The Wall Street Journal has an excellent article about Netflix, including confirmation of my assumption how the tiny and superb Roku Video Player came to be. If you have trouble reading the article, click here.
Category: Tech
Web crawling… emphasis on crawling
Yes, I know, the site is slow. Sometimes so slow it may as well be down — which it was, for about eight hours, a couple of days ago. I might be able to improve things a bit without yet going to the aggravation of switching hosting services.
Sit and Deliver
I’ve said before that I like Turner Classic Movies. Tonight when I noticed that “Stand and Deliver” is on TCM I whipped out the Acer netbook and checked Netflix Watch Instantly and found the movie there. In seconds it was playing on the Roku, and I caught up to the scene on TCM. Cable TV and DVD seem so antiquated.
IT Pro tech tip
Don’t use EMC CLARiiON Mirrorview/A. Not off of a live drive, anyway. Use Mirrorview/S instead.
Never a DELL moment
I was going to post an “e-toy update” but now my primary PC — a one-year-old DELL Inspiron 530 — won’t start. Not even in safe mode. After running a full scan yesterday, of course. AAUGH!
So I’m on the Acer netbook. I won’t bother trying to figure out what’s wrong. I’ll just go straight to an installation of Windows.
(Later) OK…. I shall not die this day. Not yet, anyway. I ran Safe Mode so it would go to a command prompt, and I was able to launch explorer.exe (the desktop GUI interface). Running chkdsk revealed some file system problems, so I set chkdsk to run with the fix option on the next restart. Why did NTFS develop a problem? Don’t know, but I won’t ever run the Verizon system optimizer again, that’s for sure. It’s the one thing I did differently yesterday than I usually do when doing a maintenance scan.
(Later still) Well… the first restart after the last thing I wrote resulted in a BSOD with PFN_LIST_CORRUPT. So I most likely have a hard memory error, or a bad device driver. I removed the Cisco VPN and its virtual adapter, and the error hasn’t returned. But just in case I burned a bootable Microsoft Memory Test CD.
Wolfram Alpha fizzle
When Google appeared, using it for only one minute convinced me to switch to it from AltaVista. Today it took only one minute for me to decide the new semantic — excuse me, “computational” — search engine Wolfram Alpha is of little to no use. A more informed and detailed critique of Alpha, damning with faint praise, is on Ars Technica.