Category Archives: Computers

Testing an iPad

Writing a blog entry on an iPad is rather painful, but possible. I wouldn’t want to write more than a few lines this way, but it’s nice to have in a pinch. Editing is possible using gestures to zoom. Still, … Continue reading

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Why Google will win

I don’t know who’s calling the shots over there at Google, but they’re absolutely brilliant. Google’s technology is impressive, no doubt. They’ve come a long way in the 12 years or so since two college kids named Sergi Brin and … Continue reading

Posted in Computers, Internet | 2 Comments

Command line tools strike again

Every morning at 3:00, one of our servers grabs the latest code from our source repository and runs the build script.  As you would expect, the build usually completes without error and everything’s fine.  From time to time, though, one … Continue reading

Posted in Computers, Programming | 3 Comments

Movie madness

Outside of YouTube, MP4 is probably the most popular video file format available online.  MP4 videos exist inside a container format that’s also widely referred to as “the MP4 container format.”  Honestly, I’m not sure what the correct name for … Continue reading

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GNU tools for Windows

I got annoyed with Windows today.  I had this HTML file that contained a bunch of links to RSS files I wanted to download and examine.  The task before me was to extract the URLs, remove duplicates, and then download.  It’s … Continue reading

Posted in Computers, Programming | 2 Comments

Bad laptop USB ports

My USB mouse on the laptop stopped working the other night.  I replaced the mouse with a known-working one and even it didn’t work on the laptop.  I wasn’t prepared to debug the thing at the time, so I continued … Continue reading

Posted in Computers | 4 Comments

Slow file deletion on Thecus N7700

I work with big files.  Really big.  Daily, I back up a file that is larger than 200 gigabytes.  We have a Thecus N7700 network attached storage (NAS) box that holds about seven terabytes.  Every day I copy the latest … Continue reading

Posted in Computers | 5 Comments

New removable drives

Update on my removable drive troubles. I tried drilling holes in the case (after opening it and removing the drive, of course) on one of those Seagate FreeAgent drives.  Getting the thing apart was quite a chore, and I had … Continue reading

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More removable drive troubles

I’ve mentioned before that we use USB external drives for transportation of data from our colocation facility to the office.  After struggling to find reliable devices, we finally settled on the Seagate FreeAgent 1TB drives.  They’ve served us quite well … Continue reading

Posted in Computers | 7 Comments

Infected!

Updated.  See below. I don’t know how, but I somehow managed to get the Malware Defense “anti-spyware” program on my system at home.  Fortunately for me, it doesn’t do anything malicious like delete files or install botnet sofware.  It just … Continue reading

Posted in Computers | 4 Comments

Two useful, one marginal

I recently had the need to delve into the world of JSON (Java Script Object Notation) to read some data from a particular Web site. For my purposes, the simple JSON reader provided by .NET worked just fine. The way … Continue reading

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Sniffing network traffic

My latest crawler modifications require me to scrape Web pages that host videos so that I can obtain metadata (title, description, date posted, etc.) that we place in our index.  Unfortunately, there’s no standard way for sites to present such … Continue reading

Posted in Computers, Internet, Programming | 1 Comment

A small change?

I’ve been programming computers for a long time.  Getting paid to write computer programs, even, which I thought was pretty darned funny when I first started.  People were paying me to do something that I loved.  But I digress. After … Continue reading

Posted in Computers, Programming | 2 Comments

Disk space is (almost) free

Today you can buy a one-terabyte Seagate drive online for $80, shipping included.  That works out to about 8 cents per gigabyte.  In August of 2003, I paid 80 bucks for a 120 GB drive:  about 67 cents per gigabyte.  … Continue reading

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Looking for a Ghost Replacement

When describing the problems I was having configuring our new servers, I mentioned that I was going to try using Clonezilla to speed the process.  The idea was to get Windows installed and all the other software configured on one … Continue reading

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A few Linux nuggets

In general, it’s a bad idea to start a file name with a dash (-). For example, a file named –help is going to give you all kinds of trouble. Say you want to rename the file. mv –help help.txt … Continue reading

Posted in Computers | 3 Comments

Software Upgrades

Firefox just notified me of the available 3.5.2 update.  I figured what the heck and told it to apply the update.  After the update was applied, Firefox restarted and then I got a notification that one of my addons, the … Continue reading

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A diskette? What’s that?

We just bought some off-lease Dell servers locally and I’m tasked with getting them set up and installed at the data center.  It’s not my favorite part of my work.  I’m at heart a programmer, and fiddling with hardware always manages … Continue reading

Posted in Computers, Rants | 5 Comments

Downloading with wget

GNU wget is a free program for retrieving files from the Web.  I freely admit that I’m just a casual user and don’t know all the things that it can do.  But it does one thing that I use quite … Continue reading

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Windows Explorer Wonkiness

In Windows Explorer, double-clicking on a folder name in the list pane opens that folder so you can view its files.  This is nothing new.  Over the years I have become accustomed to double-clicking and having that folder’s files appear … Continue reading

Posted in Computers | 2 Comments