Posts Tagged ‘Technology’

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Descriptions, Descriptions, Descriptions

Sunday, February 22nd, 2009

I’ve just been reading through the nominees for Best Blog Post at the Irish Blog Awards. There are some great posts in there, but what struck me is that there’s all these great Irish blogs out there, and they’re all neatly categorised for the Blog Awards.

Which got me thinking about this blog. How would you categorise it? Although I was long-listed in the Best Technology category, I don’t think this is a technology blog per se. Not like Ken, Bernie, Pat or Donncha.

I don’t exclusively write about emerging technologies, the latest and greatest gadgets, how technology can transform peoples lives, or increase corporate productivity.

I don’t earn my living from technology any more. There was a time when I would avidly follow processor specs, the latest semi-conductor news, which was the best graphics card and so on ad infinitum. Now I don’t even know what speed the fastest processor is. More to the point, I don’t care.

What interests me is the process of using technology. Of pushing it to it’s limits and seeing what happens. Not what happens to the outside world, but to the world inside me.

In other words, I want to break it, fix it and by doing so learn about it. I want to know how far I can go before the technology becomes “magical” – in the of Arthur C. Clarke sense of the word.

So this is barely a technology blog. It’s definitely not a personal blog either, you’ll find very little about me in these pages. Not because I want to be mysterious or anonymous, but because I’m not a very interesting online personality. In person, that may be different story – you’d have to ask my friends, I’m not objectively aware of myself.

So it’s not a personal blog, and it’s not a technology blog – so what category does that leave me in?

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My Initial Reaction to Mac OS 10.5 Leopard – Part 1

Saturday, November 3rd, 2007

Seeing as I just posted about installing Leopard, I might as well give you my initial reaction to Apples new flagship OS.

On logging in for the first time, there’s a couple of things that will strike you straight away:

The Dock has been radically changed. It now sports a 3D look, along with reflected icons. Gone are the small black arrows to indicate running applications, instead you have a glowing blue light which I find is nearly impossible to see.

Leopard Dock
Click for larger size.

The menu bar has a new “theme”, it’s now translucent, the Apple icon has been changed and the Spotlight icon has been updated. A lot of users have complained about the translucency, but my desktop picture is black along the top, so I’ve hardly noticed it.

Leopard Menu Bar
Click for larger size.

The Finder has been updated, and the folder layout on the left now resembles iTunes. The folder icons have also been updated.

Leopard Finder
Click for larger size.

So they’re the main visual differences between Tiger and Leopard. When I get a chance, I’ll post more about the other big changes.

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Posted in Apple, Mac, Technology | 1 Comment »

Installing Mac OS 10.5 – Leopard

Saturday, November 3rd, 2007

It’s been a while since I did a proper technical post, but lately I’ve had little time to devote to the techie side of my life. So to help me get back into the swing of things, I ordered Leopard from the Apple website last week. At €129, it’s a lot cheaper than Windows Vista.

I usually don’t go for installing new operating versions until they’ve had time to settle down and the developers have had a chance to release updates for the bugs that invariably crop up. This time I decided I would bite the bullet and go for Leopard straight away.

I’ve never installed Mac OS before, so I wasn’t really sure what to expect. Coming from a Windows background, I’ve had plenty of opportunity to reinstall Windows – and what a tortuous experience that can be. (After working tech support for so long, I have the Windows mantra down pat: “Backup, format, reinstall.”)

As it turned out, installing Mac OS was a lot easier than installing Windows: pop the disk in the drive, double click the installer icon, and click the restart button. The machine automatically boots from the DVD drive, and the install process begins.

There are three options to choose from when installing a new version of Mac OS:

  • Upgrade,
  • Archive and Install, and
  • Erase and Install.

The first option installs Leopard over your existing OS, keeping your data and applications intact. The second makes a backup of your previous installation and installs Leopard, and the third wipes your current installation and then proceeds to installation.

I went with the Upgrade option as I didn’t want the hassle of reinstalling my applications and starting again from scratch. Once you click the “Continue” button, that’s it, no further user interaction is required. In all, the process took about an hour to complete, and when my MacBook rebooted at the end I was straight into Leopard.

Some users have reported problems with their installs hanging after the reboot, but apparently the problem is due to an unsupported extension for Logitech mouse drives. More seriously, there have also been issues with the built in firewall, so if you’re using your Mac on an unprotected network, you might want to invest in a full firewall product. The only problem I had was that I had to re-enter the encryption key for my wireless network connection, even though it was already stored in my keychain. Apart from that, I had no installation problems. Now it’s time to play with the new OS.

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Posted in Apple, Mac, Technology | Comments Off

Testing the WordPress Dash Widget

Friday, November 2nd, 2007

Nothing to see here. Just a test.

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Leopard Cracked to Work on PC’s

Tuesday, October 30th, 2007

Apple’s new OS, codenamed Leopard, has barely had time to cool down after coming off the presses, and already some enterprising individuals have managed to get it running on a PC. The method is a bit tortuous, but it can be done. The Register, and OSX86 Scene Forums have more.

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Dozier Internet Law

Friday, October 19th, 2007

Dozier Internet Law are an American company specialising in Internet and (US) copyright law. Their tag line is “We Protect the Reputations and the Intellectual Property of Businesses on the Web.”

For a company specialising in Internet law, they have some strange ideas. According to their User Agreement, it’s illegal to link to their site without written permission. Even more strangely, you’re not allowed look at the HTML source code for their website. Doing so infringes their intellectual property and violates their copyright – despite the fact that copyright law does not prevent you from viewing a work. It only prevents you from making an unauthorised copy. Unfortunately for Dozier Internet Law, every browser on the market will read the source code and make a copy when the site is viewed. Worse still, that copy is stored on the users hard-drive. So according to Dozier Internet Law, every single person who views their site is committing a breach of copyright law.

It gets better! Oh does it get better. The site was built using a program called Zope. Whoever built the Dozier Internet Law website left a whole lot of stuff turned on that they should not have – including the ability for anyone to upload files to the site. Of course, the Internet being the Internet, a whole lot of stuff has ended up on the Dozier Internet Law website that shouldn’t be there, including copyrighted works. So now Dozier Internet Law are breaking copyright law by making these copyright works available for download.

The games have begun, and guess who’s losing? That’s right Dozier Internet Law!

PS. For anyone from Dozier Internet Law, I’ve linked to your website a total of 13 times, and I’ve mentioned your company name 10 times.

By the way, here’s a screen shot of the source code for your website. It could do with a bit of cleaning up, there’s 4 errors and 52 warnings on the main page alone.

Source HTML Code for Dozier Internet Law

Welcome to the Streisand Effect. I haven’t linked to your “File Library” because there’s stuff on there that is illegal in quite a few countries, including Ireland. I may even have to report it to the relevant authorities. Tsk, tsk.

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Posted in Copyright, Internet, Technology | 2 Comments »

Installing Windows XP on a Packard Bell SW51

Friday, October 5th, 2007

I was recently asked to downgrade a friends Packard Bell SW51 from Windows Vista to Windows XP. My friend is not what I would consider to be a geek, but even he could see that Vista was a steaming pile of horse manure, and he just wanted an OS that would work. So it was back to XP for his notebook.

Luckily, the Packard Bell website had all the necessary SW51 drivers for XP, so the install should have been simple enough: back up his profile, wipe the machine, install XP, apply service packs, install drivers and do a Windows Update to get the latest patches, install the necessary programs, and put back on his data.

There was only one issue – the wireless LAN driver provided by Packard Bell for Windows XP, doesn’t work on Windows XP. It’s a Ralink RT73 USB Wireless LAN card, but the supplied driver just doesn’t work. So it was time to go hunting for the correct driver. I was lucky that I wasn’t the first person to come across this issue, and I was able to locate the correct driver here. It’s the ZyDAS ZD211B driver, but it works perfectly.

UPDATE: As per Guillaume’s comment, the original lik was broken, so I have changed the link to the new download location. Thanks Guillaume.

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Posted in Networking, Technology, Windows | 27 Comments »

Monster Apologises

Friday, October 5th, 2007

Looks like Michele got an apology from Monster regarding the spam he received. It wasn’t an apology from “Smithers” aka John Burns, but from James Mailley, the head of Monster.ie. As Michele makes clear on his post, he received a spam from an employee of Monster.ie and not from Monster themselves. Nice to see that’s been cleared up then.

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Monster.ie – There’s A Spam-Storm Abrewing

Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007

Monster.ie are spammers. There’s no denying it. More specifically, John Burns, a Business Development Manager with Monster.ie sent Unsolictated Commercial Email (UCE) to a group of email addresses that were harvested from the IT@Cork website.

Unfortunately for Mr. Burns, (am I the only one that thinks of the Simpsons when I hear that name? No? “Excellent”), he sent this email to a group of people who know exactly how to deal with it. Like Michele Neylon from Blacknight. And Tom Rafferty. And being the prolific bloggers that they are, of course they were going to post about it.

I’m not going to harp on about the fall-out from Mr Burns actions, (hee-hee-hee), but it’s starting to get interesting. I recommend that you start with Michele’s post, and then move on to Tom’s.

PS: Mr Burns wants his name removed from posts associated with this topic. So let’s call him Smithers.

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Posted in Internet, Technology | 1 Comment »

Starting School

Wednesday, September 26th, 2007

I started my course last night, and judging by the course description, it looks like it’s going to be a lot of work. I suppose there would be no point in doing this if it were easy, so I’ll be getting my head down from next week on.

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Posted in Technology | 2 Comments »

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