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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Category: Geekery

  • A Duck In Vegas, Day Two

    If nothing else, I ate far better today than I did yesterday. (Did I pig out at the poolside party last night? Yes. Which mostly made up for not getting lunch at all.)

    Today featured the bulk of the Kaseya Connect conference material. Yes, there’s more tomorrow, but today we received the keynote speech and the motivational speaker (Jim Abbott, a baseball pitcher born without a right hand, quite a storyteller with a good message but not necessarily the best fit for a room full of people who don’t follow baseball, even if they’ve heard of it at all) and most of the Big Product Announcements.

    So, what’s on my shopping list?

    • Enterprise Monitoring: They ditched Zabbix (a product I generally like, but admit that the configuration is somewhat arcane) for Intellipool, a company that Kaseya acquired just for this purpose. The demo looks fantastic, and will probably obviate the need for the quirky, cumbersome Network Discovery module. (Um… whoops?)
    • Policy Management: If we can get rid of the tangled mess of templates and replace it with policies that we can apply consistently and automatically based on service-level orgs and client groups, I’ll be able to provide a far more consistent management experience. We want it, oh yes, we do.
    • Online Backup: We’re using Ahsay right now, but if Kaseya can integrate an offsite folder backup solution and let us pick our own destination, I’ll try to get the bosses to buy it. Right now, however, it’s Amazon S3 only… and we like having end-to-end control far too much to go for that.
    • Mobile Device Management: I almost skipped this presentation, but a live demo of deploying the agent to an iPhone and an Android, backing up and restoring contacts, and wiping the iPhone completely convinced me that we may have a chance at selling this to certain C-level types among our clientele.

    Meanwhile, staying in a fairly posh hotel provided some amusement. When they came in to tidy up while I was off at conference sessions, they not only made the bed and replaced the towels as I expected, they also took the time to line up and organize the little travel bottles of toiletries I’d left clustered (but upright, I’m not a total slob) on the sink. Cute, guys.

    Tomorrow morning I get to pack up, check out, get through the last day of conferences, head to the airport, check through security, wait a few hours, then finally fly home.

    I can’t wait to be home. I’ve had some fun here but after tomorrow I won’t want to travel again for a good long time…

  • Electronic Bookery

    So… I may or may not have purchased one of these earlier this week. Ahem. There’s an unconfirmed rumor that this may-or-may-not event transpired after playing with a particular person‘s recently acquired similar gadget.

    At any rate, I’m amused at one particular aspect of the “ebook” phenomenon. I understand that the way most dead-tree books will become a pile of ones and zeros is through being scanned and treated with an Optical Character Recognition program, then (allegedly) proofread by a human being for error correction. The problem seems to stem from the fact that proofreaders get tired and/or bored partway through a job.

    Case in point? Fred Saberhagen’s “First Book Of Swords.” Toward the end of the book I saw an entire page in which the letter “I” was turned into the number “1”, each and every time. Earlier, I saw a lowercase “y” turned into a lowercase “v”. These are understandable glitches on the part of the OCR software, but a proofreader paying any kind of attention should’ve caught them.

    I don’t know what to make of another little quirk, namely that text in italics tends to be several point sizes larger than the normal text around it. This could be a problem with the particular book rather than the platform. Time will tell. I’ve only purchased two ebooks in my life so far and the other one’s not downloaded yet.

    Ahem. That is, hypothetically speaking… aw, who am I kidding? Yes, yes, I’ m a sheep. I own a Nook Color. Baaaaaa.

    So how is the device itself? Generally I like it. I mean, sure, if I was just going to read books all day I’d have gone for the regular e-ink device and called it good… not to mention saving $100 and potential eye strain. A big selling point for me, however, is having a 7″ screen WiFi device with a decent, working web browser. I can read books and surf the Internet? SOLD.

    And to answer the geeks out there… no, I’m not going to “root” my Nook Color and turn it into a full-on Android tablet. I like the machine just the way it is, and don’t want to “break” things for the sake of being extra-geeky.

    Yes, yes. I’ll turn in my alpha-geek membership card now. Big deal.

  • Google Talk Chat Logs

    I fired up Trillian this morning, as I usually do once we’re out of the morning meeting or huddle at work, and immediately for every contact I chat with using Google’s system I started getting a slew of “error” messages, several at once every couple of minutes:

    “This conversation is no longer off the record.”

    That’s funny, I don’t remember ever going off the record to begin with… let alone several times per second.

    It took some digging around Trillian’s forums, but I found the problem: Did you know that, by default, Google Talk chats are logged by Google?

    No, I didn’t either. And I don’t want them logged.

    If you feel the same way, go into your GMail web interface, click Settings, then go to the Chat settings and select “Never save chat history,” and Save Changes. This will also keep 3rd party chat clients from going nuts from time to time, apparently…

    UPDATE: As the lovely Kylanath points out, you then probably want to go to the Chat “folder” in GMail and blow out everything in there. You may be amazed at how many are in there. Then, empty your Trash.

  • City of Heroes and Windows 7

    This may not apply to many folks, but here goes:

    If you’re running Windows 7, if you have an nVidia card but it isn’t an “uber” card, and you play City of Heroes, and you decide to upgrade to the 266-series drivers… make sure you remove the PhysX and “nVidia 3D” components via Programs & Features or risk abysmal performance.

    I’ve had to run without FSAA, without Anisotropic, and with basically none of the Ultra Mode fancy stuff turned on since I converted to Windows 7 on my HP xw4400 workstation with the 9800 GT. Which struck me as a bit odd since I ran with most of the “UM” goodies enabled (at lower settings, mind you) under XP on the same hardware. (Yes, it was a fresh install. This isn’t my first rodeo, Mr. Stark.)

    Tonight a CoH patch came down, and after that applied… I got less than one frame per second. Much less. I had to find the command line arguments so I could force a lower screen resolution just to get the Options display to appear. After an hour of frustrated tinkering & researching, I was getting ready to roll back to a much older driver release. While in Programs & Features getting ready to yank them out, I noticed the other two nVidia entries in the list. On a whim I pulled just those out, and rebooted.

    And… City of Heroes ran like a dream, albeit with the reduced settings I’d been forced to adopt. So I turned on FSAA to 2x, which had previously brought the game to its knees.

    Still smooth. And after I turned Anisotropic Filtering back on. And the Ultra Mode shadows. And bloom. And depth of field. (Yes, all of those were off to get any kind of performance, previously.)

    I don’t know what the hell “nVidia 3D” is, but I suspect it doesn’t play nicely with City of Heroes, and I don’t have anything else that needs it. Good riddance. As for PhysX… if that was the culprit, I’ll live without it, thank you very much.

  • When You Wish Upon A Yule

    Since the subject seems to have come up lately:

    • Thinkgeek Wishlist
    • Amazon Wishlist (I know, there are valid reasons not to patronize Amazon. You’re not even remotely required to buy anything from them, mind you, but it’s the only place I have access to all of the music, books and videos I want all in one storefront, so that’s where I keep the wishlist.)
    • Funagain Games Wishlist

    This entry may be updated if I find somewhere else that I should have made a list… and/or checked it twice…

  • Sprucing Up The Place

    After months spent not doing much of anything in the way of website maintenance, I finally threw some more top-header rotation images into the queue. Most of them are earth- and space-sciences material for now. I’ll be taking more pictures this summer and plan to scour through the results for suitable material… probably more skylines and plant life, that sort of thing.

    (And what’s this? Posting two days in a row? Who’d have thunk it?)

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