WhistlinDixie

Make Yourself Known

First of all, you may have noticed that I have not been online at all this past week. That would be because I was banned from the network at the place where I was staying for using too mush bandwidth. Basically, they were in the process of banning me, but were unable to because they could not stop the connection that I was using. So, to disconnect me, they had to shut down the hotel’s internet connection and initialize it again. Because of this, and the fact that it was my second offense, I had to get the hotel manager to call them and tell them to lift the ban on me. Only problem is that the manager works hours that overlap with mine, so it was a little hard to go and talk to her. I finally called her on Friday, but got her voicemail. I left a message, but figured that I would probably have to call again on Monday. However, I tried connecting this afternoon, and it worked. I’m not sure if she actually requested my ban be lifted or that by keeping my wireless off for a week allowed me to connect as a different computer, but I’m back.

Anyway, back to what I was going to write about. I ran across a site called Frappr that allows you to make a Google Map that pinpoints the location of anyone in your group. All you have to do is type in a name (real or made up), a zip code, a "shoutout", and, optionally, a picture. Frappr will put a marker on the map according to your zip code and post your shoutout, with picture, at the bottom of the page. You can click on the markers on the map to read the shoutouts that have come from there. It looked pretty neat, so I got my own Frappr page. So, feel free to go and make it known just who exactly reads this and where you are. No registration is required, so go ahead and Frappr. (Check it out. I think that I just invented a new verb.)

This Frappr map is deprecated. Don’t waste your time with it.

Now I Can Come To You

Do you find that you are forgetting to visit my site to see if I have anything new? Now you can use a little program called an aggregator to get the latest from me. Just go out and download a news aggregator that supports RSS 2.0 and subscribe to my feed. Right now I am using JetBrains Omega Reader 1.0.4, which is currently being offered for free. It requires the Microsoft .NET Framework v1.1, as do most of the aggregators that I have seen. I am sure that there are plenty of other quality news aggregators out there, including the one built into Mozilla Thunderbird and a few plugins for Mozilla Firefox, so don’t feel obligated to use the one that I am using.

What is RSS, you ask? Basically, it is a way that a web site can publish headlines or other content in a standardized format. You can then use a news aggregator to subscribe to one of these feeds. Whenever a new item is available, it show up on your aggregator the next time the aggregator synchronizes. By doing this, you do not have to go and visit each individual site to manually check for updates.

To subscribe to my feed, click on the icon that is in your browser’s address bar (in Firefox or IE7) and tell it to subscribe to the feed. If you are using IE6, you can right click the "Hungry? Feed on RSS" and click on Copy Link Location, then paste the address into your feed reader.

Innnterresssting

I found this on the net last week. I’ll go ahead and set this up for you since it is not obvious from the excerpt what this is about. There is a piece of software called Microsoft SQL Server that a lot of web servers use to provide content. For all I know, Xanga or Amazon.com could use it. There are competing products, such as MySQL, which is used by Google, but that is really beside the point. DateTime is a data type that is used by SQL Server to store, you guessed it, a date and time (ie, 08/15/1986 15:30:43). Due to size limitations, the span that can be represented by a DateTime variable must be limited. In other words, you couldn’t use one of these to represent the time of the Pharoahs or the year 3000. Anyway, not that it matters too much, but here you go:

Episode III: Best Sports Movie Ever?

According to Kenny Mayne of ESPN’s SportsCenter, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith is the best sports movie ever. Better than Field of Dreams, Hoosiers, any of the Rockys, or Caddyshack, to name a few. His biggest disappointment was over the small number of football scenes. George Lucas, the man behind the Star Wars saga, said that originally they had a lot of football scenes in the movie, but they had to cut them because they were too gruesome for the theater. Now, Kenny only has to convince the original R2-D2 and Chewbacca.

Ok, way OT, but to continue on what I was talking about on Friday, IBM has announced that it will be switching to Firefox internally as the supported browser for the company. I’d just like to say, I’m pretty sure that with IBM’s track record, they can’t be wrong on this.

Changing of the Guard

What great news for this Friday the 13th: IE’s market share slips below 90%! I guess that is what you get when your newest browser is at least four years old. It’s no surprise, really. After all, it sometimes takes Microsoft months, and in a few instances, a year or more, to release critical patches for its browser. On the other hand, last weekend, three new vulnerabilities were discovered in Firefox. By Thursday, they were already pushing the bugfix out to users. Talk about a fast reaction. Microsoft could never turn out a patch in four to five days. Instead, they would have you wait for their monthly update release schedule, and even then, there would be no guarantee that the bug will be fixed. And the best thing to look forward to is that come v1.1 of Firefox, there will be an actual patching system implemented, so you won’t have to make a 4.5+ Mb download to get every bugfix. So, in conclusion, join the browser revolution by choosing the most secure, most extensible, most feature rich solution on the market: Mozilla Firefox. After all, I still have yet to have someone visit my website using Firefox, except me, of course.

Technical Difficulty

This wireless network is really starting to get on my nerves. From around 10:00 this morning until 9:00 tonight, I have been unable to access the internet. No matter where I carried my laptop in my hall, I could not connect to a good access point. Since I could not access the internet, I ended up playing HalfLife 2 all afternoon. Finally finished the game. The ending cinematic was predictable after playing the first game. The high point was definitely when you got the dark energy-infused gravity gun. You don’t know how much fun it is to grab enemies and fling them at each other. It was also fun to rip large items off of walls that used to be unmovable objects.

In other news, tonight marked the first time that I actually cooked a meal for myself, other than just putting something in the microwave or the oven. So maybe it was only Hamburger Helper. You have to start somewhere. Just for kicks, my mom suggested that I take a picture of it, so, here you go:

The true bachelor setup: food, TV (ESPN, nonetheless), and a computer. Who could ask for anything more?

OK, so maybe it doesn’t look too appetizing. It was tasty and somewhat nutritious.

Annoyances

You would never think that a wireless internet connection would be the biggest pain in an apartment that is in a hotel-like complex. It has been for me. The access point that I am closest to is not connected to the internet for some reason or another. There are plenty of access points that work just fine, but they have weaker signals than the non-functioning one. To get connected to a working access point, I have to unplug my laptop and carry it out into the hallway, where it can pick up a good signal. Then, I can carry it back into my room. Then I hope that the connection stays strong enough that my laptop will not connect to the bad access point again. My arm is starting to get tired, so I hope that it doesn’t happen again.

In other news, I now know that I have friends. Last time I checked, I have 20 friends. What really surprised me was how many people have invited me to be their friend only a day after I joined the FaceBook community. Thanks.

I’m Back!

After a very long night and most of this morning and afternoon, I finally have my computer back up and running. There were a few things that I couldn’t recover, but I’ll be downloading them again. There are a few small quirks that I still have to iron out, but it should all be good. I am currently copying the entire contents of my hard drive to my new external hard drive I would use Norton Ghost, but that was one of the few things that I was not able to recover. Also, since I didn’t use the restore DVD, I also don’t have Norton AntiVirus anymore. I am using AVG (free) while I try to obtain an actual copy of Norton.

One Step Closer

I just spent the last couple of hours recovering files. Unfortunately, it was not as easy as just telling it to recover my user profile folder. Instead, I had to tell it to recover all of the files in each folder, and repeat this process for each folder, making sure to keep the folder names and folder structure the same. Another slight complication is that it will not recover files to folders with periods in them. This means that I have to recover them to a folder without periods in its name, and them copy them to the correct folder. This becomes time consuming quickly.

Unfortunately, some of the larger files that I had are being troublesome. When I try to recover them, it says that there is an error and I have to abort that file. The only possible solution that I know of is to recover directly off of the hard drive instead of the image that I made to save time. So, right now I am scanning for partitions, again, on my laptop hard drive It should be complete by the morning, so that I can start to recover files again. With my schedule, I won’t have time to get back to it again until tomorrow evening at the earliest. Maybe I’ll be back online around midday Saturday.

So Close, But Yet, So Far

Well, checked on the progress of the recovery this morning, and it all looked good. I told it to recover all of my user profile to my new external hard drive At first, it estimated 4 hours to finish. It quickly changed to 1 minute and then finished. I was slightly puzzled at how it had copied over 7 GB of data in about a minute and a half. I opened up the folder that it had been recovered to and I saw all of my files. When I dug deeper into My Music folder, I saw that the files were there, but when I hovered the mouse over them, I noticed that each file had a size of 0 bytes. In other words, the file had been created, but contained no data. I was slightly irritated and started running simple scans on all of the detected partitions. Then, the program crashed. This means that I will have to scan the hard drive all over again, about a 10-12 hour process in all. To help it go faster, I am now copying an image of the hard drive to another hard drive that is much faster. By doing this, the preliminary scan goes from taking 5 hours to a little less than an hour. It will take around four and a half hours to create the image (compressed to save space), but things should go much faster after that. Maybe I’ll be up and running again by the weekend. Or at least I’ll start on that road since my term paper will be finished by then.