Geeky

What laptop should I buy?

The question every geek dreads: “What laptop should I buy?” Throw in “What low-cost laptop should I buy,” and raise it to the level of “It’s for my kid who’s away at school, to use for schoolwork” and you have a recipe for frustration.  It’s one of those innocently simple questions that has a really complicated answer, like when people ask MrsDoF how she makes those incredible oatmeal chocolate-chip cookies of hers. They end up asking her; “Do you really have to use both kinds of oats?” and she has to explain for the ninetieth time, yes, and this specific shortening, etc. just like the recipe says, unless you want different results.

Please understand, we geeks get this question (about laptops, not cookies) all the time.  I went to the funeral of a dear friend once, and wasn’t three feet in the door of the church before the minister buttonholed me with a similar question.  And the answer isn’t what you really want to hear, but here it is anyway.

Get ready to spend some money and learn some stuff…

Continued...

Posted by George on 01/05/08 at 03:44 PM
Geeky • (15) Comments • Link

It was a semicolon

First, mad props to Les at Stupid Evil Bastard, who helped me with upgrade to EE 1.6.1 and the Akismet spam blocker.  Thank you, Les!  Your patience with the dimwitted pupil is great Karma.

Second, I found the reason that my blog layout broke with Internet Explorer - a missing semicolon in the header div object in the .css style sheet. 

margin-top: 3px” (should have been) margin-top: 3px;

Of course Firefox and Opera and Safari graciously skipped over my error, negating only that one property of that one div.  But Microsoft’s Internet Explorer broke the entire layout, ignoring all properties and divs after that line.

Now I’m working on cleaning up the layout in the home page and in the comment pages among others.  I apologize for commenting problems in the past - please let me know by email if you have problems commenting. Sometimes the reason is not clear, there have been a couple I just have not been able to solve.  Hopefully the new EE version will fix.  Also please let me know if the layout fails to render in your web browser.  It should have a header, two columns (one wide, one narrow), and a footer. 

The problem of code typos is not restricted to decrepit bloggers, however.  Programmers for the advanced F22 Raptor jet had a little boo-boo…

Continued...

Posted by George on 12/29/07 at 08:01 PM
Geeky • Blogging • (6) Comments • Link

Merry Christmas to ALL…

Just a note to everyone,

I have had such a great time writing this blog thanks to your visits and comments!  And visiting your blogs too, even if I don’t always comment.  I’ve learned from you, been inspired, irritated, uplifted, and been forced to think. 

With deepest appreciation, Merry Christmas to you, and happiness on this day and a great year to come.

Thank You!
- George

Posted by George on 12/25/07 at 01:45 PM
Geeky • Blogging • (9) Comments • Link

Screen font sizes and vision

Clearly, most web developers have better vision than I do.  I am constantly scaling up font sizes in my browser to read other people’s layouts and the reason is equally clear in the .css page that I am wrestling with now at work.  It starts with a “font-size: 74%;” as a body property and then scales up from there for titles and links.  If you bump the font-size to 100% it completely breaks the layout (which is another issue). 

Now that I think about it this may represent a prejudice on the part of web developers in favor of their fabulous layouts and attributing less importance to the actual content that will later be added by the stakeholder.  Got to make it super-easy to navigate through the site to content which is too small for the site visitor to read.

So I bumped the body font-size to 100% anyway, and started working down the .css, reducing the element font sizes one by one to reconstitute the layout.  But this leads to another observation; element names should be descriptive and should adhere to standards.  It isn’t always clear what actual element they refer to without picking through the haystack to find a strand of hay with a particular serial number.

There’s a quick way to do this: open the .css in an editor, and Search for “font-size” from top to bottom.  As reach each element, change it to 200% and hit ‘ctrl+s’ to save.  Then ‘Alt+Tab’ to your browser and hit F5 to refresh.  You’ll know immediately which element has been affected.  Then ‘Alt+Tab’ back to the editor, set the element to whatever size you want, save, and hit ‘Find Next’.  (This technique works with any property, and by the way it’s also a good time for adding comments to the .css page)

So here’s my message to web developers everywhere:  “Some of us never had good vision to begin with and we’re not getting any younger.  Knock off the itty-bitty type!”

This has inspired me to re-do the .css for my blog over Christmas break, by the way.  The layout and other properties need spiffing up, and lately I discovered the .css doesn’t even load in IE7. So to you IE7 users out there, I apologize. 

Posted by George on 12/19/07 at 11:06 AM
Geeky • Design • (3) Comments • Link

In which I do my damndest to win a free laptop contest

Don at Life Cycle Analysis is gunning to win a very nifty laptop.  The ThinkingBlog has a Big Giveaway Contest running through the 20th and the winning blogger gets a free Ruffbook ‘Tech’ laptop computer.  It’s an exceptionally tough laptop, with a water-resistant keyboard, magnesium frame, power-saving system, and everything you want if your laptop goes where you go.

He says: “If you are a “thinking” blogger, then you might be able to win a new Ruffbook Tech in the Big Giveaway running through December 20th. All that you have to do is write about this computer in your blog. Hurry up, though. I got here ahead of you, and I do play rough!”

OK Don, the really important question about any hardened laptop is; “How well does it keep up with the star of a cheesy disaster movie?” The hero needs to be able to prevail in part by his courage and rugged good looks, and in part by his rugged, good-looking laptop.  That’s a shameless contest-entry post.  cool smirk

“Keep the pictures coming!  This stuff is pure gold!”

Jeff Wells knew what was coming; he really shouldn’t have stopped to take pictures.  But his journalist’s lizard-brain had fed the words “Top Story” to his frontal cortex, and he ran out onto the pier.  From there he snapped images of idiots standing where only minutes before had been eight feet of water.  Some people on shore were trying to warn them; he got pictures of them as well.

But as he snapped an image of the horizon he knew it was time to run.  Stuffing the camera into his backpack he turned away from the wave.  It occurred to him that the main difference between him and the sightseers was that if he survived, he would receive a journalism award…

Continued...

Posted by George on 12/16/07 at 02:30 PM
Geeky • hardware • (6) Comments • Link

Google vs. Wikipedia

I’ve been extolling the virtues of wikis at work, as our network guru is planning a college-wide tech wiki.  In this process a few people have learned of Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia which is, I feel, a fantastic resource.  Now Google is gunning for Wikipedia by proposing an online knowledge base of their own.

The system will centre around authored articles created with a tool Google has dubbed “knol” - the word denotes a unit of knowledge - that will make webpages with a distinctive livery to identify them as authoritative. Mr Manber wrote: “A knol on a particular topic is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read.”

This can only be a good thing for those of us who enjoy access to vast stores of information.  Just one little quibble… they’re calling the articles “knols”.  Add that to “blog” and “wiki” and a host of other internet-driven words that just sound ridiculous to me for some reason.

Posted by George on 12/15/07 at 02:09 PM
Geeky • (2) Comments • Link

Pearl Harbor day, forgotten

I have related this story before in various places so forgive me if you’ve heard it before.  If memory serves this is the first time written it as a separate post.

It was maybe 10 years ago on Pearl Harbor day and I was in a donut shop for coffee and a donut.  Three were newspapers strewn about featuring interviews with veterans and showing the Arizona in flames.  The owner of the shop was discussing the Pearl Harbor attack and the war that followed, with one of the other customers.  Her high-school aged employee was listening in.  Suddenly she made a connection:

“Wait a minute!” she said, “We… we dropped a BOMB on JAPAN?!!!”

It would be accurate to say a “moment of silence” ensued, while her boss and the customer struggled to think of an appropriate answer…

Posted by George on 12/07/07 at 02:16 PM
Geeky • History • (3) Comments • Link

Linux-alicious

On Sunday I set up an Ubuntu system for my son to use while he visits over holiday (it will be a step down for him but better than no computer).  But for all its well-intentioned interface smoovieness, Ubuntu is a bit bloated.  If you want quick and clean, (above all quick) there are distros that have all the extra baggage pre-removed. Geekalicious goodies from InformationWeek Daily:

  1. Five tiny Linux distros that pack a punch
  2. 7 Reasons why Linux won’t succeed on the Desktop.  I had read this one before and it makes some great points.
  3. Why Linux will succeed on the desktop.  This one unintentionally illustrates a couple points from number 2, but opens a new thought: KDE4.  Though it is still in beta, I am definitely going to have to look into that some more.  But it won’t be for machines that would use the tiny distros.  The developers clearly have the Mac in mind.  Anyway the author believes Gnome needs to go away for Linux to succeed.

Unfortunately one great opportunity for Linux is the utter failure of Vista.  I would rather not see Linux succeed the lazy way, by default.

Posted by George on 11/20/07 at 07:48 AM
Geeky • Software • (8) Comments • Link

But at least the interface is pretty

I get email, lots of it.  Chopping through the uncontrolled undergrowth in my inbox, Outlook informs me that I have 224 unread messages.  They’re probably mostly spam but I’d like to flip through them anyway.  So I set up a “Read” column icon in the message sorting pane and clicked on it.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense.  Hey Micro$oft, do you think you could pull a couple young geniuses off the program to innovationalize transparent animated title bar interfaces, and get them to fix basic functionality? 

Posted by George on 11/12/07 at 09:17 AM
Geeky • Software • (12) Comments • Link

Windows Vista is so bad that Dell, Fujitsu, HP, and Lenovo customers want XP back

As if Excel’s inability to do basic arithmetic weren’t bad enough, Microsoft Vista is so awful that users and manufacturers have pressured the company to allow them to go back to using Windows XP.  (From Corpus Callosum)

Let me get this straight: Microsoft spent $6bn to develop Vista, and a year after it hit the market, major manufactuers are asking for the old Windows™ back?  OUCH!  Who’s in charge of product design at Microsoft, Michael “Heckuva Job” Brown?

Seriously, someone with an eight-figure salary ought to be fired over this.  Maybe the next version of Windows will run on SUSE the way Apple’s OS runs on a *nix base. 

Posted by George on 09/25/07 at 06:03 PM
Geeky • Software • Link

Microsoft Excel’s New Math

We tend to trust numbers that spit out of spreadsheets, right?  I mean, computers are objective and trustworthy!

Not so much.  Excel 2007 has a major bug.  If you multiply 850 times 77.1, the answer comes out to be 100,000.

Maybe it’s time to update Pierre Gallois’ famous quote:

“If you put tomfoolery into a computer, nothing comes out of it but tomfoolery. But this tomfoolery, having passed through a very expensive machine, is somehow ennobled and no one dares criticize it.”
- Pierre Gallois

How about ..."And even if you put good numbers into Excel, tomfoolery may still come out.”

Even my old slide rule, with its 3-sig limited accuracy, delivers 65,5xx… a much smaller error, and easy enough to resolve to the full number with a couple more steps.

Updates: 

  • In the comments Ed posted a very good link below to Joel On Software Explaining the Excel Bug - especially interesting because Joel worked on early versions of Excel.
  • and Mark at Good Math, Bad Math, discusses The Excel 65,535=100,000 Bug and floating-point operations as related to display and printing.

Posted by George on 09/25/07 at 08:42 AM
Geeky • Software • Link

Ahh… I finally dumped Linux and got back to Windows!

Over the last several months, I’ve been using a couple different flavors of Linux on my IBM/Lenovo X40 laptop, with the idea of writing a review of desktop Linux the way I did for the Apple laptop that I borrowed.  Of course, since I didn’t have to give Linux back in a month, I used it for a greater length of time.

As with the Apple, I didn’t try to become a super-geek in the OS being tested.  The parameters of the test were a knowledgeable Windows user stranded with the unfamiliar OS, sink or swim.

Linux worked pretty well, though there were a couple extremely annoying glitches.  In the final analysis I just preferred Windows XP more, and Windows is the native home for two of my six favorite applications. (Yes, I know it is possible to tuck then into Wine but then I’m not really testing the Linux apps, am I?)

This is only a review-preview.  I just started working on the actual review, which will be ready when it’s ready.  In the meantime, here Information Week’s very pessimistic assessment of Linux’ chances at desktop dominance.

Posted by George on 09/22/07 at 07:30 PM
Geeky • Software • (8) Comments • Link

Microsoft Expression Web Editor: first contact

I’ve begun working with Microsoft Expression Web editor, and I must say, it’s a pretty decent standards-based ripoff of Dreamweaver.  But the code view has a blinking validation notifier that actually interferes with cursor placement - obnoxious! 

Will Microsoft ever create a good product without at least one feature that turns using it into a grinding endurance test? Stay tuned…

Posted by George on 09/13/07 at 09:09 AM
Geeky • Software • (1) Comments • Link

The Mad Biologist strikes gold every Sunday

Every Sunday I look forward to Mike the Mad Biologist’s Sunday Links.  He divides his links into scientific and general-interest, and comes up with great stuff. Here’s a sample:

  • Students not knowing how to learn: Thanks, NCLB”

    This past Monday my three non-AP classes had their first quiz, on the first chapter of the material in the textbook.  It was worth 25 points for 25 answers.  It is the same quiz I have given each of the previous two years, since we got a new textbook and began teaching Government in the 10th grade.  The first year the scores were perhaps a bit weak, last year a bit weaker, and this year they plummeted.  And I have no doubt as to the reason.  It is due to No Child Left Behind.

    If you want a brief exploration of the impact of this horrid piece of legislation, keep reading…

  • The real hypocrisy of Idaho’s conservatives

    In a foreshadowing of Risch’s comment about the New Orleans victims, the author Marc Reisner ... quotes one of the Teton dam’s earlier opponents about the culture of this part of Idaho: they “get burned up when they hear about someone buying a bottle of mouthwash with food stamps. But they love big water projects. They only object to nickle-and-dime welfare. They love it in great big gobs...”

There’s lots more where that came from.  Go read!

Posted by George on 09/03/07 at 08:35 AM
Geeky • Blogging • (1) Comments • Link

Now using Expression Engine 1.6.0

Last week, pMachine hosting, which is now called “Engine Hosting”, contacted me to say they were moving some servers on Saturday night, and would I please set a couple locks open for them to proceed. 

OK, no problem; they were very nice about it and the transfer went smoothly.  By Sunday morning this blog was back up, and by 1:00 pm, MrsDoF’s blog was back up too.  (Let the reader understand the urgency of that second point...) All was well, except hey, you old fool, you’re running a “really old” version of Expression engine!  And your terms of service, blah-blah-blak something-something.” It was time to upgrade, to fix that which was not broken.

OK, they were nicer than that. But last time I attempted to upgrade Expression Engine, I managed to screw it up.  Sure, I tweak the template a bit from time to time but I just haven’t had the time to really get into EE and hack the circuit.  EE is something that I only touch once a year or so (longer if possible) so I’m basically a “user” with that package.  Those of you in computer support know that isn’t predictive of a good outcome.

Les Jenkins over at SEB rescued me back then, so this time, I asked Les if he’d guide me through the process. (See what happens if you feed stray cats, Les?) Having 20-20 tech-support vision he graciously offered to do the upgrade for me.  I accepted and here we are at version 1.6.0 - WooHoo!  Les, what can I say - you totally rock!  I gots you some Anime’ on the way

Oh, and pmachine.com is now called ellislab.com.  The more things change… Folks, please drop me an email if anything weirder than usual happens in page rendering or commenting. 

Posted by George on 07/08/07 at 08:20 PM
Geeky • Blogging • (6) Comments • Link
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