Technology: Crash!

_{Posted by Todd at 1:48 AM - Sunday, January 16, 2005}

This is turning into an annual event...

I just had another hard disk crash. This time, it's that new 80GB drive I put into my main desktop machine, dying after only two months of usage. It's definitely a heat problem; I can power the drive down for a while and access data from it later, until it gets too hot again and brings down the system. What a pain; hopefully I can just take it into PC Place and get a replacement and let them deal with the manufacturer.

This disk is a Samsung product. Their diagnostic tool needs a lot of work; it doesn't seem to like the fact that my main (working) drive is a Maxtor and refuses to do any diagnostics. Lovely. Maxtor's diagnostic tools don't have this problem; why should Samsung's?

I've gone through about five disk drives in the past three years; fortunately, I have been able to replace all of them under warranty.

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Technology: Social Software

_{Posted by Todd at 2:30 PM - Thursday, January 6, 2005}

Happy New Year everyone!

It was nice to get together with a few friends that I haven't seen in quite a while, as well as exchange the traditional phone calls and IM conversations with distant relatives. Otherwise, it was a fairly quiet Christmas, which suits me just fine.

Now that I'm back to writing software under a couple of small contracts, I've been thinking a bit about software design issues once again, both large and small. I stumbled upon this little gem, found (appropriately enough) via the LOSURS mailing lists. Nothing too earth-shattering, but clearly written and a good starting point for those interested in the subject.

If that doesn't have enough meat for you, go read Joel's Advice for Computer Science students. You'll be glad you did, or at least you'll enjoy a little quirky humor.

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Technology: The Sound of Silence

_{Posted by Todd at 8:03 PM - Friday, November 19, 2004}

For about a year and a half, my computer has been getting pretty noisy. The older of the two hard drives makes a pretty much constant whining noise that is really annoying. I finally decided to do something about it, and spent a whopping $100 on a brand new 80GB drive(!) Competition is hard on the manufacturers but the consumers sure do benefit from it...

My desktop is now the quietest PC in the house. What a nice change!

For those who are interested in going a little further with this idea, try checking out some online resouces on the subject.

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Technology: RSS and You

_{Posted by Todd at 11:42 PM - Monday, October 11, 2004}

I just finished implementing an RSS feed for my weblog. I'm going to talk a bit about why this matters, and how you can take advantage of it.

The basic idea behind RSS is this: weblogs and news sites generally add content by publishing "stories", in time order. An RSS reader allows you to retrieve a list of the latest stories, usually including a brief summary, without actually visiting the website. Depending on the program, this makes it easy to check the "headlines" from a large number of websites very quickly.

So, how can you try out this wonderful tool for yourself? Well, the latest version of Mozilla Firefox has a built-in RSS feature! When you visit a site that supports RSS, you'll see an RSS icon in the lower right corner of the browser window. Clicking on that brings up a menu that lets you "subscribe" to that website. Subscribing to a website creates a "live bookmark", which is basically a menu containing a list of the latest articles for that website. It's generated automatically, and you don't have to do a thing! Pretty neat eh?

I've been reading about the RSS technology and some of the standards debates that have been surrounding it. Neither is an "official" Internet standard as of yet, but for now, neither you or I should have to worry too much since they are both fairly well supported at the moment.

For all my fellow bloggers out there, I should mention that the weblogs you follow probably already support RSS!

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Technology: Laptop Update

_{Posted by Todd at 8:07 PM - Monday, October 4, 2004}

I decided to upgrade the kernel and drivers on my IBM ThinkPad, and boy am I glad I did! Many of the problems I used to have are now fixed. I also, at long last, managed to figure out how to get proper video output working within XFree86. I can now play videos and DVDs under Linux at full speed and they look great!

My laptop now works better under Linux than it does under Windows 2000 (which it came with).

If you'd like/need more information on what I did, visit the Linux section of my website.

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Technology: New Legs for an Old Idea

_{Posted by Todd at 2:36 PM - Friday, October 1, 2004}

From 1983 to 1987, I lived in the town of Nipawin, Saskatchewan. Around 1982 or so, the entire town chipped in to buy a large satellite dish. They used this dish to get channels like HBO and then rebroadcast them to the entire town. For the entire time I lived there, we had better TV shows and movies than most of the province, and essentially for free!

In any case, the town eventually got into trouble over this, and was forced to shut the system down and pay a fine as well.

It appears that Andrew Greig, a Toronto-based consultant, is about to pull the same stunt again with the help of open source and modern wireless technology.

Quoting from the article (PBS | I, Cringely):

But like hardly any of us, Andrew uses his WiFi network for Internet, television, and telephone. He cancelled his telephone line and cable TV service.
...
Now most of Andrew's neighborhood is watching digital TV with full PVR capability, making unmetered VoIP telephone calls, and downloading data at prodigious rates thanks to [Andrew's] shared bandwidth.

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