Silliness, Video

Swinging on a Star

I watched Hudson Hawk a couple weeks ago, and I just can’t get this song out of my head!

And all the monkeys aren’t in the zoo; every day you see quite a few. So you see it’s all up to you… You could be better than you are! You could be swinging on a star!

Assorted Ramblings, Photos

One for the Scrapbook!

I got my picture in the paper! You can see it on The Gazette’s website in several editions, along with an article about the Jaycees’ event where the photo was taken.
Now if you look at that photo (it’s the group standing in front of a brick wall), you won’t actually see me anywhere. That’s because I’m not in it. Instead, it’s “my picture” in the sense that I was the photographer. (I was also responsible for the press release the article is based on.)
This is the fifth time since January ’09 when The Gazette has printed one of my photos. It’s also the first time I’m aware of when they’ve put one of my photos on their web site.
I think it’s kinda cool!

Here’s a larger version of the same photo:

Your 2010 Gaithersburg/Germantown Jaycees Board of Directors:
(left to right) Individual Development Vice President, Valerie Lefor; Chairman of the Board, Jason Silverberg; Community Development Vice President, Kara Farrell; State Director, Vicente Lopez; Secretary, Valerie Palmer; Treasurer, Dean Lefor

Tech

Computer Archaeology

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One of my favorite movie lines comes from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. It’s the very end of an action sequence in which Indy rescues his father from the Nazis. The two of them take a moment to catch their breath and Doctor Jones, Sr turns to his son and asks, “You call this archaeology?”
It’s been a day or two since I last had any prolonged fisticuffs with the forces of evil, but every so often I also make a surprising discovery.
This evening, while trying to figure out where I’d stashed my copy of the data access drivers for Microsoft Access, I discovered a file sitting in a dusty corner of my hard drive.
The file is named msie302m95.exe, it’s 10.8 MB in size, and dated July 31, 1998.
I’m nearly certain it’s a standalone installer for the Windows 95 edition of Internet Explorer, v3.02.
IE 6.0 is the current bane of existence for web developers. It has a number of quirks, lackluster support for web standards, and it’s been around since 2001. And because it was bundled with Windows XP and most people won’t upgrade their web browser (not even for free!), it’s still the most common web browser on the web in general.
IE 3.x dates back to the days before Microsoft won the first browser war. This was the first browser from Microsoft to support JavaScript and among the last to still support the <marquee> and <blink> tags. (These days, both of those effects are largely unlamented, but if you feel desperately eager to create something similar to the average Geocities page, you can reproduce them with a very small amount of JavaScript.)
I don’t miss IE3. But one thing’s very clear from this discovery:
I really need to clear out my hard drive a bit more often.

Assorted Ramblings

The Four Seasons

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Someone asked me to identify my favorite season. After some thought, I don’t think I have one.
In Spring, when the rain comes and the winds start blowing, it’s like the planet itself is waking up from a nap. You can just feel the potential for new life.
In Summer, life slows down and you can get outside and enjoy the light. It feels like daylight will go on forever but when night finally does fall, it’s a cool and friendly darkness.
Fall has all the colors and comfortable temperatures. And although the evenings start to get a bit crisp, that’s just perfect for warm apple cider and bonfires.
Winter gets a bad rap for the bitter cold (I don’t like it either), but when there’s a few inches of new fallen snow, and no tracks through it yet, the world looks like a Currier and Ives card. It’s just gorgeous.
What about you? Is there one particular season you favor over the others?

Assorted Ramblings, Tech

Software Reinstall

Choosing to go from 32-bit Vista to 64-bit Windows 7, also meant choosing to do a “custom” installation of Windows. Meaning that I have to reinstall all my programs.
Still more to be added over the next few days, but here’s what I’ve got so far.
The List:
General Computing

  • Open Office – compatible with MS Office
  • Mozy Home Unlimited (paid version) – after a horrendous support experience this summer, I’m not as big a fan of this company as I used to be, but I do like the concept of automatic offsite backups.
  • Avast! Anti-virus – free alternative to the various paid security suites. (The main deterrent to malware is still a healthy degree of skepticism when clicking links.)
  • Foxit Reader – alternative PDF reader
  • VLC media player – plays dang near everything in terms of video or audio, and doesn’t bring unwanted baggage.
  • Paint.Net – Image editor.
  • 7-Zip – Fairly universal archive/extract tool. Even opens ISO files!
  • InfraRecorder – Burn CDs and DVDs
  • Picasa – photo management.
  • VMWare Workstation – For software I don’t trust, for experimenting with other software environments (e.g. Linux), and other situations where my primary computer isn’t the best choice.

Internet Tools

  • Firefox – Web Browser
    • Firebug – Debugging tool for use with Firrefox.
  • Thunderbird – because I like desktop email
  • Putty – Client for Telnet, SSH and FTP, plus it’s scriptable. (I’m not sure where to find this anymore.)
  • Chrome – Web Browser from Google.
  • Adobe Flash Player
  • FileZilla – Both regular and Secure FTP.

Developer Tools

Tech

Migrating Mozilla Profiles

I bit the bullet today and installed Windows 7 on my primary computer. All in all, it was a fairly painless process, though because I was switching from 32-bit to 64 (I can finally use that 4th GB of RAM!), I had to do a “custom” install which means I have to reinstall all my programs as well. For most purposes, it’s very much like moving to a new computer.
One of my gripes with Firefox and Thunderbird is that while the installers for both applications are very helpful about importing settings (passwords, network configurations, etc) from competing products, neither one provides a facility for migrating settings from your previous computer.
Fortunately, with a little bit of knowledge, it’s not overly difficult to do this by hand (which is probably why nobody – myself included – has written an appropriate migration tool).
Disclaimer: I don’t use many plugins, so I don’t know if or how well these steps will work with plugin settings. You’ll probably want to wait until after the migration before installing any plugins on the new system.

Copying your Firefox settings

Start off by installing Firefox on the new computer, all we’re copying is the user settings, not the software installation. I recommend you make certain that both the old computer and the new one are running the same version of the browser. (I’m not certain this is completely necessary, but it’s better to be safe.)
Next, one the old computer, you’ll need to use Windows Explorer to visit the directory where Firefox stores its settings.

  • On XP: the path is
    C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox
  • On Vista or Win 7: the path is
    C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox

<username> is, of course, the username you use to log into the computer. (You can find this by going to a command prompt and typing “net config workstation”.)
The “Application Data” or “AppData” directory is usually hidden, so you may have to blind type the path into the Explorer address bar.
On the old computer, make a copy of the “profile.ini” file and the “Profiles” directory.
On the new computer, go the corresponding path on the new computer, delete the existing “profile.ini” file and the “Profiles” directory, and replace them with the copies you made from the old one.

Copying your Thunderbird settings

Start off by installing Thunderbird on the new computer, all we’re copying is the user settings, not the software installation. I recommend you make certain that both the old computer and the new one are running the same version. (I’m not certain this is completely necessary, but it’s better to be safe.)
Next, one the old computer, you’ll need to use Windows Explorer to visit the directory where Thunderbird stores its settings.

  • On XP: the path is
    C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Thunderbird
  • On Vista or Win 7: the path is
    C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird

<username> is, of course, the username you use to log into the computer. (You can find this by going to a command prompt and typing “net config workstation”.)
The “Application Data” or “AppData” directory is usually hidden, so you may have to blind type the path into the Explorer address bar.
On the old computer, make a copy of the “profile.ini” file and the “Profiles” directory.
On the new computer, go the corresponding path on the new computer, delete the existing “profile.ini” file and the “Profiles” directory, and replace them with the copies you made from the old one.

Other notes

  • I don’t know why Thunderbird doesn’t store its settings under the Mozilla directory. Presumably this is a philosophical difference between the two projects.
  • Everything I’d read about a “custom installation” of Windows 7 had me thinking that the hard drive would be reformatted. I was pleasantly surprised to find that this is not the case. (Doing a backup is still highly recommended!)
  • Consequently, in the case where the “old computer” is the same physical box, you can find the old “users” directory stored in C:\windows.old. Presumably this would also apply to the “Application Data” directory when upgrading from XP (XP users must do a custom installation when updating to Windows 7). My upgrade was on a Vista machine, so I can’t say for certain what happens with XP.
Tech

Intro to CSS Selectors

From the writing-things-down-so-I-can-find-them department….
Selectors in a nutshell:

  • tagname — applies the style rules to all instances of that tag. (About the only place I use this is to “reset”, p, div, and some others to display the same way across all browsers.
  • #idname — all HTML (or XML) tags can have an id attribute. The value of the id attribute must, must, must be unique across the entire page. #idname lets you set the style for that element. (For example, on the shoreleave site, all pages have a div with id=”content”. I then have a #content rule (in a shared CSS file) which forces all the content areas to look the same.
  • .classname (note the leading period!) — these are the values which appear in the class= attribute. You can also specify this with a tag name as in p.class1 and div.class1 so class1 would have separate meanings when attached to a p versus a div. (This is not necessarily a good idea, name overloading is confusing after all.)

You can also group things like this…
div p.classname which would mean, ‘Anytime a div tag contains a p with class=”classname”, the p should be displayed according to this rule…’

Silliness

NYE

In a conversation with my boss this morning, I announced my plans to take the rest of the year off from work. He fully supports this decision; as he said, you have to stick to your principles.
He left 30 minutes ahead of me!