I thought I’d pass along a couple of very useful utilities I’ve been running for a little while now in Windows. One is the virtual desktop manager Virtual Dimension first brought to my attention by David. There are a few quirks but it works better than a couple other ones I’ve tried (and given up on) in the past. This is the first app I’ve found for which transparency is actually useful.

The other utility is Post-it Software Notes by 3M which I’ve found to be a fantastic replacement for a half dozen copes of notepad running at any given time filled with some text I don’t want to try and remember. Any notes you have open are saved, so they reopen after reboots; damn handy. I’m currently using the Lite/Free version but will probably purchase Standard $15.

Both are great apps and definitely worth checking out if you’re on Windows.

I just synchronized my Treo over the Sprint PCS Vision connection. I think it’s pretty damn cool!

You may recall that I had my laptop repaired and when it came back, the battery was wrapped and labeled defective, with a warning saying that any damage caused by it would void my warranty. Well I’m sick and tired of being tethered to a power source, and don’t want to spend the money on a new battery. So tonight I unwrapped and plugged the battery in and, as expected, everything’s working fine. Whee, no more power cord.

I’ve had enough, and after being inspired by anticAPSLOCK.com I have ripped my Capslock key from my Microsoft Natural Keyboard at work.

No More!

Tonight turned out to be a very productive evening. First off was downloading the UltraVNC source, making a quick change to a constant and recompiling. This was for work where we are wanting to allow one user at a time to hit a pc via VNC. Apparently this configuration option is/was available in the original version of vnc but is absent from its derivative.

Next up was configuring exim to use my ISP’s smtp server for outgoing mail. I only use it for a couple mailman mailing lists and was having problems with subscribers having aol.com email addresses. A common problem, just had to slog through some docs on how to get around it.

And finally, a new version of MythTV was released yesterday which I installed. The program listings had broken a couple (probably more, just hadn’t noticed) days ago which I also fixed by changing to the new method MythTV is using for getting listings in the new version.

ChefWeb is up! Right now it’s just providing the ability to search and display recipes. Tomorrow night I’m going to hook up the ‘what can I make’ code to the web, should be a piece of cake since it looks/works just like the regular search.

Chef Web is just a web interface on the larger project Chef. Its goal is to allow us to be at a grocery store and lookup the ingredients for a recipe we want to make. It’ll also show which ingredients we actually need to buy, based on the inventory kept in the Chef database. Overall, Chef has been a pretty large effort but it’s all starting to come together now.

If you look at that page in IE, it looks like crap but I really don’t care since 1) it looks great on my Treo 600‘s browser and 2) I don’t use IE on the PC.

Continue reading “Chef Web”

Damn Visual Studio.NET takes forever to install. It has been running for a good 45 minutes and it hasn’t even gotten to the MSDN Library (3 CDs).

I tried out PalmVNC with my Treo. That’s some really cool software; I highly doubt I’ll ever have a need to use it, but it definitely has geek factor.

(Disc 1 of MSDN now installing..)

My laptop came back today after a stunning turnaround time. Much to my delight, they did indeed replace the hard drive (serial numbers prove it). However, they said they didn’t find anything wrong with the CDROM. Odd, I haven’t been able to burn a CD in months. After booting I pop in the same CD that refused to burn while I was on the phone with their support guy, and it worked just fine. Don’t know what to make of that.

They also returned my battery wrapped with tape saying it was defective and should I put it into the laptop and something goes wrong with it, my warranty is void. I’m suspicious, I think it would work just as well as it did before shipping but I’m going to start pricing them regardless.

Now on to reinstalling everything, what a chore.

Today I received the box and packing instructions for my laptop, so this evening I spent some time getting my laptop and accessories packed nicely before shipping it off to a place called MicroMedics for repair. Hopefully their work is better than their name and url make them look.

Without my laptop I have had to struggle working on my desktop (500Mhz). Instead of doing more coding on Chef, I decided to get ASP.NET running on linux with Mono. Here’s the first page! I plan on using ASP.NET on linux for serving up the web frontend to Chef, should be fun.

No TV is going good, although Ana is really looking forward to the end of this week. I think that if the TV were on tonight, I probably would have been too lazy to get Mono up and running.

Today during my lunch hour I went to Circuit City to drop off my laptop to get its problems fixed. I was quickly handed a pamphlet and told they don’t do repairs like this anymore. In the literature was a 1-800 number to call. Uh oh. This could be bad.

Oh my gosh. I’ve done the tech support calls before and they’ve been relatively easy to guide in ‘diagnosing’ the problems. What I experienced tonight was pain. I tell him that I notice very loud knocking when I’m doing work on the second partition of the drive. His solution? Let’s run chkdsk on the first partition, even after I told him I ran it on both the night before with no errors reported. I tell him about the entries in the Event Log, and he’s completely confused about what that is. I have to call back after 45 minutes of chkdsk running – I get a new guy and he tells me that I have to now run a system restore. I argue with him about how that will most likely just hide the problem (I won’t hear any noise/trouble when it’s done). He agreed but says I have to do it anyway…

Continue reading “Circuit City Support absolutely blows”