uvageek

So with regard to Facebook, I have two things that frustrate me to no end right now…

1 - Notifications.  Why is it that I receive e-mail notifications sometimes fifteen days later?  Come on now Facebook, get your act together and beef up your SMTP relay with the outside world so as to handle the load as you continue to scale your system.

2 - Blog import.  Facebook apparently is supposed to go out and crawl blogs every few hours to pull the RSS feed, do a quick comparison of the last update timestamp and then pull the new items into the “Notes” section.  At first I had some minor issues as my blog was not RSS compliant and had errors (I blame this on the version of MovableType that I was running but however have since changed route and am using WordPress).  However, since then it has been working “sometimes.”  I’ve had something like five or six blog posts since the last time that it has pulled and posted the newest notes, what’s up with that?  The RSS feed is legitimate according to different online feed validators.  Again I see this as a scalability issue.

Helpful tip of the day from your friendly neighborhood Geek… if you’ve ever been forced to document your network and need to get all of your network adapter MAC addresses, IP addresses and what not, feat not there’s a quick and dirty command line tool you can use to do just that.

I suppose I should delineate in stating that this is applicable to Windows XP and Windows Vista (sorry Linux, I have no information for you today).

From your friendly command prompt, type “getmac” and boom, all your MAC addresses and their transport connections. In the past, most of you may have said, “Well this is of little use to me…” but in my world, I see this is highly helpful in that there are times where you have systems that aren’t connected to a network and therefore, there’s no way to query such information through the GUI (at least that I know of).

Anyway, hopefully this tip was as useful as it was to you as it was to me finding it, and yes you’re more than welcome to tell me that I’m dumb for not knowing that this existed and that I just hadn’t located it since apparently I’m somewhat of a command line junkie…

So my good friend Danny down at UVA sent me a link this evening that I read and was like, “Nooooo!”  Granted, I don’t own an iPhone, nor do I intend to procure one until the iPhone has been upgraded to 32 GB of solid state memory and is on the UMTS/HSDPA with a downlink of 14.4 Megabits per second.

Alas, that’s another subject altogether, back to the link at hand… over at TechCrunch there was an article posted on the 10th of July entitled “Will an iPhone Blend“.  Apparently some company known as BlendTec has a blender that can even take on the iPhone and make it into a nice (okay, so maybe not so nice) smoothie of dark plastic.

Nonetheless, check the video out when you get a chance - probably my favorite part is the slow motion section

Editors - The Weight Of The World (An End Has A Start)

After much thought and procrastination, I finally did a dump of my blog that was running on MovableType and imported it into WordPress.  So far I have to say that I’m fairly impressed at it’s easy interface and framework.  In addition, the installation is cake compared to when I installed MovableType

Quote of the Day:
The happiest people don’t necessarily have the best of everything. They just make the best of everything
–Anonymous

So apparently the Huffington Post has an article regarding how a watchdog group is slamming Google for the lack of respect for privacy.  Now, it may just be me, but this is old news.  UVAGeek reported on this a year and a half ago in a story when Google was starting to work on Google WiFi.  Google has slowly but surely been aggregating information on users for quite some time now, such that they could probably match up very easily someone’s name, their likes, their relationships, their religious beliefs, their shopping preferences and anything else that you could think of.  So really, I don’t know what all the fuss is that a watch dog group is just pointing this out when UVAGeek did this quite some time ago; and the fact that really it’s common sense…

So apparently the Huffington Post has an article regarding how a watchdog group is slamming Google for the lack of respect for privacy.  Now, it may just be me, but this is old news.  UVAGeek reported on this a year and a half ago in a story when Google was starting to work on Google WiFi.  Google has slowly but surely been aggregating information on users for quite some time now, such that they could probably match up very easily someone’s name, their likes, their relationships, their religious beliefs, their shopping preferences and anything else that you could think of.  So really, I don’t know what all the fuss is that a watch dog group is just pointing this out when UVAGeek did this quite some time ago; and the fact that really it’s common sense…

For those of you that know me, I tend to be the person that likes to facilitate collaboration and communication. I’m the guy that makes sure that the right people are in the room, working together rather than reinventing the wheel every five feet.

So I was looking around the net and I stumbled across http://www.wamily.com. After a few e-mails to the support address I finally got in and I have to say that I’m impressed.

The developers of this site have brought a lot of fundamentals of collaboration to the table in a web 2.0 way using ajax and update requests like you wouldn’t believe. Additionally, for those of you familiar with Facebook, this takes it to the next step by creating collaborative groups that enhance group interaction. They even let you share your own files in collaborative albums, post your thoughts on wikis, and talk in message boards. All of this happens in your ‘wamily’ as they like to call it.

Needless to say, I have to say that in terms of a social networking web application this does an incredible job of facilitating interactions unlike some other failed systems of the past (friendster, etc.)

So I will admit that I’m quite impressed with Windows Vista. However there is one fatal flaw that annoys me… availability of software to provide firewall or antivirus services.

OneCare, definitely for the non-techie. You install it and then you just “trust” it to do its job. Not quite sure how I feel about that, though Microsoft is set to release ForeFront Client Security which should provide for a more configurable interface.

So what to do? Wait for Zonelabs to come out with their firewall? Perhaps considering it is more or less a what you tell it to do is what it does kind of firewall.

Nevertheless, definitely disappointed with OneCare, maybe in the future they’ll add the ability to open up firewall ports as you’d like rather than just using what Microsoft thinks you should use.

So apparently there are a limited number of Windows Vista Ultimate boxes out there that have none other than Bill Gates signature on them.  Can we just say that’s outrageous?

So I do have to say that I think technology is truly amazing.  Why you ask?  Quite simply because for $80 I was able to buy Microsoft Streets and Trips 2007 with a GPS locator.  Simply amazing.

Broadcasting this out from:  38.80529 degrees North and 77.16328 degrees West.  Apparently with an elevation of about 300 feet from sea level, being tracked by 8 satellites.