This is the new feed:
The transition was fairly painless. The DasBlog posts imported to WordPress directly from the RSS feed, but all the comments were lost. This may be a future possibility so I zipped up a working copy of DasBlog. Moving my eight Blogger posts to WordPress was easy with the correct plugin for ‘new’ Blogger (i.e. not the default Blogger plugin). First impressions are that WordPress is very easy to use, has plenty of features and lots of community support.
Like many busy people I used to politely decline requests to join LinkedIn – a social networking website for professionals. A few weeks ago I finally gave it a try and on uploading my Gmail contacts a whopping 70+ people I knew were already in LinkedIn, wow it has really taken off! Check out my shiny new LinkedIn profile here:
What are the main benefits I see from the site? Luckily I have never have trouble finding contracts, but every so often I find myself working for really bad managers – incompetents seem to cluster, why is that? With LinkedIn I hope to avoid making such mistakes ever again:
LinkedIn should enable us to observe any company’s rate of turnover, especially to discover if competent senior developers are leaving in droves or only staying for a few months. As more and more people joined LinkedIn it will become pretty easy to contact someone who used to have the job you are interviewing for – what better way to get to the 411 on why they left than ask the individual themselves?
One thing I have found is that not every member responds to an invite immediately. After three weeks I sent a reminders to the few stragglers and all but one responded within the day – perhaps they missed the first ‘bulk request’ due to spam filters? Whatever the reason don’t forget than you can easily resend an invitation to an existing member.
Steve Gibson of GRC fame spits out another useful tool:
It simply displays if some newer hardware features are available on your PC. The screen-shot is verification that the 64bit PC I built almost three years does support DEP.
DEP: Prevents buffer overflows in hardware – this a very big deal. Of course the operation system must support DEP too. Which versions of Windows support it is unclear, but 64bit Vista and XP should support it. Hopefully Steve Gibson will extend his utility to test DEP with an actual buffer overflow
Hardware Vitalization: Hardware support for running Virtual Machines – they should run with no speed degradation
You can see all of Steve’s free utilities at his circa-1995 website:
grc.com
After a period of dumbing down his Security Now podcast is again one I highly recommend:
grc.com
When re-hosting this blog I decided to go with an engine that published plain-jane html. The main reasons are:
. Simplicity of hosting
. Speed of pages to appear (i.e. no ASP.Net engine to ‘warm up’)
. Should be simple to migrate to another engine in the future
Unfortunately I decided that Linux is a simpler and faster choice than windows. I say unfortunately because it appears Apache on Linux is case sensitive, i.e. Index.html is different from index.html.
This means there are few dead-links on this site right now, and they will have to stay that way until I return from vacation. Probably I’ll swap back to IIS hosting. Anyone else who looking to move their blog don’t make the same mistake!
Over the last few days I have been on forums and chatting with friends about HDTV.
Anyone in the market should be aware that just getting HDMI is not enough. According to this article at cnet not all HDMI devices are compatible – nice. It was interesting to read Dvorak’s rant about HDCP in last month’s PC Magazine about what will happen when someone who bought a Sony TV two years ago, plugs in a new Sony blue-ray player only to find the player refuses to send HD content to the non-HDCP capable TV. Already I can picture non-technical yuppies flipping out at innocent Best Buy clerks – ‘listen sonny boy, I spent half your yearly salary on that [bleep]ing TV so you’d better make it work or..’.
Wikipedia details differences between versions of HDMI, which are principally higher bandwidth on video + new audio codec support (lossless TrueHD and DTS-HD). The question is would play a lossless codec straight to a TV’s built in speakers?
What is next? Probably a black market for boxes that accept any version of hdmi input, handshake with hdcp and output to DRM free DVI/ hdmi/ component video.
It is the time of year again, and since Lariam has almost totally gone my life will return even closer to normal this year.
Professional Highlights of 2006
Personal Highlights of 2006
2006 was really a major regrouping after Lariam and the start of crunching numbers for retirement planning, so what about 2007:
Professional Goals for 2007
Personal Goals for 2007
Surely no-one but me is interested, but what happened to last year’s goals?
Professional Goals for 2006
Personal Goals for 2006
