Category: Computers


  • Fear brings out the worst in people. Fear of change or the unknown manifests in criticism, anger, and overreaction. Yes, I am guilty of this like everyone else… I am not somehow above all this. The idea of democracy, I think, where everyone is able to provide input into the making of a decision was…

  • At the BbWorld Developers’ Conference (Thursday afternoon and Friday morning after BbWorld), there was a session by John Fontaine called What the Heck is a Hotfix? (PPT,audio recording). I’d been meaning to go look for this at the Bb Connections web site where the conference presentations were uploaded. However, I found this through a Bb…

  • Warm fuzzies abound when support uses this as the last item for when something occurs. Some form of dark wizardry I know this was meant to be funny. I even found it funny. Seriously…. There is a lot of dark wizardry….

  • Who Are You?

    I’m so vain…. I probably think this post is about me…. Probably only people who do vanity searches notice this, but there are spiders pulling names off web sites. They link the names to companies, blogs, and other web content. Supposedly, these sites allow online reputation control. Rather than you claiming your identity as others…

  • Open letter to Flickr developers, Generally, I agree, writing with full capitalization (aka all caps) violates computer etiquette much to the chagrin to the computer literate. The illiterate obliviously walk into this trap. Lack of any capitalization lacks the capability to cause the same anger. That said, there are legitimate uses of full capitalization. Batman…

  • Previously I have seen usability describing ease of using a web site. These four essences of usability are interesting. I believe that to satisfy customers, a Web site must fulfill four distinct needs: Availability: A site that’s unreachable, for any reason, is useless. Responsiveness: Having reached the site, pages that download slowly are likely to…

  • VM(Night)Mare

    So, I need to install software on a couple servers which don’t exist. They are virtual: VMWare ESX. I can see and login to the web site. However, its frustrating to consistently get a working console. I get a partial page with “Error on page.” Going to the error reveals: Browser#ResponseReceived(): invalid content type text/html…

  • Much of what I might write in these posts about Vista is knowledge accumulated from the efforts of my coworkers. This is part two in a series of blog posts on our presentation at BbWorld ’07, on the behalf of the Georgia VIEW project, Maintaining Large Vista Installations (2MB PPT). Part one covered automation of…

  • I really have to stop listening to the same song played over and over. It may affect my thinking…. We had another node crash due to the Sun JVM issue. Our start script failed to make a file in /var so the node did not become fully operational as expected. While waiting for those with…