Geek: HCI, FireFox2, New Laptop
Joss Whedon
Of Firefly fame, was one of the writers on Disney's Atlantis (one of my favorite animated flicks). That coupled with the Anime style, make sense to why it so different than other Disney works, and also why I like it.
Geek: Designing Interactions
A book + DVD and interview (several excellent vclips online) of the innovators, mice, drop down menus, from Apple to Palm to IDEO, Englebart to Will Wright
http://www.designinginteractions.com/interviews/
Geek:Firefox 2
Super nifty! I like the google suggest in the built in search bar, and the spell check everywhere! I imagine this will greatly help search engine index. First seeing it on the new laptop accessing yahoo mail, originally I thought using it was something clever on javascript and it had me wondering what exactly they were getting. The idea of real time understanding of messages I'm writing by the server was kinda spooky. Though I've always wanted that feature as the spell check happening after the fact makes it hard to recognize what's being spelled wrong. Now if they could only add it to a training program, I might be able to reclaim much of my lost spelling ability.
Though after using it for a bit, it would be better if words were able to be looked up via answers, wikipedia, google, etc. Some of the things it suggests are bizarre.
Geek: New Laptop Finally Working and Home IT
Compiled the first thing on the newish laptop (named "Duot") today, just in time for a meeting with an authoring big wig tomorrow morning. Did you know it was possible to put 4+ kids through Ivy League schools just by selling alphabet books door-to-door to schools!? Makes sense, if there is enough money to have 'baby Gap'. Also it's a good market, as kids are relatively uniform in their needs to learn the basics.
Despite getting the laptop near a month ago today was the first day it did something 'productive', the new laptop was put in charge of recovering the data off the old hard drive (to be used on the new laptop), and that was *SLOW* like 1-2 solid weeks(!!!?) and it didn't recover all of it (Growl!). Since the directory structure was hosed, the 'super-scan' found several partitions on the drive, and while the majority (like 43GB) was recovered in a little over a day, the other partitions were 'bad' so it barely did anything over the rest of the weeks.
Amusingly I got the "must activate windows, in 4 days" about halfway into this unpausible process, which meant if I didn't register it by that date, then I wouldn't be able to use the machine for anything without buying a serial, or reinstalling windows. Trying to activate turned into "this serial has already been activated too many times". (Meaning the Ebay seller wiped the drive with a pirated serial despite there being a valid serial on the bottom of the laptop...) So I crossed my fingers and turned the calendar/date back to give me some additional time before being locked out, which worked long enough for the recovery to meet my satisfaction.
After a week of it seeming to go no place, I gave up on the old hard drive recovery (I'm pretty sure everything is there, it's just going to take time to wade through it all...searching for *.jpg reveals like 10K items, thankfully my camera are usually large enough to find. The flash work (various script files are going to take awhile) as most of them have parallel files used by SVN (which I no longer have access to, and in some cases) attempted to copy the recovery data over the network, had to reboot to get it on the same network and then found somewhere in the process it found the right date, and I was locked out *sigh*.
Ironically since the recovery data was on the new drive I couldn't just re-image it with the image off the server as long planned *sigh* as there was no way to get it off once the machine was. So I resigned myself to doing it the conventional way, which resulted in the fastest OS installation ever:
1) Slipstreamed XP to SP2 (again)
http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/windowsxp_sp2_slipstream.asp
2) Integrated most of the updates since SP2, and many of the common utilities from Windows
http://www.ryanvm.net/msfn/updatepack.html
3) Utility to help automate an install (putting in serial numbers, user name etc. configuration etc)
http://www.nliteos.com/download.html (also requires .Net Runtime)
4) Burnt it as a bootable DVD-R using nlite and proceeded as normal, the install automation was painless, though I missed a few dialogs.
It's amusing to me that I've finally got this process down, about 2 months before Vista makes leaning this useless. Though I have yet to see a feature in Vista that will make upgrading really worth it.
After install, reinstalled all the latest drivers (downloaded prior to the lockout) for the all the common utilities I use (e.g. pdf, clipboard manager, explorer replacement) all the common applications (which is getting smaller every year as programs move online into services, and workflows get more sophisticated integrated into applications.
Since I've had to reinstall several machines lately, the centralized Installs directory has gotten pretty cleaned up, all the serial numbers put in the right place, I've had programs on it from Win95 and on (98, 2000, XP..) separated into an _archive directory, I can still keep them around if necessary (e.g. to access old data if it hasn't been converted to something more modern from old drives).
I've also been able to get some random irritating tech things done this weekend:
- figured out why one of the 3 monitors wouldn't turn off when entering power save, resulting in this bouncing box for a night light, turned out the cord was *slightly* loose, though the image on the screen was fine.
- across the 3 machines, removed all the various old windows installations from the boot.ini which saves about 30seconds on booting (which has been happening a lot this weekend).
- got the secondary NIC working on the server, the driver was hidden away in the NVIDIA everthing in one driver, now the new laptop is connected at gigabit speeds and the tablet on conventional speeds on a private network (they all have net access through the wireless). They all use the 'offline files' feature to check things in an out, so the data is still centralized on the server, but I can work with it on any of the machines, provided I only edit it in one place at a time. I was reading today about Citrix doing essentially 'streaming' applications, which is also tempting, though in some cases each machine is functionally different, e.g. the TabletPC has drawing programs on it I wouldn't use anyplace else.
- figured out how to get the same user profile to work across the various machines in a peer to peer fashion (turned out all that was truly needed was a password on the user name), thus creating tighter control on permissions of the data, since some of it is shared on the wireless with the neighbors (and potentially anybody who figures out access to our network ...and the network is quite populated (i found i was already a part of a workgroup I didn't identify). Note to self: Guest user in the User Accounts isn't the same thing as Guest in the Permissions settings.
- Windows Media Player is a reasonably decent DVD player (provided you have PowerDVD or WinDVD already installed as the actual DVD codec), it's actually got the best UI compared to PowerDVD, and WinDVD, except it doesn't play as smoothly (regardless of settings) and it doesn't have all the tweaky controls (e.g. surround sound settings) easily exposed
Of Firefly fame, was one of the writers on Disney's Atlantis (one of my favorite animated flicks). That coupled with the Anime style, make sense to why it so different than other Disney works, and also why I like it.
Geek: Designing Interactions
A book + DVD and interview (several excellent vclips online) of the innovators, mice, drop down menus, from Apple to Palm to IDEO, Englebart to Will Wright
http://www.designinginteractions.com/interviews/
Geek:Firefox 2
Super nifty! I like the google suggest in the built in search bar, and the spell check everywhere! I imagine this will greatly help search engine index. First seeing it on the new laptop accessing yahoo mail, originally I thought using it was something clever on javascript and it had me wondering what exactly they were getting. The idea of real time understanding of messages I'm writing by the server was kinda spooky. Though I've always wanted that feature as the spell check happening after the fact makes it hard to recognize what's being spelled wrong. Now if they could only add it to a training program, I might be able to reclaim much of my lost spelling ability.
Though after using it for a bit, it would be better if words were able to be looked up via answers, wikipedia, google, etc. Some of the things it suggests are bizarre.
Geek: New Laptop Finally Working and Home IT
Compiled the first thing on the newish laptop (named "Duot") today, just in time for a meeting with an authoring big wig tomorrow morning. Did you know it was possible to put 4+ kids through Ivy League schools just by selling alphabet books door-to-door to schools!? Makes sense, if there is enough money to have 'baby Gap'. Also it's a good market, as kids are relatively uniform in their needs to learn the basics.
Despite getting the laptop near a month ago today was the first day it did something 'productive', the new laptop was put in charge of recovering the data off the old hard drive (to be used on the new laptop), and that was *SLOW* like 1-2 solid weeks(!!!?) and it didn't recover all of it (Growl!). Since the directory structure was hosed, the 'super-scan' found several partitions on the drive, and while the majority (like 43GB) was recovered in a little over a day, the other partitions were 'bad' so it barely did anything over the rest of the weeks.
Amusingly I got the "must activate windows, in 4 days" about halfway into this unpausible process, which meant if I didn't register it by that date, then I wouldn't be able to use the machine for anything without buying a serial, or reinstalling windows. Trying to activate turned into "this serial has already been activated too many times". (Meaning the Ebay seller wiped the drive with a pirated serial despite there being a valid serial on the bottom of the laptop...) So I crossed my fingers and turned the calendar/date back to give me some additional time before being locked out, which worked long enough for the recovery to meet my satisfaction.
After a week of it seeming to go no place, I gave up on the old hard drive recovery (I'm pretty sure everything is there, it's just going to take time to wade through it all...searching for *.jpg reveals like 10K items, thankfully my camera are usually large enough to find. The flash work (various script files are going to take awhile) as most of them have parallel files used by SVN (which I no longer have access to, and in some cases) attempted to copy the recovery data over the network, had to reboot to get it on the same network and then found somewhere in the process it found the right date, and I was locked out *sigh*.
Ironically since the recovery data was on the new drive I couldn't just re-image it with the image off the server as long planned *sigh* as there was no way to get it off once the machine was. So I resigned myself to doing it the conventional way, which resulted in the fastest OS installation ever:
1) Slipstreamed XP to SP2 (again)
http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/windowsxp_sp2_slipstream.asp
2) Integrated most of the updates since SP2, and many of the common utilities from Windows
http://www.ryanvm.net/msfn/updatepack.html
3) Utility to help automate an install (putting in serial numbers, user name etc. configuration etc)
http://www.nliteos.com/download.html (also requires .Net Runtime)
4) Burnt it as a bootable DVD-R using nlite and proceeded as normal, the install automation was painless, though I missed a few dialogs.
It's amusing to me that I've finally got this process down, about 2 months before Vista makes leaning this useless. Though I have yet to see a feature in Vista that will make upgrading really worth it.
After install, reinstalled all the latest drivers (downloaded prior to the lockout) for the all the common utilities I use (e.g. pdf, clipboard manager, explorer replacement) all the common applications (which is getting smaller every year as programs move online into services, and workflows get more sophisticated integrated into applications.
Since I've had to reinstall several machines lately, the centralized Installs directory has gotten pretty cleaned up, all the serial numbers put in the right place, I've had programs on it from Win95 and on (98, 2000, XP..) separated into an _archive directory, I can still keep them around if necessary (e.g. to access old data if it hasn't been converted to something more modern from old drives).
I've also been able to get some random irritating tech things done this weekend:
- figured out why one of the 3 monitors wouldn't turn off when entering power save, resulting in this bouncing box for a night light, turned out the cord was *slightly* loose, though the image on the screen was fine.
- across the 3 machines, removed all the various old windows installations from the boot.ini which saves about 30seconds on booting (which has been happening a lot this weekend).
- got the secondary NIC working on the server, the driver was hidden away in the NVIDIA everthing in one driver, now the new laptop is connected at gigabit speeds and the tablet on conventional speeds on a private network (they all have net access through the wireless). They all use the 'offline files' feature to check things in an out, so the data is still centralized on the server, but I can work with it on any of the machines, provided I only edit it in one place at a time. I was reading today about Citrix doing essentially 'streaming' applications, which is also tempting, though in some cases each machine is functionally different, e.g. the TabletPC has drawing programs on it I wouldn't use anyplace else.
- figured out how to get the same user profile to work across the various machines in a peer to peer fashion (turned out all that was truly needed was a password on the user name), thus creating tighter control on permissions of the data, since some of it is shared on the wireless with the neighbors (and potentially anybody who figures out access to our network ...and the network is quite populated (i found i was already a part of a workgroup I didn't identify). Note to self: Guest user in the User Accounts isn't the same thing as Guest in the Permissions settings.
- Windows Media Player is a reasonably decent DVD player (provided you have PowerDVD or WinDVD already installed as the actual DVD codec), it's actually got the best UI compared to PowerDVD, and WinDVD, except it doesn't play as smoothly (regardless of settings) and it doesn't have all the tweaky controls (e.g. surround sound settings) easily exposed