Category: Tech

Problem

As I feared would happen, the conversion of my site to iPower’s new management platform has made a mess of things. My oldest blog post is now my newest. AUGHH! If you click on the individual categories you should be all right. I’ll start the troubleshooting process….

UPDATE: Indeed, there’s been an update. A big one. WordPress is now the absolute newest version, which seems to have fixed the problem. It was no surprise this update was necessary, but I would like to say that the iPower support guys confirmed this for me, in a matter of minutes. So kudos and not brickbats to them.

The only casualties I’ve spotted so far are the “Contact” and “Gallery” pages on the navigation bar, and that seems to be a problem with the theme. I should be able to fix that with some minor code edits, or maybe I’ll finally try a new theme. Please let me know what quirks and blow-ups you come across. Hopefully no blow-ups!

UPDATE update: Well, what I just did seemed to have fixed the navigation bar problem. So if you were hoping I’d pick a new theme, you’ll just have to wait! 😉

Media Matters

Having been, in a relatively small way, in both the broadcast and print media, I’m fascinated by the blurring effects the Internet has had between these industries. Newspapers have been hit the hardest, and they’re doing what they can to adapt, mostly by taking advantage of the Web.

One innovation is to use blogging software, so letters to the editor can now be comment threads. Another approach is to add video. The suburban paper here, The Metrowest Daily News, posts videos on YouTube that are relatively rough, but servicable. Some are interviews, while others capture events, such as this suspicious truck fire at a Bose (the Wave Music System) Corporation parking lot.

Larger newspapers, such as The Boston Globe, are now posting slickly-produced videos to complement their feature stories. The video below goes with the story at this link, and I think it does a good job of helping to get the writer’s point across.By the way, as I’ve pointed out before, the newspaper business had decades of warning that changes were coming. The very thing that was a great burden and expense, the printing and distribution of paper, was also a primary reason (along with literacy) for the success of newspapers, because it gave them control over access.

Papers liked to promote the idea that a single copy would be read by more than one person, but of course they preferred that not too much of that went on. Readership is only a guess, while circulation is a known number, and it’s always better to sell more copies.

DELLiciously Mine

The estimated delivery date for my new DELL Inspiron 530 was two weeks, but here it is five days later, and I’m using it right now. The integrated video connector is, alas, merely VGA, but as I said before that’s all right with me, and eventually I’ll get a standalone video card with DVI.

And lest any doubters out there think XP Home doesn’t support a Quad-Core processor, this fragment of a screen shot is from Device Manager…

Intel Quad Core

… and this is from the performance tab of Task Manager.

Intel Quad Core

DELLicious?

My home computer is five years old, and mastering videos is painfully slow. So it’s time to give it to The Kiddo and buy something new. Here’s the link to what I ordered. A DELL Inspiron 530, Intel quad-core, for $500.

The only upgrade I took was for 3 GB of 800 MHz memory, instead of 667 MHz. This seems to be a rock-bottom price on a pre-made quad-core system. Take note that I ordered it with Windows XP. I first bought XP literally the day it came out, but I have yet to want Vista; which has been out for over a year, and still has driver problems, as well as placing a significant drag on system speed compared to XP.

If this machine has everything I think it’s supposed to have — DVI (rare for integrated video) and two open PCI slots — I’ll be very pleased. If it has only a VGA connector I can live with that, but I won’t be as pleased. Estimated arrival is in about two weeks. I’ll let you know how it looks and works.

Oh. One more thing. XP works with multi-core processors. For licensing, Microsoft counts the number of processor sockets, not the cores. XP Home supports one processor, and XP Pro supports two processors, regardless of the number of processor cores.

Tecch Support

A little ways back I posted a clip from the first Superman movie, with Gene Hackman as Lex Luthor. In that scene his henchman, Otis, played by Ned Beatty, has a black eye. Lex gave it to him earlier in the movie after Otis screwed up a slightly challenging technical assignment.

[flv:/Video/2008/APR/LexLuthor.flv 448 252]

Those numbers may as well be an IP address! I love this scene, and I’m fond of quoting it at work, because it perfectly dramatizes the reality of life in high tech, where support people who are earnestly working hard, and trying to do their job right, nevertheless totally screw it up.

Human Voice Recorded in Dirt — 1860

The earliest known recording of the human voice is from 1860, and it was recorded in dirt! Scratches made along paper with a layer of soot, to be precise. The phonautograph was invented by Frenchman Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville, and it was the inspiration for Edison’s phonograph. Recently, engineers recovered this amazing recording of a singing woman.

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/2008/MAR/phonautogram.mp3]

Rough, but recognizable and thoroughly amazing! Compare this to the nanotube FM radio I featured at this link. Neither recording is high fidelity, but both represent the absolute state-of-the-art in technology for their time.