ThoughtAsylum

I’ve been looking at a number of things in the hours since my last post, but I’ve still a bit of work to do before I start blogging about any of those. Instead I thought I’d share with you a bit about one of my favourite little gadgets - The Maxell 12GB Hard Drive.

Once upon a time the humble computer was not the multimedia hub that it is today.  If you wanted a sound then you had to use the internal speaker that could just make a beeping noise.  Modern PCs still contain such a speaker -its useful for giving warnings on the POST (Power On Self Test)  part of the boot.

The shine may have rubbed off a little and the mullet dated somewhat but I still have a soft spot for the MacGyver series and I still wish today that I knew 1% of what he did and could do 1% of what he could with a roll of gaffer tape and a pen knife.  Unfortunately I ever did manage to cram everything into my head.

Back in ‘97 I was working on a visual tool for the solution of some algebraic equations as part of my Masters in Computer Science and I reached a point quite quickly where my code exceeded 32KB.  Windows notepad stopped working.  I had a magazine CD lying around with loads of free and shareware tools on it so I had a browse through the CD and I came across a text editor that fit the bill.  It was actually quite cool and it had a tabbed interface and let me open several files at once that were bigger than 32KB - I was very impressed.

I haven’t posted anything about martial arts yet but some activity yesterday gives me an excellent reason to post a brief congratulations to some guys who were grading for Jiu Jitsu Dans yesterday.  So congratulations to one of my old students Sensei Bhachu who gained his Shodan and also to one of my instructors Sensei Lycett who has reached the lofty height of Sandan.

Because NoteTab is my favourite text editor and it can be ‘programmed’ using the inbuilt clipping language I thought I’d share some aspects around one of my NoteTab clipbooks used for working with VBS files; Microsoft’s Visual Basic scripting still gives me a quick and easy way to implement automations and NoteTab simply helps me do that even faster.

A couple of days ago I posted about using NoteTab to ease the encryption of VBS files to VBE files using Microsoft’s Script Encyption utility.  I mentioned at the time that this encyption was in fact reversible.  So today I’m going to show you how this is achieved.

The Internet has been abuzz with the news of the release of Power Pack 1 for Windows Home Server (WHS PP1) a couple of days ago.  I’ve had an HP Media Smart Server for several months and have been waiting like so many others for this update to fix the infamous data corruption bug.

I teach a lot of students a lot of locks in my martial arts classes.  This involves entangling and applying pressure to the joints of the body in order to cause a level of discomfort (pain) that allows someone to be controlled - be it wrist locks, arm locks, leg locks, shoulder locks, finger locks or head locks.

The thing about security in the digital age is that pretty much everything is governed by passwords.  I have so many to remember these days that it’s just not funny any more.  Some of them have particularly stringent complexity enforced on them making them that much harder to commit to memory … particularly as it’s full of obscure user IDs.

I recently updated iTunes to version 7.7 on my XP desktop recently and today I plugged my iPod video in to synchronise.   The whole thing froze up and iTunes effectively became non-responsive.

As every good martial artist knows, duck the roundhouse kick to the head and you might just live long enough to be hit by the fist behind the beard of Chuck Norris. The question is how can his Walker Texas Ranger character manage to make those round house kicks to the head when his jeans fit so well?

As an IT enthusiast I have far too many computers.  I won’t even begin to go into just how many and the various states of repair, but the point is I have more than one computer and from my other posts you may also have noted that I like to have my IT on the move.

It’s been several weeks since I last posted something here.  This is beause I’ve been rather busy preparing to get married, getting married, and then having a honeymoon.  Anyway I’m back and I’d thought I’d write a little something about a little task I set myself a few days back.

There are lots of different photo albums out there available to upload your photos to.  I’ve looked before at flickr and I even have a photobucket account somewhere, but I had a situation recently where these didn’t quite fit my needs.

I run a number of web sites on a relatively cheap hosting service called Dataflame.  My current bandwidth doesn’t let me run sites particularly well from home (just yet anyway), and the technical issues I’ve had sometimes have been infuriating, but for the price, I think the service is probably quite reasonable.

I’ve been migrating some web site content over the last few days onto a new installation of Drupal.  The original site is still in place but in order for the Drupal site to run properly I needed to install it to the site root and set it offline.  Originally I’d redirected the domain URL to the old index.html page, but this caused a few problems for Drupal saving settings.

Last week I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to visit Old Billingsgate in London for the MISCO Expo ‘08.  After standing in line for twenty minutes a good few hundred yards from the entrance I managed to get in and was pleasantly presented with a Wenger laptop backpack and a nifty wireless Kensington mouse.  The venue was quite small but there were plenty of suppliers packed in.

I’ve been training in martial pursuits for my whole adult life and I am now facing a publicity problem.  What makes people want to join a martial arts club?

I’ve been working on a few updates on web sites recently and like many web site developers I have been struggling with some nice browser based variations.  I hope one day to find that Internet Explorer will actually display pages the same way every other browser seems to be able to without a special style sheet tweak or HTML workaround.

I recently changed my mobile phone to a Samsung Omnia i900.  Whilst there are several issues with it at the moment - mainly due to Vodafone being way behind on tweaking any of the Samsung firmware releases, I’ve found it to be a good phone, but it hasn’t been great at getting the contact data off of my previous phone; a Sony Ericsson K800i. After trying a few options I managed to get a neat transfer of data that worked well.

One of the problems I’ve found frustrating recently with my Samsung Omnia i900 mobile phone is the Opera mobile browser bookmarks. The browser has been preloaded by my operator with a number of bookmarks that I have no use for.

One of the most useful little scripts I’ve written allows me to copy a file’s path to the clipboard.  This provides a quick and easy way of pasting it into a file attachment dialog or even into the body of an e-mail. It’s certainly one of the most useful little automations I use on a daily basis.

I thought I’d start my first post on my new blos with a bit about why I’m starting it. For the last couple of days I’ve been attending an event for The Higher Education Academy where the staff from all of our subject centres and our office in York got together to collaborate and discuss various topics as well as have a bit of a seasonal do.

A little while back prompted  by a discussion doing the rounds on the Academy technical group I had a bit of a look into quick response codes (QR Codes).  These are a type of data matrix represented by a collection of  pixels in a square grid that are usually used to represent something like a URL.

I’ve been running a Windows Home Server for almost a year now but in trying to set-up a new FTP server (which caused some very odd networking issues with my router) and came across an odd issue. I’m guessing this may be down to one of the various updates I’ve applied to my server as I’ve not had cause to tinker with it since before I applied the Power Pack 1 upgrade.

My background is as a systems developer and I like to think that I’m quite a good developer in so much as I like to achieve outcomes using the minimum of effort. In my book “a good programmer is a lazy programmer”. So whilst this post does not relate in any way to programming it does relate to me finding ways in which to update this blog with the minimum of effort. In this particular case through something you may have noticed a little way down on the right side of the page called “Spot IT”.

One of the biggest things in the Academy is communication. Just like any other organisation there’s a whole heap of discussion about the right ways to communicate and about who receives what information, and about what constitutes too little and information versus information overload. There will never be a perfect fit for everyone, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t worth exploring the options we have available and trying things out from time to time.

When it comes to podcasting Apple is the king.  The iPod and its variations lead the market and  the software bundled with Mac OS X makes creating any sort of podcast a breeze.  Unfortunately not everyone has access to an Apple Mac be it for financial reasons or for internal IT related issues.  Creating podcasts from Windows is a little more laborious, but with the right tools it can be made much easier.