Paul Lockwood » Technology

Atlanta User Groups I recommend

Paul Lockwood — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 18:43:29 +0000

A friend just asked me what .Net groups are good these days. Atlanta is the Software Capital of the South which means we have many great groups in town and I watch them all for interesting topics, but these are the three I personally attend most often:

http://www.meetup.com/AtlAltDotNet/ this is great for new ideas and decent technical depth. It is a fairly new group still finding its feet

http://www.iasahome.org/web/atlanta Atlanta’s IASA chapter – always has super-smart people in attendance. Most meetings end up being a discussion (or argument!) with few punches pulled. The best part? BS artists are shot down very quickly and most never come back

http://www.atldotnet.org this is the ‘main’ .Net User Group in town and excellent at delivering high level introductions to topics. Networking is very good here too as local MVPs etc are at most meetings

Other .Net focused groups are http://www.atlantamspros.com and http://ggmug.com. A good attempt to list all relevant groups is http://www.devcow.com/usergroups but I don’t believe it is currently maintained.

Hopefully that helps a few people looking to learn more and network

Deleting data before donating

Paul Lockwood — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 14:22:40 +0000

This was so easy I felt obliged to blog it. Under our house rule ‘not used it in a year, so it has to go’, our old P4 laptop is being donated. It held old tax records, Microsoft Money files etc which had to be deleted first.

One free and simple technique is Boot and Nuke. I download the small ISO and used this free ISO burning tool to burn a CD.

The laptop then booted from the CD into a Linux program which looks similar to below once running. I choose the default and it took about two hours to delete a 70GB 7400 rpm hard disk with a DOD Short (three pass) technique:

Finally another 30 minutes using Averatec’s media recovery discs and it is now ready for someone else to enjoy.

Google’s shiney new Browser

Paul Lockwood — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 22:35:46 +0000

Chrome is out, download it here: http://www.google.com/chrome. I know the title post was a little obvious, a quick web-search shows a stack of hits for it already

Chrome is built on webkit and has worked fine for me on all my favorite sites so far, interesting tid-bits:

Task Manger shows each tab is a separate process – for better stability one assumes
Love my new desktop shortcuts to gmail, hotmail etc
The new tab option shows screenshots of favorite pages – cool
Starts-up fast, renders fast
Username/ passwords were sucked out of Firefix – creepy
It evilly dropped a shortcut into my quick launch bar, grrr

So it looks like us web-devs will soon have three mainstream browsers to test for All the more reason for everyone to start using JQuery etc.