TO-Tech Blog

I just read about three bloggers who died recently over at…

In Web world of 24/7 stress, writers blog till they drop

I don’t blog for a living. But, I do blog and write quite a bit. I blog regularly for O’Reilly Media and try to regularly update my personal blogs. And, a bunch of Windows Mobile articles were just published over on the Microsoft.com Windows Mobile site. Over the past few months, I decided to cut back writing on my personal blogs just to get a bit of time back for other things. What used to be 6 or 7 posts per blog per week is probably down to 4 posts per week.

For those who think blogging full time might be the way to go, read the article. Maybe your day job isn’t so bad after all…

Take it easy out there fellow bloggers…

I could never figure out which AMD processors have the AMD-V virtualization assist feature. Search AMD’s website for this information proved futile. Fortunately, I read a Microsoft newsgroup post where a Virtual Machines MVP provide a link to a Wikipedia entry that provides this information. Here’s the link to that Wikipedia page…

List of AMD Athlon 64 microprocessors 

I remembered seeing the Realtek audio driver being listed as a problem for the Windows Vista SP1 update. So, I wasn’t too surprised to see this problem. Fortunately, the Check for solutions online button actually led me to the Realtek driver page with updated Vista drivers at…

Realtek Audio Drivers page

…and the new drivers resulted in a functional audio system on my Vista box.

Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) is available. Before installing it, you might want to read more about it at…

Microsoft TechNet Windows Vista TechCenter SP1

The 32-bit version is huge weighing in at 434MB. The 64-bit version is, un, huge-er at 762MB. And, be aware that some applications, especially security related apps, might break after SP1 is installed.

I wanted to try out Xubuntu on an old Dell Latitude L400 notebook because its Xfce X11 windows manager is tuned for low-RAM systems (the L400 has 256MB RAM). Unfortunately, it only managed to display half the screen making it unusable. So, I left Puppy Linux running on the Dell.

Sorry for the blurry image. I took the photo with a camera phone.

While discussing Web Design Guidelines with a co-worker, I flashed back to the old Klingon Programmer’s Code of Honor and decided we need a Klingon Web Design Code of Honor instead.

• Guidelines are for the weak. Klingons do not design with guidelines. They design with honor.
• The web server daemon serves the Empire would honor. It must be defended at all cost.
• Klingon web designs do not interface with the user. The web interface must instill fear and respect and overwhelm the user.
• Cross-site scripting exploits are the domain of the foul Ferengi. Therefore, XSS must be hunted and destroyed.
• Cross-site request forgery is yet another foul Ferengi technique. XCRF, like XSS, must be hunted and destroyed.
• Klingon web sites do not authenticate. Sign-ins require a Blood Oath.
• Style Sheets do not cascade. They swoop and dominate the page.
• Klingons battle and subjugate content. They do not manage it.
• Klingons use web design battleplans. Frameworks are for the cowardly.
• Klingons spit at spindly microformats. Klingon data descends as they please upon unsuspecting web pages.
• Web content is not syndicated, it is unleashed.

Hmm…

UltimatePC.com

…Let me see if I understand this correctly. I have the Ultimate version of Windows Vista. But, I need to buy more? And, what happened to all those ultimate extras that we Ultimate Edition owners/users were supposed to get??? Here’s what I think. Take a cue from Apple and roll all the Windows editions into Ultimate Edition and charge US$129.95. One edition. All the features. One version for support staff to deal with. Think about it.

I’ve been using VMware Fusion on a Mac to play with Fedora 8 (Linux). However, I just learned about this blog entry that gives step-by-step instructions (with screen caps) for installing Fedora 8 under Virtual PC 2007.

Fedora 8 (werewolf) on Virtual PC 2007

The important screen cap to pay attention to is the one change during the grub reboot to add i8042.noloop (mentioned in my CentOS/RHEL blog entry) to deal with the mouse problem.

One of the reasons I’m using Virtual PC less and less is that VMware and Parallels does a much much better job of installing and running Guest OSes.

I’m looking forward to trying Hyper-V under Windows Server 2008 as soon as I can get a PC with the specs to run it properly.

I’ve been managing my family photos on a Windows XP PC because it deals with files copying, etc.) much faster than Windows Vista on a much faster (hardware-wise) PC. However, XP decided it could start to burn a data DVD but couldn’t figure out how to finish it (I let the process go on for 20 minutes before killing the process from Task Manager). So, I copied the photos from the XP PC to the Vista PC using an external drive. I guess don’t burn data DVDs often using Vista because I noticed that it default to burning a Live File System. This may have been marginally ok when using DVD+RW discs was more common than using an external hard drive for read-write external storage, but it makes no sense now. The Life File System is horrendously slow. It would take hours to write even a gig or two. Fortunately, I clicked on the formatting options and saw and chose the Mastered option instead.

The second thing I noticed is that the slowest recording speed setting available is 6x. I generally only burn a couple of backup data DVDs a month (usually just photos). So, I have a bunch of 4x DVD+R discs I was using on my XP PC. Fortunately, I have 16x DVD+R discs too and used those instead. But, I wish a 4x option was available too.

I hope this is the final HP PhotoSmart C6250 horror story I post here

The printer hardware itself is fine although it is (1) extremely noisy during startup and (2) locks the PC it is connected to if it is on during boot up. However, I had to remove all the printer’s applications software from a Windows XP networked PC this past weekend after suffering through weeks of slowness and occasional system freezing. The problem was that HP’s application monitoring software would go into some kind of endless loop if the printer was not turned on and, therefore, undetectable. Since HP’s software had been unable to actually work with the networked printer for the past two weeks anyway, I didn’t see much point in debugging it further. The XP PC runs much much faster now and has not locked up since removing the HP software this past weekend.