Archive for » July, 2005 «

Tuesday, July 26th, 2005 | Author: Administrator

How much FUD is this article full of? First, Michael Robertson of Linspire accuses Apple of making a mistake by not releasing OS X for every PC. Yea, that’s it, a mistake for a **hardware** company to not release it’s operating system for other manufacturer’s hardware… Moron! Second he goes on to embrace Job’s statement that IBM’s chip roadmap was not going to meet apple’s requirements. Those of us with half a brain can deduce from the recent chip releases from IBM and the obvious architecture advantage of PPC 64-bit compared to the non true 64-bit pentium 4 chips that the move to intel is only to get the obvious price breaks that the only other large profitable pc manufacturer (DELL) gets.

> Until then, however, customers will have to make a tough decision > - purchase a new computer that is guaranteed to be made > obsolete or wait two years for machines to be released and > software to be natively working.
This was another great quote from Mr. Robertson. As if this was any different from any other computer purchase. Especially during this time of 64-bit conversion. While the apple camp has made a relatively painless switch to 64-bit the windows camp has yet to make it, and the linux camp nowhere near as smooth an experience as OS X.

While Linspire is just another OK linux distro, Apple seems to have quadrupled it’s value in the last few years with it’s strategy. So I’m sure Michael Robertson of Linspire should be criticizing Apple’s newest move.

Enough with my rant of this obvious ignorance and narrow minded view. I’m going to do something enjoyable.

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Friday, July 22nd, 2005 | Author: Administrator

I love the new OS X (Tiger). I am just now getting rid of my habbits of organizing my mail the old way. You know with folders that I have to manage myself. I now only have two folders: Personal and Work. Spotlight will do it’s job to find everything else for me. I am starting to slowly get this way for the rest of the file system too. I probably will never make this full conversion on my home machine as I have to access it by the command line constantly. Having spotlight doesn’t do me any good when I’m on the command line. Unless I want to learn regex… and I don’t. I can’t stress how much I love spotlight. It’s a whole new way to organize. A lazier, more efficient way.

My big complaint is Safari. Now don’t get me wrong. Safari is a great browser and Mark Hyatt and the gang over there have been busting their hump to bring safari up to and surpass current web standards. I congratulate them on passing the Acid 2 test, but Where is the Spotlight integration? This is a big deal. If Jobs and company wants us to rethink the way we organize wouldn’t we have to be able to utilize this new tool (Spotlight) in the application that is used most? I would dare to say that the web browser is one of the most used apps on a computer. That being said, how come Safari has a weak at best search feature for bookmarks? The bookmark organization is still one of the best, but it does not have the advanced “new way of being organized” search capabilities.

Features:
I would like to see safari be able to search through bookmarks using metadata from history. Also search my history the same way. Give advanced users a way to change how much history is saved for meta searching. The bookmarks should also be updated automatically in the background if I so choose. Give advanced users the ability to change the frequency of auto-updating of bookmarks. I would like to search for xcode through my bookmarks and if a article on xcode was on slashdot two weeks ago. I want slashdot with that particular URI to show in my results list with a date of course. Now I realize that when I click the result it would probably pull up slashdot and that article would be long gone, but I then know that slashdot had it and I can search XCode in slashdot to find it. This is much quicker than searching google and would also allow me to limit my sources to my hand picked trusted sites through bookmarks.

So Mr. Jobs and Mr. Hyatt, are you listening? Give me a way of utilizing your revolutionary tool in one of your most used apps that is on every one of your systems.

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Category: Rants, technical  | Leave a Comment
Thursday, July 21st, 2005 | Author: Administrator

The project OpenRico looks like it has a lot of promise, but with one major thing missing from it - DOCUMENTATION. So as I figure it out. I will document it here. In the coming weeks I will have a few of the more interesting components (read - the ones I’m using for my project) documented with a walk through tutorial. So stay tuned.

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Category: info, technical  | 2 Comments
Tuesday, July 19th, 2005 | Author: Administrator

I have more Gmail invites again. Same rules apply, leave a comment or email me to receive.

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Tuesday, July 19th, 2005 | Author: Administrator

I spent my weekend this week at Busch Gardens, Tampa Bay. I must say the overall attitude of the employees was disgusting. The whole thing starts with buying the tickets. I walk up to the ticket teller window. I ask about the Florida resident discount.

She replies with, “You can use the coupons you have or, —(turns head away from mic)”.

Obviously the microphone is there for a reason and I could not hear her through the bullet proof glass. So I ask, “what was the last part?”. She repeats her statement with the same reaction at the end so I could not hear her… again. I ask, “what?” again. She seems very inconvienced at this point and looks at me rudely and sternly and over pronouncing every syllable repeats her statement so I can finally hear the end. OK, so maybe she’s mad because she thinks I just could not understand her and she had to repeat it 3 times and not because of her inability to use a microphone that is essential to her position at work. So I let that go just thinking that woman is cranky.

Next, I walk up to the food cart that sells Italian Ices. I ask, “Can I have two lemon Italian Ices?”.

“__No!__”, I’m told.

I step back from the stand, look up at the sign and read in big letters “Italian Ice”. I ask, “Are you out?”. “Yes!”, she replied.

After a 2-3 second pause I asked, “Are you getting more?”.

“NO!”, she replied with a stern, don’t bother me right now voice.

“O-K”. I rush to get back in line with my friends and wife and ride one of the many awesome rides they have.

Our next experience with incompetance and lack of motivation occurred when we started to ride one of the older roller coasters and they had what they had termed, “Technical difficulties”. I was at the front of the line and could see the technical difficulties AKA - vomit in a seat. Now, __In Busch Gardens it apparently takes 4 employees 15-20 minutes to assess the cleaning situation and take action.__ After assessing their “technical difficulty” the outcome apparently was that the current crew could not handle this by themselves and no shorter than 15 minutes later a cleaning crew of two showed up. They proceeded to a Cabinet next to the operations booth next to the ride, grabbed cleaner and paper towels out of said cabinet and proceeded to clean. They did so with such efficiency that the ride was up and running less than 20 minutes. We got on the ride and 1 minute later we were done.

We decided that we needed to eat at this point, grab a quick bite from a fast food style stand. Well this was __only a 40 minute wait__ to receive pre-prepared food. In all fairness though, had we been at a *taco bell*, *McDonalds*, *Boston Market*, or name of fast food place here it would have probably take about 10-20 minutes to clear a line of that size. This line was literally run by retards at the cash register that moved at the speed of grass growing. Not all was bad from all the retards though. One was very amusing as she had a conversation with herself and proceeded to argue.

Another time my friend walked up to a food stand and asked for a pepsi.

The women working replies, “We only have diet Pepsi!”.

My friend replies, “Oh, OK. What else do you have?”.

The women retorts with a firm voice, “Just Diet, We only have diet Pepsi!” as if we are somehow inconviencing her.

Damn! Who shit in her CornFlakes? I was thinking.

Yet another time of great service to others in the park is at the end of the day, thank God, I was waiting in line for dippin’ dots icecream. I started to notice a pattern, people would wait in line, get to the front, and then ask for whatever flavor they wanted that they picked off the sign. At this point is where the employee would say, “We are out of that”, not rudely though (surprised). The person or persons would then decide on another flavor or leave. If they did decide on another flavor and decided to get any size other than small they were greeted with, “We only have small”. Now after waiting in line without a warning, you must now find out you’ve been __waiting for nothing or something you didn’t really want__ but bought anyways because you had waited so long for something.
Add to this another time of waiting in line while it literally did not move for 5 minutes. Oh yea, this line only served popcorn and drinks. I’m beginning to think that this park only hires retards and morons. What kind of work ethic do you need to have to work here?
All in all, I had fun because of the rides and my friends, but I won’t be returning because of the shitty employees.

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Thursday, July 14th, 2005 | Author: Administrator

I finally gave into the temptation of using a freely available open source photo gallery. I have implemented this at Robinsonstuff.com. This is much better suited as I do not have as much time as I thought to build out this photo gallery. Unfortunately the themes available and manipulation of the look and feel of the Gallery software used is not strait forward and will take some tooling around. Customization of the site to my specifics will be a long term process. Also being in it’s early stages I will definitely be taking suggestions and for the time being I will not be charging for this service. Hopefully I will never have to charge for this service. I am a strong believer in free services and getting paid on the backend. TV used to be this way, Radio still is.

I welcome all to come try the new photo gallery and let me know of any improvements or suggestions they would like to see.

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Category: info  | Leave a Comment
Tuesday, July 12th, 2005 | Author: Administrator

I will be giving out free Sugar CRM accounts upon request via comments or email. I will be hosting these for free because I have a desire to fill up my bandwidth and disk space that I never use on my reseller hosting account. This does not mean that I will supply you full control of a hosting domain, but I will give you admin access to your own sugar crm suite hosted on my server.

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Monday, July 11th, 2005 | Author: Administrator

A new website, called Train Like A FREAK!, for bodybuilding and nutrition has opened it’s doors to the public. It looks like its just getting started, but there doesn’t seem to be any advertising (for now at least) to deal with and after contacting the admin he claims to never allow pop-ups (or unders) on the website as he hates those with a passion. It seems to have potential by looking at the structure being built out. The site, right now, seems to be a large forum with recipes, nutritional information, training information, the ability to keep training and diet/nutrition journals.
The site uses open source to run itself. phpBB is the software to run everything. This is a well supported suite that is made to support mods and themes. So I would expect some future improvements to come rapidly to this site. As a fitness/nutrition buff myself I will use this site for my own personal tracking at the very least.
I hope to see more sites based on open standards do well. It will help prove OSS’s place and shut up nay’ sayers.

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Category: info  | 2 Comments
Thursday, July 07th, 2005 | Author: Administrator

When we have enough!? When will the world (Major Players in the U.N.) finally get pissed at the terrorists in the Middle East enough to take action that gets results? I’m not talking about sending troops in and policing the streets and just taking a reactive stance against terrorism. I’m talking a full out offensive. If they kill 40 innocents, then we torture 400 of their friends and family members, then we move onto them. We broadcast this torture into their homes. We send a clear message that we will not stand for terrorism. Of course this in turn could be considered terrorism, but this may be the only message that gets through. Our actions could also be considered a measure of self defense. If someone were to break into my house or car I would clearly go on the offensive and mame the asshole who decided to put me and my family in jeopardy. Why should we consider the protecting of our freedoms any differently?
This would have to be a classified and covered up mission. As most people wouldn’t be able to stomach the true realities of the world. Much like today! I wouldn’t expect alot of the US public to accept it. Especially liberals who expect freedoms to come for free. Their moto has always been I want peace and freedom to do what I want as long as I don’t have to show courage and fight for my rights, long forgetting what our ancestors had to do for these freedoms. I especially wouldn’t expect most californians to stand behind this with their tree hugging, “I don’t eat meat” ways. Definitely Gay countries like France and Canada would be out. And the “Master Race” would be out as well - they’re making too much money and would hate to jeopardize their economics.
This is just a rant, so if you would like to comment - don’t bother. I don’t care nor would like to discuss your views on politics and/or war. I’m sure a bunch of pussies who would never stand up for their rights if it involved work will get pissed on this one.

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