Category: Tech

Who Am I?

WHO R U

A friend where I work needed a favor. She had an idea for a presentation that required the old Who song “Who Are You” — but it couldn’t have the swear words in it.

I was in the radio business when the song came out, and there was a short, cleaned-up single version.  Not having the single handy, I made one of my own. Although the question should be asked, who am I to touch a Who song?

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Sounds/Wordpress/OCT06/SongEdit.mp3,http://www.dograt.com/Sounds/Wordpress/OCT06/SongOriginal.mp3]

On the audio player is my edit, followed by the original. This was transferred from the vinyl LP I bought the week that the album was released in 1978. I don’t think the album is all that great, actually, so I never bought the CD.

Can you tell where the four edits are? The deletion at 4:38 was the trickiest.  It’s at 5:34 in the unedited cut.

AIEE-IE7

Internet Explorer 7 is now running on one of our home computers.  The most obvious change is that it does tabbed browsing, which is something that Firefox users already do.  Another addition is that IE finally reliably displays “favicons.”

A favicon is a mini-icon that appears in the address field of a browser.  I’ve just added a favicon to DogRat.com.  This is how it appears in IE7.

Nice!  Just as I wanted it.  So yay to that much about IE7.  But I’m sorry to say it screws up something else.  It’s cropping the bottom of the site title.

Boo, IE7!

Boo!  Perhaps I need to edit the style sheet, or maybe Microsoft has done something for which there is no easy workaround.  I’ll look into it, but not today.

666 = rw-rw-rw


What is the significance of the 755, mentioned in the previous posting?  Click the picture to watch an excellent animated presentation on UNIX file permissions.

It shows you how binary numbering works, compared to the decimal numbering that we taken for granted, because we have two hands with five digits each.  The value of 1112 is 710.  So the decimal numbers for the permissions are 755, 744, etc., and are pronounced “seven, five, five,” and not “seven hundred fifty-five.”

Bible Tech

This week’s Boston Sunday Globe had an article about The Massachusetts Bible Society’s struggle to survive in the Internet Age:

The Massachusetts Bible Society, a 197-year-old organization that distributed Bibles to seamen during the war of 1812 and welcomed 19th-century immigrants to Boston’s docks with free Scriptures, has sold its downtown building, is about to close its wood-paneled bookstore, and is trying to reinvent itself for a world in which the latest theological treatises are just a mouse-click away.

If the link above to the full article doesn’t work (registration may be required) click here. Hey, look at that. Comic-books are mentioned…

… and a now-missing set of 1940s Bible stories published by the editors of DC Comics, has for years been housed at the Boston University School of Theology.

As I explained previously in this blog, during college I was an Evangelical Christian. Or at least I tried to be. Although I am no longer a church-goer, that doesn’t mean I don’t read the Bible. But these days I read it online.

Bible Link

Another previous post was about my new SanDisk flash drive with U3 software. Recently, a U3 version of a free program called Bible Link Basic became available. There are add-ons that cost money, but I’m a relatively casual Bible reader.

    Click here

Here’s a screen grab of the small toolbar that comes up when Bible Link is started. From the toolbar you can search the Internet or view local copies of two different versions of The Bible. Click the toolbar image to see a full-size copy of the Bible viewer. Additional translations are available for download at reasonable cost.

The reduced images of the viewer above show how you can navigate by dragging the numbers on the right; (1) for books, (2) for chapters, and (3) for verses. Another neat feature is you can either read just the New American Standard or King James version, or you can view both, one above the other.

So here already is another nifty U3 application for flash drives. I never quite saw the need for a PDA, but this approach to portable applications and data is making a convert of me.