Archive for the ‘technology’ Category

Tweetgeist
April 25, 2008

FIRST Tweetgeist (n) [from "zeitgeist", german, the intellectual and cultural climate of an era; and "tweet", to post a message on twitter.com]: The collected and distilled wisdom of one’s circle of advisors, as compiled via the “twitter” internet application. Example: I’m not sure if that restaurant is any good; let me check the tweetgeist. As [...]

Think Small
March 12, 2008

A college student wrote in to Picnik asking for general advice about how to create a similar project for school.  After reminding him that we’ve had a team of people working on Picnik for several years, and tossing a few book recommendations his way, I closed with this advice: Overall I think the best way [...]

Ubunting
December 16, 2007

I’m writing this blog post while running Ubuntu!  The migration is now (more or less) complete and it had some delights and some frustrations. After spending a bunch of time trying, unsuccessfully, to re-partition my hard disk I decided to throw in the towel and just start from scratch with a complete overwrite.  To my [...]

Leaping To Linux
December 9, 2007

Today I started preparations to convert my main computer over to linux. Ubuntu, specifically. This computer had become too slow and unstable and I figured if I was going to have to re-install Windows anyway, I might as well take the opportunity to make the conversion. It turns out my leap won’t be such a [...]

Zippy Mouse
November 7, 2007

Here’s a weird one: changing the refresh rate on my monitor here at work makes my mouse noticeably faster.  Usually I run at 60Hz, but to deal with some hardware issues I sometimes change to 120Hz.  And then my mouse cursor becomes so responsive it’s actually hard to control.  Is the mouse software running off [...]

How Microsoft is losing
May 4, 2007

I’m working on a specification document for my new job.  I need to draw a diagram showing how various servers communicate with each other.  Unfortunately, Word keeps hanging after I get a few boxes done. I kill Word, submit the error report, and Microsoft tells me to download some updates.  Fine.  Except now I need [...]

Time to Convert Another One?
June 21, 2006

Kate and I did the server shuffle a few weeks ago.  Kate’s desktop computer became our mail/web server, and our web/mail server became a file server, and Kate got a new Mac Mini to use as her desktop computer. We started setting up the file server yesterday — formatting the old computer and installing Windows XP [...]