Battle of the code-names

April 26, 2005

Michael Hyatt says of the Longhorn moniker for the someday possibly released version of the Windows Operating System "Sadly, some would say that this aptly describes what Windows has become. A bloated cow that, when provoked, can become 'dangerous and uncontrollable.'"

It was particularly fitting after participating in this thread via email today. It is probably a good thing then that Copeland never made it out the door.

Google Satellite Maps and American History

April 5, 2005

It seems that Apple once was forced to remove references to Groom Lake from its products. I wonder if Google will have to do the same with this map. Google has done a great job of adding satellite images to their mapping product. I wonder what the aliens will do now that their once secret landing spot is so readily visible? :-)

Don Park has another use for Google Maps, picking out bicycle routes.

Update: Some truly amazing images can be seen in looking at the history in this view of the history of atomic testing at the Nevada Test Site. Subsidence craters from many of the hundreds of underground nuclear tests conducted by the United States and United Kingdom are visible.

KISS

March 29, 2005

I spent some time this evening searching for the way to repeat the mac to mac migration that is offered the first time you launch a new macintosh computer. Several web searches and delving into /System/Library/Core Services were not productive. However, sitting right there in the Utilities folder is Setup Assistant which is for just this purpose. Remember to Keep It Simple Stupid!

CSS and Line Numbering

March 27, 2005

For all the CSS experts out there, I'm looking for a way to do line numbers in a CSS document. I want to have a legal pleading style document with each line numbered to the left of the line. Any ideas on how to approach this?

DirecWAY, Ground Control & XML-RPC Redux

March 27, 2005

I've written previously about the problem with DirecWAY which I purchase through their reseller Ground Control. DirecWAY has a problem with their web accelerator that breaks XML-RPC calls between this site and others. Today I found it breaks XML being sent to eBay through the eBay API as well.

The first response I get when I tried to approach them is that the application I'm using must be the problem. Since they don't know that XML-RPC is they figure it must be me. So, here's what I did. Setup a web-proxy that sends web-requests on a port other than port 80. XML-RPC calls work just fine when using the proxy. Switch to port 80 where DirecWAY has Web Accellerator running and see the web surfing speeds remain the same but now all your XML-RPC calls will be truncated.

Sometimes a VAR such as Ground Control can be very helpful in these situations. On the other hand they can do what Ground Control has done and say that well, they're not sure what to do. DirecWAY tells them everything is working correctly. So, of course it is. Neither Ground Control nor DirecWAY seem to understand networking well enough to appreciate the testing that I've done and accept the meaning of those results. I guess it is time to redouble the effort to get DSL out here.

Open source

March 15, 2005

As I noted recently I'd had some difficulties with closed-source software. I also worked with some open-source software that I had a problem with. The difference in the two ended up being that with the closed-source software I spent several weeks trying in vain to get the problem resolved (which I did today). With the open-source I posted here and within an hour had the answers and a great new place to find information.

Computing