Archive for the ‘Geek Stuff’ Category

More Mac observations (2009-7-24)

Today I abandoned the Mac Mail application that comes with OS X in favor of Thunderbird. In a way, I hated to do it.  Mac Mail is very nicely put together, with an elegant, simple interface and everything right where it ought to be.  But in my experience the IMAP support was flakey — particularly [...]

Houston, Tranquility Base here. The MacBook Pro has landed. (2009-7-15)

The proof of the pudding, they say, is in the eating.  And so far, I’m liking what I’m eating. My shiny new (refurbished) MacBook Pro arrived this morning via FedEx ground.  The timing stunk — I was up to my ears in alligators due to some network issues at the data center (turned out to [...]

Switching Sides (2009-7-13)

Late last week, I did the unthinkable.  I ordered a new laptop…from Apple. I’ve been watching the MacBook Pro line closely lately, especially since Apple introduced the new unibody design, and I’ve been really impressed with what I’ve seen.  In addition, OS X seems to be maturing to the point that nearly anything you can [...]

More info on Authorize.net (2009-7-3)

Turns out the problem was indeed a data center fire (which is a truly frightening prospect).  As best I can tell, a transformer shorted out and started a small fire.  Sprinklers kicked in and put out the fire but also shorted out generators and caused much more serious problems.  Ultimately, all power to the building [...]

Authorize.net Is Down…that’s bad news (2009-7-3)

Looks like Authorize.net is down hard.  That’s a huge problem for online retailers, thousands of whom rely on Authorize.net to process credit cards. See Authorize.net Goes Down, E-Commerce Vendors Left Hanging for a little more info.

Photos have gone missing, too (2009-7-3)

It would appear that any photos that were uploaded to a BlogWare photo album have not come across with the rest of the data that I migrated.  Not sure if it’s worth tracking those down…it probably accounts for fewer than 30 posts. 

Moving to WordPress (2009-7-2)

I’m moving the blog to WordPress, so bear with me for a while as things settle. It’s a little sad to move off of Blogware (which has served me well for many years).  I played some small role in the birth of Blogware as one of the earliest beta testers.  Unfortunately, Tucows has essentially abandoned [...]

It's a small world, after all… (2009-7-2)

File this one under “bizarre coincidences that you simply couldn’t dream up on your own.”  One of my clients has been having trouble with ColdFusion on his server.  I’m not a CF guy, so I can’t solve it for him, but he ran across a company with a bunch of very smart CF guys whom [...]

SLICK! WizMouse (2009-2-26)

Does your mouse wheel drive you crazy sometimes?  Try this out… WizMouse is a mouse enhancement utility that makes your mouse wheel work on the window currently under the mouse pointer, instead of the currently focused window. This means you no longer have to click on a window before being able to scroll it with [...]

A Little Chrome is a Good Thing (2008-9-4)

Google released their own browser a couple of days ago, and it’s fantastic.  As with all things Google, it’s sparse and simple, but hides lots of sophisticated capabilities underneath it all.  I’ve been running it since it came out, and have had virtually zero problems with it (with the exception of one really poorly done [...]