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Hi.  Shameless plug and request… please become a fan of my business page on Facebook so I can get at least 25 fans and get a custom web address for it.  Link.  Thank you!!!

A friend has created a new iPhone app called QuickGifter.

The description is as follows:

How many times have you been embarrassed by giving the wrong gifts? Or the wrong size? Or the wrong color? The new QuickGifter iPhone app takes all the worry out of gift giving by keeping a well-organized gift database of any and all important wish list information that you may need while shopping . Best of all, if you have a spouse, partner, relative, or friend that is shopping and needs the same info, you can easily email them QuickGifter wish list details for any person in your QuickGifter library.

Check it out at quickgifter.com or watch the video:

Watch the video:

The firewall in Windows 7 appears to be much more sophisticated than the one in Vista or XP. To configure it properly on a computer you wish to be a Quickbooks Pro database server, the simplest way is to use Intuit’s free nettool.exe program. Download from here.

To quote Donald Rumsfeld, there’s known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns.

In the case of web development as with many things, some people who use web sites, think they know how easy/hard it is to build them. (Hint: they don’t)

Check out this person who needs to hire a programmer yet they already ‘know’ how ‘hard’ the task is and how long it will take.  link.

My nice Dell XPS 420 has an ATI Radeon 2600 HD XT video card in it. Perfectly smooth performance for my needs (I’m no gamer), and it runs my 24″ display at 1920×1200 under Vista just fine.

A few months ago I figured I’d upgrade the display driver, and got a new install from the ATI (now AMD) web site. After the install, the ‘Catalyst Control Center’ (known as the evil ‘CCC’ to many) would NOT start automatically or run when launched – displaying some obscure error.

After so much wasted time researching the problem, finding hundreds of people with similar problems but no answers, or none that worked at least, I gave up, but wait, I couldn’t uninstall the new software either. So I had to use the system restore to go back to an earlier ‘time’, which worked, restoring the old driver and control center that shipped with the system.

Fast forward to recently, and my system has been crashing overnight a few times lately. Not good. Couldn’t find out why, nothing in Event Viewer, or anywhere else. I leave my machine on all the time because it backs up at night, plus it’s actually less wear and tear on the hardware to leave it on.

Recently after being frustrated further with the occasional out of the blue crashes, I upgraded to the latest driver, but did NOT bother trying to install the catalyst control center (ccc) as I don’t need it anyway. All good so far!!!

My goodness the internet is great. I was about to throw out a Sony surround sound receiver I’ve had for years because it would flash “PROTECTOR” on the display after being on for a few seconds, and I’d tried everything I could think of (cleaning, making sure no bits of wire in speaker posts, leaving off for hours or days, etc.).

I’d looked around the internet for solutions and most described things I’d already done, plus the usual “they all do that, throw it out” unhelpful comments.

Then finally, I found solution #2 at fixya.com’s page on this and figured I’d give it a try.

It basically said open it up, clean out the dust, and then disconnect and reconnect every connector you can get your hands on. I’d already vacuumed out the inside (which wasn’t really dusty anyway), but proceeded to disconnect and reconnect every connector in there, and there’s a BUNCH. Some are electronic type connectors with tiny wires, and others are definitely power type connectors.

Anyway, did all that, fired it up, AND IT WORKS! I’m now testing with loud playback connecting my blackberry storm to an input (what an amazing phone that is!).

Anyway, sounds awesome. State of Trance 2008, Mosaik’s music… ahhhh….

T. Boone Pickens has made a fortune in oil.  But he’s an American first and at 80, he’s still passionate and dedicated to helping the U.S. reduce its dependence on foreign oil.  The U.S. gets 70% of its oil from foreign sources today, which is a MAJOR NATIONAL SECURITY RISK.

Get involved!

This day contained 2 things burned in my memory.

Like many who love NASA and all it has accomplished, I was horrified to learn the Challenger space shuttle blew up a couple of minutes after launch as it rocketed into space.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4JOjcDFtBE

Later that day, President Ronald Reagan gave a speech to the nation, that was brilliantly written by Peggy Noonan, and brilliantly delivered. He talked to the astronauts loved ones, to all adults, to children, about loss, taking chances and bravery, why life isn’t for the ‘faint hearted’ and added a poetic line at the end that still gives me goosebumps.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JKIZ7j20EA

So I got a Blackberry Storm recently (love it, although there’s quite a learning curve!).

Anyway, it can capture video, which is pretty cool.  So I grabbed a few tiny videos and wanted to see if I could transfer, edit, and publish on youtube.

Took two tiny videos, transferred them, imported to Windows Movie Maker (free), trimmed the videos, added titles, credits, transitions, and music, in, oh, 15 minutes?!

Here it is.  Not Oscar-worthy, but hey, it’s my first.

As a web developer, one important task is testing web pages with multiple different browsers and even different versions of the same browser.  This could drive a person insane, but I’d like to share a couple of discoveries.

Trying to be a good developer I’m using ‘div’s more than tables these days, using CSS extensively, and trying to code to ‘strict’ page layout rather than ‘quirks’ mode or ‘transitional’.

If all the above paragraph makes no sense to you and you’re developing web pages, I can guarantee they won’t look the same across Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) or earlier (shudder), Internet Explorer 7 (IE7), and the about to be released IE8, FireFox (FF 1.x, 2.x, 3.x), Safari, Opera, endless mobile phones, oh and Google Chrome, etc.

First admission – I do not bother testing on all the above browsers.  That would be the first step toward insanity.  I look at browser statistics to see what the vast majority of people are using.  Anyone else?  Best of luck to you.  I refer to w3school’s excellent page on this.  As of writing, this shows IE6, IE7 and FireFox account for 91% of all browsers in use!  So that’s what I test.  I have an old computer I deliberately don’t upgrade to IE7 (it has IE6 SP1), I have IE7 and FireFox 3 on other computers including my main desktop.  IE6 is sliding down (thankfully) from 34% to 20% in one year but that doesn’t mean I can avoid the testing for a while yet.

<rant> The biggest headache by a long shot is IE6.  It has some BIZARRE behavior.  For one of the wealthiest and most successful companies on the planet to have its most widely used piece of software be so riddled with bugs and incompatibility with MASSIVELY documented web standards is inexcusible. </rant>  OK, I feel better now.

There are MANY web sites documenting IE flaws, but the biggest problems I’ve found are with IE6 and earlier, and specifically with its confusion and completely screwed up calculations relating to widths, margins, padding, borders, and even positioning.  Apart from that it’s great.

The page here demonstrates ‘default’ differences in browsers.  It looks different in IE6, IE7, FF.  Go ahead and look at the html/style tags – not much to it!  IE and FF have different default body margins, different default paragraph line heights, and a HORRIBLE bug in IE6 which DOUBLES the margin sizes of any divs that are FLOATED!  Ugh.

Fortunately, there are fixes that countless wasted hours have been spent discovering.

For the doubling (and worse) of margin sizes for floats by IE6, the fix is to add “display: inline;” to the style definition (or inline style value of the element) which since it’s a float should be ‘obvious’ and the default, and does seem to be for IE7 and FF, but IE6 needs this to get it right.  Thanks to this excellent web site for this solution!

For other problems, setting defaults are the main solutions.

The second page here has these fixes applied and looks pretty much identical in the 3 browsers.

I hope this helps.

Ever sit down to your computer which had some stuff running only to find you’re at the login screen (and not just the screensaver password prompt screen)?  Did you lose some work?  I have!

No easy option to change this, but it IS changeable.

Great blog post here about it:

http://softwarex-nz.blogspot.com/2008/01/stop-vistas-update-auto-reboot.html

Thank you!

I just saw the new Disney/Pixar movie WALL-E and I was blown away.  I think critics of this movie may have been expecting a comedy, perhaps a Toy Story with robots, but it’s nothing of the kind.  It certainly has humor, but it’s in a dark, tense, but ultimately uplifting (hey it’s Disney) backdrop.

To me it contains parts of many science fiction books and movies, including 2001: A Space Odyssey, all of Isaac Asimov’s amazing robot books, even Rendezvous With Rama, my favorite book by Arthur C. Clarke.

The movie’s web site is also amazing.  Here’s a free embed they provide:

OK – call me lazy. Tell me I’m not getting the full benefit of my Canon 40D digital SLR camera. Yes I know about RAW files, curves, unsharpening, HDR, etc. But sometimes, well, most of the time, I just want to take pictures and have them look great on screen and printable at anything less than a HUGE print without loads of, ok ANY, computer ‘post processing’.

Little point and shoot digital cameras in decent light situations (i.e., outdoors) take great pictures in most circumstances. But they’re still slow, cannot do shallow depth of field, often don’t have a very wide angle field of view, and to me at least, are generally irritating (except for their size)! Once you’ve seen the quality of pictures and enjoyed the flexibility and range of options and control with an SLR, it’s hard to go back. I know, I tried. Got tired of lugging the Canon 20D and lenses around, sold the lot. But less than a year later, I was ready to throw my Canon point and shoot camera in a fire pit. Read the rest of this entry »

Sooner or later I guess this topic was going to get mentioned here.

U.S. gas prices have doubled and more in the past couple of years.  It must be hurting millions of people directly (getting to and from work or school for example), and hurting many businesses too, which must deliver things and have things delivered to them and so they must raise prices on everything in turn to make up for it.  It seems the U.S. government has totally distorted how it reports inflation because gasoline and food prices alone are skyrocketing.  Maybe the drop in house prices is counteracting that some!

The politicians are arguing over causes and remedies, but while they do NOTHING, quietly, millions of people are driving a little less, maybe trading in the old clunker or big SUV for something much more efficient, sales of hybrids have skyrocketed, and the American people are being very sensible about all this.

We’ve all heard it’s ‘greedy oil companies’ that are the cause but that really isn’t the case – they process crude oil and refine it, etc., and pass along the costs they must pay.  Now global demand for oil and gasoline has been climbing and is projected to climb a great deal more as prosperity increases in China and India in particular, as they hold almost half the world’s population!  U.S. gasoline consumption has not increased significantly in decades.  Increasing overall demand puts upward pressure on prices if supply is not increased. Read the rest of this entry »

An old Logitech mouse I had broke recently so I began looking for a new mouse. Since I spend a LOT of time at this computer, I need something that’s comfortable, and very functional. I’ve come to rely on middle button click to open links in new tabs in the FireFox browser, rely on the forward/back buttons on the side, etc., so I can’t go back to something basic.

So recently I bought a Microsoft wireless mouse 5000 mouse from Newegg. BIG mistake. First off, it’s junk – very cheap and light. I should have known because in fairness, it is cheap, as in inexpensive. Second, I have big hands and found the positioning of the forward/back buttons on the side way too far back so I had to make a very awkward move to get to them. Finally the middle scroll wheel ‘click’ was way too hard to engage and definitely gave me hand ‘ache’ after hours of use.

So I’ve been on the prowl for a new mouse. I’ve been eyeing the Logitech MX Revolution mouse for a while, which they claim is the “world’s most advanced mouse.” Lofty stuff, so I broke down and got one. Figured I could return it if I really don’t like it. Well so far I’m AMAZED.

First thing that’s different is the shape. Instead of a regular ‘big egg’ shape, this one has a concave area for the thumb which is VERY comfortable.

I like a mouse that requires VERY LITTLE EFFORT to click, scroll, move, etc. This mouse is very light in use, although not light in overall weight so as to feel like a piece of junk. It’s very nicely made as are all Logitech products I’ve found.

It not only has the usual left/right buttons, scroll wheel, and side forward/back buttons, it also has a programmable button behind the scroll wheel (which they default to a configurable ‘search’ function, and they also have another ‘thumb wheel control’ on the side that can be used for a variety of things, but by default it’s used to flip through the running programs, and is GREAT. The thumb wheel is not a continuously turning wheel but it can be rolled forward or backward to an extent, a bit like a one direction joystick. I set it to do forward/backward scroll and oh man, it’s great! But wait, there’s more… Read the rest of this entry »

Canon’s ‘digital rebel’ line is about to evolve once more with the new Canon XSi (or 450D as it is known in some parts of the world).

Just as the XTi leapfrogged in some ways the semi-pro 20D/30D with automatic sensor cleaning and more megapixels, the XSi brings features from the 40D plus some more into a smaller, more affordable package.

Canon’s optional bundled standard “kit” lens has also improved recently from the pretty weak EF-S 18-55 to the new EF-S 18-55 IS (the ‘IS’ means it is ‘image stabilized’ so you don’t have the be quite so steady in holding the camera).

One feature new to Canon’s DSLR’s is Auto Optimization. It adjusts exposure/brightness/contrast curves automatically to make for more ‘appealing’ looking images right out of the camera. Images from digital SLRs often look ‘flat’ or ‘dark’. Basic controls have existed to adjust contrast or saturation of all images but they’re too simple. Auto optimization appears to do a MUCH better job and will be a big win for those (like me!) who don’t like to spend HOURS editing images on the computer!

I have a 40D, which is a GREAT camera, but I’m wondering if I might prefer the XSi, perhaps with its optional grip to make it feel a bit more substantial. One thing holding me off though is that the 40D is a MUCH faster camera for burst shooting, doing 6.5 frames per second vs., I believe, 3. I don’t need this every day but for shooting horses jumping over fences, faster is better!

The 40D also has a glass pentaprism vs. the cheaper pentamirror in the XSi so the 40D should have a brighter viewfinder although I’ve not compared them yet.

The XSi is 12.2 megapixels (vs. 10.1 for the 40D) which will impress the easily impressed, but this is likely to be at the expense of a bit more noise in images at higher ISO settings.

Anyway, hat tip to Canon for delivering another EXCELLENT camera!

We have a pool and I’ve put some landscaping lights around the outside of the screened enclosure, but some more ‘ambient’ light would be nice.

Came across a very interesting product recently called Starlite 7 from Starlite Lighting Systems. It consists of UV resistant translucent colored plastic pieces that fit into the aluminum pool enclosure beams and an optional fiber optic cable lighting system that provides lighting behind!

Looks great and comes in a bunch of different colors. Pretty neat!

Arthur C. Clarke, writer, visionary, and scientist, born 16 December 1917, passed away on Tuesday 18 March, 2008, at the age of 90. To quote the opening line from one of my favorite books by Clarke – Rendezvous with Rama – “Sooner or later it was bound to happen.”

Arthur C. Clarke wrote so eloquently, so clearly, and so creatively, that while he reached millions with his books and articles, it is a shame that more people haven’t read him, dismissing his works as just “science fiction”. But they’re really about so much more. They capture his hopes and dreams for future progress. His worries of potential catastrophes. He predicted many things that have come true. He conceptualized stationary satellites which provide so many great services today (television, phone, internet, GPS to name 4).

Clarke always kept busy, was always curious about so many things, and relentlessly searched for answers throughout his life. His writings in many ways are his speculations on answers to difficult questions about the future of humankind, whether and how we will venture into space to reach new frontiers, and the inevitable problems we will face.

One other work I must mentioned, is 2001: A Space Odyssey. He wrote this book and collaborated with famous and unique director Stanley Kubrick on the screenplay and movie of the same name. Both were milestones. The movie though made both very famous, and to this day still stands the test of time in its effects, painstakingly created, frame by frame, without the benefit of computer imagery. A story of our first contact with enigmatic alien intelligence and a computer named HAL on a huge spaceship that can’t allow the mission to be jeopardized by error-prone human astronauts.

Goodbye Arthur. You had a magnificent journey, and you will never be forgotten. Thank you.

Links:

• Wired magazine final interview with Arthur C. Clarke
• Final video message
• 1993 interview, also in Wired
• Obituary in The Times

I’ve had my Canon 40D digital SLR camera now for a few months and really like it. Some photographers are very much into the computer editing of photo, but I’d rather get usable or near usable images right out of the camera. The 40D is a lot more adjustable than the 20D I had before was, and the sensor is better. I will get some sample photos on the site here soon! Meanwhile here’s some links to GREAT in depth reviews of the 40D in case you’re considering one.

• The digital picture
• wlcastleman.com
• Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

One last piece of advice, if you’re going to get a nice digital SLR like the 40D or better, don’t put a cheap lens on it. Without a good eye the brain of the camera can hardly see a good picture!