Selection: Technology

Preparing to move all my domains to a new server, which will cost me more, but will be much faster. Especially danen.org has been really bogged down lately.

So... if you cannot get to one of my sites in the next few weeks, we're working on it!

The RSS feed is now available under the "other" menu selection. The RSS feed will update my Hyves page at gdanen.hyves.nl

If you have not used RSS before, it's worth checking out. Many news services also use RSS. 

I am in the process of adding an RSS feed for those interested.

If you're not interested, that's fine too.

Now that all websites have been migrated, it's time to switch from my DSL provider to our local high-speed cable provider.

Interbaun has served me well over the years, allowing me to run a web server from home on a static IP address. Yet the combination of off-site hosting and the higher speed of cable modem will in the long run be cheaper and more enjoyable.

So, goodbye Interbaun, hello Shaw. 

Although nobody's crystal ball is clear on the impact that the change in the daylight-saving time rules will have on enterprise IT systems and applications, the problems could be bigger than most people realize.

That's because IT shops have had less notice in dealing with the time change than they did for Y2K, and because the issue doesn't have visibility at the highest levels of an organization as it did for Y2K.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2098954,00.asp

This year's daylight-saving time change is causing major frustration for IT administrators running Microsoft programs that need to be individually patched to reflect the change.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2102366,00.asp

Daylight-Saving Date Changes, Conservation Remains

Energy use and the demand for electricity for lighting homes is directly connected to when we go to bed and when we get up. Bedtime for most of us is late evening through the year. When we go to bed, we turn off the lights and TV.

In the average home, 25 percent of all the electricity we use is for lighting and small appliances, such as TVs, VCRs and stereos. A good percentage of energy consumption for lighting and appliances occurs in the evening when families are home. By moving the clock ahead one hour, we can cut the amount of electricity we consume each day.

http://post-journal.com/articles.asp?articleID=13213

The Energy Policy Act of 2005 This act extends Daylight Saving Time in the U.S. beginning in 2007, though Congress retained the right to revert to the 1986 law should the change prove unpopular or if energy savings are not significant. The act stipulates that DST would begin on the second Sunday in March and end on the first Sunday of November. To confuse the issue, the European Union begins DST on the last Sunday in March and return to Standard Time on the last Sunday in October.

Why Daylight Saving?
Accordingly, the practice of Daylight Saving Time was enacted to save in the economical use of the production of energy. In the average home, 25 percent of all the electricity we use is for lighting and small appliances, such as TVs, VCRs and stereos. A good percentage of energy consumed by lighting and appliances occurs in the evening when families are home. By moving the clock ahead one hour, we can cut the amount of electricity we consume each day. However, this practice fails during the four darkest months of the year, November through February. According to research, by shifting time ahead one hour, many more people take advantage of the extra hour of daylight and are less prone to indoor activities which in turn, use less electricity. Studies done in the 1970s by the U.S. Department of Transportation show that we trim the entire country's electricity usage by about one percent EACH DAY with Daylight Saving Time. This translates to the saving of about 10,000 barrels of oil per day while on DST.

Why the second Sunday in March instead of the first Sunday?
There was a significant group who opposed the original proposition of adding two months to the 1986 enactment and the 2005 enactment, (which requested the last Sunday in February to the last Sunday in November for the DST period) is a result of a compromise ... four weeks instead of eight, for the addition.

http://www.wtoctv.com/Global/story.asp?S=5893867

RANT 

When will we do it AGAIN??? Previous legislation was less than 20 years old before this change. It really irks me that Canada blindly follows the US congress in these matters. We live after all in a global society, not a US society...

Daylight Savings Time (DST) starts 3 weeks earlier and lasts 1 week longer in most areas in North America starting 2007.

That means all devices that are programmed to automatically change to DST have to be updated. I'm not worried about my Windows computers, but my web server needed updating. There the fun began. I inadvertently installed a new kernel, which caused the server not to boot anymore. Took a bit of time to figure out how to undo that, but now I'm ready for the new rules for DST.

For a long time blogger.com was the place for people wanting to put up a blog.

Now there's a new game in town, VOX.com with many more sharing options. Just check a few sites to get an idea of nice design. Kit Carino's blog is a nice example. 

The Dell laptop is behaving silly again, slowing down even when nothing is running.

I initially thought it was only the hard drive, which I rebuilt several times, but now the clock does not keep proper time. This might be a motherboard problem. The wireless has been flaky for about half a year also.

Perhaps it's time to start looking at a new laptop, rather than trying to get it fixed. It's been running almost 3 years 24/7, so I can't really complain. I just complain that I have to spend money again... 

A spammer, whom authorities say emailed at least 9 billion unwanted advertisements, faces a hefty fine.

Dutch authorities have fined an unidentified man $US97,000 for sending "unsolicited electronic messages to consumers to promote erection enhancement pills, pornographic websites, sex products and such," the country's telecommunications watchdog "OPTA" said Friday.

Read more...  

<rant>
Internet Explorer sucks big time. Just look at fields 1,2, and 4. Why in the world are they yellow?
</rant>

Cookies (the computer kind) are a bitch to program. Setting cookies in both PHP and JavaScript for the same application only complicates things.

What really does not help is setting them with one name, and trying to read them with a different (i.e. wrong) name. Wasted several hours tracking that one down today...

For a limited time (it's a test site, so things change...), check test.danen.org/secure and play with the "customize" settings.

The note to self is to check the names of variables...

Spent 2 days moving files around so I won't lose anything.

That done, I went to play around today. I had noticed CTF loader messages when opening certain MS apps. Turns out that's for recognizing other languages. Uninstalling it did not help. Next step was to uninstall MS Office and Frontpage, do a complete CHKDSK and re-install MS Office and Frontpage.

After all that and several days of work, it seems the laptop is ok again. 

Almost the same thing is happening as happened in March this year. Had to reboot a number of times today to get the laptop going. However, FrontPage does not want to load. Safe mode, repairs, re-install, nothing works.

Before I muck around more, time for critical backups.

I will likely not be available much... 

Time for a new desktop computer for photo work. I am finding that I'm not very productive with 6mp images which will only get worse if I move to a higher mega-pixel camera next year.

Storage is also a problem with my current equipment. The new system comes with 500 mb, and can be expanded to 1 terabyte with an additional drive.

Should be here in 10 days or so. 

All You Need Is DOS
(With apologies to Lennon/McCartney)
Jeff Emsley - 2006

DOS, DOS, DOS, DOS, DOS, DOS, DOS, DOS, DOS.
There's nothing you can install that can't be batched.
No XCOPY that can't be matched.
Nothing you can say but you can learn how to write the code
It's easy.
There's no memory you can't LOADHIGH, and FIXBOOT will work if you just try
And if your computer has lag, just DEFRAG
It's easy.
All you need is DOS, all you need is DOS,
All you need is DOS, DOS, DOS is all you need.
DOS, DOS, DOS, DOS, DOS, DOS, DOS, DOS, DOS.
All you need is DOS, all you need is DOS,
All you need is DOS, DOS, DOS is all you need.
To see an IP you can just PING it.
To see what is happening use ECHO, you don't have to wing it.
No more cut and paste, just MOVE it.
It's easy.
All you need is DOS, all you need is DOS,
All you need is DOS, DOS, DOS is all you need.
All you need is DOS (all together now)
All you need is DOS (everybody)
All you need is DOS, DOS, DOS is all you need.

This was written for a person who does not understand how DOS batch files can make life MUCH easier when doing over 100 installs of a particular software package.

Quote form SitePoint's website...

SitePoint is a fast growing online media company and information provider targeting the Web professional market, specifically Web Developers and Designers. The company has five major revenue streams: advertising and sponsorship, content-based products both online and in retail, software, and more recently streaming video subscriptions and classified listings.

I have been getting their newsletters for a while, and it's worth it. If you're a web developer, check out Delivered Fresh to subscribe.

Fifteen years ago, Tim Berners-Lee formally introduced hypertext to the world on the alt.hypertext newsgroup. His aim was to link information from anywhere. He made the tools available to use hypertext on the internet. The world has not been the same since.

Read more on BBC News . 

Apparently I have missed some messages due to my computer crash. The wonders of technology...

Anyway, if you have emailed me since my laptop crash and have not received a reply, please re-send your message.

Finally got my laptop back up and running, although it's hard to re-install every single program I used in the past two years. Just copying files back from a variety of sources, so I can get back to working on my websites.

Almost right after yesterday's post, Windows blew up on my laptop. There was no saving it. So now I'm reinstalling everything. It's amazing how much one can accumulate on a computer in almost two years. A good time to start fresh, it's just darn inconvenient. I'd rather pick a time myself and not be forced into it. My biggest obstacle at the moment is that my wireless does not want to work. I'm sure I'll eventually figure it out...

I thought was it time to organize my movie collection, so I went looking for software. Found some web based software at konni.com.

If you have access to a web server with PHP5 and MySQL, it's worth checking out. It can locate all the movie information from the IMBD, the Internet Movie Database, saving you a lot of typing...

I could not find Uden Centraal today, so I was browsing other available stations.

Found DRS2006 Webreceiver at http://www.drs2006.com/index.html (a free download) to be a nice way to organize my internet radio stations. Check it out...

Turns out web radio is much more useful than I thought initially, when I was a manager trying to control bandwidth.

http://www.drs2006.com/Webreceiver.zip

I am trying out a new editor for entering blog posts. It's called TinyMCE and can be downloaded for free from Moxiecode Systems. Quite nice, but have to do more testing. I may make it availalble for blog commenting in the future.

At the moment, it seems to be missing the ability to insert links. I have to dig some more into the documentation...

My wife posed an issue today. She got a reply from somebody she did not know. He said "you keep sending me emails that should be for somebody else". Turns out she typed an email address wrong at some point and Outlook remembered it. Now whenever she typed "Marv" in the "to" field, she got the wrong address in addition to the good address, but the wrong one was at the top.

So the message went to the wrong person...

C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook has a number of files that can be deleted and the "to" options list will be cleared. Hopefully she will now pay more attention to the options, but if not I can always kill those files...

I came across an interesting report and although it is 3 years old, it is probably even more relevant today. Spam is getting worse and more hideous. If your email address is listed on a website, a newsgroup, or a public mailing list, you risk attacks of spam, phishing, identity theft and who knows what else.
Read the findings of the Unsolicited Commercial E-mail Research Six Month Report.

Got to tell you some more about this Dutch Internet radio channel. It's called Uden Centraal and it will play back through iTunes, RealPlayer (Phil?) and likely Windows Media Player.
Thank you again, Phil, for sending the link to me. It's not even the occasional Dutch song that attracts me, it's more the oldies I used to listen to in Holland. The old French and German songs...
Isn't nostalgia a funny thing. Nothing to do with who you are or where you were born. Just what you were exposed to in your early years.
Funny, at 10:30pm my time, 6:30am in Holland, the songs get really weird. It's Dutch, but, yech... Muziekanten, something... Noisy music but no intelligent lyrics.
It's supposed to get better at 7am.
To find it, go to http://www.shoutcast.com/ and under "Comprehensive Genre List" find the Oldies genre. Then search for "Uden".
Enjoy!

Spent a few hours cleaning out a spot for the new server. As the old one is still running, I need them both in place.
Apache, MySQL and PHP seem to be working OK, so now I'm making sure all my sites still run properly. I already found that all pages that use forms and database updates will need checking. Learning lots of new stuff in the process.

Picked up my new server from Vincent today. Now off to a time of configuration and testing. :)

Was watching "Call For Help" and they featured a person on web design. Here's his site: Box of Chocolates.

Could it be? Purolator tracking says my laptop is "on vehicle for delivery." For the other two shipments, that meant delivery that same day. That would be a great diversion at the right time!

By golly, it showed up just before 3PM. Now to see what's on it, and set it up to my liking...

Wireless worked at first, then not, and now again... Don't know how it got fixed, but it did.

Had a good dump of snow last night (2-3 inches), but most of it disappeared during the day.
Planted some seeds and bulbs today, ready for spring!
New toy to play with too... Here's a sample shot.

Mucked around most of the day hooking up the digital cable converter. Cecile is really confused now, with all those remote controls... :)