Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of forwarded or group invites for kinds of things about not buying gas for a day, not buying gas from the two largest oil companies, or even everyone not using electricity for an hour (One Hour NO Power). These are ambitious endeavors for problems I agree are present. My…
What two web sites would you combine? Why? Let’s Make Website Mashups, Like Netflickr, Figg and BoingPress: It seems to me — for the purposes if this column — that the best way to reduce this clutter is to combine domains, creating a new site that incorporates the strengths of both the originals. I call…
Remember the commercials for the cereal where the kids decide to give Mikey the stuff to see if he likes it? Someone sent me a WordPerfect document. Its been years since I got one of those. Office XP obviously doesn’t open it without scouring the Microsoft web site for the coverters. Before subjecting myself to…
Some of my latest work has been in chasing cheaters or “Vista ate my homework” claims. Some background: I work for a project that hosts online classes for 32 of the 35 universities in our system. We have about 125,000 users who have performed at least 100 actions this term. We have had about 50…
So I scanned some baby pictures I found for posting on Flickr. I noticed the memory gage on Corsair (I’m a geek, I name my computers) was near full, so rather than deal with swapping, I clicked the Close button on iTunes. It reclaimed about 1/3 my memory usage which is exactly what I wanted.…
I took a college course on FORTRAN in college. At the time I was a Pre-Engineering major with aspirations to transfer to a program requiring it. In my entire educational career I haven’t taken much in programming classes: QBasic Fortran Java Actually, that is all the programming languages I’ve learned (and through lack of use…
Flickr now has collections (a set of sets). I’ve moved my sets into collections. For a while I have not been taking good care of my sets. I was waffling between naming sets similarly and putting related sets near each other. Now, with collections I can do this more effectively. Just what a librarian minded person…
Time Change a ‘Mini-Y2K’ in Tech Terms – New York Times: For the roughly 7,000 public companies in the United States, Mr. Hammond estimates the total cost of making computer fixes to deal with the daylight saving time shift at more than $350 million. “It’s causing a lot of corporate technology people sleepless nights,†he…