2009-7
2

Moving to WordPress

Category: Geek Stuff | No Comments

I’m moving the blog to WordPress, so bear with me for a while as things settle.

WordPress Logo

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 Blogware — they’re still keeping everything up and running, but no new development is underway — and WordPress has just continued to get better and better.

So today I took the plunge and exported my content from Blogware.  It wasn’t too difficult to import it to WP, and I’m up and running.

There will be bumps in the road.  For one thing, the URL’s of all my posts will change, so I’ll have to wait while Google catches up to the change.  But frankly, the blog is here mainly for me (with the exception of a couple of posts that get a lot of traffic from Google and seem to be helpful to a lot of people), so I’m not too concerned about it.  The handful of popular posts will be OK; I’ll install traps to redirect any incoming traffic to the new URL.

The other unfortunate thing is that the identities of those who posted comments in the past appear to be lost, presumably because Blogware and WordPress use completely different systems to identify users.  Not much I can do about that other than to apologize to anyone who’s upset that their comment is now anonymous.  Post some new ones and we’ll be fine.

If you’re a WP afficionado, post a comment with your favorite cool feature so that I don’t miss out on anything.  Thanks!

2009-7
2

It's a small world, after all…

Category: Geek Stuff, General | No Comments

GlobeFile 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 he contracted to dig into it.

Today he forwards an email from the consultant with a fantastic, well-researched explanation that got almost exactly to the heart of what was going on.  With just a little more insight about the server configuration (which I was able to provide) all of the pieces fell into place and it looks like we’ve found the root cause.

That’s all well and good, but the name of the consultant — Steven Erat — looked vaguely familiar to me.  Try as I might, I couldn’t place it, and there was no obvious connection (he’s in a completely different state, even). 

But a few minutes with Google revealed all.  Turns out that SIX YEARS AGO we had exchanged comments on each other’s blogs.  In fact, I just noticed that his blog still appears in my Blogroll, bookmarked lo those many years ago. 

It’s amazing how small the world really is.

2009-3
13

Happy Boy

Category: Family Stuff, Main Page | No Comments

Happy Boy - (C) 2009 Eric Longman

Christopher seems excited about the new camera.

2009-3
13

Spring is Springing

Category: Main Page | No Comments

Spring is Springing - (C) 2009 Eric Longman

Fun with my new toy, a Nikon D40.

2009-2
26

SLICK! WizMouse

Category: Geek Stuff | No Comments

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 the mouse wheel. This is a far more comfortable and practical way to make use of the mouse wheel.

WizMouse from Antibody Software (it’s free)

2008-12
31

What will you do with your extra second?

Category: Main Page | 2 Comments

TimesphereIt’s nice every year when daylight saving time causes our clocks to shift backward, seemingly giving us an extra hour in the day which I always use to catch up on my sleep.  But it’s a cruel joke, since that extra hour is always taken away when the time shifts the other direction.

Today, however, we actually DO get extra time in our day…an entire second of it.

A “leap second” will be added to atomic clocks worldwide at 23:59:60 (near midnight) Coordinated Universal Time on December 31, 2008.  Read more about the leap second.

Now, you’ve got to consider how you’re going to use the extra time in your day.  For us here in Atlanta, it’ll happen right at 7:00pm.  Make it good!

2008-9
27

The Gas Crisis

Category: General | 1 Comment

Today I waited in line for over 30 minutes to buy a tank of gas…and felt lucky for how it worked out.  30 minutes in line at a Kroger 15 miles from my house which was one of the ONLY places that even HAD gas, and not only that, but they had all grades and didn’t place any limits on what you could buy.

This gas shortage seems to be fairly specific to metro Atlanta and Nashville, TN, from what I can tell, and apparently was due to a confluence of factors including Hurricane Ike (which caused the pipeline that primarily supplies Atlanta’s gas to shut down temporarily) and the EPA’s requirement that we use some special kind of low-sulfur gas because of our pollution problems.

What’s odd is that the EPA temporarily rescinded the fuel restrictions earlier in the week, but the shortages have only gotten worse, and I can’t understand that.  To my knowledge, all but five of the refineries that were damaged in Hurricane Ike are back online, and since we can use whatever fuel we can get, presumably everybody should be resupplied. 

I just feel lucky to have a full tank of gas again.  When I was at half a tank, I considered filling up but decided against it since I didn’t want to exacerbate the problem (some have speculated that part of the problem is that people are panicking and filling up earlier than they normally would).  So I waited until the low fuel light came on, and then started to get really nervous as I passed station after station after station that simply had no gas.  Honestly, only about 1 in 10 stations has ANYTHING.

Anyway, it is what it is.  I’ve got another 320 miles worth of gas in the tank, so I should be OK for another week or so.  Hopefully, by then the shortage will have eased a bit.

2008-9
4

A Little Chrome is a Good Thing

Category: Geek Stuff, Software | 1 Comment

Google Chrome LogoGoogle 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 website that managed to hang the browser).

It’s still beta software, so you may want to hold off, but as is usually the case with Google stuff, beta seems to mean “as good as what anybody else would release.”

Think you might be interested?  Go get it.

2008-7
24

Another Great Tool!

Category: Geek Stuff, Software | No Comments

If you manage lots of Windows servers like I do, then you’ve doubtless found Microsoft’s very nice “Remote Desktops” utility.  This one isn’t the built-in “Remote Desktop Connection” tool which allows you to connect to one server at a time.  No, this one has a little more smarts, and will save multiple server definitions and let you connect to lots of servers and toggle between them.  It’s a nice little life-simplifier.

Until, that is, you get more than about 5 servers in it.  The problem is that the list of servers can’t be sorted or grouped in any way, so you wind up with this hodgepodge list of servers that inevitably you have to scan down to find the server you want to connect to.  Admittedly, a minor annoyance, but c’mon!  Why can’t this tree view work like tree views do elsewhere in Windows?

Apparently, there’s no easy way to re-sort the list.  (Conceivably, there’s no way at all to re-sort the list, but I quit looking when I determined it couldn’t be done easily!)

V2_logoThen I found the wonderful freeware visionapp Remote Desktop viewer.  Same kind of layout — servers in a panel on the left side, remote desktop display on the right — but, oh, how much better this one is!

You maintain Credentials separately from servers, so it’s easy to mass update a password if it changes across multiple servers.  Then create Connections and tie them to Credentials.  The cool thing is that you can also Group your connections (COLO Clients, Our Servers, Client Servers, Local Servers, etc) and specify that they should be sorted alphabetically if you wish.  Like Microsoft’s tool, you can specify whether to connect to the server console or not.

This is everything that Microsoft’s Remote Desktops should have been. 

I note that visionapp also has a commercial version called visionapp Remote Desktop 2008.  Probably worth a look-see if you manage hundreds of servers.  Runs about $70.

2008-7
14

Fantastic (Life Saving) Software

Category: Software | No Comments

Here are a couple of outstanding pieces of software that I’ve run across lately.  One is highly recommended because you need it.  The other is highly recommended if you need it.

SyncBackSE from 2BrightSparks

You need to back up your data.  Trust me on this, you NEED to do it.  I’m on the tail end of a horrendous double-drive failure that’s costing me a ridiculous amount of money, time and effort.  SyncBackSE GraphicWhat’s worse is that I DID have a backup (mirrored drives), but the jobs to push the data off to a third location weren’t working. 

One great way to do it is with SyncBackSE from 2BrightSparks.  This one is a bit like Microsoft’s wonderful SyncToy v2.0 Beta, but is more “industrial grade” and has lots of flexibility that SyncToy doesn’t.  It also handles huge, deep directories with aplomb, and can even back up TO or FROM an FTP connection or ZIP drive. 

PC Inspector File Recovery Box ShotPC Inspector File Recovery from Convar

A fantastic little piece of freeware from a German company, PC Inspector File Recovery (despite the “Get Smart” sounding name) is a general purpose data recovery program.  This is useful if you’ve deleted or formatted a disk, but I found it especially well suited to recovering pictures from a digital camera card that had spontaneously formatted itself.  Out of 193 potentially lost pictures, PCIFR recovered all but 2 of them (and I had tried to recover the lost files using other tools to no avail).  Best of all, it’s free!