44 posts tagged “computing”

Vox was dead again for the last couple of days. Daisy has been very good and has replied to my messages, though it’s a bit annoying that no one else at Six Apart has. It still seems this problem is unique to me, but it can’t be if I can’t compose messages on Vox on any one of three different computers. (I’ll be trying from another office shortly, too, and we are both on the same ISP.)
   Complaining about Vox interrupts the flow of these posts a bit, especially when I just wanted to share these Wellington images with you. Christchurch seemed to have better weather when I visited.

I wonder if Vox is fixing its problems. I have been trying all morning to get the compose screen up, and here it is, after a couple of hours (as opposed to days). The only problem is, two hours on, the inspiration for writing the post has kind of left.
   Let’s see what I’ve put up lately that I had an intention to mention: how about this guy in a Chevy Camaro Transformer costume? Watch on: there’s a bit of a surprise. (Thanks to Tanya for this one.)

How odd, the compose screen comes up twice over a short period, despite being out of action for two solid days. Even before those two days, it was only working intermittently (but I could deal with clicking refresh for a few hours—a few days gets boring).
   Before the service goes away again, here are some shots I wanted to share with you of Christchurch from my last visit. These were shot from my suite at the Hotel Grand Chancellor.

Finally. The compose screen has taken two days of refreshes to load.
   So if any of you are wondering why I haven’t blogged, that’s why. I can’t. And waiting two days for the screen to appear is a little longer than the two seconds that it should take.
   After I click ‘Compose’, Vox just loads a blank screen. On viewing the source, there’s nothing there. Yet the browser reports ‘Done’.
   I filed a complaint with Vox today so hopefully they can fix it. However, so far I notice I am alone with this glitch as many of you are able to compose normally.
   Last time this happened, other antipodeans were affected as well, but I see Snowy, Ninja and Robin have been able to post to their Vox blogs lately.
   I think it could be my ISP, but yesterday and today I tried proxy servers and the compose screen still failed to come up. I’ve also tried Firefox and IE8, and Windows XP and Vista, all to no avail. I’ve also cleared the cookies.
   Until then, I am blogging a little at jackyan.com/blog and, for my mayoral campaign, at yourwellington.org.

I suspect I might go to Windows 7 some time in 2010 or 2011. The reason: I have an XP machine running the way I like it. My laptop is running Vista, the way I like it. I have no obligation to Microsoft’s share price. My obligation is to me and my productivity, and last I looked, technology serves me. As long as it does so, and does so reasonably, then the status quo is absolutely fine. In a year, maybe I might need the new features, but not now.
   For those considering upgrading, this PC World article is instructive.

Any mathematics’ whizzes out there?
   I am sitting here using QuattroPro, as I have done since the early 1990s. It’s always worked. Except today.
   This is the first time I have used the program on the new computer, so I think there must be something incompatible in there.
   Feeding in 15.28 into a numerical cell, the computer insists that I typed 3.28. However, in the formula window up top, it shows 0.644444444444445.
   So I tried putting in 15+.28, assuming that would give me 15.28. The computer believes the answer is 6.43, though the formula window is correct.
   The cell is a numerical one—as the whole column has been since 2002.
   Can anyone see relationships between what is being typed and what is being displayed?

I was glancing at the laptop and what it could see of the head-office network today (without going into the network itself):

If you told me 10 years ago that a simple office network would have over a terabyte of hard drive space, I would have laughed at you.
   The laptop itself has 320 Gbyte, and the two hard drives it can reach have 1·5 Tbyte between them. The cellphone alone has over 2 Gbyte.
   Not long ago my main computer was on 80 Gbyte, the design computer was on 40 Gbyte, and I think the laptop had something in the region of 10 Gbyte, less than a tenth of the above. The cellphone had 40 Mbyte.
   And I am sure it is within living memory for many of us when 40 Mbyte seemed to be endless space for a home computer. That’s what I had on my PC, and it was double what my closest friend had on his.
   We are getting to the point where the time involved in deleting a file exceeds the cost of retaining it. These numbers will be perfectly normal to so many people now, especially younger readers, while I still marvel at them.

Apart from announcing that I would run for mayor of Wellington, the week was dominated by this:

   This computer belonged to my friend Nigel, who moved to Australia earlier this week. And as he’s very “in” to web development and graphics, he has to have the latest and greatest—which meant that this unit, even though it’s grunty and would put many modern computers to shame, sat in his shed. He generously gave it to me.
   The DVD, hard and floppy drives are mine, which at least explains the mismatched colour of the first. The floppy was originally a gift as well from another friend who was disposing a 1998-vintage PC. Interestingly, despite everything being beige in those pre-Imac days, this one happened to be black, so I took that rather than the one I had used on my old PC.
   I have now a healthy appreciation of what computer-makers do when systems are built. The unit came without the drivers, etc., and with a few faults that Nigel warned me about. When I was in Auckland two weeks ago, he plugged it in and there was no display; prior to that the main fan was faulty.
   Step by step, I (with more than a little help from Dad—who still seems to be more logical brain-wise than a lot of these younger computer types) brought this PC back to life, installed the right drivers (thank goodness for the internet) and the programs. I took the opportunity to upgrade at least one, while I had to ask for new registration numbers for two (which came overnight).
   Things went fairly smoothly other than the motherboard drivers—I put in the wrong ones and replacing them forced the computer to run so slowly that Windows XP took 40 minutes to boot! However, a System Restore fixed that and it is back to normal.
   I’m pretty proud of myself as among the tasks I had was editing a DLL for a 1995 program that would not work on newer computers. I’m certainly no computer programmer (I did take a course in BASIC and LOGO in 1984 though), but the changes (as suggested by a hacker on a forum) worked. In another case, I had a technical issue and found the solution on a forum where I had posted the answer. What was interesting was how long it takes to replace 10 years’ worth of stuff: three days.
   There remains a couple of issues. There is still one entry in the System Devices that has a yellow warning exclamation mark next to it, but the last time I tried fixing that, we had the motherboard driver issue. Secondly, while this baby is on auto-detect for the LAN speed, another computer at the office is going at a mere 10 Mbit/s when I know it is capable of going at 100 Mbit/s. Yet when I put both at the same 100 Mbit/s speed, the transfers go at about a tenth of the speed that they were going at when the settings were 10 Mbit/s and auto. It’s the exact opposite to what I expect, but it would not be the first time that network settings have had me stumped.
   Meanwhile, I have to give props to old faithful, which we used to refer to as Moneypenny (the name assigned to the hard drive):    While I’ve had a few new machines in here, I stuck with my old desktop PC. Thanks to swapping out the DVD drives, what is in here is Nigel’s. And this machine has been very good to me for over 10 years, and if you have accumulated this much stuff, then you’re a bit hesitant to take time out to redo everything on a new system. In fact, I doubt I would have proceeded with the “upgrade” if I went into a store with a couple of grand. I got a bit attached to a very faithful computer. But when you have a unit that is much newer and faster sitting in your office, despite its faults, then you have to act. You almost feel compelled to fix something that is broken.
   Of course, no one can run an international company on a computer if it stayed the same as it was in March 1999. This has been the subject of motherboard, CPU and RAM upgrades over that time, usually done by a real expert, though I did the RAM stuff myself (not that hard). It ran OK, but when I bought the Asus laptop, I found myself on that all the time. And stuff in this family just keeps going—they seem to like being here.
   The new machine does mean greater productivity, so expect to see me work more rather than blog, which was what I tended to do on the laptop because I enjoyed the better speed and, admittedly, the Windows Vista interface.
   It didn’t help that I had early starts on most days this week, after tinkering with the computer at night, attending several functions (including the Montana World of Wearable Art Awards last night) and going to bed at 3 or 4 a.m. So any typos above are mine. Hopefully I can rest up tonight. But for now, a big, public thank-you to Nigel.

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It would be a pain in the ass cleaning grubby fingerprints off the screen.

Gosh, don’t these computer boffins test anything any more?
   I installed Firefox 3.5.3 today on my laptop. I had heard that most of my plug-ins were compatible with the program, and as it is the fourth incarnation of the 3.5 series, I thought: surely the errors had gone. But I kept some healthy scepticism on the grounds that ‘improvement’ in the computer world usually means that I would waste time downloading something and have it blow up in my face.
   This was no exception.
   It not only created a bug with one of our sites, which could have been coincidental, I found some rudimentary interface issues. Pressing down on the mouse wheel, on some sites, did not open the page in a new tab. Again, I doubt I am alone.
   In Firefox 3 in the past, one could select text and drag it into the Google Toolbar search box. The behaviour then would be: the text would be, if it was comprised of multiple words, framed in dumb quotation marks. The text existing inside the box would disappear in favour of the new phrase. The Google Toolbar would automatically begin the search.
   Not any more. And this is not Google’s fault. The latest toolbar works fine with Firefox 3.0.14 on my desktop machine. It just doesn’t work with 3.5.
   All that happens is that the text is pasted in to the box, wherever the cursor happens to land. The old text is not deleted. The search does not activate.
   This is one of the most basic, oft-used, everyday features in a web browser in 2009—but Firefox 3.5 does not support it.
   I was advised to upgrade on the Mozilla forums. That’ll teach me to listen to computer boffins. I now have a buggy browser that has caused me some frustrations already in its first few hours. It is also not that noticeably faster than its predecessor.
   People: test, test, test. I am not asking the world here. I am just asking that things work reasonably.
   Ten to one no one has bothered filing a big report because they are quite happy to tolerate crap. I shouldn’t judge: after all, I am still on Facebook. If I was that intolerant, I would file a complaint with them every day. Instead, I only file one every two weeks and still manage to refrain from calling Mark Zuckerberg a nonce.
   So a nickel’s worth of advice today: if you haven’t “upgraded” to 3.5, don’t.