(1) Solid case of not finding a text string in a text file.
(2) General feel like it has "downgraded" it's search capability. When it first came out, I never had it fail to find what I was looking for. Now, it does. Interesting?
Google Desktop has some problems
Wednesday, May 24, 2006
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Posted by reinkefj
Technology’s challenge: Easy to use! Understandable?
Tuesday, May 23, 2006http://news.tbo.com/news/metro/MGBO3GM5INE.html
***Begin Quote***
Mike Palazzolo said he routinely faxes his daily special to regular customers. When a couple of them asked to be taken off his mailing list this year, the manager said he was unable to remove the numbers from his fax machine's speed dialer and instead entered a long series of identical digits in their place. He assumed those numbers would be meaningless, but they turned out to be Ebsary's fax number.
***End Quote***
Now I am not sure if I believe the excuse. But it does point out that the side of technology that faces humans is often cryptic, forgettable, and the documentation stinks. I have about five cheap remotes at home whose instruction books are probably in some recycling landfill somewhere (don't distract me with that rant!). I can't program them but I can't part with them. So, I can empathize with this fellow. I see some hidden assumptions in this that make this little morality play even more interesting: (1) government "laws" that interfere; (2) free local calls; (3) Lawyers in general; (4) the fax machine maker (i.e., I sold it that end my problem. Now go ahead and use it. I dare you!); and (5) an incomprehensible user interface. Dontcha just love it.
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Posted by reinkefj
I received a “free” email from my “other” alma mater … … BUT … …
Monday, May 22, 2006… … I discovered how to break it. Tried to use it. :-) I basically tried to send email from one alumni id to another. AND it broke. (I've never seen that before.) So I dropped an email to both schools techies.
Dear Help: In attempting to send an email over to Manhattan College, I received a bounce. In consulting with an old friend, who happens to supervise their datacenter, we think that the problem may be inside your "cloud". Care to advise? After all, email should be able to flow between my two alma maters. I did. ;-) Just thought you might want to be aware of the problem, FjohnR
The support guy at FDU is looking into it.
Just doing my "job" as alpha / beta tester aka polish minesweeper without equal! You give me a freebie and I can break it. After all who tries to send email to themselves. :-)
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Posted by reinkefj
The carpenter with the nail in his brain
Monday, May 22, 2006http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/book_week.shtml
Monday 22 – Friday 26 May 2006
Brain Matters
By Katrina Firlik, abridged by Doreen Estall, read by Vicki Simon
***Begin Quote***
Katrina Firlik, a young American neurosurgeon, is one of the scarce females from a rare species in medicine. She describes her fascination for the brain and its workings and malfunctions, and tells of the chief moments of her long training as a neurosurgeon. Through cases she has encountered: the carpenter with the nail in his brain, the schoolboy who is thrown out of his car and has a blood clot on the brain which grows before her eyes, the child with raging bacterial meningitis, the teenage girl with severe epilepsy, she reveals the astonishing achievements and the limitations of neurosurgery.
***End Quote***
An absolutely "neat" listen.
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Posted by reinkefj
I can break anything. Just give me time! In this case, Google Notebook.
Sunday, May 21, 2006In this case, I was playing with GNBK doing some alumni research. (Sweet) And then I decided to do some networking (turkey) work. I decided that GNBK would be useful there as well. But, I want to keep the two well separate. SO I created a GMail account for the purpose. THEN when I tried to use it. GBNK reported that the "internet was unreachable". I don't think so. So I went and signed out from GMail and everything works fine. Guess there not prepared for the multiple gmail id situations. BUT, it should give a wrong error message.
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Posted by reinkefj
Are you sick of filling out web registration forms and remembering a mountain of passwords?
Sunday, May 21, 2006***Begin Quote***
Are you sick of filling out web registration forms and remembering a mountain of passwords?
Me too! I must have filled out hundreds of web forms in my lifetime, each asking for pretty much the same information. And usually these websites don't even really *need* any personal information, they just require a unique identification for a person, and a way to prove that the person controls that identity. At their core, that is what all those registration and login forms and verification emails boil down to. I started Videntity.org as a way to avoid all this hassle.
***End Quote***
Yup.
I'll try anything and everything.
So I took out an identity http://reinkefj.videntity.org/ and then went for a spin at Live Journal.
Appears to work.
Now if it was "accepted" everywhere, it's would be useful.
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Posted by reinkefj
Arghh another strange failure
Sunday, May 21, 2006This morning at 0830 21MAY06, I took up luggable to find it a mess. Nothing that a reboot wouldn't cure, but investigation and restart took 30 minutes of my life thatI'll never get back and have nothing to show for it. I wish I'd have jotted my findings as I found them. But here's what remember.
(1) RSSBANDIT was offline. YIM75 was offline and nothing would bring it back. Outlook was apparently OK. IE6 was "not responding". Every keystroke or mouse click took a long time to respond.
(2) Dyndns, MsnMsg, and Syncura were rproting OK.
(3) Google web accelerator was disconnected. (It does that a lot?)
(4) Outlook has a inbound email message at 647
I began killing things and eventually got to where I could restart.
Hmm?
(A) This was different that when the WAP stop working.
(B) Google Web Accelerator is suspect.
(C) ISP can't be rulled out.
(D) IE6 running OWA to work was in the mix.
Argh squared!
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Posted by reinkefj
Google’s Notebook has been running when I had some lockups. Beware?
Saturday, May 20, 2006When using GNotebook, I have had Internet Explorer 6.0.2900.2180.sp2 go nuts TWICE. It, on its own, spawned a bunch of extra windows. I assume it kept going until it ran out of whatever. Now I have never seen IE6 do that before. I don't know what causd it. I've used without it happening. And, I've never seen that behavior with Firefox1503. So be advise!
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Posted by reinkefj
SPAM seems to be picking up! What to do?
Saturday, May 20, 2006In my unscientific study of email trends, I am taking more spam on my non-hidden short "human being readable" email addresses. Sigh, we know who controls the inet.
The hidden and random sting ones seem to be pretty immune. The hidden ones are never exposed to any one but me; no significant risk there. The random string ones are the ones where the address portion is just a long random string. And they seem immune; guess no spammer wants to chase them.
I have lot's of dedicated email addresses for lots of different purposes and have also “lost” a lot of addresses to spammers.
In the losing, I discovered "alpha spammers". They use alpha progression to eventually “discover” every address. I wised up to it when some dumb spammer had “reinke @att.net, reinkea@, reinkez@ reinkeaa@, …” in the To field. They eventualy discovered every one of my @att.net addresses since they all looked like reinke xxxxx @ att.net! So, I have adopted the long random strings as the “user” part. Also since no one invests any time in the “name”, I can change it when needed (i.e., if it starts to be spammed).
Since 99% of the use of an email address is to be hit by “reply”, no one cares. AND I have many ways for people to get back in touch, like http://public.2idi.com/=reinkefj, so it seems to work for me.
I'm going to have to abandon more of my non-hidden short "human being readable" email addresses. Sigh. I'm probably going to have to look into more of the alternatives.
My web-based email web form at http://public.2idi.com/=reinkefj has been very immune to spam. Who knows how long that will last.
Some of the various providers have some interesting features like only accepting email from sources in your address book. I'm going to look into them.
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Posted by reinkefj
Imagine how useful it would be to have a wiki. Now how do you sell it to Leadership?
Friday, May 19, 2006http://software.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=06/05/12/1539231&from=rss
Enterprise Applications
Putting MediaWiki to use in an organization
Friday May 19, 2006 (05:01 PM GMT)
By: Mark Alexander Bain
***Begin Quote***
Imagine how useful it would be to have an online knowledge base that can easily be updated created by key people within your organization. That's the promise of a wiki — a Web application that "allows users to easily add, remove, or otherwise edit all content, very quickly and easily," as Wikipedia, perhaps the best-known wiki, puts it. Why not bring the benefits of a wiki to your organization?
***End Quote***
Imagine all you want! Leadership doesn't understand it. You can talk until you are blue in the face. They can't understand it. And, you can't make them. Talk's cheap. And, that Leadership, who you are trying to sell, has been sold and bought the Brooklyn Bridge so many times they don't even listen anymore.
Thus, you can't get it in the door!
I knew what the benefits were from using wikopedia and the wiki at http://wikiw.freetalklive.com. But, until you have your "own" demo, you don't KNOW what it could do for your organization.
I suggest throwing it up on a laptop for demonstration purposes.
Some caveats. Any relatively modern virgin windowsXP from Dell should be good enough. I say virgin because your companies deploys as a standard image may interfere with your deployment. I say virgin also because I had played with Perspective prior to attempting MediaWiki and it needed a wipe to get it to work. But for one kilo dollar of hardware, zero software dollars, and at most 4 hours of clock time, and you can have your demo.
In my case, I use my Verizon Wireless Broad Band card and DynDns as well to make an internet accessible demo. I have actually supported five users (admittedly slowly) in simultaneous updating pages.
A demo will open the eyes of most Luddite of Leaders. A demo they get. They see it. They touch it. And, they "know" it's not that bridge. Or that they are not commissioning a trek into the unending budgetary swamp. They can make the leap from small demo to big demo.
After all to them it just feels like a funny website. But they'll "get it" when they see it.
That's what I did. It makes it visceral, easy to see, and touchable!
Now you are not going to garner the huge knowledge gains from a corporate wiki by running a demo. The value is having the enterprise version out, available, and open for use.
But you have to get to that point. This is how to do it.
Heck, if you're in a pickle, gimme a yell and I'll rent you my laptop for a day. ;-)
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Posted by reinkefj
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