http://www.ComputerBob.com/journal_archive/2008/06.php .
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A few people have already registered for my brand new
Survivors Forum, but so far, no one has posted any messages there. The forum's slogan is, "If you're still alive, you're a survivor." Judging by all of the email messages that I get from this site's visitors, we've each lived through one or more difficult, life-changing experiences, so each of us has the potential to be a real help and encouragement to many other people who are going through the same things in their lives. Please sign up for my Survivors Forum and share your survival stories with the rest of us. If no one wants to be the first to post, I plan to start the ball rolling by posting one of my survival stories later today.
Recently, someone anonymously posted a 38-page critique of eBay's proposal to accept only PayPal payments in Australia. Of course, it's perfectly ethical and acceptable to critique eBay anonymously —
or is it?
If you spill some cooking oil onto your kitchen counter, how do you clean it up? It makes sense to me that oil companies should
do the same thing when they spill some oil.
The man who invented the Pringles potato chip can has died. I would tell you to insert your own lame joke here about how he was being buried, but his children
already did it for you.
If you wish that there were more cameras watching every move you make, everywhere you go, then boy have I got
some good news for you.
Yesterday, I added my own story about surviving a violent assault to my brand new Survivors Forum. I invite you to read it, to respond to it, and to share your own survival stories with the rest of us. If you're still alive, you're a survivor. Please join my forum and tell us how you did it.
Each additional one increases the chances that there may eventually be some justice in the case: Denmark has become
the fourth country to formally protest the ISO's recent, incredibly flawed approval of Microsoft's incredibly flawed OOXML document format as an international standard.
Several different times in the past, I've seriously considered moving my web sites to web hosting providers that were housed in
The Planet's extremely impressive datacenter in Texas. After all, they've thought and planned for anything that could possibly go wrong with a datacenter — make that
almost anything.
I love bananas. I eat sugar-free banana pudding all the time. I also love banana bread, but I haven't eaten any in a long, long time, because it's very sugary and contains a lot of fat. I have a friend who absolutely hates bananas. He can't even stand to smell them. He'll probably be happy to hear about the current
threat to the entire world's banana crops. UPDATE: I sent him an email message, asking him "What did you do?" Here's his reply: "OOPs.... I guess my little experiment got out of hand... I didn't think the disease would spread that fast.... honest ! ! !! Sorry about that...."
This story spans the topics of both medicine and psychology: A man developed a rare form of cancer in one eye that would normally have resulted in the loss of that eye. But in his case, it gave him
The Persistence of Vision: A Story of Freakish Perception.
Yesterday, I had my web hosting provider move all of my web sites to a different, more-established server. I asked them to that because the server that my sites were being hosted on kept getting spamlisted, apparently because of the mistakes of new web hosting clients whose web sites were on that same server. Now my web sites are on a server with longer-term clients whose server hasn't had any blacklisting problems.
If you continued to see yesterday's Journal entry for a long time into today, it's because when you move a web site to a different server, it takes a couple of days for the rest of the Internet to "learn" about the new server's location. In the meantime, people continue to see the web site running on the old server. If you're reading this, you're getting this web site from the new server.
It seems that no matter how hard the good guys work to protect their stuff, the bad guys always find a way to get into it. Now, two computer scientists in England have reportedly "managed to attack the Microsoft's CAPTCHA used on several of their online services such as Hotmail and Windows Live,
with over 92% recognition rate." That's another perfect good example of why I don't trust any of the free webmail providers with any of my private data.
And now
there are five.
In a technological update to the centuries-old theological conundrum, scientists are now wondering, "How many robots can
dance on the head of a pin?"
It was poorly built. And they were foolish enough to build it on swampland. Still, that didn't stop people from spending more than $46 million (USD) in the latest attempt
to keep it from falling down.
Today's Journal entry about this web site getting its one-millionth visitor is now a separate article. You can find Thanks A Million! in this site's Personal Stuff section.
Yesterday's Journal entry about this web site getting its one-millionth visitor is now a separate article. You can find Thanks A Million! in this site's Personal Stuff section.
You wouldn't believe me if I told you how many hours I spent in the past two days, relentlessly troubleshooting this web site's Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). But no matter what I tried, I kept seeing the following problems that had suddenly appeared a few days ago:
I even tried restoring individual lines from an older backup of this site's CSS styles, but it didn't solve the problem.
After a lot of copying and pasting, I finally realized that the only difference between the CSS styles in the old CSS file and the CSS styles in my current CSS file was the fact that I had removed the dark borders around the main content div a few days ago, to give the entire site a "softer" look.
Eureka! As an experiment, I added the dark top and bottom borders back onto the main content div, and suddenly everything displayed where it was supposed to display — including this site's home page, articles and forum admin pages. So I changed the CSS to make the main content div's top and bottom borders white and only 1 pixel wide, and the problem was solved. I also put a comment into my CSS file to remind me to never delete those borders again.
So if you've noticed that some things here didn't quite look normal for the past few days, or if you've been here often enough to have seen some of the sometimes-bewildering results of my various CSS-troubleshooting experiments, now you know the rest of the story.
Regular readers of this Journal know that I've been happily using Linux full-time instead of Windows for almost the past 2 years. If you're still on the fence about trying Linux, take a look at
Microsoft Free — One Year Later. Yeah, I know — the article's editor should have hyphenated the phrase Microsoft-Free.
It's written in a weirdly self-referencing, first-person-grandiose style that I personally find annoying, but if you have more patience for that sort of thing than I do, you might get a kick out of
How Linux Saved My Life.
My new Survivors Forum is getting a lot of visits from readers, but not very many people have become registered users yet, and only one person has posted a message there besides me. To try to get some discussions going, I'm going to post a story about my brother's suicide there as soon as I finish writing today's Journal entry.
If you read yesterday's Journal entry, then you know all about the recent troubleshooting that I did on this web site's CSS for a few days. One of the tools that helped me through that frustrating process was
Browsershots.org, which shows you screenshots of any web page that you choose, displayed in any browser(s) that you choose. Since I run Linux full-time, I use Browsershots to show me how my web pages look in Microsoft Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8 in Windows and in Safari on the Mac.
If you're still using Windows XP, then I hope you already know that XP Service Pack 3 is
not yet ready for prime-time.
We have met Big Brother — and apparently he's Swedish: "Sweden is on the verge of passing a far-reaching wiretapping program that would greatly expand the government's spying capabilities by permitting it to monitor
all email and telephone traffic coming in and out of the country."
It sounds like something out of a science-fiction novel, but it's a scientific fact: Robots are now
having children and grandchildren
Is it possible to be running a Linux PC and still get infected by a Windows XP viruses? Only if you're gullible enought to believe
this scam.
Five years ago, when I built the PC that I'm using to write this Journal entry, I was a full-time Windows user, teacher and tech-support person. At that time, I chose to use an Asus motherboard in it because I had read that they were fast and dependable, and it has served me well. Now, as a full-time Linux user, I have
even more reason to use an Asus motherboard if I build another PC.
When it comes to air travel, there will probably always be a struggle between those who seek to protect the rights of travelers and those who seek to provide security for those same travelers. But based on
the latest airline security news, you're not going to see me traveling by air any time soon.
Who says that General Motors is way behind when it comes to developing and marketing hybrid vehicles? I'm guessing that they're people who know that GM is hoping to start selling
a hybrid van in 2010 — a full 13 years after Toyota began selling its Prius hybrid.
Throughout his trial, he repeatedly claimed his innocence, insisting that he didn't have anything to do with his wife's disappearance. But his "geek defense" made judicial history as he told increasingly implausible stories to try to explain pieces of strong circumstantial evidence against him, like the fact that his wife's blood was found in his car, and that he had removed and thrown away the car's passenger seat the day after she had disappeared. Still, as his defense attorney repeatedly pointed out, the prosecution didn't present any direct evidence to prove that any crime had even been committed, let alone murder. But there should be no doubt in anyone's mind that the jury was correct when it convicted computer genius Hans Reiser of murdering his wife Nina, now that he has
offered to lead authorities to her body in exchange for a lighter sentence.
This morning, I added a couple more of my own stories to my Survivors Forum. One story tells about the stroke I had last year that put the left side of my body to sleep. The other is about me losing over 100 pounds after my stroke. I invite you to visit my Survivors Forum — read some stories, leave some comments and tell us about some of the things that you've survived in your life. If you're scared or embarrassed to share your stories, just register with an anonymous nickname, so no one will know who you are. That's what I do.
If you're a Linux user (like me) and you prefer to use KDE as your desktop environment (like me), you're going to want to take a look at
20 Essential KDE Applications - Review.
Have you seen the upcoming Firefox 3's new features? Sure, you may have read about them, but have you seen them? Well, now
you can.
I always say: A smart person learns from their mistakes. A wise person learns from others' mistakes. Keep that in mind when you read
How to Buy The Wrong Color Laser Printer.
They're often a pain in the neck for users, mostly because they're so hard to read. Unfortunately, those CAPTCHAs that you have to deal with in order to register for many online services are currently still the best way to keep automated spambots from flooding services like my Survivors Forum with mountains of junk messages. Here's a little background on
how they work as well as how it's possible to get around them.
Do you think it would be a good idea if the energy that people use to walk around could be turned into electricity? See what you think after you read
Light Fantastic: Pedestrians To Generate Power.
Here's a woman who used Windows most of her life, but now she has
switched to Ubuntu Linux. See what she says about it if you're wondering what it would be like to switch.
When Windows users switch to using Linux, one of the first things a lot of them ask on support forums is "How do I defragment my Linux hard drive?" Linux vets already know the answer to that question, but if you don't, then take a look at
UNIX File System Fragmentation.
At first glance, a new TSA rule for passengers on airline flights looks like a good way to help stop terrorists — but at least one author says that the new rule is
seriously flawed.
I hate it when the grocery store packs my shopping cart-full of groceries into those thin recyclable plastic bags that don't hold very much, are hard to pick up, and tip over while I'm driving, dumping grocery items all over the inside of my car. And after several trips to the store, they fill up an entire kitchen cabinet until I take them to a local fruit stand that is happy to reuse them. I think I'd probably run into some of the same problems with the tiny reusable burlap bags that they sell at the checkout line. I miss the large, thick paper bags that they used to use. They held a lot of groceries, didn't tip over, and folded flat when they were empty. That's why, in the future, I'd probably buy some inexpensive reusable grocery shopping bags, if they were made of
super paper.
If you've hung around here much today, you've probably noticed various error messages appearing intermittently at the top or bottom of my web pages. That's because I installed and tried over 20 different page counter scripts — looking for a replacement for the text-file-based Spidercount, which has been giving me problems for the past several weeks. The intermittent errors were the result of the fact that there are a lot of really poorly designed, poorly documented page counter scripts out there. As of this writing, I'm using the PHP/MySQL-based
EP-Dev Counter in its text mode (its graphical mode has image-path problems with the way I phpInclude it into my pages). It seems to be working just fine, and I'm really tired of trying different counter scripts, so even though I have several more that I haven't tried yet, I'm going to keep using it, at least until I'm rested enough to try the others.
Whether you use Windows, Linux or a Mac, there's a version of the free and open source OpenOffice.org office suite made for you. And the fact is that it can easily
replace Microsoft Office for most people's needs.
IBM has announced the creation of the world's fastest computer. It's
twice as fast as the previous speed champion, and it runs Linux. Those IBM engineers are smart.
Windows users are accustomed to their computers running slower and slower over time, but Linux users aren't — they expect their computers to run at full-speed without having to constantly optimize things and repeatedly reinstall their operating systems. So if you're using Linux and your computer is running slowly, there's almost always a simple reason for it. Take a look at
3 Reasons Why Your System Might Be Slow.
Finally, the news that many of us have been waiting for a long time: The ISO has put Microsoft's OOXML standards approval
on hold. And, as usual, Slashdot's readers have a lot to say about it.
Regular readers of this Journal — and those who never read this Journal but have read My Debian Adventure or My Debian Adventure, Part 2: Lenny — know that I've been very happily using Linux full-time instead of Windows since July, 2006, and I've been very happily using Debian Linux full-time since December, 2007. At first I ran Debian Etch (Debian Stable), but I switched to Debian Lenny (Debian Testing) about a month ago. Debian fans know that Lenny is scheduled to replace Etch as Debian Stable this coming fall, and now its developers have released
some news about what Lenny's going to contain — and yes, it answers the question of whether the new Lenny will come with KDE 3 or KDE 4.
Do you ever get the feeling that Microsoft is like the kid in grade school who all the other kids hate because he constantly "tells on" them? I get that feeling all of the time, especially when I read things like this: Microsoft has
filed for a patent for technology that will help it enforce what it calls "Digital Manners Policy." If you think about it, you may be surprised at just how many parts of your life Redmond wants to be able to control. I'm not.
It's much cheaper than gasoline. It contains more energy per gallon than gasoline. It can be blended with gasoline or it can completely substitute for gasoline, even in older engines. It can be produced locally. And it has a net zero carbon footprint. So why do I have a feeling that we'll probably never get to use
SwiftFuel in our cars? Because of all the things I just told you about it.
Today's Journal entry is now a separate article. You can find A Fast, Simple PHP/MySQL Web Site Counter in this site's CB Guides section.
It took me many years to sit down and start writing it. Then it took me several days to finish writing it, even without all of the gory details that I remember about it.
Yesterday, I finally finished writing the emotionally draining story of the freak accident that changed my life forever. You can find I'm Missing Part Of My Brain in this site's Personal Stuff section.
Just like I said I was going to do yesterday, I ran the About.com web counter script alongside the EP-Dev Counter script on this web site for a day, to make sure that it was working correctly. It worked just fine, so I removed the EP-Dev Counter and now this web site is running only the About.com web counter script. And yesterday's Journal entry about it and other counters is now a separate article. You can find A Fast, Simple PHP/MySQL Web Site Counter in this site's CB Guides section.
Reaction to my new article, I'm Missing Part Of My Brain has been very positive. Thank you for taking the time to send me encouraging, supportive email messages. Please add your comments about my article to this thread of my
Survivors Forum too. And while you're at it, share some of your own survival stories, so that everyone can benefit from them.
Regular readers of this Journal know that I've been very happily using Linux full-time instead of Windows for almost 2 years. Though I know that Linux could replace Windows for many, many people, I don't claim that it's for everyone — so if you don't want to use Linux, that's fine with me. But I agree with the writer who asks that you
Get The Facts Straight when you talk to people about Linux.
Linux users know that the two most popular Linux desktop environments are KDE and GNOME. But one writer doesn't like the direction that they're heading, and concludes that
Linux desktops are in trouble.
If you think Spam is bad, you're going to really hate
SPIT.
Do you think it's fair that a computer user who only checks their email and browses the web pays the same amount for Internet access as their neighbor who downloads several entire movies and hundreds of other video files every day? I don't. But I also don't like it that some major ISPs are planning to
place caps on broadband use. What do you think should be done? Let us know in the
Computers section of my Survivors Forum.
In order to make it much more interactive, ComputerBob is in the process of transitioning his Journal to use a full-featured blogging tool. Until he finishes that transition, you can find today's Journal entry at
http://www.computerbob.com/survivors/index.php?topic=15.0
In order to make it much more interactive, ComputerBob is in the process of transitioning his Journal to use a full-featured blogging tool. Until he finishes that transition, you can find today's Journal entry at
http://www.computerbob.com/survivors/index.php?topic=16.0