Google Desktop Search finally works with Firefox.
Unfortunately it still doesn’t work with my anti-virus software and I can’t be bothered disconnecting from the net, uninstalling the AV, installing GDS, rebooting and then reinstalling the AV to get it going. At least not today I can’t so I’ll be sticking with Copernic Desktop Search for now.
Steve Rubel reckons Microsoft’s new Office marketing campaign is all wrong, and misses out on opportunities for “conversational” marketing, such as blogs and podcasts.
Me, I reckon they should at least have designed an animation that doesn’t have a character that looks at first glance like a giant penis.
… Or is it just me?
My 3 month old USB drive has gone kaput, and just when I’d started to get used to it, and finding it really useful. It’s one of those Imation swivel ones, and had been fine until last week, when I plugged it into a PC that had a loose keyboard plug. Whether that was a factor or not I don’t know, but random keystrokes and beeps started emanating from the computer, until I figured out what had gone wrong. The drive hasn’t worked since then. Nothing happens when I plug it in, not into my home or work computers.
Imation’s web site is next to useless. They’ll be getting a call on their support line from me as soon as I get the chance. It’s still under warranty, so they should replace it.
Of course, those friends of mine who wondered why I bothered to buy a name-brand drive may well have been vindicated.
Me, I’m wondering if I should forget USB drives and just buy that iPod I’m covetting.
Update Tuesday 7am. Imation said find the receipt and take it back to place of purchase for a replacement.
Driving to work yesterday my iTrip suddenly stopped working. Where there should have been The Podcast Network‘s The Jazz Show was static, and screeching. When I paused the show there was a high pitched tone. It lasted all the way from half way up the bridge, down by Albert Park Lake to Malvern.
It wasn’t until I was driving home that the solution presented itself.
The Australian Grand Prix is on at Albert Park Lake and they have set up a temporary FM radio station for attendees.
So, if your iTrip is tuned to around the 91.5 mark and you are travelling through inner city Melbourne over the next few days you may wish to dig out the iTrip CD you never thought you’d use again and reconfigure your pod or you can download your iTrip software from the Griffin Technology site.
Yesterday’s discovery with reading Excel via ADO and the ODBC Text Driver: numeric values may be wrong if it takes a guess that the column contains date fields.
The geeky detail (found in VB6SP5, Excel 2003, ADO 2.7, Jet Provider 4.0):
The text driver looks at the first few lines (configurable via the MaxScanRows setting or the Rows To Scan field in the DSN configuration box) to figure out what sort of data it is dealing with in each column. If there are numbers, it assumes the columns are numbers.
But if it sees dates, and sees no other data in the next few rows, then it assumes all the data in those columns are dates. If it gets further down to rows containing actual numbers, it still thinks it’s reading dates, and when it tries to convert the number to a date and back again, it causes a rounding error and ends up adding 1 to the final number.
In my case, the solution was to get the spreadsheets to contain zeroes (quite valid for the data being loaded) in the first few rows, instead of blanks. A little tricky, but it remains a good method for getting data out of Excel.
I don’t like Word’s change tracking. Never have. I suppose it’s useful in some circumstances, but almost every document I’ve come across that had it turned on proved it to be a symptom of self-importance on the part of the author.
Maybe my dislike of it is partially fuelled by the fact that I don’t know how to work it properly. It’s irritating to open a document and have to continually turn off the View Markup just to hide all the colourful lines and balloons that otherwise display. And it bloody turns itself back on every time you open the document again.
The way to permanently hide it all is to approve all the changes, something that can apparently only be done by showing the Reviewer toolbar. And my problem is that on the occasions I encounter markup all over the place and I want to get rid of it, I can never remember how it’s done.
This article goes into plenty of detail. But in summary:
There, finally got rid of the bastards.
Well yesterday I got a PSU from Digiworld in LaTrobe Street. 400W ATX for $79. Took it home and discovered it didn’t fit in the case. No good. I did a little research on the net and found the Gateway page documenting the dead power supply I have. The page offers the following chilling comment: “This power supply is not backwards compatible with any power supply.”
I took the bought one back into the shop this morning, along with the corpse of its mutant cousin. A couple of guys in the shop concluded what I already suspected: it was a Gateway custom job. An evolutionary dead-end. They’d taken some kind of smaller version of an ATX PSU and turned it sideways. And thanks to Gateway no longer trading in Australia, the chances of finding another one are minimal.
Digiworld were happy to give me a refund (despite their notices up claiming they would only issue credit notes — surely contradicting statutory requirements), and to wish me good luck.
I tried the mob that Gateway left holding the fort. Despite their web site saying they stock parts, when I rang them up they said they don’t any more.
D’oh.
So I have an otherwise fine five year-old computer. Even if I upgraded, it would have been nice to keep it for the kids. I’ll take a quick look on eBay and the other secondhand outlets, but it seems the best I can do is strip it for parts (particularly the hard drive, which has all my useful stuff on it) and buy a new one.
Lesson for the day: When buying a PC, make sure it uses standard spec parts. The guy in the shop reckons Dell does this customised mutant fiddling too.
UPDATE 21:30. The most important thing – the hard drive from the dead PC – has been transferred over. I’ll have to do a little fiddling to get things like Outlook running again, but at least the data is intact. The data, after all, is the most valuable thing. And hey, the kids are rapt at the prospect of buying a shiny new PC.
Firefox 1.0.1 is out, and fixes a bunch of security vulnerabilities.
BUT before you go and download it, be ware: apparently there’ll be trouble if you install it over 1.0 and earlier versions. Be sure to read the release notes first.
I need a new Power Supply Unit for my main PC. Why do so few people in this town seem to sell them? Or if they do, they’re not advertising effectively.
The local Dick Smith ran out yesterday (sometime between 4am when their web site stock level updates, and when I got there).
I had to hunt around, but seem to have found a retailer in the CBD that has a fair range (better than Dick Smith’s choice of one). Will have to go shopping at lunchtime.
It seems like some others my sites are being bombarded with hits from a mob called AllResearch. Apparently one of the things they do is hit RSS feeds and suck down every page referenced, for some kind of indexing. Judging from the amount of traffic they’re burning up, they suck big-time, in fact. I mean, indexers usually put in a lot of hits on web sites, but these guys are hitting more than 10 times as much as the next one down the list, MSN.
These are the top hitters over at toxiccustard.com:
Time for a little .htaccess magic:
order allow,deny
deny from 38.144.36.
allow from all
So I was checking out copper (as you do), and followed the wikipedia copper entry link to EnvironmentalChemistry.com’s copper data, and I discovered that ad blockers are beginning to change the economics of the web. The web site whinged that they had detected ad blocking, and if I wanted to get the content I’d have to turn it off (and provided directions – which I followed, but it just turned out to be a bunch of atomic numbers and covalent bonds and useless crap like that).
The economics of a lot of the web are not dissimilar to those of free-to-air television; there’s a covenant between the producers (broadcasters/webauthors) and the consumers – we will let this stuff out to anyone, and you will consume our advertising. Advertisers give the producers cash to cover the costs of publishing. There’s a profit in it, and everyone’s happy.
Except that consumers have decided they don’t like the deal anymore. People are taping TV shows, and skipping the ads. People are using ad blockers in their browsers. The economics of the model are breaking down. I personally am behaving this way because I find the advertising increasingly intrusive and irrelevant, and thus annoying. The ads suck, for products that suck, and they’re shoved down my throat. So I avoid them. This is how a character in Carl Sagan’s novel Contact became the richest man on earth – by selling TV ad blockers.
The three outcomes I can forecast from this are:
I for one have no idea how this will play out, but I’m sure advertising will get more subtle. It’s done that over the last century, and will continue to in response to increasing consumer sophistication. Perhaps advertisers will find a way to back off, and only offer their products to customers who want them; they certainly want to act that way, because it’s a waste of money advertising women’s sanitary napkins to the gay male viewers of Friends — unless they’re planning to fix their car’s leaky roof with one.
BTW, how did they figure out I was blocking their ads?
Well the advance warnings the other day were a bit muddled up, but Apple has announced new iPod models and a price drop in the old ones. I don’t have one, but I’m certainly thinking about it… if you buy one in the next little while, make sure you don’t pay the old price!
To me the full-size iPod appeals because you can literally chuck all your music onto it, and the wide range of accessories available. But the iPod mini (especially the new bigger capacity ones) appeal for the smaller size and longer battery life. Maybe I’ll go shopping.