer. The manufacturer apparently wants you to buy everything they make and try them all, because they offer no guidance as to which you might want to try first.

The manufacturer is taking its cues from a number of software manufacturers, who run out of gas when it comes time to write an explanation as to how the thing works. Apply coat 1. Apply coat 2. Why do I mention music electronica? Thinking of Roland, whose documentation is poor, but at least they feel they must issue manuals and even post the PDFs of same on their website (unlike MOTU, who's decided that manuals can only be distributed with the physical product, pre-web style). Well, except for the wall wart I bought from them last week, which had only some vague disclaimers and warnings on the box. OK, you may not need one for a wall wart, but this one is kinda special and really needed a manual.

Oh, and the nails product? Well, I'm trying it (the 2 step version) every 3 days and not removing it between applications. This is working well so far, but I'm more than uncertain about this approach (as are others) --I feel my breasts growing larger.

Flickr not displaying complete set despite "public" settings

2008-12-15T11:00:00.002-05:00

I'm a "pro" occasional user at Flickr. After routinely posting sets for public viewing, today it didn't work. After a couple of frustrating hours investigating it (not easy to do -- two browsers are needed to do the testing), it appears to be a problem with the "safety" settings on the photos. The symptom was that the first photo of the set would show, but not the remaining photos of the set. The safety settings were the same as before, but they weren't showing unless I was logged in -- as though the photos were private, but they were in fact public. The "fix" was to use the batch edit feature on the set to reset the safety settings ("Set safety filters") -- even though the individual photo settings were already set. Go figure, er, photo, Flickr.

Best guess as to cause: transient glitch in the uploader.

PSU (Power Supply) Epidemic

2008-12-07T15:05:00.007-05:00

If I didn't know better, I'd suspect a new and innovative malware attack on power supplies. What is it with computer power supplies these days? In my small office network, no less than six have failed over the past 20 months!

The latest was a pair of Antec SP-450 SmartPower 450W that failed. These were included in the Sonata II case, which Newegg and many other retails sold with considerable success. I deployed two of these units a couple of years ago, and both have failed in the last 90 days.

According to at least one source, Antec no longer uses their own PSU.

There are numerous failure reports about the SP-450 lots shipped with the Sonata II, and posted in several forums. But this is not to pick on Antec alone. The failures I've seen have crossed all brand and capacity boundaries.

I do worry about breaking my Antec PSU tester, which does get very hot if left in test mode for very long.

Yes, I have UPS / power protection on all but one of my machines.

While I'm on the subject, the Antec Sonata II case has a number of good features, but one of them is not a good design for replacing the PSU. Because a case structural member is located between the motherboard area and the PSU, you must squeeze the PSU through a couple of steel rails. With the MBO installed, the fan assembly prevents a clear shot of the allowed space for remoal and replacement. AFAIK the PSU can't be accessed by removing a side panel or pulling it out the front, or by removing a rear plate.

Windows ruler window - Shift-R Annoyance

2008-12-07T11:19:00.006-05:00

Periodically, I'll be typing as fast as possible (i.e., wearing out the backspace key), and suddenly Windows decides I've summoned the following window. What causes this?

Some folks think it's caused by the IE7 web developer toolbar. Try disabling it to see if that helps. (A temporary measure - you'll probably need the toolbar for some other IE7 problem soon enough).

(Google: the window says "Ruler Snap to X/Y Axis Hide Tick Marks Snap to Element Hide Endpoints Hold down the Crtl key down to create multiple rules. Ctrl-M shows/hides the window magnifier.")

MS05-051 "broke" Vista: HRESULT was 8007043c eventsystemobj.cpp

2008-08-10T14:11:00.005-04:00

I pride myself on keeping my most critical Vista box well patched and happy (from a Microsoft point of view). I plan to use Vista for many years -- I even bought the "retail" version.

Imagine my surprise when I noticed that it was no longer accepting peer to peer network connections. "Hmm, I guess I'll try rebooting," I frowned. But Mr. Ultimate Vista refused to start up. It displayed the Vista logo, then, without any message or notice, rebooted itself again. This would have gone on indefinitely if I had not intervened.

I booted into safe mode, (luckily that worked!) looked at the System log (not a minor accomplishment, since some of the other log flavors were not viewable due to "could not connect" errors). The error that got my attention was "The COM+ Event System detected a bad return code during its internal processing. HRESULT was 8007043c from line 45 of d:\rtm\com\complus\src\events\tier1\eventsystemobj.cpp." And a probably related message, "System log:The following boot-start or system-start driver(s) failed to load: ACPIaswSPspldrWanarpv6." Deeper frown.

I looked at the Reliability Monitor, and it showed nothing unusual for the past couple of months.

A TechNet forum post suggested a closer look at the Microsoft KB entry that is the title of this post. In short, the problem is with permissions policies -- apparently some critical Windows applications were locked out from the Registration directory.

This is an understandable "bug." What is less understandable is how this problem escaped the automated test tool sniffers one imagines that Microsoft has at its disposal. After all, the easiest problem for a test script to detect is a boot failure.

Before the era of web- or email-enabled newsgroup / forum posts, my system could have been down for days as I sorted this out.

One other thing: the Microsoft warrantee for Vista is 90 days after it's activated.

KVM's and USB - PS2 Adapters: "Active" Doesn't Work Either

2007-11-04T09:43:00.000-05:00

I'm using my third (obsolete, but widely available, and, yes, they keep breaking) Cybex - APC Commander KVM. This aging KVM design has no USB inputs. A new Dell 2900 server uses only USB keyboard and PS2 connectors. The inexpensive adapters that ship with new mice/keyboards didn't work. Some web research indicated that "active" adapters, with small circuits to bridge the two standards, might be more effective. I tried a pair sold by Sewell Direct. No dice.

Wikipedia and Mediawiki

2007-04-16T14:02:00.000-04:00

While composing a brief comment on ted.com about Jimmy Wales' presentation, I was tempted to mention that Mediawiki, a community variant of the software underlying Wikipedia, doesn't seem to have kept up with its recent surge in use. I base this upon, of course, a reader's perspective, but also from having deployed Mediawiki several times over the past few months.

Voo2do.com Replies

2007-03-20T23:59:00.000-04:00

Shimon of Voo2do.com discusses its server outage in a reply to an earlier post here. A good time to add my voice to those who've mentioned how convenient and easy to use the site is, which is to say that a lot of work has been put into it. Nice ride.

Inventory Spoofing: An Interesting RFID Exploit

2007-03-20T23:16:00.000-04:00

According to
http://www.bof.nl/nieuwsbrief/nieuwsbrief_2006_16.html (in Dutch), Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, has developed a prototype of a device capable of:

Detecting all RFID chips and scanners in its neighborhood
Keeping an inventory of all RFID chips you carry on your person, and alert you to new additions to the "inventory"
Block the reading of any RFID you carry
Spoof a given RFID

More details at http://www.rfidguardian.org/ (in English)

Added Risk Forum

2007-03-20T15:26:00.000-04:00

See the very bottom of this page for the RSS headlines from the computer security Risk Forum.

Voo2do is back

2007-03-20T15:14:00.000-04:00

The site's manager has weathered a disk failure and put the service back online.

Voo2do.com: "Oops, actually we're not out of business"

2007-03-19T09:36:00.000-04:00

As previously reported on this blog, there's no free ride. The mea culpa splash screen, adorned with vegetation and earth tones, is pleasant enough, but low on professionalism. After several days of unacknowledged down time, the Voo2do.com manager posted a message today that, so far as can be determined, is predated to the 16th.

We regret to inform you that the server behind these sites has suffered an unexpected failure. . . I apologize for this inconvenience and am working to get things fixed ASAP.

Heads-Up display pricing declines, utility elusive?

2007-03-15T23:46:00.000-04:00

I EEE Spectrum reported on a new heads-up display design priced in the $300 range. Those who tried it on the editorial staff at Spectrum were unimpressed with its utility, but found it to be well designed.

Still, the marketing staff at the manufacturer's Myvu.com site quotes reviewer David Pogue of NYT:

"What’s cool is that you can still see by looking around the TV set on either side. Hard to explain, but really neat."

Free Rides on the Web2.0 Highwire

2007-03-14T21:22:00.000-04:00

It's an awkward, mysterious place where commerce and Web 2.0 intersect. Open source projects, such as those sponsored by Google last summer, "This Is Cool" projects originated by developers on their own time, and sites hopeful of commercial viability live in a fragile space. Developer attention wanders. Interests shift. Social networks may grow but later shrink as the novelty wears off. Sites may not achieve viability, or fail to attract investor risk-taking.

This may or may not be the case with Voo2do.com, a lightweight personal "project management" site embraced by some adherents of David's Allen's Getting Things Done. It's been a handy tool, and today it's been down all day. Could be a momentary disruption, or the end of an experiment. Its user population is probably modest -- I have no idea -- but it's certainly much smaller than Flickr.

Come to think of it, how much does Flickr contribute to Yahoo's bottom line? Above the line, it must be a large bandwidth sinkhole (though less deep than for YouTube or MySpace). "Web2.0" experiments can be compelling -- e.g., PageFlakes or WidgetBox -- but relying on them for an important application is easily questioned. Never mind "important" -- think about all those family photos disappearing because they weren't backed up at home if Yahoo decides Flickr doesn't pay its way.

Bibus bibliographic database - Windows Notes

2007-03-08T11:15:00.000-05:00

At AVI, we're testing Bibus as one of several vehicles for managing research bibliographies. I have used Refworks for more than a year, and also CiteuLike. There are collaboration options with these products, but for various reasons, we are unable to exploit them.

Bibus can be used for Windows, which is the platform of choice in the AVI farm.

There are some two installation-time tips to consider, which appear to affect the MySQL schema and/or underlying code that is installed.

Several screens only appear when the product itself, not a new SQL repository managined by Bibus, is installed. These include adding what is in our case, a necessary modification -- adding some sort of support for keywords. Keywords aren't included in the base product.

When installing, two additional screens appear. The first of these allows a few additional reference types (a la "journal," "book").

The second allows replacement of custom fields with specialized fields. Here we added "Keywords" which are used extensively in AVI bibliographies.

Unfortunately, Bibus does not support keywords directly. Data was imported using the "note" field and moved to the custom "keyword" field via SQL (or manually).

Minor nuisance: SQL must be used to remove references.

THE NEED

A web service to Refworks or equivalent. Bibus solves an AVI problem but is only accessible through the Company VPN.

Learn Like People Do, Silly

2007-03-02T12:03:00.000-05:00

Decades ago the AI community kicked around the idea that there was a rationale for teaching machines to learn in ways that resemble how people learn. At the time, there was little appreciation for how difficult that might be, but it was a healthy debate that has been lost in the "I can code that in ROR" wave.

Courtesy of Awesom-O, I was reminded of this by a recent announcement by Anybot that its robot learned to walk using machine learning methods.

"Man in the Middle" Serious Game Design Advantages

2007-02-23T15:33:00.001-05:00

The Virtual Terrorism Response Academy (VTRA) is part of the Dartmouth Medical School. The Interactive Media Lab announced availability of its emergency response training software. Interestingly, it's a mix of instructor/expert content and "video game" style software. This hybrid format can overcome some common objections for "games" and adds credibility that on-camera experts can lend to a project.

Technorati Tags: serious games, gaming

Cash on Hand -> Ethical Lapses at Microsoft?

2007-02-19T12:16:00.001-05:00

Sometimes having too much cash on hand is not a good thing. Here's an example of Microsoft offering to buy off a Wikipedia author to influence his entry on OOXML. As reported by NWC, OOXML is a Microsoft-sponsored variation of the Open Document Format electronic publishing standard. Microsoft purportedly offered to pay Rick Jelliffe to change his entry on OOXML.

Windows App Install Permissions in Corporate Settings

2007-02-15T11:30:00.000-05:00

I worked for more than a decade as a consultant in Fortune 100 settings. I remember well the difficulties one faces when installing even an innocuous application in Windows when you don't have admin (root) access. Martin McKay weighs in on the User Access Control in Vista, which, it seems, is not helping matters. I chime in with a reply on the CW blog page.

"Sorry! We could not process your data due to a loss of session data"

2007-02-06T22:28:00.000-05:00

MediaWiki users have apparently seen this message fairly often, based upon its prevalence -- intentional or otherwise -- on web sites. Less often appearing is commentary on cause.

In at least some of the cases, this is actually a PHP-related problem rather than a MediaWiki problem per se. Usually it's because the php.ini file doesn't have a sensible and writeable directory for the session_save_path that is available to the webserver. Use phpinfo() to learn which php.ini is in use, correct the directory to one that's writeable and accessible to the browser, then restart the web server - usually Apache (not the computer).

This will appear at errorprocessing.com at a later date.

Drop shadow effect on blog skin

2007-01-25T17:07:00.000-05:00

GameSpot has deployed a drop shadow effect on its skin.
Kinda neat.
White text on dark background must be fairly large and/or boldface.

Technology models undermined by business models

2006-12-21T00:03:00.000-05:00

Elder technologists will say it was inevitable, but it's still unfortunate to learn (as from Nelson Minar) that previously free and open technologies are abandoned because -- guessing here -- they don't draw a straight line to the bottom line. For years, the Google SOAP search API has been the prime example of an open web service for those learning about web services for the first time. Now we learn that it's been put on "end of life" status. And Google Answers? Nice service, nice idea, free: now gone. For now, the Ajax search API remains, but you have to wonder.

Although technical complaints with SOAP have been aired (echoing the words of colleague Mike Kocka), the larger issue is that it may be time to question business models based upon "free" APIs such as those provided by Flickr, de.licio.us and other Google APIs. It was a nice meal while it lasted, perhaps, but won't satisfy the capitalist appetite.

Seagate 1TB disk drive

2006-12-04T18:01:00.000-05:00

A post at the Daily Tech reports that Seagate expects to offer a 1 terabyte drive in the summer of 2007 for about 700.00.

Even though this announcement mainly affects the consumer channel, imagine the trickle-down effects for power and physical space utilization, backups, and perceived obsolescence of various storage subsystem technologies.

RDF Support

2006-12-01T18:14:00.000-05:00

As noted in a previous, more detailed post, I'm trying to get more systematic in cataloging and using feeds. In doing so, it's becoming clear that not everyone supports RSS1 or RDF. E.g., Google and Bloglines support RDF, but Happyfish doesn't.

RSS Reader in a CMS: Worthwhile?

2006-12-01T17:00:00.000-05:00

When I saw that Community Server had an embedded RSS reader, I couldn't see the point. Sure, you want to publish content from select sources on your site. But what would be the point of giving users the option to subscribe the sources on your site?

Now that I've used the product slightly more, I'm beginning to see the point. If readers like your site, it's convenient for them to self-aggregate content you have preselected for them at the site. Now it falls to me to sort out what options the designers have been the site administrator. There are permissions issues to sort out; by default the feature is not granted to new users in the setup I've stumbled into.

Alfresco test drive

2006-12-01T13:49:00.000-05:00

I was able to configure a Windows 2000 Server version of Alfresco. By default, it uses HSQL, and I'd prefer postgresql. There's an FAQ for the latter, so that will be the next task at hand if I pursue this. On my 2GB machine, it did labor a bit launching the application with Tomcat -- possibly too much heavy lifting for a virtual shared hosting scenario.

Next day: I read the FAQ over at Textdrive, and this clinched what is, for now, my decision to forego Java as an open source CMS platform.

The Alfresco documentation reflects VC investmment. Plone.org is almost up to this standard, but not quite.

Technology Paradigm Pain

2006-11-29T23:29:00.000-05:00

A long and helpful transparent exposition of this French firm's transition from Python to Java for their enterprise class product reveals much about the state of software generally.

P3P Dead

2006-11-22T17:54:00.000-05:00

Two years ago I put a fair amount of effort into adding P3P standards to a corporate website. In the process, I became aware of the numerous privacy and other issues that we take for granted as web developers and designers. The P3P standard -- forever in my mind associated with the AT&T "Privacy Bird", an icon that would indicate the privacy level of a webpage -- codified the privacy policies of a site, and allowed for automatic actions to be taken based upon browser settings. Best of all, it exposed these issues for website builders. It looks like it's dead for now. Speaking both as a citizen and a website worker, this is one standard that will be missed.

Plone adoption at ACM

2006-11-17T12:35:00.000-05:00

This is an important announcement for Plone "Mo." ACM is planning a comprehensive Plone rollout. There are more details at Plone.org.

Cursory Evaluation of RSS Writer Editors

2006-11-17T10:05:00.000-05:00

Given the dearth of applications to create and write RSS feeds, users must be happy with the feeds being created by their CMS and blogging tools. I find this odd.

For several projects, I wanted to create specific feeds to serve specific reader subpopulations, so I sought out several syndication feed authoring tools and tried them. These applications have reasonably polished UI's, so some of the deficiencies are puzzling.

Not only are the applications somewhat thin on features, the underlying standards seem to have undergone a dumbing-down since RSS 1.0 and RDF that is the opposite direction from the drift of tag-happy social bookmarking sites like Magnolia and Delicious.

Disclaimer: This is not a thorough review and I could easily have missed some functions.

Review of Syndication Feed Writer/Editors

Only one of the applications could spider/crawl a site and create an initial feed
Most could not write Atom, RDF or RSS1.0, though some could read it
None seem to be unaware of the related Google sitemap XML format
Most odd of all, several of the packages did not allow for rearranging of the news items within the feed! (Suggestion: Spend more time on use cases before coding).
Some did not handle UTF-8 format
Not all handled the Yahoo media extensions (see http://search.yahoo.com/mrss. “MediaRSS”. Also see the Java plugin for ROME: http://wiki.java.net/bin/view/Javawsxml/MediaRSS).
Not all seemed ready for iPod standards
Several integrated ftp. Nice to have, but not worth it! Developers should have spent more time on other functions. Ftp is easy once the feed has been made.
GUID tags, when not URLs, tend to leave out permalink = "false"
Inconsistent handling of "article archives"
Feed author which is supposed to be an email address is permitted to be a name (what's really needed is dc:creator, part of the Dublin Core and implemented only by Tristana Writer AFAIK)

FWIW, here are my unedited notes of what I found from downloading and testing several commercial and freeware applications.

EMSI Alnera FeedWorkshop: (1) no crawler; (2) does not write Atom (3) No integrated Help (I couldn't figure out how to add a new article to an existing feed; it's a toolbar button in one of the somewhat unconventionally designed list panes) (4) Exports to CSV, HTML, text (5) supports XML style sheet (6) Article reordering is supported (7) Minor issues with the English translation (8) Handles enclosures (9) Permalink = false problem 34.00

Feed for All (1) does not read or write Atom or RSS1. (2) Doesn’t open UTF-8 feeds and translate them. (3) Does not issue “Are you sure?” for item deletion. (4) exports to JS, HTML, txt and CSV. (5) Reordering is OK. (6) No spidering. (6) MySQL import option. Delphi. 40.00

Tristana (1) Does not allow for rearranging of topics. (2) Handles Yahoo media extensions for attachments. (3) Has spidering. (4) Writes Atom 1.0 (5) Feed Submission (Pinging) Service pings (directly?) leading 22 feed directories and listing services (6) Seems to lose article author between saves, or has some rule it's obeying I haven't figured out (7) provides permalink = false properly (8) seems to show the bottom of the article list at the top of its editing list (8) Even if you manually rearrange the XML, RSS Writer will rearrange it in its own order, which is based on the article's timestamp. Ergo, change the timestamps to reflect the desired article listing.

ROME This is a roll-your-own toolkit, much more ambitious than the commercial applications. It is not a standalone usable application, nor was intended as such.

RSS Feed Creator (1) Rearrange? Yes. (2) FTP built in .NET application. (3) Doesn’t edit everything in the header, only Title, Desc, Link and Publication Date – but there is a built in XML editor (4) Same issue with items

Feed Editor by Extralabs (1) Does not appear to read/write RSS1.0 or Atom1.0. (2) Can rearrange news items. (3) Integrated ftp. (4) Has iTunes extensions (5) Can start feed from importing by certain HTML, CSV or XML formats (6) Handling of feed editor credit doesn't comply with feedvalidator.org (7) Built in XML editor 40.00

Broadcast Builder (www.lionhardt.ca) – (1) Download URL was wrong. Vendor supplied a different one by email. (2) There is no reorder. (3) Appears to store everything as “*.rds”. (4) Does not crawl a site. Import is from RSS or OPML. (5) The feed validator behaves differently from the usual validator (see above) - complains about “markers” – what are those? (6) Exports to Access 2000 (is this of value?). (7) There is an integrated blog tool, but what does it do? There appears to be an interface to external blogs, but the logins fail without issuing any error messages. (8) There’s an internal link to forums, but this results in a 404 (URL goes to .com instead of .ca). (9) Does not write ATOM or RSS1 (10) imports dc:creator and other fields maintained by other editors (11) but doesn't maintain dc:creator or other fields

FeedSpring by Usable Labs. Open source product (GNU GPL). (1) supports RSS 2.0 (2) Allows reordering of items. (3) Encounters some difficulties reading other RSS feeds, but these can be overcome (4) No support for Atom or RSS1 (5) For non-URL GUIDs, doesn't generate the "=FALSE" XML required at feedvalidator.org (6) Author field is not populated, which some editors may require for RDF or other compatibility (7) Handles item enclosures (8) Drops the permalink = false clause even if it is already present in the feed.

Uninventing The Wheel

2006-11-06T16:45:00.000-05:00

I'd forgotten about this site, SQLZoo.net, but it is indispensible for those of us working on cross-platform database projects. Give it a goal, say granting permissions on a database, and it will give you the syntax for how it's implemented across various DB engines.

The existence of these variations is, or should be, a source of considerable professional embarassment.

More than that, it reminds me how often it becomes necessary to descend from software abstraction into implementation minutae. This is an old problem. There's something rotten eating away at the trunk of the Tower of Babel.

Promising solutions: www.sqlobject.org, other middleware.

Open Source and the Easter Egg

2006-10-26T22:55:00.000-04:00

My latest task was to be an easy one -- building the Apache - PHP stack for Windows 2003. "Easy," you think. "People are doing this thousands or hundreds of times a day." Very wrong, and yes I did know better.

The error I faced was this one:

Cannot load [path]php4apache2.dll into server. The specified file cannot be found.

Search on this error message and you'll see hundreds of instances dating back to 2004.

For the solution I attribute this Devside.net careful posting and bailout.

For a more animated expression of dismay, keep an eye out for the launch of errorprocessing.com. In the meantime, allow me to observe that in the relatively controlled environment of a Windows server, configuration management for the LAMP stack should be the responsibility of the folks at php.net. The information given there provides a hint, but not the solution.

And then there are dozens of misdirected suggestions, such as removing quotes around the pathname . . . This is not about assembling working components into working order. It's an Easter egg hunt, and one no self-respecting child would tolerate.

IBM Information Server Product Modules

2006-10-12T17:05:00.000-04:00

Is this a new class of product, SOA reworked, or vaporware? In any case, does it matter to anyone beyond the Fortune 100 who must pay attention to Blue's offerings? IBM is so not on my radar, despite their stock price.

Link to IBM Information Server Product Modules

Migration: TMobile Sidekick to Sprint PPC6700

2006-09-18T10:03:00.000-04:00

After initial hardware problems with Sidekick two years ago, I have been happy with both the Sidekick and with TMobile's customer service. Sometimes TMobile's coverage in Long Island (including parts of the microcommunity where I live) or certain airports was weak or absent, but it's been satisfactory.

But it's an expensive proposition with all the voice and data features added into the service -- pushing $80/mo. So I'm consolidating with my family Sprint service and moving to a standardized PPC platform using their PPC6700. I've got an older Toshiba PPC (non-phone) that I've had for awhile, so that aspect isn't new.

I'll update these notes as I find time.

Using Activesynch to move my Outlook address book resulted in an out of memory condition on the PPC6700 and I had to reset the device.
Activesynch versions <4 inevitably created dozens of Valentines Day reminders. There seems to be no standard for handling "all day" events that works across platforms cleanly.
Danger's Sidekick has excellent web integration, whereas PPC6700 (and all PPC's IMHO) assumes you are at a stationary desktop (with a Windows license, of course) to which you often return. I've gotten away from this model, and have little use for Outlook except at work. Reason: to hard to get at messages from various locations (e.g., homes of friends and family, and the phone itself). So there is no easy way to get my 700 names out of the Sidekick and into Outlook to push them at the PPC6700. TMobile used to support Intellisynch (Google has cached those pages), but I think when Nokia bought them, that went away. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I got tired of searching for another solution for this very old problem.
The Sidekick transparently handles the Send/Receive for email. I assume this has to be set up in Pocket Outlook, as I wasn't getting email without poking the app.
Sprint's customer service and/or customer service infrastructure is spotty. More on this later.

Declan Butler, reporter

2006-09-15T16:43:00.000-04:00

Mr. Butler writes for the weekly science journal Nature. While most of Nature is not available online, Butler does a thoughtful job of excerpting useful reports and suggesting which content might be worth the extra $

Link to Declan Butler, reporter

Boing Boing: User creates virtual ecosystem in Second Life

2006-08-25T11:33:00.000-04:00

A good use for a rule-based system?

Link to Boing Boing: User creates virtual ecosystem in Second Life

UNCG ECON 201 Dancing Alien

2006-08-23T10:57:00.000-04:00

Metrics for Game Development

Outlets like the Journal for Game Development are probably all over this, but one must wonder, upon seeing a nonprofit venture of this sophistication, the costs:

Cost to create a character (e.g., the "alien")
Cost to create a scene (e.g., a room), even without animation
Ongoing web traffic expense (even for curiosity seekers, as must be stomping all over the site this week)
Ongoing maintenance and debugging, especially when there's turnover of student labor that might be used to create the game

Link to UNCG ECON 201 Dancing Alien

Playing Games For College Credit

2006-08-23T10:11:00.000-04:00

The UNCG Division of Continual Learning today announced it has developed a groundbreaking new video game for college credit that is scheduled to launch this fall. Called ECON 201, the game teaches the principles of microeconomics by following an alien species that must learn how to survive after crash-landing in a post-apocalyptic earth.

read more digg story

My additional thoughts:
- Will this affect the pricing model for credit coursework nationwide?
- Is there an advantage given to institutions with better developed multi-media (especially 3D) resources and talent?
- What about role playing games?

Wurldbook

2006-05-17T23:43:00.000-04:00

I signed up as a paying customer for Wurldbook and the service has been more than satisfactory, though at times it can be slow to load.

As of this writing, I have more than 6,000 URLs bookmarked.

Google has introduced a bookmarking feature (IE only) that is in beta. More on that service later.

wURLdbook vs. Pluck

2005-02-16T09:13:00.000-05:00

I tried both Pluck and wURLdbook and find that wURLdbook is much better supported, and a much better citizen on my Windows Server 2003 (std) box. Pluck would grab hold of IE (it insinuates itself into IE) and wouldn't let go of the TCP/IP connection, halting not only Pluck but all other network traffic on the box. We'll try Pluck some other time. Like about a year from now.

Like other aggregators, Wurldbook requires a conceptual relink of your view of the web.

Software technology and more

2005-02-14T21:57:00.000-05:00

This blog is focused on technology issues other than knowledge based software systems. KBS comments are in knowlengr.blogspot.com. Or, Worth1000Pix.com.