tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-56157602009-07-09T05:20:52.680-07:00Curious MindThoughts on various topicsJoenoreply@blogger.comBlogger169125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5615760.post-50754167065947281782009-07-09T04:40:00.000-07:002009-07-09T05:20:48.263-07:00I've just uninstalled Adobe Creative Suite 3 from my laptop. Why, you might ask, would I give up the most excellent Photoshop and Illustrator applications, Acrobat Professional and Flash?The short answer is because they're just so damn inconvenient and I've found that CorelDraw CX4 is a good replacement for the two applications that I used primarily on the laptop, Photoshop and Illustrator.You Joenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5615760.post-21864509378980484122009-03-10T11:49:00.000-07:002009-03-10T11:51:10.053-07:00I'm having problems with DEP causing Visual Studio to crash, perhaps because of third party components that I'm using? In any case, I found that this command can be used to disable DEP:bcdedit.exe /set {current} nx AlwaysOffOnce I can determine a better work around, then I can use this command to turn it back on:bcdedit.exe /set {current} nx AlwaysOnJoenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5615760.post-74896187320362295342009-03-10T09:50:00.000-07:002009-03-10T09:54:11.774-07:00I'm installing visual studio 2008 on Windows Server 2008 and got this error message:"VJSharpCodeProvider could not be located"After a bit of research, I found that the problem was caused because my application contained some .java files and that the solution was to download and install the Microsoft Visual J# redistributable package, 64-bit edition from microsoft's download site.On a different Joenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5615760.post-53540287160827952122009-03-09T11:19:00.000-07:002009-03-09T11:38:12.046-07:00Here are a couple more helpful tips for running Windows 2008 Server as your desktop O/S:How to disable user access control (UAC) so that you aren't bombarded by those "are you sure" messages.How to disable data execution prevention so that visual studio doesn't act weirdly.Turn off Shutdown Event Tracker and change performance setting from background to programs (for some reason the background Joenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5615760.post-70199603975092213642009-03-03T09:33:00.000-08:002009-03-03T09:46:50.475-08:00I've just acquired a kill-a-watt power consumption meter. It's a pretty nifty gadget and with it I've been able to roughly calculate how much some common devices cost to power up. For example:A Dell M5200 laser printer uses 960 watts while printing, so if you printed continuously for 24 hours, you'd burn up $2.46 worth of power.My laptop uses 80 watts while active, so if I leave it turned on and Joenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5615760.post-64306348853665875782009-03-02T12:46:00.000-08:002009-03-02T13:01:38.817-08:00I couldn't find a calendar that I liked today and rather than make one in word or excel, I decided to use iTextSharp. I'm growing quite dependent on iTextSharp. I hope that it sticks around. It's a wonderful library.The puzzle app that I created last month has got me to thinking of a way to cut the puzzle pieces out, and that led me to do a bit of research into industrial lasers. I think if I wonJoenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5615760.post-59340904864860938672009-02-27T08:40:00.001-08:002009-02-27T08:44:36.751-08:00Just in, from "The Economist" magazine: Sales of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged are booming as aficionados compare the events described in the book to our current economic malaise.Joenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5615760.post-66646210983020284622009-02-20T04:38:00.001-08:002009-02-20T04:40:46.826-08:00In the past, whenever I've wanted graph paper I've always written a simple program to draw horizontal and vertical lines to form the grid size I sought, then printed out the results. I was thinking about adding a little web app to jlion.com to do this as a public service, then found this site: http://incompetech.com/graphpaper/plain/. This guy has done a wonderful job and his web apps are much Joenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5615760.post-88116213719665926912009-02-19T09:41:00.000-08:002009-02-19T10:06:51.181-08:00I've been working on a jigsaw puzzle application for a while now, and you can view the results here: http://www.jlion.com/tools/jpuzzle.aspx.I learned a few things while working on this. Really, creating the jigsaw app was a fun puzzle in itself. The app divides an image into squares and then randomly designates each side of each square as "in", meaning the knob points into the square, or "out" Joenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5615760.post-54155383251760985942008-11-11T05:23:00.000-08:002008-11-11T06:39:27.404-08:00I continue to listen to Malcolm Gladwell's "The Tipping Point", a book which on the whole I find very interesting and thought provoking. "Mavens" are experts in a subject and are willing and eager to share their knowledge. "Connectors" are people who effortlessly and intuitively bring people together, and "Salesmen" are folks who can translate difficult subjects in a way that "sticks".Along with Joenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5615760.post-1492717003292273112008-11-07T11:42:00.000-08:002008-11-10T10:52:00.087-08:00I've just finished the rereading Larry Nivin's entire ringworld series, starting with Ringworld, followed by The Ringworld Engineers, The Ringworld Throne, Ringworld's Children and finishing up with Protector. I did not read Fleet of Worlds or any of the other Niven "Known Space" books.What a trip! This is something like 45 hours of Ringworld. I came out of it wishing that there were a Ringworld Joenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5615760.post-44368259845218312042008-10-22T17:31:00.000-07:002008-10-22T17:35:35.430-07:00Stupid Hyper-V mistake #1:Never copy your hyper-V drive, change the drive mapping in the hyper-v administrator, ignore the warning about snapshots, then try to restart your virtual machine. The hyper-v drive contains only the base configuration of the virtual machine (prior to the administration of any snapshots). When you copy the drive, you lose the snapshots and any updates or changes to your Joenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5615760.post-53886799918022341922008-10-21T10:06:00.000-07:002008-10-21T12:17:14.012-07:00I've just returned from a week in Las Vegas, where I attended the yearly Inforum conference. I'm glad to be home.The conference was, in my opinion, well structured and informative. I learned quite a lot while there and felt like the time away from home and the office was not wasted. I was there to learn more about Infor's ERP product, Syteline, and this I did. It looks like the newest version, V8Joenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5615760.post-54324509505772494282008-10-07T06:18:00.000-07:002008-10-07T11:41:32.588-07:00So far Hyper-V is working out well for me. I am disappointed that I am not able to use USB devices such as scanners or printers with my Hyper-V virtual machines. It would be nice if I were able to use VM-ware workstation in combination with Hyper-V, or if VM-ware server would work with 2008 64-bit (as of a couple of weeks ago it didn't).The nice thing about having Hyper-V on my development Joenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5615760.post-3955805670428904522008-09-06T22:08:00.000-07:002008-09-06T22:35:31.363-07:00Well, today I took the plunge and installed Windows Server 2008 x64 on my computer at home. Really, I was hoping to take advantage of hyper-V. I had bumped up the ram to 8gb and was thinking that I should be able to run a couple of virtual pcs at the same time...There are a lot of reasons for wanting to do this:I have some hardware (an hp photo printer, for example) that requires funky drivers Joenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5615760.post-68698389936728897662008-09-03T06:34:00.000-07:002008-09-03T06:58:53.730-07:00Like many software developers, I spend some time thinking about my competitive strategy. How will I remain employable and employed in a flat-world future dominated by outsourcers? BaseLine magazine is one of my favorite IT magazines and they've published an encouraging analysis of the risks and dangers of outsourcing. Key points: The actual cost advantage of outsourcing is typically something Joenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5615760.post-21523674321733629602008-08-22T05:21:00.000-07:002008-08-22T06:51:31.529-07:00Brian Krebs of the WashingtonPost.com wrote this blog entry which is an overview of how some scammers operate. I hadn't realized how sophisticated these operations had become. It's really an arms race.And if it is an arms race, perhaps statistical analytics is the Predator drone. I found this article today on eWeek's web site about Guardian Analytics which is a software tool that use statistical Joenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5615760.post-55943974808893233952008-08-14T12:01:00.000-07:002008-08-14T12:29:54.832-07:00thoughts for the day...A couple of days ago, a russian hacker tried to use a sql injection attack against one of the sites that I support. The attack was really pretty simple--a script tagged on to the querystring of one of the pages. The intent of the script was to update every column in every table with a bit of javascript that would redirect a viewing user to a web site hosting a virus.We've Joenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5615760.post-42186758108969385222008-07-25T05:11:00.000-07:002008-07-30T10:42:54.425-07:00BooksI've just finished the Dune 3-part series: Dune, Dune Messiah and Children of Dune. What a slog! The series starts out well. I felt that Dune Messiah was a bit tedious, and Children of Dune not entirely consistent with the previous novels. What I enjoyed about the Dune series was the philosophy: What would it be like to be able to see into the future? What if memories were inheritable or Joenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5615760.post-82408821455393688402008-06-29T10:47:00.000-07:002008-07-02T09:06:53.403-07:00I've been working on a DLL wrapper for volume shadow copy recently and today I decided to try it out on a 64-bit operating system. I chose Windows Server 2008 and tried to set it up on a VMWare WorkStation v6 virtual machine. The OS installed correctly up until the final reboot, after which I got an error message indicating that my CPU was "cpu not compatible with 64-bit mode". This confused me Joenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5615760.post-19033764338362036842008-06-12T06:50:00.000-07:002008-06-12T07:13:13.560-07:00I've just finished reading "The Bourne Identity" by Robert Ludlum. I've seen the movie which pro ports to be based on this book several times and found very little similarity. I guess both the book and the movie center around an assassin with amnesia and a girl, but little else seems familiar. The book is engaging but a little mindless. Which, I guess, makes it a good counterpoint for Dune, whichJoenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5615760.post-69362314272460844142008-06-09T04:25:00.000-07:002008-06-09T05:04:47.402-07:00I'm now about a fifth of the way into the audiobook version of Frank Herbert's Dune. This is a book I read as a teenager. I had forgotten how engaging it is.Are you creating a calendar for your web site? Want to make it easy for folks to add your events to their Microsoft Outlook calendars? A solution is at hand. There's a format called iCalendar that provides for interchange of event informationJoenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5615760.post-91343188768228023192008-05-31T13:14:00.000-07:002008-05-31T13:41:47.698-07:00I'm just coming back from a very nice vacation in Vermont. One morning, while staying at my parent's home, I spotted this black bear in their back yard. When he spotted me with my camera, he ambled off into the forest.While not bear-spotting, I found time to finish Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. I found the ending of the book to be somewhat anticlimactic. IE: I felt like there were a lot of Joenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5615760.post-86981909442242340742008-05-14T04:58:00.000-07:002008-05-14T10:02:35.563-07:00I've started reading The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson. This is the second book by this author that I've read: I enjoyed Snow Crash immensely, and The Diamond Age in many ways surpasses this earlier novel.Diamond Age is set in the distant future, in a world where nanotechnology has become commonplace. Almost anything a person can imagine, from floating cities to chopsticks can be manufactured Joenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5615760.post-45735211153911473622008-05-13T12:22:00.000-07:002008-05-13T12:27:31.357-07:00So I've just received my long anticipated copy of Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Premium. I say "long anticipated" as it took over a month after our order with Zones for the software to finally arrive.Now having waited such a long time for the software to be delivered, I find that I must wait only a slightly shorter amount of time for the software to install. This is the slowest installation program Joenoreply@blogger.com0