Google Buzz – What’s the Difference?
Sun, February 28th 2010 at 11:21am
After using Buzz for a little while it seems to be quite a different animal than Twitter or Facebook. While all three services are similar for the user posting the way they all handle replies from other users is what sets them apart.
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Adding TRIM Support to Crucial SSD
Wed, October 28th 2009 at 11:49pm
Still playing with my new system, and really loving the new SSD. However in the back of my mind I was a little worried about the dreaded performance drop off of SSD’s after writing data to them for extended periods of time. So when shopping I made sure I bought a drive that was going to support the new TRIM command supported by Windows 7. Anandtech.com explains what TRIM is much better than I can, so I will leave that there.
WARNING: Backup all data before flashing your drive, or trying anything even remotely like this
However, the Crucial drive I have (CT128M225), like all the other SSD’s out there, require the drives controller to be flashed to support the new TRIM command. So I downloaded the iso and booted into the flash utility, but no drive showed up!
So it seems there is a little hiccup with the flash utility from Crucial, it does not have RAID drivers for the Intel P55 Express chipset on my motherboard. So I had to do a little trickery, basically you simply boot into the BIOS configuration and change your drive settings from RAID to IDE. This basically disables the RAID functionality and makes all your hard drives look like IDE drives.
IMPORTANT: do not let Windows boot with this setting changed, Windows will figure you removed the RAID, mess with drivers, re-assign driver letters and who knows what else.
After turning off RAID I rebooted using the Flash CD, flashed my Crucial drive, removed the CD and rebooted back into the BIOS. After changing back to RAID the system booted as normal all the RAID volumes were found again (I have my Crucial drive as the main, and two 750GB Seagate drives in RAID 1 for protected data drives).
Windows 7 required a restart again, I assume it updated drivers for TRIM? and now everything is running great.
You will not see a performance increase, but this will help keep your system fast while you use it in the future, and the firmware had some other bug fixes and features.
Preparing for Windows 7: 32bit vs. 64bit
Fri, October 23rd 2009 at 11:00pm
Windows 7 is in the mail and I am starting to thinking about the first issues I am going to come across when installing it, 32 or 64bit. I have been using the 64bit RC version of Windows 7 for months now and there are two issues that keep bugging me, and both are related to Adobe Acrobat Pro 8. more »
Defensio Spam Detection
Mon, October 12th 2009 at 03:31pm
Recently when I was looking into updating my blogging software I spent a bit of time looking at comment spam solutions. Before the site upgrade I had had comments disabled for a long time, even with user accounts the number of spammy users, and comments was high on my Drupal blog. So I knew I needed some solution if I was going to activate comments again.
Defensio was the solution I chose on Drupal so when I installed WordPress I decided to go with it for my WordPress blog too. It turned out to be a very easy install, you basically just sign up for an account with them, then install the WordPress plug-in. Once that is done Defensio reviews all your comments and gives them a “spammy” value.
What I like about Defensio is that it is an adaptive filter that learns what is spam based on input from you, or other content administrators on your site. The more input your give it the better it becomes. Even on a small blog like mine where I have only had a few comments I still get nearly one hundred spam comments a week, and so far Defensio has caught all of them with zero false positives.
For a site with heavier usage I would guess that solution would workout even better, because the more input you give Defensio the better it can identify what is spam and what is a valid comment.
It is still early days, I have only been using it for a couple of months, but so far I am quite impressed with it.
Defensio uses a pretty simple API and seems to have plug-ins for many blogs and forum packages.
Google Analytics
Sun, September 13th 2009 at 11:33pm
After installing the new blog I thought I would be a good time to try Google Analytics. On my old site I simply used Webalizer which was supplied by my host, and it gave me a general idea of what was going on with the site. But really did not give any idea of what people are actually doing on the site. Google Analytics is much better at this, because it does not just track hits to certain pages, but also gives you stats on many other useful things like Bounce Rate, Traffic Type, Visit Time, Returning Visitors, etc.
For a site as small as mine it’s more of a point of interest than a vital tool, but it has recently helped me find a problem. After looking at the stats for a few weeks now I saw that one page (node/36) from my old site was getting hit pretty heavily, and going to 404 error. I knew this would happen because I did not map my old Drupal urls to the new Wordpress posts. But it seems that an old Wallpaper I made for Ubuntu got a pretty high Google ranking in image search for some keywords. So I was getting some decent traffic from that, but most of the people Bounced off the site as soon as they hit the 404. I got all this info from Google Analytics.
So after learning this I added a Redirection Plugin and setup a 301 Redirect for node/36 to the new post I made about the wallpaper. Now eventually Google should pick up the redirection and update it’s index, and hopefully people will find what they are looking for.
Google Analytics an extremely useful tool, even for personal sites like this one. It should be in any Webmasters toolkit.
Home Office September 2009
Mon, September 7th 2009 at 11:15am
Just finished cleaning up the cabling and older gadgets that were cluttering up my work (and play) area. It was a much longer task than I had expected it to be. Sorting out cables, drilling holes using a hole saw and trying to route all the cables in an organized way. Took most of Sunday to do it all. But you know what it really is worth it because when everything is clear you just feel a lot better about doing work .
Home Office 2009: Overview Shot
The overall effect is quite dramatic, I forgot to take a before shot, but you can trust me it looks better. Even though it was never really bad, I was starting to get gadget clutter with my 5.1 Speakers, external hard drives, USB hubs and the new set of cables coming out for my Macbook Pro. All those things have been removed or streamlined making everything much easier to use. more »
Snow Leopard Observations
Tue, September 1st 2009 at 09:35pm
Seeing as I am pretty new to the whole Apple and OS X I am not going to try and write a review, but just some of my limited observations of the past few days. When I first got my Macbook Pro several weeks ago I was (and still am) very pleased with the overall package, but there were a few nagging things that I did not like. None of the problems were close to the problems I had with my Dell XPS M1330 I bought a few years ago though.
Snow Leopard = Tablet Edition?
Tue, September 1st 2009 at 10:23am
So far I have been very happy with Snow Leopard, everything on my system is much snappier and seems to work better, but I will be posting some more about that later. Right now I just had a though about why Apple is releasing this now, and it seems that this would be the perfect Tablet OS.
Everything they did in Snow Leopard seems help both the desktop but mostly the tablet. For example:
- Smaller Footprint: A new Tablet will most likely sport an SSD so the few extra gigabytes we scoffed at on the desktop become more relevant on a tablet.
- Faster: Faster code means they streamlined and made their code run more efficiently. This means much better performance for us on laptops and desktops, but would also mean that the full OS will run better on smaller devices. A tablet will most likely have a lower powered embedded CPU, like a Atom. So efficiency would be important.
- Software Support: A tablet would probably not like running emulation software like Rosetta. So this clean break mentality of Snow Leopard will help force developers to update their applications to the latest Snow Leopard API’s, and get rid of as much legacy apps and drivers as possible. Then when the tablet launches it will have as much software support as possible
These are just thoughts about where this could be leading. Even it a tablet is not coming I think optimizing code is a great thing, especially when the results are so noticeable. Personally I am not even all that excited about a tablet unless it costs around $300, which I am pretty sure it will not. My Macbook Pro and PC serve me well.
Friend Feed Syndication
Sun, August 30th 2009 at 11:25pm
I have been considering ways to aggregate my content from Twitter, Facebook, Delicious and Google Reader for a little while now. The best way seemed to be to make my own plugin that would pull data in from these various sources and allow me to display it on custom pages on my site. But the more I thought about it the more I realized that this is just what Friend Feed does already. It pulls all your “stuff” into one place and gives you a running feed of all that content.
So I thought I would just grab the RSS from Friend Feed important it and do some minor manipulation on the data for what I wanted. But I was quite shocked to see that Friend Feed inserts display styles and HTML into their RSS feed which makes it very hard to parse and manipulate the data. The Friend Feed engineers are meant to be top Google people and it was quite surprising to me the way they mixed all the display syntax into a data sharing format. It basically makes the feed useless for any application other than having a Friend Feed like box on your site.
So now I am back to designing/coding/using Wordpress modules to do it. Gina Trapani’s Twitalytic looks awesome, and I am thinking of looking over that code and seeing if it will work as a general aggregator with interesting stats to boot.
Better Watch Out Adobe!
Thu, August 27th 2009 at 10:39pm
For a long time Adobe has been my personal favorite source of all design related software from Photoshop to InDesign. The move from Quark 6.5 to InDesign was like night and day. Adobe also has a great community and fanboys that publicize their products to no end. But they are starting to forget that the community made them what they are. Now that they are the “Big Company” on the block it seems that the bottom line is all that matters.
The recent news that they will not support CS3 on Snow Leopard is just another sign, but it has been going on for a long time. For me the first time I noticed it was when I tried to upgrade to Windows Vista 64. Back then CS3 was the newest release and people running Photoshop are the most likely to want more than 4GB’s of RAM that a 64bit OS provides. However first off Adobe Acrobat Pro 8 would not even install without several error messages and trips to the message boards. Once it was installed the PDF printer would not work at all. It took several months for them to release a fix, and to this day CS3 still has some more minor visual bugs that stopped me moving to 64bit Vista. more »
