Messages from Blogs category

pennwood on "Don't Buy Apple"

My wife bought a Dell desktop & we spent as much on security & service as the Dell cost in just 2 years ($600) before the 'bad guys' trashed it. My Apple cost a little more but I haven't spent a dime on either security or service .... and it's trouble free for almost 4 years. Easy choice for me.
Publication date: 2009-06-12 more

pennwood on "short survey"

Hi Beth. I bought my Apple for security reasons. No viruses. I surf, a lot. Everything works good for me. I'm not addicted to my Mac - I may be addicted to the internet .....
Publication date: 2009-06-12 more

Add Custom Search to any site in two minutes

By the way, you might have missed it at Google I/O, but the Custom Search Engine team has made it really easy to add custom search to any site. Google recently introduced Web Elements, which are simple snippets of code you can copy/paste into your site’s HTML. From the Custom Search Element web page, I copied [...]
Publication date: 2009-06-11 more

Android barcode scanner in 6 lines of Python code

After my last video about using a barcode scanner to add and search books in your library, I was feeling pretty happy. Bar code scanners are pretty cheap--mine cost about $65. But then Google released the Android Scripting Environment (ASE) and it turns out that you don’t even need a bar code scanner. Instead, you [...]
Publication date: 2009-06-10 more

Search your bookshelf with a $65 barcode scanner

(Okay, if TechCrunch wrote about my video then I should probably at least do a blog post too.) Last year I suggested potential Summer of Code projects and one of my favorite suggestions was “How about a good open-source program to manage your book library? Something like the Delicious Library program, but that works with Linux?” [...]
Publication date: 2009-06-07 more

Straight from Google: What You Need to Know

I just gave a talk at WordCamp San Francisco 2009. Thanks to Matt Mullenweg and the Automattic folks for a great time! I think there will be a video up soon, but if you want to browse the slides in the mean time, here they are: You can also download the talk in PowerPoint format.
Publication date: 2009-05-30 more

Hulu Desktop vs. Hulu in Browser vs. Nexflix (Flash vs. Silverlight?)

For a while now we've had a computer hooked up to our large screen television and stereo system. A couple months back I upgraded the motherboard, CPU, and memory so that we could start using the Windows 7 release candidate and Windows Media Center on it. The new hardware also meant we could play back high definition video. Aside from playing back photos in Picasa and various video files, we also stream music using Pandora or play from our library using WinAMP or Media Center. For streaming video, we'd been using Hulu a bit (which is Flash based) and Netflix (which is Silverlight). Yesterday we tried out Hulu Desktop and attempted to watch the Glee pilot. Hulu desktop crashed on the first run after install (could be a Windows 7 issue) but then ran fine upon restarting it. But the video quality was low and quite jerky. It used a lot of CPU too. This made me wonder if it was really taking advange of the video capabilities of our system. It was bad enough that we switched to watching the show using the browser-based streaming. Hitting the full-screen high quality version acually played better there and used less CPU. So the desktop application clearly needs some performance tuning. I compare all of this with Netflix streaming which uses Silverlight and the difference is clear, even in 720p resolution we tend to keep our display set to. Microsoft has done a good job of tuning Silverlight for video. If I recally, they have very good H264 support built-in. That said, I'm glad to see Hulu Desktop out. It makes a lot of sense to have an app that can be controlled via IR remote instead of the wireless keyboard we had been using. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-05-29 more

The Big ALTER TABLE Test

As previously noted, I've been playing with XtraDB a bit at work. Over a week ago I decided to test compression on one of our larger tables and it took a bit longer than I expected. (root@db_server) [db_name]> ALTER TABLE table_name \ ROW_FORMAT=COMPRESSED KEY_BLOCK_SIZE=4; Query OK, 825994826 rows affected (8 days 14 hours 23 min 47.08 sec) Records: 825994826 Duplicates: 0 Warnings: 0 Zoiks! It's too bad we couldn't use all the cores on the machine for the ALTER TABLE, huh? On the plus side, the file sizes aren't too bad. Before: -rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql 1638056067072 2009-05-24 09:23 table_name.ibd After: -rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql 587617796096 2009-05-27 07:14 table_name.ibd I'll have more to say about XtraDB and the compression options in a later post. But given the interest that my Twitter messages about this big ALTER TABLE generated yesterday, I figured I'd share a bit more detail here. For anyone doing the math at home, that's going from rougly 1.5TB to 500GB (the new file size is slightly inflated, since this slave managed to replicate about a week's worth of data before I caught it). I was hoping for 4:1 compression and managed about 3:1. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-05-28 more

Use a Wii Balance Board with Linux

In this post you’ll learn how to make a working Bluetooth weight sensor + fast real-time graphical display with about 200 lines of Python code. digg_url = 'http://digg.com/linux_unix/Talking_to_a_Wii_Balanceboard_in_Ubuntu/'; You can code any Nintendo Wii-like video game for Ubuntu/Linux and the Nintendo Balance Board very easily. Here’s a video demonstration: This post assumes that you can already [...]
Publication date: 2009-05-23 more

awesomeo on "Wireless Filght Simulator Control"

Something like this is about the cheapest you'll be able to do: http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=209708411&listingid=32657468&dcaid=17902 Also, a long USB cable won't work since the maximum length is 16 feet. You need to use special "active" cables or an Ethernet extender.
Publication date: 2009-05-22 more

What you should do next week

Next week is going to be a humdinger. If you’re in the Bay Area, here’s what I think you should do: - Attend Google I/O. If you’re a developer, trust me, I think you’ll get something out of the conference. Just check out the list of sessions, for one thing. The price is $400, but if [...]
Publication date: 2009-05-22 more

grampa on "Wireless Filght Simulator Control"

Good afternoon,  I would like to know if there is an inexpensive wireless usb device that is capable of transmitting approx 50 ft to my PC with out having to use a long usb cable. Gefen, Belkin and Iogear have them [wireless usb hub] available but are rather expensive. I have a contoller for a Remote Control flight simulator program but it requires to be connected  directly to my PC via a usb connection.  Thank you for any consideration.     grampa
Publication date: 2009-05-21 more

Letter to a young journalist

Don’t conclude from my previous post that I dislike journalism. All through middle and high school I woke up early to read the local newspaper each morning. I was the editor of our newspaper in high school. My mother wanted me to be a journalist. I’ve been thinking of the issues confronting journalism for a [...]
Publication date: 2009-05-20 more

Recent piece by Sanford and Brown

(I work for Google, but this is my personal opinion.) Last week I was on vacation down in Florida and I had a chance to tour Thomas Edison’s winter vacation home. The tour guide told us that Edison wired his house and switched on electrical lighting in 1887. Then the tour guide leaned in and quietly [...]
Publication date: 2009-05-20 more

Our CEO Tells It Like It Is

I haven't said a lot about the ongoing battle between Craigslist and certain overly-agressive politicains, but after reading his most recent blog post, An Apology Is In Order, I have to say that I'm really proud of Jim. Having a CEO standing up to politicians and media for what he believes is right and true really reaffirms my decision to join Craigslist last year. Better yet, he's outdone most of the media by, *gasp*, actually linking to relevant information in his post. Many prominent companies, including AT&T, Microsoft, and Village Voice Media, not to mention major newspapers and other upstanding South Carolina businesses feature more “adult services” ads than does craigslist, some of a very graphic nature. For a small sampling, look (careful NSFW) here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here. Have you fully considered the implications of your accusations against craigslist? What’s a crime for craigslist is clearly a crime for any company. Are you really prepared to condemn the executives of each of the mainstream companies linked above, and all the others that feature such ads, as criminals? craigslist may not matter in your world view, despite our popularity among your constituents, but mightn’t you want an endorsement from any of the SC newspapers for your gubenatorial campaign, whose publishers you’ve just labeled as criminals? Do you really intend to launch a criminal investigation against the phone company? What about potential new jobs connected to big data center buildouts in SC by Internet companies? Are you *sure* you want prosecute all of their CEOs as criminals??? Keep it up, Jim. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-05-18 more

Smoked Tilapia with Honey Glaze

Tonight we tried smoking Tailpia for the first time and it came out very well. The full recipe is below the before and after pictures. The fish in the smoker, before adding honey and spices: The fish after smoking: Dinner! Recipe This recipe is very simple but surprisingly tasty. It has some sweet, some smoky, and some spice. Arrange the fish on the smoker grate and coat liberally with honey. Then sprinkle on a bit of each of the following: Salt Pepper Garlic Powder Cayenne Pepper Then smoke for 18-20 minutes with hickory chips. The resulting mix of honey, cayenne, and smoky flavor is truly excellent. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-05-15 more

MySQL 5.1.34 and XtraDB 1.0.3-5

For a couple weeks now, we've had a MySQL server at work running MySQL 5.1.34 and the Percona XtraDB 1.0.3-5 plug-in. I'm testing an upgrade path for our current MySQL 5.0.xx based servers. Aside from some confusion about the initial setup (getting the built-in InnoDB to stay out of the way), things have gone very well. All of our largest and most active tables have been converted to the new Barracuda file format and I tested compression on the two largest. The first didn't fare so well, but it's a fairly over-indexed table with small rows. The second, however, contains a decent sized TEXT column (classified posting bodies) and it compresses quite nicely. Any change in CPU utilization is not significant. I hope to soon get a second server running and try to increase the compression ratio, going from KEY_BLOCK_SIZE of 8K to 4K to see if we can squeeze some more out of it without much penalty. I love all the extra stats provided by the InnoDB plug-in and the Percona (and Google) enhancements. There are a lot of knobs that I've not yet tried to turn, but it's good to know they're available when that day comes. More to come... See Also: Is MySQL 5.1 a compelling upgrade? (comments)
Publication date: 2009-05-15 more

What was new at Searchology?

Google launched 3-4 new features at Searchology today. You can read about Search Options, Google Squared, Rich Snippets, or Sky Map in my previous post. But I also pay attention to the small things that Google said. I noticed several tidbits that I don’t think we’ve said in public before. - Pat Riley mentioned a couple [...]
Publication date: 2009-05-13 more

Google Searchology 2009: Search Options, Google Squared, Rich Snippets

Google just finished its Searchology 2009 event. In previous years, Google has used Searchology to introduce Universal Search and Personalized Search. So what was new this year? Several things: Google Search Options. Marissa Mayer referred to this as a handy “toolbelt” that lets you slice and dice your search results. You can do a search such [...]
Publication date: 2009-05-13 more

On vacation for a week or so

Just to let you know, I’m on vacation for a week or so. If you send me email or tweet in my direction, don’t expect a reply for a while.
Publication date: 2009-05-08 more

MoonRiver on "How to Make a Copy of DVD Movies on Mac OS X"

You can also finish your work through Disk Utility . Just follow this guide : How to Copy DVD with Disk Utility to DVD on Mac
Publication date: 2009-05-07 more

5 things you (probably) don

(I was rooting around and found this leftover post from 2006 and figured I’d throw it out here.) It looks like blog tag has come to the search bloggers. I’ve been tagged by so many people that I yield and surrender obscure facts about me. When I was growing up in Eastern Kentucky, there wasn’t always a [...]
Publication date: 2009-05-03 more

Thinking about thunder

I read an interesting blog post by Mike Markson, VP of Marketing for Blekko, which is the working name for a new search engine planned to launch to the public in a few months. The title of Mike’s post was “Google Likes To Steal Other’s Thunder,” and he mentions several anecdotes to back up that idea. [...]
Publication date: 2009-05-03 more

I love my Samsung NC10 Netbook

A couple months back I got a Samsung NC10 Netbook. I had been on the fence for a long time, trying to decide between the an Eee PC from Asus, the MSI Wind, and the Samsung NC10. Right about the time I was going to finally do it, the ASUS Eee PC 1000HE was announced. I read a lot of reviews from folks who'd bought those netbooks and eventually settled on the NC10. The main deciding factors, in order, were: keyboard layout, build quality, ease of upgrade (mine as 2GB RAM and a 320GB disk, twice the standard in both departments), and Linux support. The MSI Wind was okay in most of those areas, but based on the many reviews I read, the NC10 was a little bit better across the board. So I ruled the MSI Wind out on that alone. The Eee PC 1000HE had just been announced and would have required waiting a few more weeks. Plus, its keyboard had a few quirks--notably the right shift key being too small and offset. Keyboards are really important to me. It had the advantage of a claimed 9.5 hour battery life vs. the 7-8 claimed on the NC10. However, I picked the NC10 and couldn't be happier. Running Windows XP, I routinely get 7 hours of battery life with Wifi on and the screen brightness set low (don't need it any higher most of the time). They range is excellent, keyboard feels right, and it's surprisingly snappy. Building a computer this small and light is really an exercise in design compromises and I thing Samsung nailed it perfectly. I've traveled with it a few times and used it all day at the MySQL Conference without having to worry about being near power outlets. The 2GB RAM is more than enough for anything I'm likely to throw at the Atom processor and 320GB is enough space for all my music, pictures, and pretty much everything except my extensive video collection. I use the NC10 a bit day to day. I think of it as a "couch computer" in addition to use in travel and at a conference. But I've also hooked it up to a HDTV to show off pictures to family and that worked just as well. I could easily see doing a day's worth of work on it with an external monitor and mouse. A couple weeks ago, I grabbed the latest Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR) and booted the NC10 off a USB stick to see how it worked. Much to my surprise, it seems that everything worked well without any tweaking. I'll probably stick with XP for now, but it's good to see that Ubuntu would work for me too. If I was looking to buy now, I'd look really hard at the Samsung NC10, ASUS Eee PC 1000HE, and the Samsung NC20 (the 12" model). (comments)
Publication date: 2009-05-02 more

neil on "configuring DHCP for OS 10.1.4 on G4 eMac???"

can anybody help. i can't seem to get my Mac on-line. i am using 10.1.4 on a G4 eMac, (it's all i have right now). i did manually insert the IP address from my provider, but still no luck. they suggested i try forums for help. cheers to all Neil
Publication date: 2009-05-02 more

beccagal on "configuring DHCP for OS 10.1.4 on G4 eMac???"

Hi. Try going to your Network settings in the System Preferences and make sure the modem is not checked. Becca
Publication date: 2009-05-02 more

Is MySQL 5.1 a compelling upgrade?

Of the many things I noticed last week at the MySQL Conference, one of the most notable was how many companies have not upgraded from MySQL 5.0 to 5.1 yet. Craigslist is in that camp and it seems that we're joined by the likes of Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and about half a dozen other companies that use MySQL heavily. Come to think of it, SmugMug are the only folks I've talked with who've made the jump (video). So it's not much of a surprise that Percona is asking if they should backport 5.4 fixes to 5.0. Given our usage of MySQL to date, the only really compelling reason to upgrade is to get access to the InnoDB plug-in (and XtraDB). I'd like to get compression, some of the various performance patches, and tuning options, so plug-in support is a requirement. But beyond that, I just don't see anything new in 5.1 that we need. As I noted in The Real or Official MySQL? Does Not Matter!, the storage engines matter more than the various add-on features in the server itself. Have you upgraded or are you thinking about it? If so, why? If not, why not? (comments)
Publication date: 2009-05-01 more

MySQL and Drizzle Tip: Checking configuration file syntax (faking configtest)

In the Apache world, you might be familiar with tweaking your config file(s) and then running $ apachectl configtest to see if the config parses. We've been discussing this on the drizzle mailing list and talking in general about configuration handling and management. Well, it turns out that you can fake it in MySQL and Drizzle too. If you have a new configuration in /tmp/new.cnf, try this: $ mysqld --defaults-file=/tmp/new.cnf --verbose --help And it'll run mysqld (or drizzled), parse the config, report any problems, print help, and exit without initializing storage engines or trying to grab a port. Neat trick! Thanks to Baron Schwartz, Arjen Lentz, and Sheeri Cabral (book) for helping to demonstrate this. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-04-30 more

Slides from "MySQL and Search at Craigslist"

Last week I delivered a talk titled "MySQL and Search at Craigslist" as part of the 2009 MySQL Conference and Expo. I talked about some of the good and bad of our MySQL work and also talked a lot about our recent Sphinx deployment. The slides are embedded below and here, thanks to SlideShare. (Anyone know why Google Docs doesn't yet handle OpenOffice presentations?) MySQL And Search At CraigslistView more presentations from jzawodn. I gave a copy to O'Reilly but don't yet see them on the conference site. The usual disclaimers apply: I said a lot that's not well reflected in the slides, and I'm sure they're less informative without the audio or video that may or may not have been captured. Either way, hopefully they're useful to folks who saw the talk and even a few of those who did not. I also delivered a condensed version of this talk at the Percona Performance Conference and those slides are available too. Thanks to everyone who provided useful feedback and discussion before and after the talks. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-04-28 more

cloris on "How to Make a Copy of DVD Movies on Mac OS X"

Movie DVD Copy is also a good choice. Never miss backing up a DVD with Movie DVD Copy. And if you just make copies to your computer, DVDSmith is freeware and can meets your requirements. Both these software can be found at http://www.movie-dvd-copy.com
Publication date: 2009-04-28 more

Azymov on "Don't Buy Apple"

NetBSD 4 with OpenBox window manager is a good option--lightning fast, even on hardware deemed 'slow' for Windoze. Apple OS X is a beautiful system--it should be, since it's based on freeBSD, another FREE operating system. Nevertheless, Apple sells their hardware for TOO HIGH A PRICE, being that they essentially use hardware primarily sold to the PC market. (Putting it plainly, Apple loves profit--with little effort on ingenuity. They're not so ingenious as their marketing department wants you to believe.)
Publication date: 2009-04-28 more

Hack on Drizzle Full-Time for Rackspace!

Given the current state of the economy, here's a quick job plug for anyone interested and qualified. At the Drizzle Developer Day on Friday, I got to meet Adrian Otto from Rackspace. Rackspace has a cloud offering (think Aamazon EC2) that's called Mosso and is willing to employ full time developers who spend all their time working on Drizzle. Here's what he sent to the mailing list. I was speaking with Eric Day at the developer conference, and I mentioned that Rackspace is wiling to employ full time developers for the specific purpose of furthering the Drizzle project's mission. He suggested that I email you on this list becuase he expected there would be interest in this offer. If you work on the project now part time, and want to make it a full time job working exclusively on the Drizzle project, let me know. The Rackspcae Cloud believes in open source, and we want to do our part to make Drizzle a wild success. Talking with him a bit, the rationale is simple: Rackspace wants to offer the best cloud resources they can. Part of that means having infrastructure that their customers need and works well. They're betting the Drizzle is part of their future, and hiring a few people to work on it makes that future a reality sooner than later. It looks like Mark Callaghan likes the idea too. Anyway, ping me if you're interested and I'll put you in touch. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-04-28 more

Slides from What Craigslist wants and needs from Drizzle

As I previously mentioned, on Friday I attended the Drizzle Developer Day at Sun in Santa Clara. While there I had the chance to speak to the group while everyone ate their salad, pizza, and cookies. The talk was titles "What Craigslist wants and needs from Drizzle" and is available as a Google Docs presentation here. I've also embedded a version of the slides below. I should note here, as I did at the talk, that this presentation is neither comprehensive or completely representative. That is to say that I'm sure there are things I've forgotten. Plus, the fact that I was working with MySQL in other high-volume web shops before coming to Craiglist means that there's definitely some personal bias and pet peeves addressed in there too. Anyway, that's what I presented. Thanks to the fine folks at Sun (soon to be Oracle) for hosting and organizing the day. And special thanks to the Drizzle developers for getting together and showing the rest of us how things work and taking time to talk about their plans. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-04-27 more

Switching things around

This weekend I decided to mix things up on my blog. So I switched things around: - I took one of my domains, dullest.com, and moved it to TigerTech from pair Networks. - I installed the latest version of WordPress on dullest.com and copied the MySQL database from mattcutts.com to dullest.com. - I changed my blog layout to [...]
Publication date: 2009-04-27 more

Ubuntu 9.04 boots in 7.83 seconds!

Recently I treated myself to a solid-state drive (SSD). That’s essentially a hard-drive made out of memory chips. I bought the Intel X25-E Extreme, which uses faster single-level cell (SLC) memory chips instead of slower multi-level cell (MLC) memory chips. I wanted to put the drive through its paces, so I decided to see how fast [...]
Publication date: 2009-04-26 more

MySQL and Percona Conferences Rocked

Now that it's Friday, I can finally come up for air and say that both the MySQL and Percona Conferences (which I wrote about earlier) surpassed my expectations. Having the two going on semi-concurrently worked out pretty well. At no time did I find myself without at least two sessions I wanted to see. Often times I had to really cut lunch short to make sure I didn't miss anything. Other MySQL Conference veterans I asked has very similar responses. There's a ton of other stuff to digest, and I hope to write up some thoughts in the coming days and weeks. As usual, a big part of the conference for me was being able to meet up with people I don't see often or who I've never met face to face. Meeting up with people solving similar problems at places like Facebook, Google, Mixi, and other high-traffic sites is invaluable. Being able get a good sense of what new storage engines are out there and how modern hardware is changing database systems (SSDs, multi-core servers) proved to be very educational in ways I didn't expect. All the politics and posturing around the Oracle/Sun buyout weren't as significant as I'd expected. People really wanted to get down to business and technology. I enjoyed giving my talks and answering questions about problems that we have and haven't solved yet at Craigslist. I'm heading over to Drizzle Devloper Day in a couple hours. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-04-24 more

Grabbag questions, April 2009

I scheduled some time today to record video, so I opened up a thread for questions. Post your questions over on Google Moderator so that I can see which questions are popular. I
Publication date: 2009-04-23 more

MySQL and Percona Performance Conferece Lineup

Amidst all the Oracle/Sun/MySQL news today, the MySQL Conference kicks off this week. So I just spent a few minutes putting together my picks for the sessions I'd like to attend at the MySQL Conference and the Percona Performance Conference (schedule). There's quite a lineup and I have some hard choices to make. Both groups have put together excellent events. And, wow, there are a lot of new storage engines and appliances coming out. To make my life easier, I'm putting the list of interesting sessions from both conferences here so I can try to decide where to spend my attention. Sessions I'm Presenting or Part Of I'm presenting MySQL and Search at Craigslist on Tuesday morning and am part of The Great Open Cloud Shootout on Wednesday morning. On Friday, I'll be at the Drizzle Developer Day to talk about "What Craigslist Needs from Drizzle." Tuesday Sessions: MySQL 8:30am - State of the Dolphin - Karen Padir 9:15am - This is Not a Web App: MySQL at Google - Mark Callaghan 10:50am - MySQL and Search at Craigslist - Jeremy Zawodny 11:55am - InnoDB: Innovative Technologies for Performance and Data Protection - Ken Jacobs, Heikki Tuuri 2:00pm - Falcon Storage Engine - Designed for Speed - Kevin Lewis, Ann Harrison 3:05pm - The PBXT Storage Engine: Meeting Future Challenges - Paul McCullagh 4:25pm - Solving Common SQL Problems with SeqEngine - Beat Vontobel 5:15pm - Hadoop and MySQL: Friends with Benefits - Frank Mashraqi Wednesday Sessions: MySQL 8:50am - The Great Open Cloud Shootout - panel 10:50am - Build Your Own MySQL Time Machine - Chuck Bell, Mats Kindahl 11:55am - Using Q4M: A Message Queue Storage Engine for MySQL - Kazuho Oku 11:55am - libdrizzle: A New Client Library for Drizzle and MySQL - Eric Day 11:55am - libdrizzle: A New Client Library for Drizzle and MySQL - Eric Day 2:00pm - Maria: The New Transactional Storage Engine for MySQL - Monty Widenius 2:00pm - SAN Performance on a Internal Disk Budget: The Coming SSD Revolution - Matthew Yonkovit 2:00pm - Crash Recovery and Media Recovery in InnoDB - Heikki Tuuri 3:05pm - MySQL Performance on EC2 - Mark Callaghan 4:25pm - Perl Stored Procedures for MySQL - Antony Curtis 4:25pm - High Availability and Scalability Patches from Google - Ben Handy, Justin Tolmer 5:15pm - Optimizing MySQL Performance for ZFS - Allan Packer, Neelakanth Nadgir 5:15pm - Redundant Storage Cluster: For When It's Just Too Big - Bob Burgess 5:15pm - Inserts at Drive Speed: Designing a Custom Storage Engine for Write-Mostly Applications - Ben Haley Wednesday Sessions: Percona 9:00am - Maria In Depth - Monty Widenius 9:55am - The Return of Gearman - Eric Day 11:15am - Fighting Replication Lag - Peter Zaitsev 12:45pm - Evaluating Disk Backends for MySQL Servers - Ewen Fortune 1:35pm - Database Performance with Proxy Architectures - Robert Hodges 2:00pm - Covering Indexes: Orders-of-Magnitude Improvements - Dr. Bradley C. Kuszmaul 5:00pm - Sphinx and MySQL: A Perfect Match - Andrew Aksyonoff 6:15pm - InnoDB Performance Tuning - Peter Zaitsev 7:05pm - CouchDB: Behind the Buzz - Jan Lehnardt 7:55pm - Linux Filesystems: Who, What, and Where - Stewart Smith 9:10pm - Open Q&A: Performance - panel Thursday Sessions: MySQL 8:30am - The SmugMug Tale - Don MacAskill 10:50am - SQL is Dead - Monty Taylor 10:50am - Map/Reduce and Queues for MySQL Using Gearman - Eric Day, Brian Aker 10:50am - Dormando's Proxy for MySQL - Alan Kasindorf 11:55am - Memory Management in MySQL and Drizzle - Stewart Smith 11:55am - Improving Performance by Running MySQL Multiple Times - MC Brown 2:00pm - MySQL Row Change Event Extraction and Publish - Gene Pang 2:00pm - InnoDB Performance and Usability Patches - Vadim Tkachenko, Ewen Fortune 2:50pm - Make Your Life Easier with Maatkit - Baron Schwartz 2:50pm - BLOB Streaming: Efficient Reliable BLOB Handling for all Storage Engines - Barry Leslie 3:50pm - Database We Can Believe In: Stories from the Front Lines (of the Obama Campaign) - many speakers Thursday Sessions: Percona 9:55am - Pushing the Envelope - Don MacAskill 10:50am - The Life of a Dirty Page - Mark Callaghan 1:35pm - High Performance MySQL from a Boring Architecture - Baron Schwartz 3:15pm - Hypertable - Doug Judd 4:30pm - Drizzle's Approach to Improving Performance of the Server - Jay Pipes 7:50pm - MySQL Replication: Getting The Most From Slaves - Peter Zaitsev 9:05pm - Open Q&A: Feature Request Bonanza - panel Friday: Drizzle Developer Day Drizzle Developer Day is on Friday at Sun in Santa Clara. I'm looking forward to many of the talks (some of which will be completely over my head but interesting anyway). Back To Work! And, with that, I need to go work on my presentation! See you at the conference... I'll try to post interesting tidbits on Twitter and tag 'em with #MySQLConf like others appear to be doing. I just found out that I can share my public MySQL Conference Schedule. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-04-20 more

Oracle Buying Sun, Gets MySQL

Interesting news this morning, just as the 2009 MySQL Conference is starting. As is being reported all over the place, Oracle has agreed to buy Sun at $9.50 per share, giving them to a ton of great technology (Solaris, ZFS, MySQL, DTrace, etc.). One one of the biggest threats to Oracle's core database business (at the low end, at least) for a while now has been MySQL. And now they're poised to own MySQL after Sun bought it not long ago. (It seems like yesterday that Oracle bought Innobase.) As I noted a while back, the MySQL landscape is changing. This news is sure to make the conference more... interesting. Oracle, please get the InnoDB team together with the MySQL team and see about GPLing ZFS. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-04-20 more

My 8.7M pixel display

A while ago I wrote about Synergy and showed a picture of my desktop as of July 2007: That’s two 24″ Dell monitors (one for a Windows computer, the other for a Linux computer). I’ve had that setup for a couple years and I recently decided it was time to upgrade. So I bought a 30″ [...]
Publication date: 2009-04-20 more

yanyouyu on "How to convert DVD, free videos, flash to iPhone?"

you can visist this site to get more information about this Helpful guide
Publication date: 2009-04-18 more

Lim Bangla John on "How to download free iPhone games"

You gotta either "jailbreak" your iphone or install a special software for that.Jailbreaking can be done at your own risk for free or by a professional ,the jailbreak will allow your iphone to install third-partysoftware for free.;) But with everything there is a price to pay!! GOOD LUCK.
Publication date: 2009-04-16 more

Lim Bangla John on "wanna buy a mac!"

YES!This is very much of a big hassle ,there are quite a number of compatiblity issues on the mac.In other words ,you should buy the mac but NEVER usethe mac to do office work!!
Publication date: 2009-04-16 more

Lucy Burr on "wanna buy a mac!"

I much prefer the Mac to Windows. A new program called Parallel can be installed on Macs that will allow Windows users to install a version of XP or Vista (?) on the Mac. You might want to look into this since it might make the transition easier. MacMall has bundled versions of these new programs with their newer iMacs.
Publication date: 2009-04-16 more

xiaogongzhu on "How to Convert protected Music/ Video to new iPod, MP3"

iPod Video Converter for Mac Hello,everyone.If you want to know about"How to Convert protected Music/ Video to new iPod, MP3",I am very happy to enjoy it with you. iPod Video Converter for Mac(http://www.ipod-video-converter.com/) is useful audio and video conversion software for iPod. Its powerful function enables you to convert all popular audio and video files, such as AVI, MPEG, WMV, MOV, MP4, VOB, DivX, XviD, AAC, AV3, MP3, to the formats supported by iPod including MP4, M4A, MP3, etc.
Publication date: 2009-04-16 more

Eric4679 on "DVD to iPhone Converter Review"

How about AnyDVD? As this program remove the copy protection of a DVD movie as soon as it's inserted into the drive, allowing you then to backup the movie using a DVD backup tool such as CloneDVD and CloneDVD mobile. You can also remove the RPC region code, thereby making the movie region free and viewable on any DVD player and with any DVD player software. Free latest version downloading http://www.dvdripsoft.com/anydvd.html
Publication date: 2009-04-15 more

Eric4679 on "iPhone too expensive for you? Check this out!"

LOL, the most powerful program for iPod at here: http://www.dvdripsoft.com/dvd-ripper-ultimate.html
Publication date: 2009-04-15 more

winniel on "How to Make a Copy of DVD Movies on Mac OS X"

Handbrake is the best choice, it is nice and free.
Publication date: 2009-04-14 more

Ubuntu 9.04 boots in 17.5 seconds!

Recently I treated myself to a solid-state drive (SSD). That’s essentially a hard-drive made out of memory chips. I bought the Intel X25-E Extreme, which uses faster single-level cell (SLC) memory chips instead of slower multi-level cell (MLC) memory chips. I wanted to put the drive through its paces, so I decided to see how fast [...]
Publication date: 2009-04-13 more

Jeffrey Soleim on "Don't Buy Apple"

Both PCs and Macs *gasp* may have hardware problems! We seem to have gotten to a place in our society where the everyday computer is a simple piece of technology that is 100% without flaws. In reality, if you sit down and think of the sheer mechanics required to manufacture a computer, of any kind, you will quickly gain a huge appreciation for what they are and can do. Let's take most of the components out of the equation for a moment and look at the processor. Assuming it's a white, Intel-Chipset Macbook, it has a mobile Core2Duo processor in it. They have *millions* of transistors in them. These are not simple pieces of technology. Will a few broken transistors affect the overall performance of a processor? Maybe not, but if you get a flawed chip, it can overheat as it's checksum fails for the billions of calculations it does per minute. Get real!
Publication date: 2009-04-07 more

Sponsor Our Ride For Diabetes (Tour de Cure 2009)

In early May, Kathleen and I will be participating it the Tour de Cure 2009, a bike ride to raise awareness and money for Diabetes. Craigslist (my employer) is sponsoring a team that we'll both be riding on. Collectively, our team is trying to raise $75,000 during this years ride. If you have a few bucks to spare for a good cause, please consider sponsoring me or sponsoring my wife (or both!). It's for a very good cause. We're both riding the 25 mile course and would love even a $1/mile contribution. As a bonus, Craigslist is matching all our donations. So if you donate $25, your contribution becomes $50 thanks to the company's generosity. Here are links for a bit more information: Our Team Page Kathleen's Page My Page You can visit either of our pages to pledge on-line. And if you're interested in riding, visit our team page. Thanks for any support you can offer! (comments)
Publication date: 2009-04-06 more

rootusercyclone on "Don't Buy Apple"

Just because you have had trouble with Apple doesn't mean you should go around preaching to everyone that Apple computers suck. Most people here have never had problems with their Mac/iPod, and if we did, Apple fixes/replaces the product without hesitation. Just because your computers broke doesn't mean that you should discourage others from buying from Apple. Why does it bother you that we use a computer you don't like?
Publication date: 2009-04-05 more

Happy 4.04 Day!

Today is April 4th, which means that it’s 4.04 day — even in Europe where they switch their months and days around. That means it’s a perfect day to learn what a 404 status code is. Essentially, a 404 is a way for web server to return a “Page Not Found” error when a browser [...]
Publication date: 2009-04-04 more

Chrome marketshare for March 2009

Google Chrome continued its upward marketshare march in March. I was looking at my browser breakdown tonight. Here’s what I’ve got from the last 30 days in Google Analytics: Some different browser marketshare numbers: - Net Applications says that Chrome went from 1.15% to 1.23% in the last ~30 days. - StatCounter says that Chrome topped 2% recently. [...]
Publication date: 2009-04-03 more

Looking into latest live metrics

(Doing the “type up a quick blog post” thing. Let me know if I had any typos.) Thanks to everyone that contacted me in the last few minutes and hours about changes in our search products and quality; we’re seeing the impact in our metrics as well. I hear your feedback loud and clear–no need to [...]
Publication date: 2009-04-02 more

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Publication date: 2009-03-31 more

The Real or Official MySQL? Does Not Matter!

Yesterday Patrick Galbraith asked What is the official branch of MySQL? which got a lot of attention, including on Slashdot (and the token PostgeSQL comments quickly appeared). Here's the funny thing. It doesn't matter anymore. Patrick's question is interesting in an academic sense, but it's mainly a distraction from what really matters. (Hint: What's the official Linux and who really cares? Ubuntu? RedHat? Debian? CentOS?) Storage Engines Nowadays what matters is the set of available storage engines. InnoDB, Percona's XtraDB, PrimeBase's PBXT, Maria, Falcon, and several others are available or will be soon. I predict that for the foreseeable future, any MySQL distribution or derivative must support the storage engine plug-in API that MySQL 5.1 defined. And since that's the case, it largely won't matter which flavor you using. Protocol(s) Look at what's happened in the world of key/value databases in the last few years. More than a few of them speak the memcached protocol as either their native and default or an optional add-on. I suspect the same thing will be the case here. All MySQL distributions and derivatives will speak the "traditional" MySQL protocol (just like memecached has the old protocol). Some of them, notably Drizzle, will have other (newere, better) protocols available as well (much like memcached has the new binary protocol). Summary In summary, the choice of MySQL version or derivative won't matter as much as you might think because they'll have the same Storge Engine plug-ins available (thanks to the shared plugin-in API), they'll all speak a common protocol (this may not be true for replication--watch that area closely), and will largely offer the same subset of SQL and SQL extensions. They'll all be supported by different groups/companies (including some "database appliance" vendors), will all be tuned differently and aimed at slightly different uses cases, and will certainly benefit from a lot of cross-pollination. That doesn't sound so bad to me. The fact that nobody can point to the "real" MySQL in a few years just won't matter. Does anyone ask (anymore) which is the "real" Linux? Nope. And for very similar reasons. Think of MySQL as "kernel" and Storage Engine as "filesystem" and you'll realize we've been down this road before. We're looking at the upgrade from 5.0 to 5.1 soon at Craigslist and don't know if we'll be using InnoDB or XtraDB yet. Time will tell. See Also: The New MySQL Landscape, which I wrote a few months back--before a good chunk of the MySQL team had left Sun. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-03-31 more

Hacking Google: Retro Links Revives Old Google Feature

Google sometimes turns off features. One such feature that I remember fondly is that at the bottom of Google’s search results, we offered nine other search engine suggestions. The idea was if you didn’t find what you were searching for on Google, you could click on the other links and easily run the same search [...]
Publication date: 2009-03-31 more

Garlic Shrimp and Scallops Recipe

Last week we tried a new Garlic Shrimp recipe that was so simple and delicious that we planned to try it again. On Saturday my wonderful wife came back from the local Safeway and presented me with 1 pound of shrimp as well as about 1/3rd of a pound of small sea scallops. Here's what the final product looked like: Preparation is simple and quick. Cut 2 red chilies lengthwise and remove the seeds. Rinse the shrimp and scallops, keeping the separate. Using a garlic press, crush 6-9 cloves of garlic. Add 5-6 tablespoons of olive oil to skillet or wok. Put the wok on high heat. Once the oil is hot, add the garlic, chilies, and shrimp. Stir frequently. After about 2 minutes, add the scallops. Continue cooking for another 2-3 minutes until the shrimp are pink and the scallops are just starting to get a gold color on the outside (they'll still be tender inside). Serve and enjoy! (comments)
Publication date: 2009-03-30 more

Enable Visual Effects in Ubuntu to Increase Performance

For a while now, I'd been running Ubuntu 8.04 on my Thinkpad T61 (work machine) with Visual Effects disabled. Why? There were weird bugs with compiz and xterm that caused corruption at times. So I shut it off and never thought about it again. But a few days ago, I upgraded to 8.10 despite the apparent increase in WiFi related lock-ups I can expect to see (apparently I don't have the Intel wireless in this machine... grumble). Switching virtual desktops, or "Workspaces" as they're called, seemed to be even slower than before--almost intolerable. Just for kicks I decided to go play with the settings. Imagine my surprise when switching that selection from "None" to "Normal" resulted in an dramatic increase in virtual desktop redraw perfomance. Yay! Counterintuitive, but yay anyway. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-03-25 more

api4me on "free Iphone games and other cool stuff"

I just launch a site with tons of free iphone games never released before http://www.api4.me , please have a look.
Publication date: 2009-03-24 more

Wordle for Nancy Grace TV Show

I recently completed a huge “Media and Journalism” project: I transcribed over 500 hours of the Nancy Grace TV show on CNN. It took a long time, but here is an exhaustive Wordle tag cloud of all the words used in those 500+ hours of television: It appears that all 500+ hours consist of those six [...]
Publication date: 2009-03-22 more

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Publication date: 2009-03-20 more

Aircraft Insurance Surprise

I haven't flown my glider much in the last year and probably won't be flying it again for many months. While that may not be ideal, it means I can spend less money by not paying for an annual inspection and can greatly reduce or eliminate the insurance costs. Or so I thought. It just so happens that my insurance carrier emailed the other day to ask about renewing my policy (it's that time of year). I explained that I probably wouldn't be flying it and would probably let the policy lapse. The countered with an offer of "storage only" or "ground" coverage, which means that they'd still insure it for non-flight related damage. Now gliders are kind of expensive to insure in the first place. The annual insurance bill is roughly the same as it is for our Cessna 182Q (which is worth twice as much as my glider). So I was looking forward to paying a lot less. Wrong! It turns out that moving to storage only coverage still costs roughly 67% (2/3rds) of what the full flight coverage is. I'm still trying to process that figure. That's like State Farm Insurance telling me that if I agree to keep my car in the garage for a year, they'll give me a 33% discount. Apparently, (1) there is a lot of overhead in the insurance industry, and (2) they think I'm far more likely to encounter non-flying damage. And, the best part is this... If I were to cancel coverage all together for the year, I'd have higher rates when I come back next year because of discounts I've accrued with them. "If you let this policy go and then come back later, the new policy offered will be about 15% higher in cost just due to the loss of those discounts." Strangely, I thought those discounts were the result of earning additional ratings (like my Commercial) and gaining experience and flight time. It's no surprise that the first four letters of the insurance company most glider pilots use are "Cost", huh? (comments)
Publication date: 2009-03-20 more

How to Write a Chrome Extension in Three Easy Steps

I just installed a “hello world” Chrome extension from this Chrome Extension HOWTO page. When you surf to www.google.com, the Google logo is replaced with a Lolcat: Here’s how to write your own Google Chrome extension in three steps: 1. Install the developer-channel version of Google Chrome. I don’t know if this is 100% necessary, but new [...]
Publication date: 2009-03-19 more

Gone to PubCon and SXSW + Lots of Videos!

Expect light blogging for a week or so because I’m traveling. I posted my 2009 travel schedule, but I’m doing a keynote at PubCon in Austin and then I’ll stick around for South by Southwest. It’s my first time at SXSW, so if you see me, say howdy! For the PubCon keynote, we’re going to try [...]
Publication date: 2009-03-11 more

Clickable transcript of my Canonical Link Element talk

Recently I’ve been playing with linking to specific parts of a video and incorporating YouTube subtitles. Then I realized that you could do a neat trick. YouTube allows you to create closed captioning with a simple text file that looks like this: 00:00:07.000 Hi everybody. Welcome back to another video. We’re doing this thing where when we [...]
Publication date: 2009-03-11 more

How many links per page?

I’m about to publish a blog post with a ton of links in it — almost two hundred of them. So before I did that, it seemed like a good time to talk about Google’s recommendation to “Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).” Why do we provide [...]
Publication date: 2009-03-10 more

DroboCare from Drobo: bleah

I bought a Drobo about a year ago. Recently I got this pop-up window: Wait a second — I bought this storage device, and now want me to extend my license “to continue to receive the latest updates”? If you go to the url mentioned in the pop-up, you see that for $49 for a year’s [...]
Publication date: 2009-03-09 more

People I would pay to life stream

I’ve been listening to the Penny Arcade podcast and it started me thinking about lifestreaming. There’s at least a few people I would pay if I could watch them stream their day over the net, either because they’re funny or interesting somehow. I thought about it a little bit, and here’s the list that I [...]
Publication date: 2009-03-09 more

Show and Translate YouTube Captions

Video captions are interesting. For example, if you subtitle a video in the same language as the video, you can help people with low literacy improve their reading skills. Or if you’re in a meeting, you could watch a video silently and read the captions. The TED conference is also thinking about subtitles. I think they’ve [...]
Publication date: 2009-03-06 more

New Craigslist Search Features

I haven't said a lot here about what I've been working on at Craigslist recently. But Craig mentioned me today in his blog and that made me remember that I should say something. :-) Much of my work has been behind the scenes infrastructure stuff, but some of that is translating into new features that craigslist users can see. And, as of this morning, a lot more users are seeing the fruits of that labor. As I noted a few weeks back in Sphinx Search at Craigslist, I've been hacking a lot on search. Here's a screen shot to show you what I've been calling "nearby search" (though "nearby results" is probably more appropriate). If you run a search in a city and there aren't many results, we'll also run the search in nearby areas to see if we can find matches there too. The above example was a search for "2008 mazda" in my hometown of Toledo, Ohio. The "nearby" results are clearly separated from local matches and local matches are still given priority. The feedback has been generally positive so far. Though, with any change, some folks aren't happy. I can't say it's going to stay in this exact form. We may need to tweak the interface, the radius of the nearby search areas, and so on. But on the whole I think it's a helpful improvement when you're looking for something that's a bit harder to find and you're willing to drive an hour or two. As of earlier today, it's available in most smaller and medium sized US cities. It'll probably come to the remainder of cities before long too. I've been testing it for about a week and a half, starting with about a dozen cities and then adding about twenty more late last week. This morning I mostly flipped the big switch. Of course, this opened the flood gates for similar feature requests: custom radius searches, state wide searching, search ALL of craigslist, etc. In related news, a couple months back I expanded the search help page to include advanced search syntax, including grouping, negation, OR queries, and more. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-03-06 more

Link to a specific part of a YouTube video

If you want to link to a specific part of a video on YouTube, you can. For example, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjDw3azfZWI#t=31m08s Notice the “#t=31m08s” on the end of the url? That link will take you 31 minutes and 8 seconds into that video. Linking to a particular minute and second can be really helpful — for example, that link [...]
Publication date: 2009-03-05 more

Why Google won

(This is just a post from my personal perspective, but I hope it’s helpful.) Every few weeks or so, someone contacts me and says “Hey Matt, there’s page out on the web about me that I really don’t like. Is there any way to remove it from Google’s index?” People don’t usually say it like that. [...]
Publication date: 2009-03-03 more

Paid posts should not affect search engines

Normally I wouldn’t weigh in on “sponsored conversations,” because I’ve talked about similar subjects before, but it’s worth reiterating Google’s position on paid posts that pass PageRank and why we feel that way. Here’s the short version as a comment that I left on Jeremiah Owyang’s blog: Clear disclosure of sponsorship is critical, and that includes [...]
Publication date: 2009-03-03 more

Book Review: Anathem

I have a sneaking suspicion that hanging out on Twitter is causing my attention span to grow shorter and shorter and … wait, what was I talking about? Oh, short attention span, right. So as penance for all that microblogging, I decided to set myself a thick book to read. I chose Neal Stephenson’s Anathem. I’ve [...]
Publication date: 2009-03-03 more

Top 5 signs you are anal-retentive

You keep large redundant amounts of all your sundries such as laundry detergent so that you never risk running out. You don’t just sort the money in your wallet by $1, $5, $10, or $20, but also sort the bills by wear-and-tear so that you get rid of the bills in the worst shape first. You look [...]
Publication date: 2009-03-02 more

Grab bag questions

I have some extra time in my calendar today, so I thought I’d open up a thread for questions. Post your questions over on Google Moderator so that I can see which questions are popular. I’ve only got 45-60 minutes, so I can’t answer every question, but I’ll try to answer at least a few [...]
Publication date: 2009-02-26 more

Learn More about the Canonical Link Element

A week or so ago I did a post about the canonical link tag, including a pointer to a 3-4 minute video about the tag. If you enjoyed that video but wanted to learn more, last week I sat down and recreated the presentation that I did at SMX West. You can watch the “director’s cut” [...]
Publication date: 2009-02-25 more

Last call for

This is the last call for “noresult” pages. If you want to mention examples, please send them to us this week. Here’s how to do it.
Publication date: 2009-02-24 more

Do you get these emails?

Every so often I get emails to my old school account that begin Dear Professor Dr. M. Cutts Taking in mind your valuated achievements in mathematics, it is a pleasure for us to invite you to publish a work in “International Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics”. I never finished my Ph.D. because I stopped working on it to join [...]
Publication date: 2009-02-23 more

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Publication date: 2009-02-21 more

buka on "DVD to iPhone Converter Review"

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Publication date: 2009-02-20 more

Pointers for Google Japan paid-post story

I just did a joint post about the Google Japan issue on Google’s Japanese webmaster blog. There’s also a post on Google’s main Japanese blog. If you don’t read Japanese, you can also watch the video where I recently talked about this. To the extent that I can speak on behalf of Google, I apologize [...]
Publication date: 2009-02-19 more

Learn about the Canonical Link Element in 5 minutes

Last week Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft announced support for a new link element to clean up duplicate urls on sites. The syntax is pretty simple: An ugly url such as http://www.example.com/page.html?sid=asdf314159265 can specify in the HEAD part of the document the following: <link rel=”canonical” value=”http://example.com/page.html”/> That tells search engines that the preferred location of this url (the [...]
Publication date: 2009-02-16 more

Windows 7 Impressions

I'll admit it. I still run Windows on a few machines--mostly because I have software that needs it (like flight planning or my scanner tools). And it's good on a notebook where drivers are tricky in Ubuntu at times. But I've also been using Windows XP Professional on all my Windows boxes (one desktop, one laptop, and one HTPC) for a long time now. However, as of a couple days ago I'm running the Windows 7 Beta on my Thinkpad T61. And you know what? I completely agree with the reviews I've seen. It's good. I basically never touched Vista (since it was teh suck) but Windows 7 is snappy, easier to use, and the transition from XP isn't that hard at all. Plus it has drivers for everything. This definitely doesn't feel like a beta at all. In fact, it reminds me of the Windows NT 4.0 beta days. I ran the beta as my desktop operating system for quite some time and loved it. For a long time I believed that nothing produced by Microsoft would displace Windows XP Professional, but I'm really starting to think they've got a starting chance. And if it's even a bit faster and leaner when the full release comes, that's all the better. I just hope there's an in-place upgrade option for those of us using the beta. And I hope they're smart about the pricing--especially if they really want to get folks off of XP. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-02-13 more

White House CTO? Bigger fish to fry first...

Over on the Sunlight Foundation blog, Ellen Miller asks White House: Where is the CTO?. Pardon my bluntness, Ellen, but what are you smoking? Don't you think there are higher priorities right now? It seems to me that Obama and his administration have their hands more than full working on the economic problems we're facing along with rebuilding some of our important international relationships. I'm as much of a technology geek as the next guy, but it really won't bother me if the punt on the whole CTO thing for a few months while some of the bigger fish are fried. I can't say quite why, but this call for immediate action on a CTO feels like a bit of headline grabbing and irresponsibility at the same time. Sure, they could come out and name a CTO tomorrow and I'd applaud the move. But I really hope they're keeping their priorities in check. Part of being a good leader is deciding what can wait and what cannot. Appointing a CTO can wait. Fixing our economy cannot. Update: It looks like Kara has jumped on this too. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-02-12 more

Write to a Google Spreadsheet from a Python script

Suppose you want to write to a Google Spreadsheet from a Python script. Here’s an example spreadsheet that you might want to update from a script: I did some searching and found this page, which quickly led me to the Python Developer’s Guide for the Google Spreadsheet API. There’s a simple “Getting started with Gdata and Python” [...]
Publication date: 2009-02-11 more

Playing With CouchDB: First Impressions

About a week ago, Nat posted Open Source NG Databases on O'Reilly Radar. That caught my interest because I'm playing with some "alternative" databases for some of our data at Craigslist. Don't get me wrong, MySQL is great. But MySQL isn't well suited to every use case out there either. (I'll talk more about this at the MySQL Conference.) Meanwhile, I left a comment on that posting about CouchDB and have been playing with it a bit more since then--mostly loading in test data, figuring out the data footprint, performance, etc. Overall, I'm impressed and encouraged. I agree with what Ben Bangert said. The simple API is great but the lack of a schema to worry about really makes my life simple in this application. I don't have any initial plans for views, but writing them in Javascript is an interesting idea. I can definitely appreciate the flexibility there. And having good replication built-in solves one of my big needs. I'm sure my thinking will have evolve after I've loaded a few hundred million documents in, but so far I'm really liking it. The CPAN modules in Net::CouchDb do a pretty good job and get you up and running quickly. I had a knee-jerk response to tweak a few things there but quickly realize that they're far from being the bottleneck anyway. It seems that without any tuning or fancy work, I can get about 75-100 inerts/sec on my desktop class Ubuntu box (Intel Core 2 Duo, 2.66GHz, 1GB RAM, single 80GB SATA disk). That's not bad for out-of-the-box performance. And doing the math on space used for a document set (after compaction), I'm seeing roughly ~3KB/doc. That's a bit more than I expected but really not bad at all. I wonder if there's a future for gzip compression in CouchDB. Or maybe we should just use ZFS... (comments)
Publication date: 2009-02-11 more

Where to find me, first half of 2009

Here’s the speaking/travel that I’m expecting to do in early 2009: January 17-22, 2009: My wife and I journeyed to Washington D.C. to see the Presidential inauguration. It was very cold. February 4-7, 2009: I just attended the TED conference down in Long Beach. It was pretty amazing. I got to pick Bill Gates’ brain on his [...]
Publication date: 2009-02-10 more

Google and Big Ideas

I love Om Malik and respect him greatly. I’m hoping to corner him for lunch sometime to pick his brain on ways that Google could improve. But today he happened to do a tweet that caught my attention just as my morning caffeine was kicking in. Om said “I think google has no big ideas. [...]
Publication date: 2009-02-04 more

Good books to read?

Here’s my current “to-read” books: Are there any other great/recommended books to read that you would suggest adding to the list?
Publication date: 2009-02-02 more

Making Homemade Pasta is Fun, Easy, and Delicious

Over the last year or so we've slowly been accumulating new kitchen toys and cookbooks. And we've been experimenting with new recipes during that time. See Jeremy's Crockpot or Slow Cooker Chili Recipe for an example. But things seem to have been kicked into a higher gear recently. You see, we asked for (and received--thanks Mom and Dad) a KitchenAid Artisan 5-Quart Stand Mixer back during Giftmas. And my wonderful wife got me the KitchenAid KPRA Pasta Roller Attachment and the The Complete Book of Pasta and Noodles to go along with the mixer. My expectation was to mostly use the mixer for the occasional bread mix (which I haven't tried yet) or cookie dough (ditto). But Kathleen is a big pasta fan and the meals in the book sounded quite tasty. So a few weeks ago I began to experiment with making my own pasta. Much to my surprise, it's a fairly easy and fun process. To make basic pasta, all you really need is some eggs and flour. In fact, 3 larger eggs and 2 cups of all purpose white flour is enough to get started. The real trick, as it turns out, is getting the moisture level of the pasta right and working with the resulting dough. You want it to stick together just the right amount with the right texture. No too dry and not too wet or sticky. And you need to let it "rest" long enough that you can work with it. Anyway, last night I made my third round of basic pasta and feel like I'm getting the hang of it. Combined with grilled chicken breasts, grilled asparagus, and a tasty olive oil and garlic sauce, it's just fantastic. Fresh pasta really tastes so much better than the dried pasta you buy at the store. It's hard to describe the difference. It's lighter, tastier, and less prone to sticking. You simply must try it. I highly recommend that pasta book too. If you're getting serious about pasta and want a variety of recipes (both for the noodles and sauces), it's a wealth of good information. Next we need to try some of the more interesting pasta recipes that use more exotic flours and spices added in. Pictures of my first and second pasta making adventures are on Flickr in Making Pasta. Have you made your own pasta? What's your experience been like? (comments)
Publication date: 2009-02-01 more

rugbygal on "artwork"

i have had a few problems, i didnt back up my iphone or ipod when my pc got a virus,  i lost every thing,  i brought a new pc and managed to get every thing back onto itunes,   but i have lost most of the artwork on my iphone and ipod,  has any body got any ideas how to get it back.
Publication date: 2009-01-29 more

Webspam in 2009?

It’s the beginning of the year, so I just wanted to get some outside opinions: what would you like to see Google’s webspam team tackle in 2009? Here’s how I asked for suggestions in 2006: Based on your experiences, close your eyes and think about what area(s) you wish Google would work on. You probably want [...]
Publication date: 2009-01-28 more

Ideal conference badge

I don’t even know how many conferences I’ve been to in the last decade, but it’s probably 30-40. In that time, maybe 2-3 conferences have really nailed the conference badge for attendees. Here’s what the ideal conference badge should look like, in my opinion: I’ll walk you through the important features of this badge: - Each attendee’s [...]
Publication date: 2009-01-28 more

Some fun links

I caught up on some of my non-search feed reading this weekend. Normally I’d drop some of these links in my Twitter stream, but I ended up with a ton of links. So I thought I’d drop them here. In case you missed it, Google’s webmaster console launched a new Webmaster Tools API a few weeks [...]
Publication date: 2009-01-28 more

Video of my

If you need a search fix, we just posted a video on the official Google webmaster blog. Essentially I recreated a talk I did for Web 2.0 and posted it online. You can also watch it below if you’d prefer: and you can also view the presentation slides I used or watch the slides directly below: I’m [...]
Publication date: 2009-01-28 more

Give Google feedback on

I recently posted asking what issues the Google webspam team should tackle in 2009. Getting this outside feedback is really handy, because it’s helpful to compare our internal perceptions against what annoys hundreds of people outside Google. After the first 150 or so comments I did a very rough tally of suggestions to see what [...]
Publication date: 2009-01-28 more

Talking to a Wiimote in Ubuntu 8.10

To add Wiimote support on Ubuntu 8.10, start by running the command “sudo apt-get install wminput wmgui lswm” to install the CWiid library and associated software. If you’re using a desktop machine, you probably don’t have Bluetooth capability. If you run the program “lswm” and see the message “No Bluetooth interface found” then you need to [...]
Publication date: 2009-01-28 more

In DC for the inauguration

My wife and I decided to head to Washington D.C. for the inauguration, and I’m already glad that I did. On the way out of a party, I spotted Minnesota Senator-elect Al Franken (Update: he’s not a Senator-elect yet, as the results haven’t been certified). Someone asked him to do a short “Hi kids, stay [...]
Publication date: 2009-01-28 more

How Not To Launch A Twitter Account

Recently someone registered a Twitter account name “mattcuttsmapxl,” which is very similar to my Twitter account name. The account was following many of the same people I follow, which is pretty annoying because people had to check whether it was me or not (it wasn’t). The account got suspended, but someone made a new account [...]
Publication date: 2009-01-28 more

Detecting Googlebombs

I recently did a Googlebomb post over on the Google Public Policy Blog. I’ve talked about Googlebomb phenomenon before (also see more Googlebomb background here). Just as a reminder, a Googlebomb is a prank where a group of people on the web try to push someone else’s site to rank for a query that it [...]
Publication date: 2009-01-28 more

Four Things You Need To Know About Knol

Recently Google mentioned that 100,000 different articles have been posted to Google Knol. I’ve been meaning to talk about Google Knol for a while, because there’s a few things you need to know. It seemed especially relevant after I saw the Silicon Alley Insider article about Knol on Techmeme, so I figured that I would [...]
Publication date: 2009-01-28 more

hagai1979 on "problem to upload song from itune"

hello i hold an ipod callasic 120 gig i, trying to upload song via the itunes the problem is that i see tish song on my ipod via the itunes but when i browese the ipod after when the ipod disccounct to the computr or itunes i cant see them!!! any help! thank in advance hagai
Publication date: 2009-01-28 more

maccolar on "How to Make a Copy of DVD Movies on Mac OS X"

If you want to rip DVD to computer, here is a step by step guide for you http://www.mac-dvd.com/mac-guide/how-to-rip-copyright-dvd-and-copy-dvd-on-mac.html If you want to copy DVD to another blank DVD disc, you may refer to this guide, it works pretty well for me. http://www.mac-dvd.com/mac-guide/how-to-copy-dvd-and-remove-copyright-on-mac.html
Publication date: 2009-01-28 more

Aashka on "DVD to iPhone Converter Review"

thank you I owned a iPhone a year ago and i tested many iphone softwares including free and free trial version, but I did not find one meet my need until the emergence of aiseesoft dvd to iphone suite, it is so wonderful that can help me convert my home dvd to iphone, convert my video downloaded from youtube, limewire and other online sites to iphone, even can help me backup the iphone movies and musics to my pc, more even it allow me split, join, crop my dvd and video, it also has other functions such as take snapshot, select subtile, sudio track, adjust the bitrate and so on, oh, it is too wonderful to lose it, i strong recommend it to everyone and gave my appreciation to Aiseesoft as well. Just enjoy your iphone time with it!
Publication date: 2009-01-28 more

ahmadmina on "DVD to iPhone Converter Review"

There is a free download DVD to iPhone video converter software available at http://www.diyinternational.net/downloads/audio.html
Publication date: 2009-01-28 more

Sal Cangeloso on "How to download free iPhone games"

my favorite free iphone games right now: lux touch, Space deadbeef, rogue, and topple. Anyone have any other suggestions?
Publication date: 2009-01-28 more

IlanaSense on "Where did all your attention go?!"

And how can you get it back? http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/11/26/my6sense-pioneering-digital-intuition-500-alpha-invites/ (iPhone only)
Publication date: 2009-01-28 more

My Dumb Cat Video

It's Friday and this is the Internet, so I present to you Cats Eating Chicken, or "My Dumb Cat Video" (embedded below too). The background is that we had a bit of leftover grilled chicken the other night and decided to bust it up and feed it to the cats. Amusingly, they all got together to partake of the feast, but a couple of them got curious about the camera too. Both Timmy (white and grey) and Thunder (mostly grey) give the camera a sniff or two. My boys (Barnes and Noble) remained single-mindedly devoted to devouring the meat. Anyway, we found it rather amusing. Have a good weekend... (comments)
Publication date: 2009-01-27 more

The New MySQL Landscape

Interesting things are afoot in the MySQL world. You see, it used to be that the MySQL world consisted of about 20-40 employees of MySQL AB (this funny distributed Swedish company that built and supported the open source MySQL database server), a tiny handful of MySQL mailing lists, and large databases were counted in gigabytes not terabytes. A Pentium III was still a decent server. Replication was a new feature! Hey, anyone remember the Gemini storage engine? :-) How times have changed... Nowadays MySQL is sort of a universe onto itself. There are multiple storage engines (though MyISAM and InnoDB are still the popular ones), version 5.1 is out (finally), and the whole company made it over 400 employees before it was gobbled up by Sun Microsystems (a smart move, IMHO, though history will judge that) a while back. If I had to guess 5 years or so ago what would be interesting to me today about MySQL, I'd have been really, really wrong. The future rarely turns out like we think. Just ask Hillary Clinton. Here's a little of what's rattling around in the MySQL part of my little brain these days... Outside Support, Patches, and Forks The single most interesting and surprising thing to me is both the number and necessity of third-party patches for enhancing various aspects of MySQL and InnoDB. Companies like Percona, Google, Proven Scaling, Prime Base Technologies, and Open Query are all doing so in one way or another. On the one hand, it's excellent validation of the Open Source model. Thanks to reasonable licensing, companies other than Sun/MySQL are able to enhance and fix the software and give their changes back to the world. Some organizations are providing just patches. Others, like Percona are providing their own binaries--effectively forks of MySQL/InnoDB. Taking things a step further, the OurDelta project aims to aggregate these third party patches and provide source and binaries for various platforms. In essences, you can get a "better" MySQL than the one Sun/MySQL gives you today. For free. Meanwhile, development on InnoDB continues. Oh, did I mention the part where they were bought by Oracle (yes, *that* Oracle) a while back? Crazy shit, I tell you. But it makes sense if you squint right. Anyway, the vibe I'm getting is that folks are frustrated because there's not a lot of communication coming out of the InnoDB development team these days. I can't personally verify that. It's been years since I corresponded with Heikki Tuuri (the creator of InnoDB). So folks like Mark Callaghan of Google have been busy analyzing and patching it to scale better for their needs. And we all benefit. Drizzle Taking things a step further yet, the Drizzle project is a re-making of MySQL started primarily by Brian Aker, who worked as MySQL's Director of Architecture for years. Brian is now at Sun and, along with a handful of others at Sun and elsewhere, is ripping out a lot of the stuff in a fork of MySQL that doesn't get used much, needlessly complicated the code, or is simply no longer needed. In essence, they're taking a hard look at MySQL and asking what it really needs to provide for a lot of it's uses today: Web and "cloud" stuff. He visited us at Craigslist a few months ago to talk about the project a bit and get our input and feedback. I believe it was that day I joined one of the mailing list and started following what's going on. Heck, I even build Drizzle on an Atom-powered MSI Wind PC regularly. It's great to see a re-think of MySQL going on... keeping the good, getting rid of the bad, and modularizing the stuff that people often want to do differently (authentication, for example). It's even better to see the group that's hacking on it. They really have their heads on straight. Unanswered Questions Why is all this even necessary? Are the "enterprise" customers and their demands taking focus away from what used to be the core use and users of MySQL? Is Sun hard to work with? It's clear that both the MySQL and InnoDB teams could be doing more to help. But having worked at a large company for long enough, I realize that things are rarely as simple as they should be. Will this stuff get integrated back into mainline MySQL? Will Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Debian, and Red Hat pick up OurDelta builds? What about Drizzle? Will Drizzle hit its target and be the sleek and lean database kernel that MySQL once could have been? Hard to say. It's hard to guess what the future holds and too easy to play armchair quarterback about the work of others. But these are question worth wondering about a bit. What's it all mean? Nowadays MySQL has a much slower release cycle that it used to. It's still available in "commecial" and free ("community") releases. There's still a company behind it--a much larger one in fact. But one that also has a vested interest in showing how it works better on their storage appliances or 256 "core" computers and whatnot. Clustering is still very niche. Transactions are not. Meanwhile, all the cutting edge stuff (at least from the point of view of scaling) is happening outside Sun/MySQL and being integrated by OurDelta and even Drizzle. The OutDelta builds are gaining steam quickly and Drizzle is shaping up. Heck, I'm hoping to get an OurDelta box or two on-line at work sometime soon. And I'd like to put a Drizzle node up too. I want to see how the InnoDB patches help and also play with the InnoDB plug-in (and its page compression). The next few years are proving to be far more interesting than I might have expected from a project and technology that looked like was on a track straight for Open Source maturity. And you know what? I like it. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-01-27 more

Talk Announcement: MySQL and Search at Craigslist

I recently learned that my talk has been accepted for the 2009 MySQL Conference in Santa Clara, California. It is currently scheduled for Tuesday the 21st and titled MySQL and Search at Craigslist. Here's the abstract (which I've promised to expand upon soon): Millions of people search for things every day on craigslist: tickets, cars, garage sales, jobs, events, and so on. This talk will look at the recent evolution of database and search architecture at Craigslist, including performance, caching, partitioning, and other tweaks. We'll pay special attention to the unique challenges of doing this for a large data set that has an especially high churn rate (new posts, edits, and deletes). And we strive to do this using as little hardware and power as possible. If you're coming to the conference, drop by and harass me. :-) If you're not sure check out the full schedule--there's a lot of good stuff packed into the conference already and a lot of talks are still not even posted. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-01-27 more

Twitter as a Dynamic DNS Service

I occasionally wish to know the IP address of my home Cable Modem or DSL connection but don't really care if it's available in DNS or not. It occurred to me that if I could programmatically detect the IP change, I'd be able to notify myself via Twitter. At first, I wanted a simple web service that'd tell me my IP address--something like WhatIsMyIP.com but an API suitable for simple scripting. Not finding anything, I created this massive PHP script instead and hosted it on my server: That made it easy to write a simple bash shell script that can be run from cron every few minutes. It uses curl to hit that script and compares the result with the previous result (stored in ~/.last_ip). If they differ it updates the file and tells twitter, again using curl. Of course, I had to create that new twitter account and then follow it in my main account. But, hey, that wasn't so hard. Now I have a Web 2.0ish social dynamic DNS thingy that uses Twitter. Aren't I cool and buzzword compliant?! (comments)
Publication date: 2009-01-27 more

Don't Bet on Moore Saving Your Ass

Over on the 37signals blog, DHH writes Mr. Moore gets to punt on sharding. His argument is basically that if you continually delay fixing your data storage and retrieval layer, Moore's Law will be there to save our ass--over and over again. Bzzzt. Wrong answer. Depending on future improvements to fix your own bad planning is a risky way to build an on-line service--especially one you expect to grow and charge money for. It's easy to forget history in this industry (as Paul pointed out in the comments on that post). There was a point a few years ago when people still believed the clock speed of CPUs would be doubling roughly every 18 months for half the cost. Putting aside that Moore's Law is really about transistor density and not raw speed, we all ended up taking a funny little detour anyway. Until recently, the sweet spot (in terms of cost and power use) was probably a dual CPU, dual core server with 16 or 32GB of RAM. But soon that'll be dual quads with 32 or 64GB of RAM. And then it'll be quad eight core CPUs with 128GB or whatever. But notice that nowadays we're not all running 6.4GHz CPUs in our servers. Instead we're running multi-core CPUs at slower clock speeds. Those two are definitely not equivalent. A funny thing happens as you add cores and CPUs. You begin to find that the underlying software doesn't always... get this... scale. That's right. Software designed in a primarily single or dual CPU world starts to show its age and performance limitation in a world where you have 8, 16, or 32 cores per server (and more if you're running one of those crazy Sun boxes). You see, David is talking specifically about MySQL (and probably InnoDB), which is currently being patched by outside developers precisely because it has multi-core issues . Its locking is expensive and not granular enough to utilize all those cores. It's expensive in terms of memory use too. And there are assumptions built into the I/O subsystem that don't scale well in today's world of fast multi-disk RAID units, SSDs, and SANs. People are hitting these issues in the real world and it's definitely becoming a serious bottleneck. See Also: The New MySQL Landscape. Moore's Law is no silver bullet here. A fundamental change has occurred in the hardware platform and now we're all playing catch-up in one way or another. I'll discuss this a bit in my upcoming MySQL Conference Talk too. The world is not nearly as clear or simple as DHH is suggesting. Perhaps they can get by with constantly postponing the work of sharding their database, but that doesn't mean you should follow their lead. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-01-27 more

Jeremy's Crockpot or Slow Cooker Chili Recipe

I've been making variations on a crock pot chili recipe for the last few months and finally have a combination we really like. Ingredients 1.5 - 2 pounds of ground beef 1 medium red onion 1/2 medium or large yellow onion 1/2 - 1 cup of frozen yellow sweet corn [see notes below] 1 green bell pepper 1 jalapeno pepper 1 14-16 oz. can of petite diced tomatoes [see notes below] 2 15-15 oz. cans of pinto beans [see notes below] 1 11.5 oz. can of V8 juice (hot if you can find it, regular otherwise) 1/2 tsp. salt 1 tbsp. chili powder 1 tbsp. cayenne pepper Directions Chop the red onion and add it with the ground beef. Brown over medium heat. While the meat and onion are browning, add beans, V8, and spices to the crockpot. Chop green pepper, yellow onion, and jalapeno and add them as well. Once the meat has browned and onions softened, add them to the crock pot as well. Cook on low heat for 6-8 hours, stirring occasionally. Serve with freshly made corn bread or fresh noodles. Optionally top with shredded cheddar cheese and onion. Enjoy with a nice cold beer, if that's your sort of thing. :-) Notes Safeway sells 15 oz. cans of Pinto Beans that are "Mexican Chili Pinto Beans." They work very well if you can find them. Safeway also sells 14.5 oz. cans of Petite Diced Tomatoes with Garlic and Olive Oil. Also highly recommended. Some people use canned Stewed Tomatoes in their recipes but I find them to be too chunky. I like a nice uniformly thick chili. Trader Joe's sells some truly excellent frozen Organic Super Sweet Cut Corn. Get it if you can. They also sell a good corn bred mix. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-01-27 more

A Job That Matters

In Tim O'Reilly's Work on Stuff that Matters he elaborated on three criteria that constitute "stuff that matters" for his readers: Work on something that matters to you more than money. Create more value than you capture. Take the long view. A number of folks where surprised when I announced that I was joining craigslist back in July but it's an organization that I really admire. Having been there about 6 months now, I can definitely say that it's a job that matters based on Tim's thinking and my own. Every time I meet someone and tell them where I work, their reaction is quite positive. They've had a good experience with craigslist, like the service, love the philosophy, and so on. Craigslist matters ordinary people--not just technology nuts. Similarly, I know that we create more value than we capture. The majority of our service is free and usage seems to be growing all the time. People I talk to get such good responses with craigslist classifieds (compared to, say, newspapers) that I know we're giving people more than their money's worth. As for taking the long view, I think being a non-public company helps that a lot. I've rarely thought about what "the next quarter" will bring. It's quite a contrast from my years at Yahoo. When we're discussing technology infrastructure, I'm always trying to think ahead a year or two (or more). But the day to day ups and downs just don't feel as important the way we operate. I like that. All in all, I've been very happy with the change and am glad that Tim posted something that helped me to explain what I like about it. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-01-27 more

Sphinx Search at Craigslist

A couple days ago, Andrew posted a news item titled Sphinx goes billions to the Sphinx web site. Last but not least, Powered By section, now at 113 sites and counting, was updated and restyled. I had long wondered how much Sphinx search queries are performed per month if we sum all the sites using it, and whether we already hit 1B page views per month or not. Being open-source, there's no easy way to tell. But now with the addition of craigslist to Powered By list I finally know that we do. Many thanks to Jeremy Zawodny who worked hard on making that happen, my itch is no more. :-) Well, I guess the cat's out of the bag! My first project at Craigslist was replacing MySQL FULLTEXT indexing with Sphinx. It wasn't the easiest road in the world, for a variety of reasons, but we got it all working and it's been humming along very well ever since. And I learned a heck of a lot about both Sphinx and craigslist internals in the process too. I'm not going to go into a lot of details on the implementation here, other than to say Sphinx is faster and far more resource efficient than MySQL was for this task. In the MySQL and Search and Craigslist talk I'm giving at the 2009 MySQL Users Conference, I'll go into a lot more detail about the unique problems we had and how we solved them. For what it's worth, the implementation isn't really done. I did update the search help page on the site to reflect some of the capabilities (hey, look! OR searches!) but there are features I have planned that I'd like to expose as time allows. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-01-27 more

Obama Interest in Kenya During the Primaries

A little over a year ago, my wife and I traveled to Africa for our honeymoon and wedding (and a lot of sight seeting--more on that over the next few weeks). Part of that time was spent in Tanzania and part of it was in Kenya. This was during the craziest part of the 2008 presidential primary race when Hillary Clinton had the perceived lead over Barak Obama and every other would-be democratic nominee. What was surprising to us is how aware of Obama and the primary process the average folks in Kenya appeared to be. We were asked on many occasions if Obama was going to be President of the United States of America. Even back then, over a year ago when he was in second place, there was an undeniable interest, hope, and genuine excitement about his prospects. Given the post-election turmoil that erupted in Kenya near the end of our trip, it's no surprise that Kenyans were celebrating his election and inauguration a few days ago. If anyone needed hope for change and a promising future after political unrest, it was the people of Kenya. When is the last time that a presidential election had such a far-reaching affect on ordinary people? (comments)
Publication date: 2009-01-27 more

Hetch Hetchy and Wapama Falls Hike Pictures and Panorama

Last weekend we flew up to Pine Mountain Lake and drove into Hetch Hetchy to hike to Wapama Falls. The weather was fantastic for mid-January: clear and in the high 50s to low 60s. After about 15 minutes on the trial, jackets and outer shirts came off, and we were down to jeans and t-shirts. Kathleen took several pictures of the Yosemite Valley area and the Sierra Nevada Mountains on the flight up with our Canon SD800 IS. Here are a few of them. You can see the full set in the Flickr photo set titled January 2009 Flight to Pine Mountain. I shot about 250 more with my Canon 300D and you can see a few here. The full set is on Flickr in Wapama Falls Hike in Hetch Hetchy Valley. The picture at the top of this post was stitched together with autostitch on Windows and touched up in Picasa. There are still more pictures of the hike that she took with the SD800 IS to come as soon as I get them on-line... You can always watch my full photo stream is here. (comments)
Publication date: 2009-01-27 more

Browser Market Share?

I hadn’t looked at my browser marketshare in a while, so I fired up Google Analytics: Rough browser numbers are Firefox 57.58% IE 26.07% Safari 6.48% Chrome 5.11% Opera 2.35% Mozilla 1.44% SeaMonkey 0.48% Mozilla Compatible 0.18% Konqueror 0.13% Camino 0.04% OneStat says that they see 0.54% share for Google Chrome. Net Applications provides an hour-by-hour graph, which is nice, but they hardwired it to look for the string “Chrome 0.2″ when Chrome is on version 0.3 [...]
Publication date: 2008-11-26 more

Opa! is Good Greek Food in Willow Glen

A month or so ago, the long under-construction Opa! opened its doors on Lincoln Ave in downtown Willow Glen. Wanting to try it for a while, we walked down on Friday night for dinner. And we were not disappointed. The Good The menu is straightforward and has a good variety of Greek food. We ordered the Keftedes (Greek Meatballs) as an appetizer. The dish consisted of two well prepared meatballs and an excellent sauce. For the main courses, we selected a Beef Souvlaki Pita (hers) and Seafood Souvlaki (mine). Both came with the most excellent Opa! Fries. (Think: garlic fries with a twist.) The food came in a reasonable amount of time and our waitress was very friendly and helpful. It was very tasty and portions were not excessively large either. Their drink menu contains a selection of beers and a good selection of Greek wines as well. The wine we sampled was quite good and is apparently available at Costco. Needless to say, we're going to have to verify that for ourselves. ;-) The interior is well decorated. I especially like the large TV monitor that shows what songs are playing over the sound system. Pricing was reasonable. Dinner for two with drinks, an appetizer, and desert (Baklava!) was about $50. Not the sort of thing we do often, but definitely not out of line with other favorite eating establishments. The Bad Opa! is a small sit down restaurant with tables for 2 and 4 (mostly) that also handles to go orders. It's often very full and could definitely benefit from more space inside. As a result, the tables are fairly close together and the waitresses occasionally bump into customers. But space isn't easy to come by in Willow Glen's downtown. More Opa! has over 60 ratings and reviews on Yelp and is also discussed a bit on Willow Glen 2.0. If you're looking for good Greek food in the area, I'd highly recommend giving Opa! a try. (comments)
Publication date: 2008-11-24 more

Where did udevmonitor go?

In case you’re looking for the “udevmonitor” program on the Intrepid Ibex version of Ubuntu, it’s changed; use “udevadm monitor” now: $ udevadm help Usage: udevadm COMMAND [OPTIONS] info query sysfs or the udev database trigger request events from the kernel [...]
Publication date: 2008-11-23 more

Trying (and failing) to get Ubuntu to work

I really want to run Ubuntu, but it shouldn’t be this hard. Plugging in an SD card reader that I picked up from Best Buy shouldn’t cause a hard freeze of my system (on both Gutsy Gibbon and Intrepid Ibex): The card reader works fine in Windows. At this point, I’m honestly thinking about crashing the [...]
Publication date: 2008-11-23 more

Virtual terminals not working? Check your keyboard.

(This is a boring post that I’m writing for people that have this same problem in the future. Just skip it.) Every good Linux user knows that if you want to drop from X down into a text-based virtual terminal, you can press control-alt-F1 (or any other key up to F6), and control-alt-F7 returns you to [...]
Publication date: 2008-11-23 more

Reindeer Car Antlers are a Great Holiday Present

Last year I got these reindeer car antlers for my wife. This year she let me have them for my car. They look like this: (Note: this is the picture from the catalog, not one of our cars.) Tons of people stop, stare, and then break out in a smile or start pointing out my car to [...]
Publication date: 2008-11-23 more

gapmusic on "For sale:Apple iphone 3G 16GB...Samsung Omnia 3G 16GB"

G MUSIC & SONS LIMITED(GAPMUSIC AND SONS LIMITED) is  global reputable International company that specializes in Sales, Supply and Distribution of brand new ,musical equipments and Electronics Gadget of the Highest Quality still at very affordable prices. The long-term relationship with clients is the first priority we have been concerned. We manage our business in the most honest and trustworthy ways. We offer our clients with high quality products in reasonable prices that make them get a promising profit and valuable business. Besides, we have dedicated staffs to provide the best services for our clients. Contact  the Sales Management ia below possible Emails... Place your order immediately: gapmusicltd@hotmail.com gapmusicltd@yahoo.com gapmusicltd@gmail.com PIONEER DJ MIXERS Pioneer DJM-3000 DJ Mixer......................................350Euros Pioneer DJM-600k DJ Mixer (Black Face)...................380Euros Pioneer CMX3000 Dual Rackmount CD Player............400Euros Pioneer DJM-600 Pro DJ Mixer.................................400Euros Pioneer DJM-1000 Professional Club DJ Mixer...........600Euros Pioneer DJM-800 Pro DJ Mixer................................600Euros Pioneer SM-1000 Audio and ideo Mixer...............1800Euros PIONEER DJ PACKAGES Pioneer CDJ800MK2 CD / MP3 Turntable + DJM800 DJ Mixer Package.........1000Euros PIONEER CDJ-1000MK3 / DJM-600 MIXER DJ PACKAGE.............800Euros PIONEER CDJ1000MK3 / DJM800 DJ PACKAGE ..................1,200Euros Pioneer DJ-X1 / Pioneer SW DJ SYSTEM ....................2000Euros Pioneer DJM-500 / Technics SL-1200MK2 ......................550Euros PIONEER DJ PLAYERS Pioneer CDJ-800MK2 Digital CD/MP3 Player...........300Euros Pioneer CDJ-400 Tabletop CD Player....................350Euros Pioneer CDJ-1000MK3 Digital CD/MP3 Player........450Euros Pioneer DJ-1000 Tabletop DD/CD Player..........700Euros Pioneer DJ-X1 Digital Turntable Player..............800Euros APPLE I PHONE Package content: iPhone 3G Stereo Headset with mic Dock Connector to USB Cable USB Power Adapter Documentation Cleaning/polishing cloth SIM eject tool Apple iPhone 3G 16GB Unlocked Phone..............350Euros Apple iphone 3G  8GB Unlocked Phone.......... ....300 Apple iphone 4GB Unlocked Phone cost...............200.   Nokia Phone Nokia8800 arte Mobile Phone..400 Nokia N96 16GB Mobile Phone..350 Nokia N95 8GB Mobile Phone..300 Nokia N81 8GB Mobile Phone..250 Nokia n80 Mobile Phone............160 Nokia N82 GPS Mobile Phone...250Euro   For fast ordering and MSN conversation please contact us ia Place your order immediately: MSN: gapmusicltd@hotmail.com Email: gapmusicltd@yahoo.com Yahoo messenger:gapmusicltd@gmail.com Your interest will be highly appreciated. With Best Regards Management.
Publication date: 2008-11-22 more

Bash Trick: Watching Multiple Background Jobs

I recently had a need to add some error checking to a bash script that runs multiple copies of a Perl script in parallel to better utilize a multi-core server. I wanted a way to run these four processes in the background and gather up their exit values. Then, if any of them failed, I'd prematurely exit the bash script and report the error. After a bit of reading bash docs, I came across some built-ins that I hadn't previously used or even seen. First, I'll show you the code: wait.sh This is the bash script that runs the parallel processes and gathers up the exit values. #!/bin/bash FAIL=0 echo "starting" ./sleeper 2 0 & ./sleeper 2 1 & ./sleeper 3 0 & ./sleeper 2 0 & for job in `jobs -p` do echo $job wait $job || let "FAIL+=1" done echo $FAIL if [ "$FAIL" == "0" ]; then echo "YAY!" else echo "FAIL! ($FAIL)" fi sleeper And here's the Perl script that I wrote in order to test the functioning of wait.sh. It accepts to arguments. The first is the number of seconds to sleep (to simulate the delay associated with doing work) and the second is the exit value it should use (any non-zero value indicates a failure). #!/usr/bin/perl -w use strict; my $time = $ARGV[0] || 1; my $exit = $ARGV[1] || 0; sleep $time; exit $exit; Discussion New to me was the use of let to do math on a variable so that I can count up the number of failures. Is there a better way? There's no native ++ operator in bash. Similarly, using jobs to get a list of pids to wait on provided to be a very useful idiom. The code is straightforward and works for my purposes. But since 99% of my time is spent in Perl rather than bash, I wonder what I could have done differently and/or better. Feedback welcome. And, if this is at all useful to you, feel free to take it and run... Finally, I'm starting to really dig gist.github for showing off bits of code. It's good stuff. (comments)
Publication date: 2008-11-22 more

on "DVD to iPhone Converter Review"

Iquite lilethe wonderful all-purpose dvd ripper - Extra DVD Ripper Express. Not only convert DVD to iphone, but also to YouTube FLV Video file, WMV Video file, AVI, DivX, XviD, VCD, SVCD, MPEG, Apple iPod, Apple TV MP4 Video file, Sony PSP MP4, Sony PS3 Video file, Microsoft Zune Player for WMV and MP4 Video file. That's why I chose it. I bought it at 10% off at http://www.gutensoft.com.
Publication date: 2008-11-21 more

Jool5 on "ipod iphone zune psp apple tv software guides"

Cool! Those were all very informative and comprehensive, too! Keep it up!
Publication date: 2008-11-21 more

Jool5 on "DVD to iPhone Converter Review"

That was a good review! Thanks a lot!
Publication date: 2008-11-21 more

Jool5 on "How to Convert protected Music/ Video to new iPod, MP3"

You guys posted a lot of good info and apps on here! Thanks for sharing!
Publication date: 2008-11-21 more

LadySharm on "How to Convert protected Music/ Video to new iPod, MP3"

MelodyCan Protected Audio/Video Converter is a software tool you can use for conversion of wide range of different audio/video file formats to most commonly used formats like MP3, WMA, WAV. This software is especially useful in case if you have protected music/video files you want to listen on playback device, which doesn't support particular DRM technology, like MP3 CD player, iPod/iPhone, Zune or other portable digital player, cell phone, Pocket PC, etc. Tips: * The music content must be legally obtained and can be played on the computer where MelodyCan is installed. * Works on x64 Vista/XP! MelodyCan DRM Converter popular tasks are: * Converting protected files to unprotected format * Convert DRM protected WMA files * Convert iTunes to MP3 format * Convert itunes protected movie * Convert DRM protected songs * Convert Rhapsody files to MP3 * Convert protected video * Unprotect WMA files * Convert iTunes Videos to MPEG * Convert protected RAX to MP3 * Remove DRM from WMV files * Remove DRM protection * Remove DRM legally
Publication date: 2008-11-19 more

9 tips for the Google Mobile App for iPhone

Here are some tips to help you get the most out of Google’s new Mobile Application for the iPhone. To get Google Mobile App on your iPhone, go to the App Store and search for “Google Mobile App,” or click on this link to install from a computer. If you have an older version of Google [...]
Publication date: 2008-11-19 more

Google Adds Voice Recognition to iPhone App

I have a very good feeling about Google’s new iPhone app that does voice recognition. I’ve been playing with this voice recognition application for several weeks and I have to say that I’m really impressed. First and foremost, the voice recognition works really well. Crazy long-tail specialized vocabulary is tricky (more on that later), but [...]
Publication date: 2008-11-18 more

TV Watching and Happiness

In one of those "well, duh!" moments the other day, I came across a headline on Slashdot that said Unhappy People Watch More TV. Given that I mostly stopped watching TV quite some time ago and consider it to be one of the more rude devices in our culture, I clicked thru to read about how others have discovered what I'd already guessed was true... A new study by sociologists at the University of Maryland concludes that unhappy people watch more TV, while people who describe themselves as 'very happy' spend more time reading and socializing. 'TV doesn't really seem to satisfy people over the long haul the way that social involvement or reading a newspaper does,' says researcher John P. Robinson. 'It's more passive and may provide escape--especially when the news is as depressing as the economy itself. Imagine that... Stagnation and exposure to negative information leads to sadness. It goes on... The data suggest to us that the TV habit may offer short-run pleasure at the expense of long-term malaise.' Unhappy people also liked their TV more: 'What viewers seem to be saying is that while TV in general is a waste of time and not particularly enjoyable, "the shows I saw tonight were pretty good. Another shock. TV provides only a short-term reward (kind of like a drug hit). If this resonates with you a bit, or you suspect deep down that there's more going on with the influence of TV in our culture, I highly recommend reading Amusing Ourselves To Death by Neil Postman if you have not already. It's too bad this stuff doesn't get taught in school--where, I'm told, teachers are using PowerPoint more and more. *sigh* (comments)
Publication date: 2008-11-18 more

on "How to Convert protected Music/ Video to new iPod, MP3"

Now powerful MelodyCan 5 in 1 Convert released new version Works on x64 Vista/XP!
Publication date: 2008-11-17 more

on "How to remove DRM protection of iTunes m4p songs and wma audio files"

As the music in iTunes is encrypted with DRM, you cannot directly put it on any non-Apple MP3 player. The easiest way is to burn the music to an audio CD and then rip it back to Windows Media Player or a similar program as an MP3. Or you can get some software to help you. I use TuneClone to do this. Though not free, it is very well worth a try. Below is its step by step tutorial about how to get iTunes music converted to MP3: http://www.tuneclone.com/itunes8-m4p-to-mp3.php
Publication date: 2008-11-17 more

mwbauers on "Don't Buy Apple"

I bought my first Mac...... a Performa in 1996....... it still works let me count...... I'm now up to three newer Mac desktops and a pair of ibook/macbooks and a couple of iPods and an iPhone, I've never had any major problems with the equipment, and only a couple of very minor and easily fixed by myself problems. Not too bad for over 12 years........ I've also gone through 3-4 standard PC's over those same years. They have been mainly major problems to keep going. It's not the hardware that keeps failing on those, it's the Windows OS's............ Except for some special hardware that requires the old PC's [cnc-gear] I'm now doing all of my Windows work on the two newest Macs. I don't expect to have to buy another Windows only computer except for cnc-control, having both mac and Windows on thesamecomputer with each bootable and virtual is just too good a set-up to pass up, for me. But the mac/Apple hardware is just fine......... and I'm a guy that never leaves the equipment in it's stock hardware config.........
Publication date: 2008-11-17 more

A word about metrics, part III: market share of Google Docs?

I’m not sure what Google Docs market share is, but I thought it would be interesting to mention a couple data points and add a new data point. Data point #1: Compete. Compete just estimated that 4.4M visitors stopped by Google Docs in September, which is just a hair below 2.4% of the U.S. online population, [...]
Publication date: 2008-11-17 more

Asynchronous MySQL Client in Perl

I recently found myself wishing for an async library for MySQL. My goal is to be able to fire off queries to a group of federated servers in parallel and aggregate the results in my code. With the standard client (DBD::mysql), I'd have to query the servers one at a time. If there are 10 servers and each query takes 0.5 seconds, my code would stall for 5 seconds. But by using an async library, I could fire off all the queries and fetch the results as they become available. The overall wait time should not be much more than 0.5 seconds. While I found little evidence of anyone doing this in practice, my search led me to the perl-mysql-async project on Google Code. It's a pure-Perl implementation of the MySQL 4.1 protocol and an asyncronous client that uses Event::Lib (and libevent) under the hood. The code contains little in the way of documentation or examples, aside from the simple bundled test script. After a bit of mucking around with it, I managed to cobble together a working example. It looks like this: #!/usr/bin/perl -w use strict; use Event::Lib; use Data::Dumper; use MysqlAsync; use AsyncCaller qw/schedule/; $Data::Dumper::Terse = 1; $|=1; my $expected_results = 25; my $results = 0; my $dbh; for (1..$expected_results) { # my $secs = int(rand(5)); my $secs = rand(5); my $query = qq[select sleep($secs)]; schedule(0.001, sub{ my $dbh = MysqlAsync->new( database => { host => "localhost", port => 3306, database => "mysql", passwd => "xxxxxx", user => "root", }, connect_timeout => 1, max_requests => 25, db_timeout => 10, # logfile => "/tmp/mysqllog", ); $dbh->get_array($query, \&result ); }); } event_mainloop(); exit; sub result { my ($result) = @_; if (defined $result) { print "result: " . Dumper($result); } else { print "error: " . Dumper($dbh->error()); } $results++; # all done? if ($results == $expected_results) { exit; } } __END__ Sure enough, that code runs in just a bit more time than the longest query it executes, rather than the sum of all the query times. What still surprises me is that this code doesn't appear to get a lot of use (or at least discussion) in the real world. In the PHP world, the mysqlnd driver offers async queries. So count this as my contribution to demonstrating that Perl can do async MySQL queries too. (comments)
Publication date: 2008-11-15 more

Post-Election Thoughts: Equal but Not

I'm happy that Barack Obama won the election. I think it's time to stir things up a bit. What really bothers me is that fact that we still don't have equal voting in this country. We certainly have the technology to share vote counts quickly and efficiently, so who not just do that? Why screw around with an electoral college anymore? It seems disingenuous at best and an outright lie at worst to call Obama's victory a "landslide" when the actual percentages of the popular vote (the only vote that should count) were so close. Yet the large difference in electoral vote counts is supposed to make us believe that something very different happened. And the media was more than happy to play along with that deception (what a surprise, huh?). It should not be possible to lose by having more votes than your opponent, but it is. Why does nobody seem to care? (See: electoral college, specifically this.) Of all the countries that have tried to copy our model of democracy in the last 200 years or so, can you name a single one that adopted the electoral college as a piece of their political infrastructure? I'd love to have my vote count as much as everyone in all the other states. Why is that so hard? (comments)
Publication date: 2008-11-14 more

Pubcon/WebmasterWorld conference, here I come!

I arrive Wednesday afternoon for the 2008 Pubcon conference, and I’ll be staying until after the networking event on the last day, which is the heart of the event. It’s the heart because the networking event is held at a pub, and the original idea of Pubcon was that some of the best parts of [...]
Publication date: 2008-11-12 more

Fun email

Every so often I get an email like this: Dear Webmaster, I have browsed your site and I’m interested in purchasing advertising space in it. I am mainly interested in placing a new page on your site with content and links that I will supply. Please let me know if you would like to discuss this further or if [...]
Publication date: 2008-11-08 more

bendy on "How to Convert protected Music/ Video to new iPod, MP3"

I'm looking for some help here - please bear with the story... Ok, essentially I used to use a Sony walkman mp3 player, with all my music files on a laptop with Sonic Stage. That laptop has since been stolen (I've still got the mp3 player) but due to a new ipod, I now use iTunes on my work lapotp. Because it's a work laptop, any 'enhanced' CDs (ie those with videos, etc on them) won't transfer to the library; the laptop just won't recognise them in the drive. Consequently there's a large element of my music collection that I now can't put on to iTunes. So I was wondering if it would be possible to: 1) Install sonic stage onto my new laptop and somehow dump the files onto it from the Sony mp3 player, and then 2) Convert these Sony files into iTunes 'friendly' files? Any help much appreciated. cheers bendy
Publication date: 2008-11-05 more

beth on "short survey"

Hi all, Im currently writting a dissertation project on Apple company (in short what makes it so popular and addictive) and I would be extremely grateful for answers on those simple quesions: 1. Can you name the reason why you've decided to buy Apple product? (you can select more than one answer) a.company adverts b.functionality c.i just stick to the brand d.friend's recommendation e.i like the overall look of the brand f. just think that other brands are crappy 2. How many Apple products did you buy during last 5 years? 3. How would you grade Mac's functionality? (1-5) 4. How would you grade Mac's stability (1-5) 5. How would you grade PC functionality? (1-5) 6. How would you grade PC stability? (1-5) 7. Do you consider yourself as a part of Apple community? 8. Do you attend any kind of Apple user meetings on regular basis? Thanks in advace for all of u and big up!!
Publication date: 2008-11-04 more

Tom Willmot on "short survey"

Moved to the Apple Forum. I too use a few Apple products, here are my answers. 1. b & e 2. 7 3. 5 4. 5 5. 4 6. 2 7. Yes 8. No Hope I'm not to late.
Publication date: 2008-11-04 more

Vote vote vote!

The polls will be closed by this time tomorrow, so don’t forget to vote, everyone.
Publication date: 2008-11-04 more

Halloween 2008 wrap-up

I missed a few Halloween tidbits: - Our Halloween post on the Google webmaster blog gives you a feel for Halloween at Google. The dog dressed up as a lion was pretty awesome. There was also a guy dressed as the Android from Google’s mobile phone OS. - What happens when a witch accidentally collides with a [...]
Publication date: 2008-11-03 more

My Halloween 2008 Costume: Rick Astley

digg_url = 'http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/my-halloween-2008-costume/'; For Halloween this year, I decided to be Rick Astley. With a little bit of hair spray, spray-on hair color, and some make-up for a widow’s peak, it looks like this: What fun. To make the costume complete, I took my Android G1 phone and bought a copy of Never Gonna Give You [...]
Publication date: 2008-11-01 more

Halloween easter egg: Google protects itself from zombies

You probably saw Google’s Halloween logo today: But you may not have noticed that Google made another change for Halloween. Check out Google’s robots.txt file today: That’s right. Zombies are disallowed from accessing /brains on Google today. You can never be too safe! Hat-tip to Google Blogoscoped spotting it first and to Search Engine Land for [...]
Publication date: 2008-11-01 more

My Halloween 2008 Costume

For Halloween this year, I decided to be Rick Astley. With a little bit of hair spray, spray-on hair color, and some make-up for a widow’s peak, it looks like this: What fun. To make the costume complete, I took my Android G1 phone and bought a copy of Never Gonna Give You Up from Amazon [...]
Publication date: 2008-11-01 more

Happy Diwali!

A little late, but I hope everyone had a good Diwali! I enjoyed some good Indian food and I hope you did the same.
Publication date: 2008-10-31 more

Cheri and Ron Smith on "wanna buy a mac!"

Hi, So I'm wondering if the original poster made the jump??? I too and seriously considering swapping in my two desktops and laptop...all link with a wireless router to a Apple system. I have a so called personal one on one meeting with a mac genius this sunday at noon discuss the pros and cons. I love the idea of consolidating everything...once and for all...for the rest of my life. All products built in the US and all tech support stateside. I was also encouraged reading about the Parallel software. Am I missing anything...any comments, suggestions? Thanks! Cheri
Publication date: 2008-10-30 more

Todd Ogasawara on "How to download free iPhone games"

The new iPhone 3G or updated iPhone or iPod touch can now take advantage of the iTunes Apps store. There's a bunch of free games available now. In fact, the current top 3 downloads are all games (Labyrinth Lite, Sodoku, Tap Tap Revenge). You can find more info about the App store at: http://www.apple.com/iphone/appstore/
Publication date: 2008-10-30 more

Todd Ogasawara on "wanna buy a mac!"

rwsmith: There are three virtualization products for Mac OS X now: Parallels (which you mentioned), VMware Fusion, and VirtualBox. All three are great products. You might want to take a look at VirtualBox first since it is free for personal use. You can find an overview I wrote about it at: http://bit.ly/lMCDC
Publication date: 2008-10-30 more

lee yang on "How to Convert protected Music/ Video to new iPod, MP3"

To be frankly, your info provided above is more of a mess, and nobody can figure out how to do it rightly. To me, we don't have to bother about copyright porblems, and i've been using PQ DVD to iPod Video Converter for long, and it enables me to converted all my DVD rentals(copyrighted or protected? right) to my ipod video, and have a great time watching all DVD or video files(mostly avi file) on ipod, but it's no problem ever since, and the same is true of my friends. If u also wanna use it, you can free download it at http://www.pqdvd.com/dvd-to-ipod-video-converter.htm .
Publication date: 2008-10-30 more

Crystal Stewart on "DVD to iPhone Converter Review"

iOrgSoft iPod Video Converter, best converter for iPod users.
Publication date: 2008-10-30 more

Jared Winter on "How to Convert protected Music/ Video to new iPod, MP3"

We are a marketing Company dealing in electronic products electronics, computer, hi-tech equipments and Accessories. We are promoting export with competitive price and unique quality of digital products such as Mobile Phones & Digital Cordless Phone (Apple iPhone 16 GB, Nokia N96 16GB, PDA, NEW HTC TOUCH DIAMOND CELL PHONE, Samsung, LG ) etc. Laptops/Notebook (Apple MacBook - Core 2 Duo 2 GHz - HDD 160 GB, Apple MacBook Pro - Core 2 Duo 2.33 GHz - HDD 120 GB,Toshiba Satellite, Sony Vaio, Dell XPS) etc. Game Console (Microsoft Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii, Sony PlayStation 3 80GB,Game & Accessories) etc. Portable CD/DVD Players, digital satellite receiver, MP3 player, Home Theater Systems, Bluetooth, Camcoders/Digital Video Cameras, Memory Card, Heat Transfer, Printers, Scanners, Hard Drives, Projectors, Plasma TV's, IPOD Digital Player, Plasma TV's. And many other product. Kindly contact us for fast delivery via (USPS, FEDEX,UPS,DHL) Regard,Jared Jared Computer Sales,Web: http://www.jaredcomputersales.com Sales Email: sales@jaredcomputersales.comSupport Email: jaredwinter@rocketmail.comSales Phone: 07031969908
Publication date: 2008-10-30 more

Bob Thurston on "How to Convert protected Music/ Video to new iPod, MP3"

Pretty funny stuff: http://www.mobilemo.com/blog/13-ways-your-ipod-or-iphone-can-kill-you/
Publication date: 2008-10-30 more

Mobier Hoo on "DVD to iPhone Converter Review"

Iquite lilethe wonderful all-purpose dvd ripper - Extra DVD Ripper Express. Not only convert DVD to iphone, but also to YouTube FLV Video file, WMV Video file, AVI, DivX, XviD, VCD, SVCD, MPEG, Apple iPod, Apple TV MP4 Video file, Sony PSP MP4, Sony PS3 Video file, Microsoft Zune Player for WMV and MP4 Video file. That's why I chose it. I bought it at 10% off at http://www.gutensoft.com.
Publication date: 2008-10-30 more

Ann Shelter on "How to Convert protected Music/ Video to new iPod, MP3"

Remove DRM protection from Windows Media, iTunes music and video files. ? Remove DRM protection from Windows Media, iTunes music and video files. ? Remove DRM from protected music files and various Video files. ? Remove DRM from from iTunes, Napster, Yahoo Music, Zune, MSNMusic, MusicLoad, Rhapsody files. ? Remove DRM andconvert DRM Audio and Video Files with up to 50x speed. ? Convert DRM files to unprotected MP3, MPEG4, CD, iPod and other MP3 player file formats at high speed and CD quality.
Publication date: 2008-10-30 more

Mobier Hoo on "How to Convert protected Music/ Video to new iPod, MP3"

I was deeply impressed by both output quality and conversion speed of Extra DVD Ripper Express. Often a DVD 9 disc was completed in about 15 minutes.
Publication date: 2008-10-30 more

skyocean king on "How to remove DRM protection of iTunes m4p songs and wma audio files"

Here is a detailed guide on how to - [b]Remove DRMprotection from iTunes AAC M4V M4P on win&Mac[/b]
Publication date: 2008-10-30 more

windbell king on "How to remove DRM protection of iTunes m4p songs and wma audio files"

I just stumble upon this guide which gives a step-by-step way to - Remove DRM Protection from iTunes AAC M4V M4P on Win&Mac
Publication date: 2008-10-30 more

john kennedy on "ipod swap?"

Plenty of people have swapped a new battery into their iPod, so the fact that I did it, is nothing new. But the fact that someone as clumsy as I am did it in about ten minutes without destroying the iPod is surprising. If you're as fumbled fingered as I am and have been afraid to open your iPod, I hope this gives you the courage to take action. ----------------------------------------- ipod batteries
Publication date: 2008-10-30 more

EX on "Mac Lac(k)"

In my town, ppl are so Window addicted that it is so rear to find any X system, Linux sometimes, but I don't think that any mac could be find in my TOWN. Cause of that, I wasn't able to learn much about mac, nor I could have it. Im just asking is there any way that I can find free Mac edition online, some kind of open source or something. Some ppl told me about hacked version, but Im not sure where I could find it, and would it be real kind of Mac system.
Publication date: 2008-10-30 more

Jeff Snyder on "Mac BBS'ing - Bring It Back!"

So, you've heard about this old thing called BBS'ing, you've got a spare Macintosh sitting around that isn't serving any particular purpose at the moment, and so you've decided to take a blast into the past, and set up your own BBS. There's only one problem...where do you find Macintosh BBS software? You've looked around a bit, but have for the most part come up empty-handed. Well, maybe I can help. You see, I ran a Macintosh FidoNet-connected BBS during the 1990's, and even ran my own conference. Not only that, but just recently, I set up my BBS again. Over time, I've collected just about every BBS program that was ever written for the Mac. If you have a look at it, who knows...maybe you'll get inspired and start your own Mac BBS...at least that is what I am hoping. Check out what I've got: ANSI & ASCII Related BBS'ing Info Documents bbs100 3.0 OSX FirstClass Hermes External Writing Hermes Externals Hermes Program & Docs Hermes Utilities MacCitadel 1.3b 68K Mailers Offline QWK Readers Mansion BBS 9.5.6 68K Misc. BBS Utilities Modem Tools MUBBS Nally 1.2 Leopard Novalink - NovaTerm Pancake Public Address Red Ryder Second Sight StarBase7 1.3b 68K TeleFinder Telnet Clients Terminal Emulators - ZTerm, GLterm, etc. WWIV 3.0 - July 1988 Zonch So, if you're interested in any of this hard-to-find software, all you have to do is log on to my BBS, the Armageddon BBS, using your favorite telnet client. If you're a Mac OSX user, you definitely want to use the latest version of SyncTERM. Yeah, it's Windowish-looking, but it's the best telnet client out there for displaying real BBS ANSI graphics. If you're still using Classic Mac, then the best deal is using the Public Address BBS software in telnet mode. If you don't have it, I have a special stripped down version available on our BBS. So come and check us out! Post a few messages, play an old game of LEECH 2000, or check out my icebreaker external called "Get-To-Know-You". And if you know Python and/or Jython, I could REALLY use your help. To access the Armageddon BBS, just use port 23 and telnet to: endtimeprophecy.org Hope to see you soon! Jeff
Publication date: 2008-10-30 more

Sal Cangeloso on "Did you get a new MacBook?"

They look pretty cool, but $1299 is a pretty significant investment (and that's the least you'll be spending). I know Joel picked one up on Friday and some buddies of mine did as well. Anyway, I just was just curious. I'm not a big Mac guy, but the new notebooks are really impressive and they are arriving just at the right time (at least for me). I'm going to too see how my new Vista system works out before making any purchases.
Publication date: 2008-10-30 more

Kevin on "Leasing problem with Apple Financial"

Hopefully I'm posing this in the right forum. We have a leasing problem and the representative at Apple Financial we've been working with is no longer returning my calls. I was hoping that someone here knew the contact information for one of the managers at Apple Financial. Here's what is going on: Back in 2002, 2003, and 2004, our company entered into "fair market value" leases with Apple Financial. The leases in 2002 and 2004 were for 24 months. The lease in 2003 was for 36 months. Getting right to the point, unaware of these leases (the employees that started them left the company and the knowledge was never passed on) we've still been paying into them until just recently. All in all, we overpaid on these leases by $36,000. Surprised that this was allowed to go on for so long, I found someone at Apple Financial in asset management. I put together a spreadsheet that included when the leases started, when they ended, how much we should have paid into them, how much we overpaid, and any other pertinent information. I estimated the buyout of the leases (which would have been in 2004 and 2006), padded the buyout cost, then added 6 months worth of additional payments (further padding the cost). I then requested the remainder be credited back to us. After almost two months of sporadic communication on the part of the representative, I was simply told "no" to my request (left in a voicemail), without any reason why or option to negotiate (I called back, but have yet to have my calls returned). I'm am shocked that Apple, a company that I always though positioned itself as caring about their customers, is unwilling to return even one cent to us or talk to us. We aren't asking for the full overpayment to be returned, only a little over 2/3rds. I feel that's a reasonable request. For Apple to keep all of the amount we overpaid seems immoral. How can that be justified? We never received notice that the leases were coming to a close. The only reason I found out about the leases is that one closed by "itself" (after 46 months of overpayment for a total of $15,812.87 that was overpaid). The first time I the saw the lease paperwork and the amount we over paid, I had full faith that Apple would come through and do the right thing. So I again want to say that I'm shocked Apple is unwilling to do anything. If you know someone that can help us, please let me know. My faith that Apples cares for its long term customers (we've been buying Apple products for our business since 2001) is dwindling.
Publication date: 2008-10-30 more

Joel Evans on "Did you get a new MacBook?"

I picked one up last week and this weekend had a chance to play. I'm writing up a first impressions-type piece but the short summary is that this is a great notebook! I haven't put bootcamp on it yet but it's meeting ALL of my computing needs and the screen, keyboard, speed, etc.. are amazing! anyone else pick one up? I don't have an immediate need for Firewire so I'm not missing anything, yet.
Publication date: 2008-10-30 more

Anthony Cahill on "Various ipod charging/connection problems"

Hi, Here's hoping I'm posting this is in the right forums. Last ipod topic I randomly stumbled upon finished in an orgy of political debate, without a real resolution. I can only hope this topic is just as fruitful. I recently picked up my fiancee's old Ipod Mini, 1st Gen, in an attempt to fix it. It appears to have numerous problems. When plugged in to a USB 2.0 port, which I know has power, as I use it to charge my iRiver, it neither charges, nor is it recognised by Windows. I've downgraded to iTunes 7, due to the known compatibility issues with the old Minis and iTunes 8 and that hasn't helped. When I plug the USB into a USB to Power Socket converter and charge it from the wall, it comes to life and shows the charging animation. During this time it is entirely usable. As soon as it is unplugged, regardless of how long it's been plugged in, it switches off and refuses to turn back on. I've attempted a soft reset while it's plugged in, but that hasn't worked either. I've replaced the battery and made sure that all the connections were secure and the issue still persists. That's about all the info I have to give. Any help would be much appreciated.
Publication date: 2008-10-30 more

Dick Feldman on "iPod video false low battery"

I've already replaced the battery twice on my ipod video. The problem is that overnight it always appears to have no charge and won't start up. If I connect it to a computer, it says "very low battery" etc. After 10 minutes, it comes on and shows mostly charged. It just falsely appears to have lost its charge. Runs ok as long as I keep it going, but after a long time off (overnight) won't start up. Any ideas? THanks.
Publication date: 2008-10-30 more

Ann Shelter on "How to remove DRM protection of iTunes m4p songs and wma audio files"

MelodyCan Protected Audio/Video Converter is a software tool you can use for conversion of wide range of different audio/video file formats to most commonly used formats like MP3, WMA, WAV. This software is especially useful in case if you have protected music/video files you want to listen on playback device, which doesn't support particular DRM technology, like MP3 CD player, iPod/iPhone, Zune or other portable digital player, cell phone, Pocket PC, etc. Main features of MelodyCan Protected Audio/Video Converter: 1. Straight and easy to use interface You can easily convert your music file with just few mouse clicks: add your music files to batch list, select appropriate output format and press start button. You can create custom profiles for output format settings or use build-in standard profiles, Drag'n'Drop. 2. Protected music files conversion All protected music files playable by both Windows Media Player and QuickTime Player can be converted to unprotected MP3, WMA. This is not protection removal though, software just plays protected files and places resulting sound into unprotected music file. 3. Wide range of supported input formats All music files with filename extensions listed below are supported as valid input files for MelodyCan Protected Audio/Video Converter: wma, m4p, m4b, m4a, aac, mpeg, m4v, mp3, ogg, aif, ra,wav. 4. Batch conversion support If you have massive amount of files you want to convert this software is exactly what you need to speed up the process. [b]Download& Try[/b]
Publication date: 2008-10-30 more

Moving the locked top panel in Ubuntu/GNOME

A new version of Ubuntu (Intrepid Ibex) is coming out this week, so I’m trying out the release candidate. Here’s an annoyance I hit and how to solve it. I keep a list of steps to perform after installing Ubuntu, and one of my steps is Drag the bottommost taskbar/panel to the right and the topmost [...]
Publication date: 2008-10-29 more

ninja250 on "Don't Buy Apple"

Dont buy Apple. I have had a MacBook and an IPOD. Both have had technical issues that were no fault of mine. My MacBook was under warranty and they refused to replace it, instead they wanted to send it to the factory to diagnose the problem.(it wouldn't boot up and was overheating) When I said that I couldn't wait that long they refused to offer any other options. I ended up waiting three weeks without a computer, just to get it fixed. So I was out for three weeks, and I had to fight daily with Apple just for that. And how was I compensated...I wasn't, they made me feel like they were doing me a favor. Then they refused to fix my IPod because it is a month over its warranty. So in other words their products are good for a year. After that you have to buy a new one, but they gave me a good deal, only $79 for an IPod NANO 4gb.(how about backing up the products that you sell with a longer warranty or quality products, or even just better support.) What happened to making a product that lasted and customer service that serviced the customer? DONT BUY APPLE!
Publication date: 2008-10-27 more

Signs of Los Angeles

I have a pet theory that you can tell a lot about a city by paying attention to its signage. So I like to keep my eyes open when I’m in a new place and take pictures of things that strike me as especially interesting. When I was down in Los Angeles, here are a [...]
Publication date: 2008-10-27 more

noindex test

Pay no attention this to page with a noindex tag. I just want to check on how Yahoo/Live/Ask treat pages with noindex meta tags.
Publication date: 2008-10-27 more

Kick Ass Fonts in Ubuntu: 3 Easy Steps

A few days ago I made yet another tweak to my Ubuntu laptop to make the fonts look a little better. The result is that I'm now quite happy--impressed even. Here are the three things I've done to make my day-to-day work easy on the eye. First, enable subpixel smoothing in the System > Appearance control panel. For a long time that's all I had done was was reasonably happy. Things looked okay but not great. But I used GNU Emacs for most of my coding and wanted fonts there that looked at good as those in gnome terminal. That led me to the second tip: install emacs-snapshot and use the GTK version. Then you can add this to your ~/.Xresources file: Emacs.font: Monospace-10 And bingo! The same font that's in your terminal is in Emacs. That made me happy in Emacs, but my Firefox fonts were still a bit sucky. So when I read Tweak Your Font Rendering for Better Appearance in Tombuntu, I had to give it a try. I created a ~/.fonts.conf file and added this to it: <?xml version="1.0"?> <!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd"> <fontconfig> <match target="font"> <edit name="autohint" mode="assign"> <bool>true</bool> </edit> </match> </fontconfig> I logged out and back in and suddnely found myself staring at fonts in Firefox that looked as good as I've seen in Safari on a Mac. That's all there was to it for me: subpixel rendering, emacs-snapshot, and enabling hinting via a .fonts.conf file. It's worth noting that you can go even farther with the advanced font settings, but I really haven't needed to go that far yet. (comments)
Publication date: 2008-10-23 more

Join the webmaster chat today!

At 9 a.m. Pacific time (noon Eastern) today, we’re going to do our third Google webmaster chat. People will be able to ask questions via Google moderator and we’ll answer a bunch either in Google moderator or over the audio portion of the chat. There will also be several Googlers doing short presentations. I hope [...]
Publication date: 2008-10-23 more

Random Updates

I've got several random things to say to the interwebs but none of them merit a blog post individually... First off, I love data. But I hate the fact that the spreadsheet in OpenOffice 2.x and Gnumeric both have row limits of 65,536. I don't know who missed the boat on 32 and 64 bit CPUs, but it's rather annoying! And, yes, twitter people, I know that 65,536 is a 16 bit limit--not 8. I was trying to make a point. Secondly, Yahoo can haz layoffs (again). Having lived through 3 rounds of layoffs in my 8.5 years at Yahoo, I know what that feels like. :-( If you're a kick-ass Perl hacker or an excellent systems and network administrator who'd like to work at a great company in San Francisco, let me know. Thirdly, the dumbest bugs are often the ones that have been in your code a long time and are incredibly easy to keep glossing over as you read and re-read it. Fourthly, Tie::Syslog is pretty handy but seems to not like being used multiple times in the same app. Each instance seems to think that it has the same "identity." Anyone seen that before? I haven't dug into that yet but probably will soon. Finally, we're out of town for a few days while the house is being fumigated for termites. And we brought all four cats with us. That what I call an adventure. Now back to your regularly scheduled... uh, stuff. (comments)
Publication date: 2008-10-22 more

ninja250 on "wanna buy a mac!"

Dont buy Apple. I have had a MacBook and an IPOD. Both have had technical issues that were no fault of mine. My MacBook was under warranty and they refused to replace it, instead they wanted to send it to the factory to diagnose the problem.(it wouldn't boot up and was overheating) When I said that I couldn't wait that long they refused to offer any other options. I ended up waiting three weeks without a computer, just to get it fixed. So I was out for three weeks, and I had to fight daily with Apple just for that. And how was I compensated...I wasn't, they made me feel like they were doing me a favor. Then they refused to fix my IPod because it is a month over its warranty. So in other words their products are good for a year. After that you have to buy a new one, but they gave me a good deal, only $79 for an IPod NANO 4gb.(how about backing up the products that you sell with a longer warranty or quality products, or even just better support.) What happened to making a product that lasted and customer service that serviced the customer? DONT BUY APPLE!
Publication date: 2008-10-22 more

rf10 on "iPod video false low battery"

I've already replaced the battery twice on my ipod video. The problem is that overnight it always appears to have no charge and won't start up. If I connect it to a computer, it says "very low battery" etc. After 10 minutes, it comes on and shows mostly charged. It just falsely appears to have lost its charge. Runs ok as long as I keep it going, but after a long time off (overnight) won't start up. Any ideas? THanks.
Publication date: 2008-10-21 more

Eesma on "Various ipod charging/connection problems"

Hi, Here's hoping I'm posting this is in the right forums. Last ipod topic I randomly stumbled upon finished in an orgy of political debate, without a real resolution. I can only hope this topic is just as fruitful. I recently picked up my fiancee's old Ipod Mini, 1st Gen, in an attempt to fix it. It appears to have numerous problems. When plugged in to a USB 2.0 port, which I know has power, as I use it to charge my iRiver, it neither charges, nor is it recognised by Windows. I've downgraded to iTunes 7, due to the known compatibility issues with the old Minis and iTunes 8 and that hasn't helped. When I plug the USB into a USB to Power Socket converter and charge it from the wall, it comes to life and shows the charging animation. During this time it is entirely usable. As soon as it is unplugged, regardless of how long it's been plugged in, it switches off and refuses to turn back on. I've attempted a soft reset while it's plugged in, but that hasn't worked either. I've replaced the battery and made sure that all the connections were secure and the issue still persists. That's about all the info I have to give. Any help would be much appreciated.
Publication date: 2008-10-21 more

SalCan on "Did you get a new MacBook?"

They look pretty cool, but $1299 is a pretty significant investment (and that's the least you'll be spending). I know Joel picked one up on Friday and some buddies of mine did as well. Anyway, I just was just curious. I'm not a big Mac guy, but the new notebooks are really impressive and they are arriving just at the right time (at least for me). I'm going to too see how my new Vista system works out before making any purchases.
Publication date: 2008-10-21 more

KevinSD on "Leasing problem with Apple Financial"

Hopefully I'm posing this in the right forum. We have a leasing problem and the representative at Apple Financial we've been working with is no longer returning my calls. I was hoping that someone here knew the contact information for one of the managers at Apple Financial. Here's what is going on: Back in 2002, 2003, and 2004, our company entered into "fair market value" leases with Apple Financial. The leases in 2002 and 2004 were for 24 months. The lease in 2003 was for 36 months. Getting right to the point, unaware of these leases (the employees that started them left the company and the knowledge was never passed on) we've still been paying into them until just recently. All in all, we overpaid on these leases by $36,000. Surprised that this was allowed to go on for so long, I found someone at Apple Financial in asset management. I put together a spreadsheet that included when the leases started, when they ended, how much we should have paid into them, how much we overpaid, and any other pertinent information. I estimated the buyout of the leases (which would have been in 2004 and 2006), padded the buyout cost, then added 6 months worth of additional payments (further padding the cost). I then requested the remainder be credited back to us. After almost two months of sporadic communication on the part of the representative, I was simply told "no" to my request (left in a voicemail), without any reason why or option to negotiate (I called back, but have yet to have my calls returned). I'm am shocked that Apple, a company that I always though positioned itself as caring about their customers, is unwilling to return even one cent to us or talk to us. We aren't asking for the full overpayment to be returned, only a little over 2/3rds. I feel that's a reasonable request. For Apple to keep all of the amount we overpaid seems immoral. How can that be justified? We never received notice that the leases were coming to a close. The only reason I found out about the leases is that one closed by "itself" (after 46 months of overpayment for a total of $15,812.87 that was overpaid). The first time I the saw the lease paperwork and the amount we over paid, I had full faith that Apple would come through and do the right thing. So I again want to say that I'm shocked Apple is unwilling to do anything. If you know someone that can help us, please let me know. My faith that Apples cares for its long term customers (we've been buying Apple products for our business since 2001) is dwindling.
Publication date: 2008-10-21 more

JoelGeek on "Did you get a new MacBook?"

I picked one up last week and this weekend had a chance to play. I'm writing up a first impressions-type piece but the short summary is that this is a great notebook! I haven't put bootcamp on it yet but it's meeting ALL of my computing needs and the screen, keyboard, speed, etc.. are amazing! anyone else pick one up? I don't have an immediate need for Firewire so I'm not missing anything, yet.
Publication date: 2008-10-21 more

Hidden text on a television

I was thinking of taking a few days and doing some photo blogging of various pictures I’ve collected in the last few months. For example, lots of people know what hidden text is on the web. What would hidden text look like on a television? I think it would look something like this: That’s some tiny [...]
Publication date: 2008-10-20 more

MacEvangelizer on "Mac BBS'ing - Bring It Back!"

So, you've heard about this old thing called BBS'ing, you've got a spare Macintosh sitting around that isn't serving any particular purpose at the moment, and so you've decided to take a blast into the past, and set up your own BBS. There's only one problem...where do you find Macintosh BBS software? You've looked around a bit, but have for the most part come up empty-handed. Well, maybe I can help. You see, I ran a Macintosh FidoNet-connected BBS during the 1990's, and even ran my own conference. Not only that, but just recently, I set up my BBS again. Over time, I've collected just about every BBS program that was ever written for the Mac. If you have a look at it, who knows...maybe you'll get inspired and start your own Mac BBS...at least that is what I am hoping. Check out what I've got: ANSI & ASCII Related BBS'ing Info Documents bbs100 3.0 OSX FirstClass Hermes External Writing Hermes Externals Hermes Program & Docs Hermes Utilities MacCitadel 1.3b 68K Mailers Offline QWK Readers Mansion BBS 9.5.6 68K Misc. BBS Utilities Modem Tools MUBBS Nally 1.2 Leopard Novalink - NovaTerm Pancake Public Address Red Ryder Second Sight StarBase7 1.3b 68K TeleFinder Telnet Clients Terminal Emulators - ZTerm, GLterm, etc. WWIV 3.0 - July 1988 Zonch So, if you're interested in any of this hard-to-find software, all you have to do is log on to my BBS, the Armageddon BBS, using your favorite telnet client. If you're a Mac OSX user, you definitely want to use the latest version of SyncTERM. Yeah, it's Windowish-looking, but it's the best telnet client out there for displaying real BBS ANSI graphics. If you're still using Classic Mac, then the best deal is using the Public Address BBS software in telnet mode. If you don't have it, I have a special stripped down version available on our BBS. So come and check us out! Post a few messages, play an old game of LEECH 2000, or check out my icebreaker external called "Get-To-Know-You". And if you know Python and/or Jython, I could REALLY use your help. To access the Armageddon BBS, just use port 23 and telnet to: endtimeprophecy.org Hope to see you soon! Jeff
Publication date: 2008-10-18 more

Alerting webmasters to webserver vulnerabilities

I’m really happy about a new experiment that we’re trying that has the potential to help a ton of site owners. A new blog post on the Google webmaster blog (you are subscribed to the webmaster blog, right? You’ll find at least as much good SEO and search-related info on that blog as on my [...]
Publication date: 2008-10-17 more

Yahoo! Search Taste Test

In today's coverage of the new Yahoo! Search radio advertisements, Erick Schonfeld at TechCruch says: So can an advertising campaign change any of that? Search is not like a soft drink. People use the search engine that they think can do the best job in helping them find things. Now, maybe Google has brainwashed all of us to believe that it does indeed produce more relevant results. And in a blind taste-test more people might choose Yahoo's results. But if that is the case, I'd rather take an interactive quiz that puts each search engine to the test and make my own decision. That would go much farther to convince me to switch than Yahoo's current creative. Funny he suggests that. I remember suggesting exactly that a few years back when I worked in the marketing group for Yahoo! Search. I suggested we do something inspired by Twingine but which hid the engine identity and let users judge for themselves. Why didn't it happen? Because some of the same people who were convinced that Yahoo! Search was "just as good as" Google (and better in some cases, they said) were afraid that people would realize that this was not the case. The cognitive dissonance was amusing, but it was also frustrating and stupid. "Either we believe we're better or we don't... Which is it?" is the sort of argument I tried to make. I guess that question eventually answered itself. Oh, well... (comments)
Publication date: 2008-10-15 more

Free links to your site

I can’t believe a new feature from Google isn’t getting more notice, because it converts already-existing links to your site into much higher quality links, for free. The Google webmaster blog just announced that you can find the pages that link to 404 pages on your site. Let me back up and give you a little [...]
Publication date: 2008-10-14 more

cloris on "How to remove DRM protection of iTunes m4p songs and wma audio files"

I've been used NoteBurner Audio Converter nearly a year now. It works perfect on both my Windows and MAC. It can convert iTunes music to MP3 with fast encoding speed and high output quality. I used to burn iTunes music to a CD to remove DRM so that I can listen to my music on every device. This method cost a lot of money and time. I was considering of buying CDs instead until I got to know NoteBurner Audio Converter. It adopts virtual burning technology so the burning process do not need a CD-the converted songs are in the preset folder of your hard disk. This is the most amazing feature for me. This software supports a variety formats including m4p to mp3,m4p to wma etc. I no longer care about the compatibility problem because NoteBurner can convert all kinds of formats to mp3.
Publication date: 2008-10-14 more

Online Predator Bills Signed Into Law Today

President Bush signed into law two bills that will make it much harder for child molesters to lurk with anonymity on the Web, especially at social networking sites. The new law, called the "Keeping the Internet Devoid of Sexual Predators...
Publication date: 2008-10-14 more

Stupid Digg + a kitten

Sorry that the blog was down for a few hours. Yesterday I did a throwaway post that somehow ended up getting 3800+ diggs or so. I didn’t have WP-Cache or Supercache turned on, so my blog melted to a little puddle of fail. “Matt, you idiot! How you could run a modern WordPress blog [...]
Publication date: 2008-10-11 more

Rimen on "Mac Lac(k)"

In my town, ppl are so Window addicted that it is so rear to find any X system, Linux sometimes, but I don't think that any mac could be find in my TOWN. Cause of that, I wasn't able to learn much about mac, nor I could have it. Im just asking is there any way that I can find free Mac edition online, some kind of open source or something. Some ppl told me about hacked version, but Im not sure where I could find it, and would it be real kind of Mac system.
Publication date: 2008-10-10 more

YouTube adds

A couple weeks ago, xkcd ran this funny comic: Randall Monroe, the creator of xkcd, suggested that if YouTube commenters had to listen to their comments read back to them aloud, it might lead to better discussion on YouTube. Some Googlers thought that was a pretty fun suggestion, so they did it. YouTube now has an [...]
Publication date: 2008-10-09 more

Great HTPC Wireless Keyboard: Adesso WKB-4000US

A few weeks ago I asked for HTPC Wireless Keyboard and Mouse Recommendations and got some excellent suggestions. After reading reviews on-line and checking out the various specs, I settled on the Adesso WKB-4000US. I decided on this keyboard partly because I've liked previous Adesso keyboards and partly because it seemed to be the right combination of price, size, and range for our use. I was not disappointed. The keyboard feels very solid--not cheap at all. Range is excellent and the feel, while not excellent, is better than I expected. The trackpad works well and no special drivers were required for Windows XP. It Just Works. They keyboard even came with a set of batteries! If there's any negative to mention, it's that the USB dongle is about twice as long as I'd have liked. But that's a pretty small price to pay for being able to sit on the couch and control the home theater PC without reception concerns. If you're looking for a good wireless HTPC keyboard, I highly recommend the Adesso WKB-4000US. It's available on NewEgg.com as well as on Amazon.com. (comments)
Publication date: 2008-10-09 more

Halloween costume for 2008?

I think I know what I’m doing for Halloween this year, but if anyone wants to throw out suggestions, I’d be delighted to hear them.
Publication date: 2008-10-08 more

windbell on "How to remove DRM protection of iTunes m4p songs and wma audio files"

I just stumble upon this guide which gives a step-by-step way to - Remove DRM Protection from iTunes AAC M4V M4P on Win&Mac
Publication date: 2008-10-08 more

johnkennedy12 on "ipod swap?"

Plenty of people have swapped a new battery into their iPod, so the fact that I did it, is nothing new. But the fact that someone as clumsy as I am did it in about ten minutes without destroying the iPod is surprising. If you're as fumbled fingered as I am and have been afraid to open your iPod, I hope this gives you the courage to take action. ----------------------------------------- ipod batteries
Publication date: 2008-10-08 more

Back Seat Flying in the Citabria: Tailwheel Fun

About a week ago I finally got the chance to work on the back seat flying with my instructor in our Citabria. I'm not new to flying from the back. I've done so in gliders for a few years now, but I knew this was going to be a bit different. I wasn't concerned about the actual flying. Flying is pretty much the same no matter where you are. The only question is how many of the instruments you can see from the rear seat. Luckily, I found that I was usually able to see the two or three that mattered: airpseed, altimeter, and engine RPM. What I knew would be the most interested was the takeoff and landing--especially the landings. Being a tailwheel airplane, the nose is naturally much higher when on the ground or in a landing attitude. That means dramatically restricted visibility from the back. On takeoff it's not too bad, since you can pretty quickly get the tail flying and level out the airplane. On landing, however, you end up using a lot of peripheral vision and a bit of faith. (This is assuming a normal three-point instead of a wheel landing. See also: Conventional Landing Gear). But a funny thing happens after you practice it a few times: you start to get the hang of it and realize that it's not all that different than landing from the front seat. You're still trying to stay lined up on the runway and fly the airplane until it lands. In fact, you're trying to keep it from landing as long as you can so that when it finally touches down there's not enough energy for it to start flying again. Aside from the satisfaction of learning something new and building confidence in flying your airplane, being able to fly from the back seat has another benefit. You can now have your wife fly from the font seat and get used to the airplane that she'll be using to finish up her training too. And I may be biased, but I think she did a pretty darn good job on her first flight from the front seat. :-) I'm not sure I'd want to put a non-pilot up front--or at least not someone who hasn't been around airplanes a lot. There are a some controls that I cannot reach from the rear. But I'd feel pretty comfortable giving rides from the back now. (comments)
Publication date: 2008-10-08 more

skyocean on "How to remove DRM protection of iTunes m4p songs and wma audio files"

Here is a detailed guide on how to - [b]Remove DRMprotection from iTunes AAC M4V M4P on win&Mac[/b]
Publication date: 2008-10-07 more

My Five Months With Google Chrome

Om Malik wrote an interesting post about Google Chrome one month after the public launch. While I was reading Om’s post, I realized that I wrote a post for the Google Chrome release that I never published. I’ll include it here, and then let’s meet at the bottom and compare notes. Like many Google [...]
Publication date: 2008-10-06 more

Quick comment for pixelrn

I tried to leave a comment on pixelrn.com but the problem with talking about hacked sites is that you often end up using language that gets flagged as spammy. Here’s what I tried to say but the WordPress installation over on pixelrn wouldn’t let me: Hi Beth, I checked and it doesn’t look like you have [...]
Publication date: 2008-10-04 more

Mobier on "How to Convert protected Music/ Video to new iPod, MP3"

I was deeply impressed by both output quality and conversion speed of Extra DVD Ripper Express. Often a DVD 9 disc was completed in about 15 minutes.
Publication date: 2008-10-03 more

Steve Fossett Wreckage in Mammoth Lakes Area

Various news sources are reporting that Steve Fossett's wreckage has been found in the vicinity of Mammoth Lakes, California. There are a few interesting bits about what I've heard and read so far, but first have a look at the terrain that area. View Larger Map There are ski runs nearby and the crest of the Sierra Nevada mountains isn't far either. The Mammoth Yosemite Airport sits at an elevation of 7,128 feet and the nearby ridges and peaks easily top 10,000. In fact, the impact appears to have happen around 10,000 feet and was consistent with flying directly into terrain. The fuselage apparently disintegrated and the engine was found several hundred feet from the impact location. My suspicion is that Steve had some sort of in-flight medical problem. He was a very experienced pilot and likely wouldn't have been doing any acro at that altitude (though is plane probably could have). And even if there was engine trouble, he'd have had the sense to try to get it down safely or at least slowly. The NTSB should be able to figure out if the engine was running at the time of impact. But first they have to get all the wreckage transported to somewhere it can be studied. The other puzzling thing is that he was supposed to be out look at dry lakes. There aren't really any dry lakes up there. Maybe 15-30 minutes away, down in the Owens Valley and beyond, but not up near the Sierra Crest. I'm curious to hear what the NTSB and FAA are able to figure from all of this. (comments)
Publication date: 2008-10-03 more

Google Blogsearch and Techmeme

More and more people are spending free time (and work time) online and lots of those people want to discover interesting things on the web. Google Blogsearch’s new home page applies that insight with a browsable version of what’s going on in the blogosphere. The UI design is a little reminiscent of Google News, but [...]
Publication date: 2008-10-03 more

New meme: Tag five friends to register to vote

Okay, I’ll help on this. A Google blog post and the corresponding video ask people to register to vote (find out how at http://maps.google.com/vote ) and/or send this video to five of their friends. I’m game for that, mainly because Jonah Hill is the funniest man in the world and he says to do it. [...]
Publication date: 2008-10-03 more

Programming Annoyance: Libraries that Exit on Me

This is something that's been bugging me for a long time now. Over the years, I've come to realize that programming time is 10% about writing the code to do the work, 70% about figuring out where failures might occur and dealing with them, 10% about documentation, and 10% about documentation. (That last 10% may be substituted with Desktop Tower Defense or something equally time wasting.) Or something like that. The point is that writing the code to do what I want isn't hard. It's dealing with all the other things that do--especially error conditions. There are so many weird corner cases to consider. And when you're working on code for a high volume web site that has its servers under load 24 hours a day, it doesn't take long to encounter those odd situations. Murphy is always watching. Years ago, after battling similar problems at Yahoo, I began to develop certain ideas about how errors should be detected, handled, and reported. An important idea here is that the developer should always be in control of when the script/program/process dies. Aside from something truly fatal (like a segfault) library routines should detect errors and report them back to their caller in the form of a known-to-be-bad return value. The problem is that I keep running into code I want to use that breaks that rule in multiple places. In Perl terms, that means that I'll be happily testing my code and suddenly something goes wrong and my script dies in a place I didn't expect. Upon digging into it, I find that the CPAN library I'm using has something like this lurking in it: if (not $good) { Carp::croak("bad stuff happened!"); } Or... if (not $good) { die "badness here!"; } Sigh! This means I have to read the code a bit more and see if I can discern why the developer wants my script to die in some cases, but in others he's content to just do this: if (not $good) { $@ = "bad things happened"; return undef; } What is it about some errors that makes them fatal while others aren't so bad that I'm deemed able to deal with them? Why has this developer taken that decision away from me? It makes no sense at all. What this means is that I then need to litter my code with ugly crap like this: eval { $object->methodThatMayDie; }; if ($@) { # handle error here } The problem with that, aside from the fact that I'm dealing with another developer's inconsistent coding, is that it pollutes my code and forces me to make yet another frustrating decision. Do I use a small number of big eval blocks and give up knowing exactly where the code died? Or do I pollute my code with a larger number of smaller eval blocks so that I can react to specific problems with a more specific solution? That means the module developer would have had to document which methods or functions may die on me. Otherwise I have to go trudging through their code and waste my time figuring that out. Guess which is more frequent. Or do I override the module's use of die or Carp or whatever. I can do it, but that has other side effects I probably don't want to deal with either. Why do I even need to deal with this in the first place? Can't people provide consistent interfaces? Is there something so bad about returning an error code and leaving it up to the user of your code to decide how to handle error conditions? Maybe they do want to exit() or die(). Maybe they want to retry the logic after waiting a bit. Maybe they want to page someone and log the failure. Maybe... You get the idea. This whole concept of "fatal" exceptions seems wrong to me. Unless things are so bad that the kernel is going to kill my process, I should be the one in charge of deciding when my code will blow up. And I shouldn't have to do extra work to asset that authority. Should I? I know that in the Java world, it's common to do a bunch of stuff in a big try block and then try to figure out what, if anything, blew up later. But I'm a firm believer in dealing with specific problems at the exact place they occur. I really wish more people thought that way. It'd make my life easier. (comments)
Publication date: 2008-10-02 more

Five fun smartphone tips

Tip #1: See what you’re ordering. You’re at a restaurant and looking over the menu. But you don’t know the difference between a turkey bolognese and a turkey piccata. What to do? Fire up your iPhone, Android, or other smartphone and go to images.google.com and do a search for turkey bolognese. In just a few [...]
Publication date: 2008-09-29 more

shoes198 on "New NEL Jersey in www.shoes198.com"

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Publication date: 2008-09-28 more

Where to submit Chrome feedback?

The best place to submit Chrome feedback is at http://groups.google.com/group/google-chrome-help Not here (I’m going to disable comments on this post) and not over at Search Engine Roundtable. I still see a comment a day or so trickling in over there, probably because the post ranks highly for “Chrome feedback.” Just to repeat, if you want a Chrome [...]
Publication date: 2008-09-28 more

cloris on "How to Convert protected Music/ Video to new iPod, MP3"

Some tools to remove DRM from music? 1 Noteburner 2 Tune4win or Tune4MAC 3 TunePat Tools to remove protection from DVD: DVDSmith (freeware)
Publication date: 2008-09-27 more

Ubuntu Kung Fu: Best Book Cover Ever!

I just ran across news that Ubuntu Kung Fu is Shipping and happened to look at the cover. As a cat lover and technical book author myself, I felt a little slighted. That's right. Keir Thomas got a kitten on his book. That kicks ass. But even better, Ubuntu Kung Fu (PDF and printed) sounds like a real winner for day-to-day Ubutnu users. As the marketing blurb says: Award-winning Linux author Keir Thomas gets down and dirty with Ubuntu to provide over 300 concise tips that enhance productivity, avoid annoyances, and simply get the most from Ubuntu. You'll find many unique tips here that can't be found anywhere else. You'll also get a crash course in Ubuntu's flavor of system administration. Whether you're new to Linux or an old hand, you'll find tips to make your day easier. In other words, it's a book that nearly everyone using Ubuntu could benefit from. I'm hoping to grab a copy shortly. Have a listen to Keir Thomas on Ubuntu Kung Fu in this week's Pragmatic Podcast. Also available on Amazon.com. (comments)
Publication date: 2008-09-26 more

Traveling => Light posting

I’m not-in-California for a few days, so expect light posting. If you want to try to guess where I’m visiting, I may start posting “Where is Matt?” hints on my Twitter stream for people that want to play along. While I’m gone, enjoy the Android coverage. Even though I love my iPhone, I think lots of [...]
Publication date: 2008-09-25 more

Google Moderator launches

Here’s a fun link for you. Google just released a free service called Google Moderator. This is a port to Google App Engine of an existing tool we use all the time at Google. Internally it was called Dory (after the fish who asked questions all the time in Finding Nemo). What does Google Moderator do? [...]
Publication date: 2008-09-25 more

Mustard Lime Beef Steaks Recipe

A few days ago I made a new grill recipe that turned out even better than we expected, so I've reproduced it here for your grilling and eating enjoyment. Ingredients 4 sirloin beef steaks (roughly 1" thick) 1/4 cup of dry mustard (Colman's works well) 1/4 cup Worcestershire Sauce (Lea and Perrins works well) Lime Juice or 1 large lime Coarse salt (sea salt is what I use) Freshly ground white pepper Preparation Cover the steaks on one side with 2 tablespoons of dry mustard. Pat it down and spread evenly with the back side of a fork. Sprinkle two tablespoons of worcestershire sauce over the steaks, allowing it to soak into the mustard--patting the steaks with the fork if necessary. Dribble a bit of lime juice over the steaks. Season the steaks with a good amount of salt and pepper. Then flip the steaks and repeat on the other side. Let them marinate for 20-30 minutes while pre-heating the grill. Cooking Clean and oil the grill. Cook the steaks on high heat for roughly 4 to 6 minutes per side, aiming to keep them pink on the inside. Do not rotate the steaks to make those nice cross-hatched grill marks. Doing so may knock off some of the mustard and seasonings. Let the steaks sit for a few minutes. Slice and enjoy. :-) Unfortunately, I have no pictures to show. But they're most excellent to eat. Trust me. (comments)
Publication date: 2008-09-25 more

HTPC Wireless Keyboard and Mouse Recommendations?

Dear Lazyweb, As of a few weeks ago, we have a computer hooked up to the 66 inch TV full-time. However, it currently has a wired keyboard and mouse, both of which are less than optimal when you'd prefer to keep your ass on the couch and pick a movie from the server upstairs. So I'm soliciting recommendations for a wireless keyboard and mouse (or keyboard/mouse combo) that has decent range (20-30 feet, ideally) and doesn't take up too much space. The keyboard doesn't need a numeric keypad or even full-sized keys. It's only going to be used to type a small amount: occasional hits to IMDB and renaming a folder or two. The mouse should be a reliable two or three button optical that can tolerate occasional attacks by our cats and possibly even a spilled drink. On option that is highly rated but also highly priced is the Logitech diNovo Edge 2-Tone 84 Normal Keys 9 Function Keys USB Bluetooth Wireless Mini Keyboard. Reviews claim is has excellent size and range. But the touchpad mouse seems a bit funky. However, I do like the idea of it being built-in so there's only one object to deal with. Thoughts? Thanks in advance, Jeremy (comments)
Publication date: 2008-09-23 more

vision on "RE: Cell phone use may decrease sperm quality"

I was on the support line with my Internet provider for over an hour the whole time on my headset, it was on the table though.
Publication date: 2008-09-22 more

gintarastr on "Video Controller (VGA Compatible)..."

Hello everybody. My problem is my Display driver, video controller (vga compatible). I have AMD sempron 3200+,MMX,3DNow,~1.8GHz. Windows XP SP2. Video should be nVidia GeForce 7300 LE. My drivers CD says that video drive is unknown by microsoft. Where can I find drive suitable for it?
Publication date: 2008-09-22 more

tchocky17 on "Video Controller (VGA Compatible)..."

hello awesomeo before i decided to write, i tried to read as much as i could to figure it out on my own, so i don't repeat someone else's query. I did the unknown devices thingy and for my VGA reading I got unknowns. I also have a franken-computer, with different parts and what not, it's a bit older too but the inside is Intel, andi went to the Intel test and it told me i didn't have an intel chipset. Hardware ID - VEN_1039&DEV_6325&SUBSYS_90251509&REV_00 enumerator - PCI detected chip vendor- unknown id=1039 detected chip device - unknown id=6324 detected vender - unknown id=1509 detected device - unknown id=9025 now i've looked up pci enumerator and some NVIDIA sites come up. what do i do next? Also is it true that printers don't work on tinyXP? my HP deskjet isn't recognized either.
Publication date: 2008-09-22 more

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Publication date: 2008-09-22 more

nugenttw on "RE: Geek.com maintenance"

5-10 years ago, this website would have over 100 comments on most news items. There would be heated debates on AMD vs Intel, or nVidia vs ATI, or Rambus vs DDR, etc. However, now most news topics don't have a single comment, and the ones that do only have 1 or 2 comments. Why is this so? It is because you now have to register in order to post. Yes, I know the advantages of registering, I am an IT person. However, the DAY that geek.com started requiring registration in order to post, comment count went down.You should leave registration for the forums, comments should just be open. Also, you should have more news about video cards, CPUs, RAM, motherboards, and hard drives. The amount of really good information about this from geek.com has gone down, and the amount of random IT news like this: "DriveSavers is offering a special discount for victims of Hurricane Ike." has gone up. No one really cares about news like this. Geek.com was great because it had indepth technical news about computer hardware. Now all we get is, "This new hardware came out, check out their review here: www.tomshardware.com." Rick used to at least summariaze the article up for you with the highlights, and not only give his opinion, but also state when he thought the article was wrong or if the tests were skewed. He never gave just a single promo spot and a link.
Publication date: 2008-09-22 more

odrozd on "PC2700 & PC133 comparisons"

PLease advice if the two computers running pc133 and pc2700 are the same.
Publication date: 2008-09-22 more

willmot on "RE: Geek.com maintenance"

Anonymous commenting is one of the improvements we are pushing today during the planned maintenance. I am only a developer and so cannot really comment on your points about writing style.
Publication date: 2008-09-22 more

Gman035t on "Best way to get started in the computer field?"

I am 16 and am really getting tired of high school. I know a nice amount of Microsoft Windows, Java, HTML / CSS / PHP, and Computer Hardware. I would like to expand my knowledge and know if a high school education is crucial to getting a job in the computer field. (Ex. Web Master, Engineer, pretty much anything in the IT field). Also, what is it I can do at, maybe a Community College, or outside my highschool (Which offers no classes worth taking to prepare me for my future career field) training to get a jump start on the my future career? Also... Is a A+ Certification worth it? Thanks in advanced!
Publication date: 2008-09-22 more

lanate on "new laptop on 64bit vista"

i just place a order for a new HP dv5tlaptop with intel core2 duo 2.53 (t9400) processor, 4 gb memory, 512 geforce nvida graphic card, 320GB 5400 rpm hard drive, and an internal HDTV tuner and blueray/dvd/cd drive. While makingthe order i was talked into getting the 64bitvistaultimate os. Was this a mistake/ do i need to change the order?I have read about cd drives not operating with 64 bitvista, and older progams and games not workingright. I'm not the most tech savy person out there so i'mnot sure. Also will the 64 bit os slow down my smaller processor on the laptop, got a intel guad on my desk top running XP. Any advice would be helpful.
Publication date: 2008-09-22 more

awesomeo on "new laptop on 64bit vista"

I have Vista x64 and love it. Haven't heard of any issues with cd drives. Really old programs and programs that install some drivers won't work but you are very unlikely to enounter either. x64 is much more stable and without it, your 4 gigs of memory won't all show up. I would stick with it.
Publication date: 2008-09-22 more

awesomeo on "Hard drive clicking"

Opening what? The hard drive? There is nothing serviceable in there. If it is clicking, you can't fix it. The freezer thing is more myth than fact, but it might work. It worked once for me, but that may have been more coincidence than cold. You also have to consider condensation damage done to the electronics. Your best bet for a clicking hard drive is professional data recovery.
Publication date: 2008-09-22 more

awesomeo on "Burning data to CD's"

Or finalize the session.
Publication date: 2008-09-22 more

awesomeo on "VGA compatible driver not installed"

Ngimbajussie, the easiest way to find those drivers is through google. With the right information on what you're looking for, you shouldn't have much of a problem finding your drivers. If you have the model number of your laptop, you can find the specifications. From there you can search for each device individually. You can also run Unknow Devices and search for the drivers to match the devices it reports.
Publication date: 2008-09-22 more

awesomeo on "Software from ebay"

With ebay, you should always pay for a physical item, not anything downloadable. Also use PayPal, it provides basic insurance agains sellers who are unable to live up to their sales pitch.
Publication date: 2008-09-22 more

awesomeo on "mirroring a laptop hard drive"

You could use your own imaging program to back up to discs. I use Acronis TrueImage workstation. This lets me install the OS, programs, data, etc then create a set of recovery discs. If they're just putting on a new image to fix your software problems, you wouldn't need to take it to them as you could re-image it yourself.
Publication date: 2008-09-22 more

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Publication date: 2008-09-22 more

FRIII on "HD Television (UK to US)"

Will be relocating back to the States and wantto Purchase a HDTV now that will operate when back in the states. 2 questions that I could use help with: 1. will it work if it has an PAL to NTSC connnection? 2. Will there be any trouble with using a simple electrical apapter when back in the States?
Publication date: 2008-09-21 more

camelot on "I am employed by AOL, I can locate/Trace AIM accounts"

Hello Kizoin, I had someone break into my email, harass my wife and close friends with accusatory comments regarding me that I would like to stop. Some come from AOL IM's, and some from email. If you will write me at perry1029@gmail.com, I can give you a list of AOL IM names used. I am sure they used false or forged information to get the screen name, so if I can even get an IP Address would be helpful. I am considering hiring an Investigator to find this information, so you could save me a lot of money. Thank you.
Publication date: 2008-09-21 more

westsiderice on "RE: Feature: VOIP with Nokia E71 How-To"

I need help setting this up with my linksys WRT54G. This is stressing me out. I don't know what to put for Realm/Username/Password under Proxy and Registrar server. Please help.
Publication date: 2008-09-21 more

tusheurectal on "Video Controller (VGA Compatible)..."

i really need some help. my brother just brought me a new video card but unfortunately not a driver for it. on the video card is just a number (GV-N76G25D-RH) and Gigabyte. i searched in device manager to see what kind is it. there i found out that the video controller is not installed.i don't know much about computers so that didn't help me very much.I also used aida to find out what kind it is but i didn't find anything in display section. please help because i have no ideea what kind of computer it is because it's made of pieces. operating system : microsoft windows xp profesional os service pack: sercice pack 2, v.2149 cpu type: amd athlon Xp, 1666 MHz (6.25 x 267) 2000+ motherboard name: gigabyte GA-7N400 (5 PCI, 1 AGP, 4 DIMM, Audio) motherboard chipset: nVIDIA nForce2 ultra 400 system memory: 1024 MB (DDR SDRAM) audio adapter: nVIDIA MCP2 - audio codec interface
Publication date: 2008-09-21 more

aircrackgeek on "RE: Openmoko to launch Neo FreeRunner July 4th"

Neopwn: The World's First Pentesting Mobile Phone What do you get when you cross BackTrack Linux apps with a mobile phone? This is the first ever publically available mobile phone, running a full custom Linux network auditing distribution; and it runs it suprisingly well. One can literally go from phone to pwn in 2 seconds. Based off of the Openmoko Neo Freerunner, many steps have been taken to compensate from the lack of a QWERTY keyboard with automation scripts, dialogs, and a point and pwn menu. It runs applications such as Metasploit and the Aircrack suite quite well, especially given the fact that it supports a wide array of USB WLAN cards. More information on the platform that was released yesterday can be found at neopwn.com
Publication date: 2008-09-21 more

jsmooth on "RE: Review: Logitech MX1100 Mouse"

Great review but don't knock using standard batteries too hard. Many of us perfer it. I hate the stupid charger, it takes away portability and requires constant charging. I have a VX and a MX and I much prefer the VX with its single AA battery. A lith ion battery last at least 6 months of heavy use. I carry an extra one in case and I'm good to go. I consider NOT being rechargeable to be a benefit and this makes the MX 1100 tops for my next mouse.
Publication date: 2008-09-21 more

dave2500xx on "Bad motherboard ?"

hello i got a custom pc and everytime i start it i start in all modes and it said being dump of phisicial memery what can it be thanks
Publication date: 2008-09-21 more

DivingDancer on "RE: New Yorkers get RFID driver's licenses"

Ok, I have to respond. I can't let complete and total ignorance go unanswered. True, the world of no privacy may be coming. But this isn't it. COMMON PARANOID MISCONCEPTION ALERT: RFID does NOT allow somebody to scan your whole life from a chip. Far from it. The RFID chip contains an ID number. That's generally ALL that it contains. In order to get any useful information you need to use that ID to look up information in a database that is stored on a server somewhere. If somebody has access to that server, you have much bigger problems than the RFID chip. AND most RFID chips are now encrypted. So PLEASE try to control the paranoid ignorant statements. Save your concerns for something that you actually know something about.
Publication date: 2008-09-21 more

Mobier on "Best DVD to iPhone Converter"

Right. But as for mac, I recommend Wondershare DVD to iPhone Converter for Mac at http://www.gutensoft.com/Multimedia/Wondershare_DVD_to_iPhone_Converter_for_Mac.htm, which is the best seller in the third quarter of 2008. And more mac converters, please refer to http://www.gutensoft.com/mobilephone_converter_for_mac.htm
Publication date: 2008-09-21 more

ig88b1 on "RE: Cell phone use may decrease sperm quality"

anybody who has their cellphone 2.5 centimeters from there nads needs bigger pants. also, who uses their cellphone for AN HOUR STRAIGHT on handsfree? i can barely stand my headset for 5 minutes. I'm going to have to call bullshit on this one.
Publication date: 2008-09-21 more

srclark36 on "Which is the Best Free Antivirus?"

Sheen160 is sooooo right on the part about having to many antivirus and firewall protecters, It will conflict and shut you down and causes many problems getting the issue fixed. Now about AOL, I have been a AOL user for about 10 years and I love AOL. everyone has diffrent experiances with lots of stuff when it comes to computers and the internet, but mine has always been good with AOL, I have tryed to use others and I always hatethem and revert back to AOL. Now that I have got high speed and don't need AOL program to connect I still use the progam thru broadband because my computer just don't seem to run smoothly on other browser, Why I don't know but it don't. I even still pay 9.99 mo to use there software and I get 1000.00 protection on my computer and 10,000.00 on ID theift protection and the McAfee antivirus.I don't know yet if I like McAfee but I am giving it a try.. I personnaly hate IE browser and I tried the free AOL browser and did not like it at all, does anyone have any adviceon a good browser??I am on Insight cable modem and I really don't need AOL but I have a hard time getting away from itdue to just not liking anything else.. Now my naighbor and good friend has Norton 360 and now I am trying to fix his computer because a trojon got in, and he is one of those people that never turns off his protectionand always maintains it well, but it got passed anyway and has taken over his administrator and is slowly taking over his computer, we are going to have to do a restore on it now before it gets to out of hand, so I don't like Nortons 360or earlier virsions either becauseI got a viruslast year running Nortons on mine as well.. anyway good luck to all in what ever you use... Thanks
Publication date: 2008-09-21 more

Locutus20 on "I am employed by AOL, I can locate/Trace AIM accounts"

AIM SN is wood21stock I lost my phone and someone is using it now, b/c I see both my YIM and AIM icons on right now as I'm using my friend's comp... my e-mail is Locutus359@gmail.com
Publication date: 2008-09-21 more

SalCan on "RE: Asus Eee PC 1000H Follow-Up"

I haven't tried them, but I would say no.
Publication date: 2008-09-21 more

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cam someone please help me.i have aacer built in web cam. i dont know how to make videos with it, only pictures and video chat. can someone please help me.
Publication date: 2008-09-20 more

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tgelvin on "RE: Comp Sci, AI & Robotics courses free from Stanford University"

Finally, we get some universities to offer FREE classes... I know I will be taking advantage of this opportunity. Timtimscomputershop.com
Publication date: 2008-09-20 more

norm1000 on "dvd problems"

My computer says that both of my dvd drives (one internal, one external) are full whenever I put brand new discs in. Otherwise they work normally ie whenever a load softwars from them or read a disc with files on. Ive tried using Nero and windows progs to save to disc but every time it says the disc is full? Mt op system is Windows XP.
Publication date: 2008-09-20 more

locke on "I am employed by AOL, I can locate/Trace AIM accounts"

hi i am being bothered repeatedly by someone the screen name is iismokemadblunts and they keep annoying me. I block them once then they come back again with another name. My email is grant_tyson93@yahoo.com
Publication date: 2008-09-20 more

arcticmyst on "HP Customer Service Nightmare"

My husband bought me a CQ50Z notebook as a gift , I had it for ONE week when it went kablooey. When I contacted HP & finally got put through to Tech Support the guy said he had never heard a computer make that sound. They sent me a box to ship it back for repair & ever since then it's been a headache. This started on Aug 26 my first phone call, they received my laptop on Aug 29 and the date for delivery back to me was Sept 9. I started making phone calls to customer service 2 days before the due date, no one in customer service could tell me anything about what was happening, all they would say was that it would be to me on the 9th & that the web page didn't get updated often. On the 10th (the day after it was supposed to be back to me) & after an hour & a half on the phone with customer service (being hung up on, transferred 6 times, told I was just a CUSTOMER & managers did not talk to just customers) I finally got what they call a case manager!!! While he was checking into everything which of course took 2 days it was Fri the 12th & the hurricane was going to hit Houston (where my laptop was) & everyone was being evacuated so I would have to wait till Mon the 15th to learn anything. Mon comes & the case manager (CM) said to give it one more day because they were not back yet because of the storm. Tues he said that they still knew nothing & offered me a replacement upgraded laptop. Told me to call him Wed with my answer. Called Wed the 17 & oh geee even though I wanted the upgraded laptop they ran out & couldn't do it anymore .... so sorry. But!! they couold build me the upgraded laptop but it would be 3 weeks. AGAIN call me Thurs & let him know. Called Thurs the 18th & said build me the upgrade ..... OH NO never said that ..... said they would build me the same laptop that I had sent them. Told him I was tired of being jacked around & give me a refund ( I now have this conversation taped!!!) Said he would check into that & it would take 5 weeks for my refund. But does it end there ...... Heavens NO ...... Got a call from my CM later Thurs night with ..... are you ready for this ....... " Just had word from the powers that be No Refunds & No Replacements until Houston is back up & running & they know whats going on!!!!! I will NEVER but anything from HP again & will tell everyone I know what my experience has been like.
Publication date: 2008-09-20 more

Mobier on "DVD to iPhone Converter Review"

Iquite lilethe wonderful all-purpose dvd ripper - Extra DVD Ripper Express. Not only convert DVD to iphone, but also to YouTube FLV Video file, WMV Video file, AVI, DivX, XviD, VCD, SVCD, MPEG, Apple iPod, Apple TV MP4 Video file, Sony PSP MP4, Sony PS3 Video file, Microsoft Zune Player for WMV and MP4 Video file. That's why I chose it. I bought it at 10% off at http://www.gutensoft.com.
Publication date: 2008-09-20 more

vision on "RE: Windows 7 refreshes Paint and WordPad"

I do not really need an updated WordPad or Paint, I do not use WordPad for anything (Notepad is my choice for notes and word is my choice for spell checking). But why would you change paint, it is a simple, and well working design that should be left alone, I like the ease of editing my screen shots in it right now (for tech documentation).
Publication date: 2008-09-20 more

crystalattice on "RE: EA relaxes Spore DRM after backlash"

The problem with DRM isn't necessarily how many activations you get, though that is a big deal. I personally don't like the idea of DRM because, like Microsoft and Yahoo's music endeavors, what happens when the company doesn't want to continue the service or support the software? Or what happens if the company goes bankrupt? Once the authentication servers are turned off, you can no longer play the game. I still play games that are 10 years old. It doesn't matter how old they are or how many times I've installed them. I can still play them because I don't have to worry about getting authenticated by a server. That's why I think DRM is a no go for media. Even having to enter a key to play the game can be troublesome if it's not on the CD itself. I can't tell you how many time's I've lost the manual during a move.
Publication date: 2008-09-20 more

crystalattice on "RE: Interactive Talking First Aid Guide helps when it counts"

You know, I can buy a pocket first aid book for $20 or less that has pictures, flow charts, etc. The only difference between this and the book is that the book doesn't talk to you, but it does have many more topics than this. And I don't have to worry about the batteries dying if I leave it in the trunk for several months. Sorry, can't see the justification for $100.
Publication date: 2008-09-20 more

CLYWILL on "RE: Create missions for Warfare Incorporated"

HAY I COULD USE A CODE TOO PLEASE C-73CE-AB54-D4AA-961C HOT SYNC IS PHONE. PLEASE EMAIL ME BACK AT CLAYWILL1371@YAHOO.COM THANKS
Publication date: 2008-09-20 more

innings on "Free Movies Download Websites"

Here's a site that offers the largest list of free movie sites on the net. All free streaming, No Registration, No Downloads, No Feeshttp://www.nosubscriptionrequired.net/
Publication date: 2008-09-20 more

littlerichie292 on "RE: Intel proves you don't need AC in data centers"

I run this same thing at my transmitter site, and it keeps my building at 23C all year long. It can be 40C or -40C and the temperature does not fluctuate. It is a great system, however the only drawback, is it is very loud.
Publication date: 2008-09-20 more

SalCan on "RE: Get major air with the Antec PC Skeleton Case"

that fan is big enough that it won't have to spin very fast, but yeah, you'll hear everything else. This is really a replacement for a test bed, so you can test out and easily swap parts
Publication date: 2008-09-20 more

califrown on "I am employed by AOL, I can locate/Trace AIM accounts"

hello, I need some help. my email is caligrownchef@aim.com thank you
Publication date: 2008-09-20 more

africa on "RE: HTC Touch HD on video with iPhone 3G and Samsung Omnia"

can we get this review in English ??
Publication date: 2008-09-20 more

krichard78 on "ipod nano - stereo/charger"

I would like to purchase a pink 8gb nano - 4th generation... can anyone recommend a quality small stereo/sub that also charges while playing! It would be awesome if the stereo was also pink... for my niece. THANKS KIM
Publication date: 2008-09-20 more

sierraslim on "cant login to xp it keeps logging back out"

Hi I cant login to my desktop using win xp pro for some reason i now get the login user screen well i put my password in and it goes to desktop and then logs back of. I try safemode and it does the same.Someone must have the answer so many people have this problem. I try a xp repair but it still goes to login screen. I have no floppy so dont tell me to boot from it. I can get into xp repair I have 300 gb of info i cant loose so can someone truely help me? If i do a reinstall will i lose everything in programs & docs? Thank You
Publication date: 2008-09-20 more

sierraslim on "Blue screen Win 95"

LOL Win 95 You got to be joking what are you cheap?
Publication date: 2008-09-20 more

hawaii-tec on "EMachines Class Action"

I'm just curious if anyone has had any indication, that this issue might be caused by the Bestec Power Supply, instead of the Motherboards. I work on a lot of Computers, and I have had several instances where the Bestec P/S appears good, and tests good with my tester, yet will not power on the Computer. Upon replacing the M/B the same thing happens, however, now the new M/B is blown. Using another good Power Supply will not work, because you have just taken out your M/B. The only way to solve the hardware failure is to replace both at the same time. This has happened to me at least 6 times and is happening today on a new M/B for an e-Machine, that i purchased for a client at $190.00. This is money i can't charge my client, and cannot return the part to the place where i purchased it. I'm willing to bet, that the Bestec Power Supply has damaged both of these Boards and maybe even the new Processor as well. I will join the lawsuit but, please consider the information i have mentioned.
Publication date: 2008-09-20 more

sarge on "RE: It's now (illegally) possible to play any burned disc on your Wii"

this kinda thing worries me i remember when the sega dreamcast came out and it was the greatest thing to be able to burn cd-r games and play them on the dreamcast with no effort but shortly after that the game makers stopped making games for the dreamcast and the dreamcast was dead.... then the only people who got the short end of the stick were the users who were not tech savy otherwise you just downloaded or rented (this was around 1996) every game you could find and burned them so nerds had a large collection of games and joe shmo had a 200 dollar piece of crap that no one made games for anymore this is not a good thing i hope Nintendo can update the firmware and fix this otherwise game makers are going to stop making games and Nintendo will have to make another wii and i don't want to have to go out and buy another game system after just purchasing this one
Publication date: 2008-09-20 more

damalloy on "blackberry email problems"

My blackberry receives all my emails however the emails are also suppose to be posted in my emails on my computer in AOL.Some emails will appear on both my computer and blackberry (which I want) while others will just be on my blackberry.Can anyone help me get this corrected.Verizon says it is AOL's problem,AOL say it is Verizons. Any thoughts? Dan
Publication date: 2008-09-20 more

Yo ho ho! Happy Pirate Day, mateys!

I hope everyone be havin’ a great Talk Like a Pirate Day! It looks like Google added support fer Pirate in our user interface. I ‘ave t’ admit that I didn’ see that one comin’. Special thanks t’ th’ online pirate translator fer help wit’ this post, don’tcha know. May the “black spot” not darken your [...]
Publication date: 2008-09-20 more

Sergey starts a blog!

I’ve checked with folks at Google and they confirmed that http://too.blogspot.com/ is Sergey Brin’s blog. The name “too” reflects Sergey’s additional life outside work. One of his first posts is about the fact that he might be more likely to develop Parkinson’s Disease when he’s older. That’s based on data from 23andMe, the personal genetics [...]
Publication date: 2008-09-19 more

ednafugate on "Have a Dell power issues"

Have a Dell laptop 1525 and when I plug in the power cord it tells me it is plugged in, not charging. Why is it doing this?
Publication date: 2008-09-19 more

shaky on "chip construction"

Am I on the right page? Can anyone tell me the components of and the how to's and is it possible for a student to construct a memory chip in his own home? Wher might I gain such information?
Publication date: 2008-09-19 more

bobandjoe on "Need help laptop shopping"

I'm shopping for a gaming laptop under $600. I know that isn't much, but I don't have very much anyway. If you know a good computer for under that price (the lower the better), then please reply with the URL of the site. Thanks. Oh, yeah, I need it to run Microsoft XP Pro. A lot of the games I play won't run on Apples.
Publication date: 2008-09-19 more

captjack44 on "screwed up character set in OS"

Help! Messed up my pc big time. OS is Windows XP Professional. I was cleaning up the pc removing some software. When I rebooted, all the text on the OS shows up in unprintable characters. Here are some screen shots (hope they show up): http://img88.imageshack.us/img88/8853/badscreen1yl7.jpg http://img88.imageshack.us/img88/9126/badscreen2fp3.jpg Not sure what I did. Any ideas? Thanks!
Publication date: 2008-09-19 more

fierynymph on "computer won't start"

When I go away for the weekend I usually unplug my computer.This has never been a problem until recently. My computer normally starts up fine with no problems at all, but now when I unplug it for a while and go to turn it on all the lights and fans start for a second then it dies and just won't start. If I unplug it again and plug it back in and wait a few minutes after a few tries it starts just fine and continues to start fine as long as I don't unplug it when I leave. This has become a sort of dance when I go away.My computer is about 3 years old self built and this is a recent problem.Is my psu going or maybe the bios battery? It just seems weird that everythings fine if I never unplug it.I would appreciate any help.
Publication date: 2008-09-19 more

sngehl01 on "Toshiba Satellite A205-s4707 help with graphics (no idea here)"

I know very little about computers in general, and even less about dealing with laptops. I want to play day of defeat source, which is a steam powered game. When I try to launch it, the computer is really jumpy and it lags bad and stuff. the game requirements: Minimum: 1.7 GHz Processor, 512MB RAM, DirectX® 8 level Graphics Card, Windows® Vista/XP/2000, Mouse, Keyboard, Internet Connection Recommended: Pentium 4 processor (3.0GHz, or better), 1GB RAM, DirectX® 9 level Graphics Card, Windows® Vista/XP/2000, Mouse, Keyboard, Internet Connection Now, my computer has 1gig DDR2 memory, 2.0 gHz processor, an intel centrino core duo processor, and Intel GMA 950 graphics processor. When I play the game, it's choppy and lags bad, and I think it's due to my computer not being able to process the graphics fast enough. How in the world do I go about upgrading that feature? Or if that's not it, what do I try to fix? Do I need more RAM? If so, how do I go about choosing an appropriate addition (I've seen DDR2 1 gig laptop memory for like $20 before, but I was a little weary of it...) Thank you so very much. Nick
Publication date: 2008-09-19 more

Envomni on "RE: Get major air with the Antec PC Skeleton Case"

Noisey?
Publication date: 2008-09-19 more

Envomni on "RE: New Yorkers get RFID driver's licenses"

...welcome to the beginning of the age of life scans. Now, walking down the street, anyone will soon be able to get your life in a moment with a rfid reader.
Publication date: 2008-09-19 more

Envomni on "RE: Interactive Talking First Aid Guide helps when it counts"

Next step.. the EMH... Emergency Medical Hologram
Publication date: 2008-09-19 more

undoIT on "RE: Review: Lenovo ThinkPad X301 Notebook"

Is the battery life actually a lot lower than the X300? I thought the X300 was getting 5 to 6 hours under normal usage. And the X301 is only getting 3? -------------- http://couponsdealuxe.com/
Publication date: 2008-09-19 more

tarbaby on "I bought e stealth and we cant get it to install on my blackberry to a nokia pho"

Publication date: 2008-09-19 more

Rok0601 on "Sony Vaio Hard Drive Help"

Hey All, I'm attempting to fix my Sony VGN-FS790Bwhich I recently re-installed Windows XP SP-2 onto as the HD was corrupted with Viruses, MalWare etc. I used a non-sony windows CD which I'm assuming doesn't have the relevant drivers, files etc. Anyway, after re-installing windows, it will no longer connect to my wireless network - rather recognize any available network at all. Infact, the antenna doesn't even show up. I tried plugging the ethernet chord in the back but it doesn't even connect then. What am I missing here??? Please Help!!!!!!!!
Publication date: 2008-09-19 more

jonlgeek on "RE: EA relaxes Spore DRM after backlash"

And what about the rumour that you cannot have more than one user account on each machine that it is installed on? I mean, if my family wanted to each have their own game save on the same machine, is that still prevented? I was very interested in getting this game, but EA has screwed themselves BIG TIME with this. I'd be surprised if they even re-coup their money on this game if they don't take out the DRM.
Publication date: 2008-09-19 more

davidrodal on "RE: EA relaxes Spore DRM after backlash"

This is very sad because it's a good game. I am a big civ 4 fan (civilization the series as a whole). This isn't quite as deep as civ 4 but once I get into the space race. it gets complicated enough for me for now. As far as the one account per machine I don't know if that is true. It seems like I have enter the game, it connectes for me to my online account, I do have the ability to logout of that and login as someone else. Then it gives me a bunch of games, some new, some I started, I have multiple ones going at the same time. So I don't know about not being to be able to on save going. You can't start from the same planet that someelse started from but you have plenty to choose from. I hope the get rid of most of the DRM on this game and that the head lines were more about the game and not about the DRM. Speaking of which, where is the review for this game????
Publication date: 2008-09-19 more

kpengland on "RE: EA relaxes Spore DRM after backlash"

From what I have read, it is indeed still one account per game.
Publication date: 2008-09-19 more

johnr on "RE: Feature: VOIP with Nokia E71 How-To"

If you are having trouble receiveing calls, please double check your incoming connection settings as prescribed above. Also, be sure you or the PBX is NOT behind a NAT. SIP doesn't play nice with NAT, and in this example, it is assumed you are on the same IP network/segment that the PBX resides on. Hope this helps.
Publication date: 2008-09-19 more

capitalist on "RE: Lenovo releases six new EPEAT Gold standard monitors"

Energy efficiency is nice, but what's their dead pixel policies? Do they have any ISO Class I monitors (i.e. no dead pixels allowed)?
Publication date: 2008-09-19 more

capitalist on "RE: Neuros launches OSD2 high def capable recorder developer kits"

Looks interesting. Has anyone tried it?
Publication date: 2008-09-19 more

Measurand on "Cool article"

Sorry, I put this in the wrong category...
Publication date: 2008-09-18 more

Measurand on "Motion Capture Technology"

This is a neat article on a unique use for 3D motion capture: http://www.gizmag.com/motion-capture-in-mri/10025/
Publication date: 2008-09-18 more

STARFIGHTER3 on "I am employed by AOL, I can locate/Trace AIM accounts"

kizoin @ <i>Jul 09 2008 9:03am</i> As long as my identity stays hidden, I'll work with anyone who needs to have an account traced. I work in the Operations Security Dept. AKA OPSSEC at AOL/Time Warner and I'm fully available to assist anyone who'd like. Post the screen name in this thread along with an explanation, OTHERWISE, give me an email I can contact you at to discuss. PLEASE CONTACT ME REGARDING THE POSSIBLE LOCATING OF MY DAUGHTER'S STOLEN LAP-TOP FROM HER APARTMENT USING MY AOL ACCOUNT AND HER SIGN-IN USER NAME: MMGenisiMM@AOL.COM MY EMAIL URL IS malveauxltd@aol.com a reward to you if you can accomplish something on this as they also took with them jewlery and other items of importance ec.
Publication date: 2008-09-18 more

Shonjir on "Installing Win 98 over Win 2000"

This is very old and I happened to find it randomly but here's some tips for the (rare) people who might need to do this... 1. You can split HD partitions with a tool like Partition Magic. A size of 50MB will suffice. Make the partition fat32. Then, from a DOS boot disk (preferably Ver.5) install DOS on that partition (so that you have best DOS support for weird old programs) and then run the Win98 CD installation. When asked, keep the DOS you installed.You will need drivers, so have internet connection handy. 2. Run fresh Win98 installation as described above by zarcondeegrissm. 3. Use a DOS emulator on Win 2000 (you can find Download and info if you Google it) Maybe someday this might help someone...
Publication date: 2008-09-18 more

datonz on "Wont to use my old laptop monitor"

I have an old laptop with a dead motherboard, so I was wondering if there is a way to use the monitor for something else. Specifically, I want to put it in my car because I have a DVD player in there. I would need it to use RCA jacks and Im not sure how I would turn it on/off, set contrast or the brightness. Any electrical engineers out there want to help?
Publication date: 2008-09-18 more

fatguy on "Video Controller (VGA Compatible)..."

hi guys , i think i have a really bad problem here , i formated my computer 3 weeks ago , but i still can't find the drivers for my computer , dun no some times i hate japanese firm also , ;(( i've only found the internet driver, but i can't get that audio , and video controler(vga compatible) and grapichs... every thing so... If any one can help me where can i get the drivers for my computer ? ? pleeeaaase . . . It's NEC LaViE G type rx , PC-GL17FTWG1 i almost lose my computer now help me ... ;(
Publication date: 2008-09-18 more

rpdrose on "Windows XP SP3"

Wonder if any one is having problems with service pack 3 (XP). After downloading and running the update my computer hung and would not shutdown, after unplugging would not only boot in Safe Mode, I tried to restore to a diffirent point but It said there were none. I ran this way for a day and the very next day the real problems started, it would only boot if you held down F2 or F8 and then when ever you let go of the key the computer went dead, nothing if you held the key down it would let you move around in the BIOS but it would always die before you could make or save any changes, I also could get to the Safe Mode but it would die before I could get it to load, Microsoft Tech Support sent me a dead link and ignores me. Anyone have any ideas? My computer is a Power Spec 8020 1.3GHz P4 , 2 Maxtor HD's totaling 90GB,Intel D850GB MB,512MB Memory, Radeon 2400 Pro Video Card.
Publication date: 2008-09-18 more

bobandjoe on "RE: Asus Eee PC 1000H Follow-Up"

Would this be good for Gaming such as DDO, WoW, RS, and DR? As for disk-based games I'm not expecting to install any anytime soon. I'm really working on getting my computer. Thanks
Publication date: 2008-09-18 more

Cybersages on "C+A Employee Benefit Solutions Provides Huge Savings on Health Care"

Company healthcare benefit can be one of the most sensitive issues among employers and employees. But if you have the right program for this benefit, your company and your employees will have a win-win situation. With C+A Employee Benefits Solutions (C+A), you can leave all your worries on healthcare benefits behind. In a recent case study made by C+A for a client, the client was faced with a $200,000 (38%) premium increase upon their 2007 health benefits renewal. Through aggressive marketing of their plan along with proposing a creative health plan design approach C+A was able to keep cost consistent going into its new plan year. C+A provides a solution to the company
Publication date: 2008-09-18 more

jcarlson on "ipod 120 gb causes reboot in windows xp"

Just upgraded from 30 gb to 120 gb. Problem is, every time I plug the 120 in, it causes a reboot. Running xp with itunes 8. Windows updates are current. Can anyone help? Spent almost an hour on phone with Apple and got nowhere....
Publication date: 2008-09-18 more

Angel001 on "I am employed by AOL, I can locate/Trace AIM accounts"

Kisoin.. Need your help...please contact me at ultispy007@aol.com regarding a friend who's reputation is being smeared on the internet by this person. The person has an AOL email account that I would like to give you. Thanks..Again, My Email Address: ultispy007@aol.com
Publication date: 2008-09-18 more

mojoman on "RE: Norton 2009 products arrive focused on performance"

Kaspersky 2009 is a piece of sh*t. It pops up alerts with cryptic questions for no reason at all. Those alerts were supposed to go away with 2009, but no luck. Brain-dead Trusted, Untrusted, Less Trusted, More Trusted zones. If you want all the details go to kasperskysucks.blogspot.com and learn about how Kaspersky deceives their customers. So dont belive all the hype you read about Kaspersky.
Publication date: 2008-09-18 more

ednafugate on "Plugged in, not charging"

I have a Dell Inspiron 1525 and it recently started giving me the message plugged in, not charging when I plug in my power cord. Can anyone tell me why? It eventually starts charging but it can sometimes take long enough that I am afraid it will shut down while I am working on it.
Publication date: 2008-09-18 more

AshleyPerkins on "Leading Online Credit Card Processing Provider Announces Multi Currency Processi"

London, UK – September 18, 2008 – Ashley Perkins, founder and CEO of Allied Wallet recently announced an advanced online credit card processing service in multiple foreign currencies. This move has been initiated as a reprieve for the high foreign exchange fees banks currently charge whenever an overseas transfer of credit is made. The online credit card processing system as perfected by Allied Wallet now offers credit card processing and settlement in JPY, EURO, GBP, CHF, CAD, AUD, USD and NZD besides other foreign currencies. Miss. Ashley Perkins justified this move saying, “This step will make it very convenient for clients and consumers alike to transfer credit and settle currency across countries. No more dealing with the reductions and hassles usually associated with unwanted conversion fees.” According to Miss. Perkins “The online finance services currently available in the market have only substituted paperwork with complicated software. On no account does this benefit the timesaving efforts of a business enterprise. Allied Wallet, with the addition of JCB and Maestro American Express accessibility for our eCommerce customers, aims to restructure the rules and simplify the present online credit card processing division.” An extremely compatible and low risk credit card processing system and a unique online credit transfer arrangement are two essential eCommerce tools that Allied Wallet has to offer online businesses. Financial and eCommerce genius, Mr. Ashley Perkins is the architect of this highly efficient online wallet and an increasing number of businesses are reaping the profits of this system. Miss. Perkins realized the need for a sophisticated online credit card processing system that did not strain the novice user or the financial executive. His acquaintance with the problems presented by existing online credit card vendors led to the launch of the Allied Wallet concept. Optimum security while performing basic or sophisticated credit card processing activities online is one of the hallmarks of the Allied Wallet service. Thanks to the singular vision of Miss. Ashley Perkins, Allied Wallet remains the trusted choice for a vast array of vast online businesses, eCommerce corporate portals and small business owners. For more information about this topic, please call Allied Wallet at 310- 601-3020 Fax: 310-694-9076 or e-mail them at support@alliedwallet.com , Contact: 468 N. Camden Dr. Beverly Hills, CA 90210 Tel: +3106013020 http://www.alliedwallet.com/ support@alliedwallet.com
Publication date: 2008-09-18 more

Nando27 on "DVD ram not showing in device manager"

hi, got a bit of a problem. After instaling a couple of 700Gb samsung HD satta2 my DVDs rom don't show up in device manager. BIO shows they are working but windows don't even recognize a dvd drive. Running win xp with all the updates on a asus P5N32 Mb, T6600 core 2 duo, 2Gb ram , (raid 0) 2 seaga 300 gb satta 2 & (raid 1)2 Samsung 700 Gb satta 2 Tried disconecting and reinstalling them with no luck.
Publication date: 2008-09-18 more

mjs on "RE: The web in the 90's"

I really like that u-geek site. Pity we have so much crap on the site today.
Publication date: 2008-09-18 more

kpengland on "RE: Wii game piracy about to get very easy?"

Even if Nintendo didn't disable it in an update, I doubt this would hurt Nintendo's bottom line much. The crowd buying Wii titles en masse are not going to be pirating games. If this happened to the PS3 or 360 it would be disastrous to those platforms.
Publication date: 2008-09-18 more

johntty on "RE: Panasonic's ExConnect bringing broadband back to flights"

It looks like Panasonic is following the same business model as Boeing. The users are getting used to FREE access in airports and coffee shops and is less likely to want to pay for access on an airplane. The industry has shown that there is money to be made by giving away the serves and selling advertising that goes along with it (e.g. Google). Why isn't anyone working that business model?
Publication date: 2008-09-18 more

tall_timbers on "RE: The web in the 90's"

many websites, includeing geek.com are way to cluttered today. I believe that actually cuts down on their usefulness and detracts from any potential ad revenue because less attention is paid to the overall site (read: ads easy to purposefully miss because the page has too much junk on it already).
Publication date: 2008-09-18 more

kittyq5 on "Code purple"

I also had this "code purple" problem after replacing the motherboard on my computer. After replacing the motherboard, the computer worked fine. When I was doing a system recovery to restore computer to factory settings to give to my mother, I could not get back on as I had the "code purple". After checking your website and many more, I learned about the lawsuit against HP and that they should fix the computer for free. After about six months, I did an online chat support (as my computer was out of warranty and could not talk to them without a charge), and they are sending me a shipping box, are going to fix the computer, and ship it back to me for free. The computer will be restored to factory settings, butI was doing that anyway. So if you don't mind going back to your factory settings, they will fix it for free. They said it would only take about four to five days as it is sent by FedEx both ways.
Publication date: 2008-09-18 more

crazymonster on "Video Controller (VGA Compatible)..."

help me!! i need a driver for video controller vga compatible. i'm using windows xp professional for my acer aspire 4315.. i dont want to use vista because my processor is intel celeron.. sadly, the driver is for vista.. i tried to use it but its not working. i try to download and use other aspire's video drivers and they are not working too.. i had already try almost all drivers for that, non of them are working! hope u can help me.. thanks awesomeo..
Publication date: 2008-09-18 more

stevenvitale on "RE: Review: LapDawg Laptop Stand"

Bought one of these about 4 months ago. One of the arms broke after very casual use. Only a 30 day warranty, so I'm out $130. Craptastic.
Publication date: 2008-09-18 more

yacikier on "Review: Video Converter Platinum"

Hey guys and gals, I'm back with another installment in my series on video conversion programs to be used to transfer your movies to the Tilt! This week I've got an ‘official' review, the folks over at Wondershare emailed me and asked me to check out their video conversion software, this isn't a DVD ripper but just for converting your already existing videos to a format compatible with your Tilt or other phones of course. Wondershare Video Convertor Platinum can convert to many formats and not just to PPC, so it's actually a very useful program for any of your video conversion needs. So, read on to check it out... As usual we start off with the Specs and Features of the program, this is just the basics grabbed from their site, if you wish to read everything they've got about Wondershare Video Converter Platinum, stop on over HERE to read all about it. Wondershare Video Converter Platinum - http://www.dvd-ripper-copy.com/video-converter-platinum.html version: 4.0.3.0 Price: $35.00 Features: Directly convert video for playback on all popular portable video/audio players ( Zune, iPod,Apple TV,iPhone, PSP, etc). Convert video to most popular video formats with powerful video editing functions including video crop and video trimming and file merging. Customize video/audio quality with various video and audio settings. Wondershare Video Converter Platinum is the best video format converter that can convert your video files including FLV video to various formats to meet different format requirements and for playback on most popular players including iPod, iPhone, Apple TV, Zune, PSP, Pocket PC, Creative Zen, and Archos and so on. It is the best video converter that can convert WMV to AVI, VOB to AVI, and this YouTube Video Converter even convert video to Youtube or convert Youtube to video with excellent quality. The best video converter supports video formats such as MP4, MOV, 3GP, AVI, WMV, RM, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, FLV, ASF and also HD video formats including TS, TP and TRP. It also supports audio formats including M4A, WMA, WAV, MP3, AAC and AC3. With the video joiner of this all-in-one video format converter, you can even merge multiple files into a single video file, and can trim or crop to edit your videos according to your need. After installing the program just hit the shortcut on your desktop to load the program, we are greeted with a graphical interface, with simple instructions on how to use the program in the main window. The are only 4 steps to get your video converted easily, of course if you wish to change the settings etc you'll add more steps to the process. To pick your format click on ‘Profile' near the bottom, a slide out menu appears and you've got several choices, of course since I'm converting for the Tilt I'm using the option for ‘Windows Mobile', with that you've got three more choices, and for our use I picked ‘General Pocket PC Video' Click ‘Add' to add your video, just navigate to the file you wish to convert as you would in windows, very easily. I'm using Stargate again as I've used with all of the reviews in this series, I've already ripped it from DVD to AVI/Divx/Xvid format and it's 1.5Gb in size. Since this software isn't for DVD ripping you'll basically only use videos that are already on your hard drive, so you'll have to rip the DVD first with another program if you wish to use one of your DVDs. Once you've got the file loaded, you'll see the the 'settings' option next the the profile selection box is now available, clicking it opens up further video options. For the General Pocket PC Video, you've only got the choice to convert to WMV format, and of course you can change other options as well like Frame Rate, Bit Rate, Resolution, and Audio options. You can pick other formats, personally I like AVI or Xvid, but the estimated size was 1.5gb even for the 320×240 resolution, and that's a bit big for me, so we'll just stick with the WMV format that is the default for the PPC profile. Once you've got all of your settings straight just click ‘Start' and the conversion process will begin, a window pops up and gives you a preview, along with status of the conversion process. You can also select options to shutdown the computer when finished and open the output folder. So here's some stats for you: Time to convert: 28:27 Output Size: 815MB CPU Usage: Average: 41% Peak: 55% The software estimated the output size at 957MB, and the actual output size is 815Mb, so it's smaller which is nicer, still though 815mb is rather large, but with the cost of SDHC cards coming down most people can afford larger capacity cards, so you'll be able to fit a few movies on your card at this size. The time to convert is pretty good as well, coming in under 30 minutes to convert a movie that's over 2 hours long, that's about the average time for most conversion software packages out there today. Yes some are quicker, and of course so do take longer, but 28 minutes isn't bad really. So it doesn't matter how fast or how big the converted video is if it isn't any good right? Well I threw the converted Stargate over to my phone and fired it up, quality was very good, and the audio was synced fine with the video. What more could you ask for? So Wondershare Video Converter Platinum works as it it should, it gives us a viewable movie that looks good and plays fine. The cost of the software is about right, coming in at $35.00 it's worth the cost in my opinion as it can do more than just convert to your PPC, you can use the software for most all of your video conversion needs. If I had to rate this software I would give it a 4.5 out of 5 score, and I think I could recommend it as well to anyone looking for a program that's very easy to use, but does offer the ability to customize your output files and convert to many formats. Pros: -Easy to use -Convert to many formats -Customizable settings -Relatively fast conversion Cons: -Large output size
Publication date: 2008-09-17 more

SyncMate on "WinMobile to Mac synchronization tool"

Eltima Software has released SyncMate vers 1.4 (Ma
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kunalch on "Intel mob865gbf & SATA HDD"

I have Intel Desktop Board D865GBF and planning to buy & install a 500GB SATA Hard Drive on my computer. Will my motherboard support it? I have tird to check intel.com and seagate websites but did not fin an answer. k.
Publication date: 2008-09-17 more

furry on "Review: Video Converter Platinum"

I'm addicted to TuneCab - all in one converter for any kind of files, audio and video, DRM-protected or unprotected. It can download, save and convert streaming video like YouTube, rip CD's, convert audiobooks etc. And it works with Vista! Try also TuneCab Online Video Catcher Ultimate. It cat download streaming video from YouTube and sites like YouTube and then convert it to any formats.
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pugachevarty on "Commuting less"

That DropBox looks awesome! But something that Alisonc points out is 2-factor authentication. Your going to have to first check with IT at your work if they will let you install something like dropbox or LogMeIn and then you have to consider how secure your remote access username and password are, as you won't what someone hacking your work system because of you wanting to work from home! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-factor_authentication Some good info there.
Publication date: 2008-09-17 more

JoelGeek on "RE: Andoid-based Dream phone to be launched next month"

T-Mobile confirmed that september 23rd they're showing off android at a 10:30am press event. No word on if it will go on sale then, too.
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gueszwhused on "I am employed by AOL, I can locate/Trace AIM accounts"

hey kizoin! i need help finding my aim password. the sn is = gueszwhused. long story short. bad relationship and i think my ex did it to be spiteful but i would greatly appreciate if you can just give me the password so i can change the email and move on with my life. my email is = njz_gr8est@yahoo.com
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a_brit on "RE: Access to in-flight porn questioned"

You give them unrestricted access and complain when they take advantage of it? Either offer them restricted access or stop complaining. I can't imagine though watching porn in public, especially if it is a really good one... I'd be making extra trips to the bathroom.
Publication date: 2008-09-17 more

fdudley on "CDROM not Responding"

Used a disk cleaner (System Suite 7, Pro) on my Dell Latitude and ever since I get a "Windows cannot read from this disk" error message. Can anyone tell me how I recoved the file I inadvertantly erased or download a freeware program in order to get my system to recognize my heard-drive? Thanks, Fred
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3d4ya on "Nice models and free models, new site!"

Hey there!We've just started a small 3d model site which would be cool for your game development: http://www.3d4ya.com We have free real-time models like this: [img]http://img525.imageshack.us/img525/3223/x0207bsn1.jpg[/img] [img]http://img295.imageshack.us/img295/2056/x020xbqz8.jpg[/img] [img]http://img300.imageshack.us/img300/2527/copyofx0202beb7.jpg[/img] [img]http://img525.imageshack.us/img525/4761/copyofx0205bei2.jpg[/img] and others: [img]http://img177.imageshack.us/img177/5711/x0301brx5.jpg[/img] [img]http://img523.imageshack.us/img523/9731/x0102bys4.jpg[/img] [img]http://img177.imageshack.us/img177/2812/x0601bro6.jpg[/img] [img]http://img257.imageshack.us/img257/2262/x0701bhn9.jpg[/img] Developers always need model, so we try our best to make as many free model as we can and hope they might help you!New products are available every week, we kindly invite you to visit 3d4ya.com frequently to check them out!Sorry if you find it annoying. 3d4ya.com
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ivanlomis on "Commuting less"

I have a long commute to the office each day: 60 miles both ways! I'd rather go in only 3 days a week, but sometimes I forget to bring my PC home with me. I need to get access to files on it, but can't get them. I'd love to access some of those files from my own pc without too much hassle. Anyone have ideas about how I can remotely access my PC effectively?
Publication date: 2008-09-17 more

SalCan on "Commuting less"

I know a few people who swear by hamachi ( https://secure.logmein.com/products/hamachi/vpn.asp?lang=en) but dropbox ( http://www.getdropbox.com ) looks awesome either should do the job. Tell us which way you end up going.
Publication date: 2008-09-17 more

Alisonc on "Commuting less"

We use logmein as well. But we have a program called phonefactor for logmein. They provide 2-factor authentication for added security. Download at : http://www.phonefactor.com/downloads I would be interested in hearing which way you end up going as well...
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pouncey on "RE: Review: Logitech MX1100 Mouse"

how interesting
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pouncey on "Burning data to CD's"

that sucks, maybe try another source. or a diffrent disk.
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skubasteve on "RE: Access to in-flight porn questioned"

It doesn't sound any worse than getting stuck next to the obese smelly bastard who's fat rolls are taking up half of your seat.
Publication date: 2008-09-17 more