05.11.08
Posted in Geek Culture, Linux/*BSD/Unix, gadgets at 4:26 pm by Nate Smith
I had some trouble installing Squeezecenter (formerly Slimserver) on Ubuntu Hardy Heron (8.04). Everything goes according to the instructions from the Slim Devices (Logitech) web sites but once you try to access the web server problems pop up.
It seems the issues stem from Apparmor. A program used to protect certain settings on Ubuntu. you can see the issued in /var/log/messages.
After a lot of digging the answer was available here: http://bugs.slimdevices.com/show_bug.cgi?id=7580#c1
There is probably a more elegant solution but this will work for now, and I just wanted to point anyone else in this direction in case others have problems.
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04.27.08
Posted in rant at 7:49 pm by Nate Smith
I realize the media gets a lot of things out of context, but whoa! This was a quote from Steve Balmer on CNN. “Ballmer said the customers buying PCs with XP are IT departments who are having trouble shifting old machines to newer technology.”
He’s right, we are having trouble justifying upgrades to an obese operating system that does not really have any justifiable ROI.
Steve must be living on the moon. He should go visit some people in the trenches really doing IT and living with a budget.
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04.18.08
Posted in ColdFusion, ramblings at 6:32 am by Nate Smith
Arguably, anyone who uses the Internet touches Adobe technology at some point. Most likely in the form of Flash and Shockwave or Acrobat. Some of the most annoying problems creep in when your browser and operating system don’t cooperate with these technologies. Adobe could fix this. If Adobe had an Adobe-browser they could seamlessly combine the browser with all their extra technologies to work together. Historically Adobe has had good support for multiple operating systems including Linux so we know there is expertise within the company to support a broad range of platforms, perhaps even including mobile phones.
You can say there are already too many browsers and several very good ones now, but I think the Adobe browser is missing.
What would be the attributes of an Adobe-browser? I think it would have several useful things. First, it would be small and tight, carefully written for fast execution. It would need to be rigorously standards-compliant, perhaps based on an existing rendering engine, but not necessarily. Finally it should be a component. The browser itself should be able to plug into IE or FireFox, or run by itself. It should also be highly manageable and secure. It should also break some paradigms about what a browser should look like. That’s a tall order.
An Adobe browser should be highly manageable and secure because in a lot of places people would want to use it as the sole interface on a Kiosk. Imagine all the Flash and Acrobat technologies right there, for a pleasant user-interface and form-filling capabilities. In companies it would be nice to be able to lock down different aspects, like proxy settings, history settings.
Maybe Adobe doesn’t want to touch the browser market for several reasons - there is no profit in it, nobody “buys” a browser anymore, several good browsers already exist, or they don’t want to dominate the Internet and have to contend with antitrust issues. Certainly there might not be much profit in it, except perhaps in an IDE, developer materials and deployment and developer education for those wishing to extend or better support the browser, the “ecosystem” around it. Several good browsers do exist. OK, extend one. Use the rendering engine from an existing browser (maybe not IE) or partner with Apple, Mozilla, Opera or KDE. Do not worry about dominance and antitrust. It would be hard to get market share away from the big two, worry about that once you are successful.
I’m not asking Adobe to merge all their technologies into the browser. They should be modular, as they are with other browsers. That way you could trim the browser down for a cell phone, or have different levels of Acrobat support according to what the browser needs to do. The Adobe developers of all those other good technologies can continue to concentrate on making them work and improving them, they would have just have an additional browser to worry about integration with.
Finally, an Adobe browser could be a great development tool for all the people who work in development with Adobe technologies today. The first and best place to make sure your AIR, Flash, ColdFusion, or even Acrobat applications are working. Hopefully within an IDE like Eclipse.
C’mon Adobe, how about it?
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04.15.08
Posted in ramblings at 4:42 pm by Nate Smith
When I was a kid eraser crumbs were much smaller.
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04.10.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 10:42 am by Nate Smith
We have a little application that collects the contents of a database and then sends them to a few mail recipients for review. It was working fine in CF 8 prior to moving to Exchange 2007. We have other applications that relay mail through Exchange 2007 fine but for some reason this one was not. It turned out that the cfmail from field only had the name and not the domain of the sender. Once we added the sender domain mail would relay and work again.
This is probably a good thing - Exchange having tighter adherence to a standard, though I’m not sure which one. But it could definitely be a “gotcha” if your mail server was working fine prior to a switch to Exchange 2007, or possibly even an earlier version of Exchange such as 2003 or 2000. We happened to be moving away from Exchange 5.5.
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03.25.08
Posted in Geek Culture, rant at 9:01 pm by Nate Smith
I have switched out many of the lights in our house with compact fluorescent lights. On many of them I have taken to writing the date of the installation on the base of the bulb. A lot of the bulb packages will say the bulbs have a guaranteed lifespan of five or seven years. Several of the bulbs I have installed so far have not lasted this long. Two or three years it seems.
I suspect there is a probably a big difference between manufacturers and that most CFLs are not yet getting the payback they promise. I have used both inexpensive bulbs and expensive ones.
Caveat Emptor!
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Posted in Uncategorized at 8:57 pm by Nate Smith
On a recent visit to Disney World I was dismayed to have to give Disney my fingerprint to enter the gates to the park. As you enter the park you slide your park pass ticket through a credit-card or metro-type of scanner. Afterwards you have to place your finger in a reader on top and wait for a green light. I thought briefly of not doing it. “What did Disney want with my fingerprint!?” I thought. I didn’t want to disappoint my family so I went through with it.
Later I had the opportunity to ask about the fingerprints at guest services. My question was “Does Disney have a privacy policy with regard to the fingerprints they take and under what circumstances and to what parties they might be released?” The first representative I asked did not have an answer. Fortunately the manager on duty did. He indicated that the “fingerprint readers” do not actually read fingerprints. They take biometric measurements of the finger. Apparently the readers they used to have measured the first four fingers on the hand but were not very reliable.
Why do they need to do this at all? They want to authenticate you as you come into the park and use special features like fastpass. When your ticket is used they want to make sure you are present when it is being used. This would be to prevent somebody else from taking your ticket somewhere to get you a fastpass while you hold a place in line. There seems to be an age cut-off for this too, somewhere around ten or twelve years old.
I would be curious if anyone finds out anything different about the finger-readers at Disney.
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01.26.08
Posted in Slug - the NSLU2 at 11:27 pm by Nate Smith
It was an interesteing experiment but I have taken the NSLU2 - the Linksys Slug out of service for running this blog. I had it running with lighttpd, MySQL and Php. It worked well enought but it just wasn’t beefy enough to meet the needs of running a blog. Even a poorly read, low traffic one like this. ;). I discovered a few things during the attempt at using the slug. Foremost, I really like lighttpd. Lighttpd is a small and fast web server that can remove some of the size and complexity of Apache. Lighthttpd itself runs great on the Slug but the overhead of Php and MySQL is what kills it.
The new machine has an Efficeon processor in it. These run at about 1 Ghz but have great power-saving features. I’ll be on the lookout for some other tasks for the Slug to take care of for me.
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01.18.08
Posted in Reviews at 7:45 pm by Nate Smith
What a clever little laptop! The eee PC is an ultraportable laptop that also happens to be ultra-affordable. It has a tiny screen and a tiny keyboard but fortunately not a tiny processor. The eee is totally flash-based, it has no moving hard drive. I think it has a fan and that is probably the only moving item inside the machine. The mouse pad has a single button to click and the action on the button is very stiff. It may begin to loosen as it is used. The installed operating system is based on Linux and works very well.
But the screen is too small! argh! Everything on the web is now being designed for 800×600 at the minimum and 1024×768 on average. I thought I could get by with the tiny screen but it’s killing me to scroll so much.
I really wanted to like the eee PC and I may yet find a niche for it. It has a lot of processing power in a small package but the screen is a big handicap.
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Posted in Geek Culture, Reviews, books at 3:56 pm by Nate Smith
If you work in Information Technology you should be running out to buy this book. Michael Lopp, the author also has a blog which I intend to 
start reading. This book is packed with humour and insighful observations about working in an office, and more specifically, software development offices.
If you are a fan of The IT crowd, The Office, Dilbert, or the movie Office Space you will probably find a lot to laugh at in this book. Good stuff -Funny, insightful, and sometimes even practical. Recommended.
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