Category: Tech

Techie items for the geek in me.

LCD Monitor Failure

Bobby

white-screen-lcd-monitor

This morning, after a software update and reboot, one of my LCD monitors went all white. This is the second time since 2009 started that this has happened to me. Both monitors were 2 years old or more and had almost daily use, but it seems strange that they have both failed within a few months of each other.

Both have failed since I installed my new EVGA 256-P2-N751-TR 8600GT 256M video card, and since I’ve been running a dual monitor linux setup. The monitors have been tested in multiple environments, so I’m confident it’s a monitor problem, and not a graphics card or other issue.

If this is just the natural lifecycle of the monitor, this is a serious step back in technology. CRTs would last many years. If LCDs fail in 2-4 years, they aren’t exactly an improvement.

Ballistic missiles are about as passe as e-mail

Bobby

I love it when we see government and military officials make ridiculously absurd statements. In an article today on the obsolescence of the US missle defence system. In it he compares the out-datedness of ballistic missles with that of e-mail.

Marine General James Cartwright told an audience invested in missile-defense that the bad guys have already abandoned the notion of shooting ballistic missiles toward the United States. “Ballistic missiles are about as passe as e-mail,” said Cartwright, who before becoming the nation’s No. 2 military officer headed U.S. Strategic Command, which grapples with these issues. “Nobody does it anymore. Okay? It’s just gone.”

So nobody sends e-mail anymore? e-mail is passe? Wow, somebody should have told the thousands of people that e-mail me every day. I’m glad General Cartwright let me know – I might have continued to use it.

Fortunately, now we all know, so throw away those Blackberry’s, cancel your Gmail account and stop living in the past.

All The Info upgrades to WordPress 2.7

Bobby 8 Comments

I hate upgrades. I don’t care what it is, upgrading software sucks.

I’ve worked in the tech industry for a while, and the nemesis of every IT person in the world is the software upgrade.

Since I hate it so much, all my blogs have been running on a WordPress 2.2 version. If you use WordPress, you know that 2.5 was a major revision.

This morning I decided to do an upgrade. I installed 2.7 and immediately found some things that were broken.

Popularity Contest, the neato plugin that puts the popularity number at the bottom of each post, had a fatal error. Andrew Daum had a great post with a nice video that explained how to fix Popularity Contest

The Now Reading plugin that I use to list the books I’m reading also had some issues. Found an update in a post entitled Now Reading for WordPress 2.7

Also upgraded the nextgen gallery plugin that s my photo albums. This actually went smoothly and I was able to use the automatic update feature of WordPress.

After upgrading I found out that Ultimate Tag Warrior is no longer supported because tagging is built into WordPress now. That’s unfortunate because I had every post tagged and now those all went away. If there is a way to convert my old tags into the WordPress format, somebody please let me know.

Finally, and this was one of the big reasons I upgraded, I installed the Post Ideas plugin that helps managed ideas for new posts. So far I’m a little pleased, only thing I didn’t like is when I went to write this post it didn’t move my notes over anywhere like I expected it to. No problem, just a quirky thing.

So, WordPress is all up to date, only took a couple hours. Still have time left to take down some Christmas lights, get to the gym and be back in time to watch the Falcons crush the Cardinals.

How to fix a broken keypad

Bobby

OK, it’s not really broken, but I have had a problem on my Slackware 12 Linux machine where the keypad suddenly stops working. The only way I have been able to fix this, until now, is to restart KDE.

This happened to me today, so I did some research.

KDE provides a handy mouse emulation mode where, by pressing SHIFT+NUMLOCK or SHIFT+CTL+NUMLOCK you can use the keypad to move the mouse cursor. I have been accidentally hitting this key combination. Of course, when I just type on the numbers with normal work activity, I don’t notice the mouse moving.

To correct my keypad activity, I just had to press SHIFT+NUMLOCK again.

Removing duplicates from two columns in Excel

Bobby

I work with a lot of email lists, and constantly have a difficult time filtering out duplicates from two lists. The system we use will remove duplicates on an import, but has no method of removing addresses in an existing list from a new list. (does that make sense?)

Often what we end up doing is pulling them into Excel (or your favorite spreadsheet program) and trying to sort out the dupes there, but it’s a little tricky.

Recently, found this great tutorial, from Microsoft no less, that explains exactly how to do it.

Outlook 2007 html padding issues

Bobby

I’ve spent the last week navigating through the disaster that is Outlook 2007 html rendering. Finally fixed everything and came down to one final issue.

Outlook was taking css padding from one table cell and distributing it across the other cell s in the row. I was getting magical gaps at the tops and bottoms of other cells in the same row. It only seemed to do this on the top and bottom, not the right and left.

Of course, none of the other major email clients (Yahoo, gmail, comcast, msn, thunderbird, Outlook 2003, etc…) did this. Once I found the problem I did a search, and found this nice tidbit.

Cell padding is acting up. This is by far my favorite and I can’t quite grasp the cell padding concept of the new Outlook. You just have to see it to believe me, but sometimes, padding-top adds space on TOP of the cell, NOT INSIDE the cell, so that the borders on top of 2 neighboring cells in the table are not on the same line. Vertical alignment does not help, setting cells to the same height does not help.

Stack Overflow and Joel Spolsky’s Fog Creek Software Management Training Program Reading List

Bobby

I’m a big podcast fan. Originally, I was mostly into music podcasts like the amazing Coverville and the excellent Shifted Sound. Over the last few months I’ve been shifting to speculative fiction podcasts and postcast novels (podiobooks – in spite of my issues with the name). What I haven’t found, until recently, was a good tech podcast. Tech podcasts are either boring, or just fixated on very narrow topics. Stack Overflow is neither.

The legendary Joel Spolsky and the brilliant Jeff Atwood have a great on mic chemistry, and their discussions cover a broad spectrum of tech subjects, from a software, hardware and business perspective.

The most recent podcast discusses the Fog Creek Software Management Training Program Reading List used for management interns at Spolsky’s Fog Creek Software. I have found the reading list to be a great resource for some time, but it is great to hear Joel and Jeff’s opinions on many of the volumes and recommendations on the best ones to read.

If you are in the tech industry, I highly recommend the Stack Overflow podcast, and suggest looking at the reading list. There are some great resources there.