Archive for February, 2009

« Older Entries

$50, 5w, SoC in a plug

Tuesday, February 24th, 2009

Rick describes an interesting computer in Marvell’s Plug Computer: A tiny, discrete, fully functional 5 watt Linux server at TG Daily. His first thought was probably typical: “what a silly concept.” But think.

This wal-wart runs at 1.2 GHz with 512MB flash and 512MB DRAM – compare that to a P3 server I have that runs at 3/4 the speed with the same RAM. The USB and ethernet provide a somewhat limited access to external devices but should be just fine for security or monitoring needs. That means this device is a very convenient central module for building all sorts of nifty smart things.

It could be setup as a remote print server, or a web server. It could run as a proxy re-directing traffic from outside locations to forward IP addresses. …

When used on an intranet, such a device could serve as a media server for the home or office network, allowing extremely low-power storage and immediate retrieval without having to have a dedicated PC-like machine sitting somewhere. Since it is IP address based, media file sharing among an entire office or home would be possible. Connect to a Wi-Fi enabled router and the ability to broadcast media at Wi-Fi speeds is suddenly possible.
…
The Plug Computer would also be capable of receiving new data, accessed through the LAN connection as though it were simply a remote hard drive. And if connected through a router to a broadband Internet connection of some kind, remote access would be possible over the Internet. And all for a five watt power consumption.

This is a Kirkwood system-on-chip (SoC) that only needs power conditioning on one end and interface conditioning on the other so parts count is low as is the cost. Using a Debian based system means that there is a well established development system and broad support for many devices and protocols.

TG Daily rates this “While the concept is absolutely brilliant, rating a 5 out of 5 for potential usefulness in a wide array of emerging enterprise-level applications, TG Daily must give Marvell a very low score (0.1 out of 5) for the “easier to use” factor” and thinks the $50 to $100 price tag is going to be a barrier. That may be but that price is in the ‘toy’ category for serious geeks whose other choices have been things like the Stamp Computer. The Marvell thing doesn’t cost that much more and is a complete, ready to go box that does not restrict you in matters of programming language and can be plugged into an existing network and accessed and used like any other server.

The basics are already there. See, for instance The Linux Insteon support page or for the Mac. For the more generic interface whatever to USB, see companies such as USBmicro.

When this and ZigBee get together, watch out!

Posted in Hardware | No Comments »

OOo tips from PCMAg

Saturday, February 21st, 2009

OpenOffice.org: 7 Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do could get you thinking. Did you know about these capabilities of Open Office?

1) you can open multiple windows on single file to edit various places in a document without having to scroll back and forth. This facilitates cross referencing and internal consistency.

2) you can import a lot of different legacy office suite formats which makes OOo handy for recovering archives. (I just wish it would import DeScribe files).

3) There are an easter eggs in the spreadsheet program, type “=GAME(“StarWars”)” in a cell and see what happens.

4&5&7) If you don’t like the way OOo does things, odds are you can fix it in tools for customizing and options.

6) OOo supports macros and its own scripting language.

As FOSS, Open Office has its forks and branches and people with better (or different) ideas. One of the major such efforts is Go-oo which brags about Microsoft Works import filters and better Microsoft binary file support. It has connections to Novell which may or may not be important to some. It is the version of OOo used in Ubuntu distributions.

Posted in Applications, Education and Support | No Comments »

Insight into the old fuddie duddie techno paranoia

Thursday, February 19th, 2009

Haven’t you heard adults making excuses because they don’t understand computers? Kristin Shoemaker nails it in Linux, Learning, and Little Kids

It’s not that technology comes naturally to kids, of course. They were simply less concerned with how it was “supposed” to work, so long as it actually did. It meant little to them that they were clicking on the Firefox icon to get on the web instead of the giant “E” — all that mattered was that they had a working browser.

It is ‘oh so much easier’ to assist someone when they aren’t stuck on stupid. When it comes to technology, kids are focused on getting the job done rather than some pre-conception about what it ought to be. So they don’t get stuck on stupid but are rather open to ideas and willing to make connections between tool and task.

Posted in Education and Support | No Comments »

Usability mistakes

Wednesday, February 18th, 2009

Smashing has a list of common web page usability problems. Number 6 “No way to search” includes form code for Google or Yahoo site searching. Such as

<form action="http://www.google.com/search" method="get">
<fieldset>
<input type="hidden" name="sitesearch" value="smashingmagazine.com" />
<input type="text" name="q" size="31" maxlength="255" value="" />
<input type="submit" value="Google Search" />
</fieldset>
</form>

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Working with web search engines

Wednesday, February 18th, 2009

A post about a Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress was a good starting point for learning about this technology. Google has defined a sitemaps format to help their web crawlers index websites.

Google has unveiled a new Google Sitemaps program allowing webmasters and site owners to feed it pages they’d like to have included in Google’s web index. Participation is free. Inclusion isn’t guaranteed, but Google’s hoping the new system will help it better gather pages than traditional crawling alone allows. Feeds also let site owners indicate how often pages change or should be revisited.

The technical details of the format is described at sitemaps.org. It is an XML format with six attributes. From the FAQ

As with all XML files, any data values (including URLs) must use entity escape codes for the following characters: ampersand (&), single quote (‘), double quote (“), less than (<), and greater than (>). You should also make sure that all URLs follow the RFC-3986 standard for URIs, the RFC-3987 standard for IRIs, and the XML standard.[link to rfx 3986 fixed]

This is one of several forms of website meta data that need to be understood and used in creating a successful website. The “robots.txt” file is explained at Thomas Brunt’s Outfront or robotstxt.org

The /robots.txt is a de-facto standard, and is not owned by any standards body. There are two historical descriptions:

In addition there are external resources:

The /robots.txt standard is not actively developed. See What about further development of /robots.txt? for more discussion. The rest of this page gives an overview of how to use /robots.txt on your server, with some simple recipes. To learn more see also the FAQ.

It should be noted that this is not content creation or web software development. It is about how to define behind the scenes website data that coordinates your website with other web services. From here you can start to look at using RSS feeds and similar technologies to improve your website.

This is a field undergoing a significant rate of change. It, like many in information technology, can be hacked at by amateurs but those amateurs are going to be missing an awful lot of the implications of their work until they become familiar with the underlying technological concepts and ideas.

Posted in Networks | No Comments »

Repair kit for Windows techs

Sunday, February 15th, 2009

A Computer Repair Utility Kit You Can Run From a Thumb Drive at ReadWriteWeb describes a Computer Repair Utility Kit that will run on a thumb drive. What is handy about this posting is that it provides links to the utilities in the kit as well as a link to the compilation put together by the Australian site Technibble.

If you don’t spend all your time with Windows, a collection like this can be a good way to find out what can be, or needs to be, done to keep a Windows system in top shape.

Posted in Applications, Education and Support | No Comments »

Video transfer – how its done overview

Saturday, February 14th, 2009

This project started with a friend who wanted to upgrade his PC. He found a deal at $700 with a powerful CPU, lots of memory, good hard drive space, and multi-media capabilities. These multi-media capabilities included a TV card and a remote control. The software was the Windows Media Center in Vista. I got the TV card and remote control as he didn’t have any interest in those for his needs!

The TV cards have TV tuners and they also have composite and S video inputs. That means you can connect a video tape player output to them to capture taped video. The media center will write this video out as a file on the hard drive at the rate of several gigabytes per hour. Once you have this video file, you will want to edit it and then convert it to a format that uses less space and can be viewed on other devices.

The key concept with video files that you need to understand to get the best success in converting and editing them is that there are containers and codecs. Container formats specify how audio and video files work together. The codecs, or coder/decoder, describe the way the audio and video information is encoded as digital information.

There are scads of containers and codecs and figuring out which to use can be difficult. The standard movie on a DVD is good for DVD players but it is not highly compressed and contains many components that allow it to be put on older DVD media file systems.

Many DVD players can also play AVI files as long as they contain video in xVid format and audio in MP3 format. These codecs allow for much smaller video files than the ones standard DVD’s use. Modern AV equipment can also use more space efficient codecs and containers that also provide other features.

In order to convert the video from the TV card to something smaller and more useful, I use the following applications.

For editing – mainly cropping out advertisements and selecting clips – I use Avidemux. This can do transcoding but I use It mainly just for cropping.

For transcoding (making AVI files) I use HandBrake. This has a focus on converting DVD’s but also works well for converting the TV card video files to an AVI container with the proper codecs for my DVD player.

To create DVD’s I use DeVeDe. This program makes it easy to select video files into titles and set the various menu options for a standard DVD. It will also adjust compression ratios to fit the space available on a DVD.

The only problem is that these files take a lot of hard drive space. Now I have to shovel things around and make backups to DVD in order to get room to breathe.

Posted in Applications, Education and Support, Multimedia | No Comments »

Scribefire update with WordPress

Wednesday, February 11th, 2009

I use Scribefire to insert posts to my WordPress blogs. The latest Scribefire update changed things so posts were no longer posted. HoodaThunk? found a solution. The fix is by using the settings icon that is one of 5 over in the left margin — “Try unchecking the “Automatically insert invisible tracking pixel” checkbox in the Publishing tab of ScribeFire’s settings.” — we’ll see if it works for me, too.

Scribefire is an interesting balance between a utility and a not-necessarily-bad trojan. (see Download Squad description or performancing or More Impressions Of ScribeFire QuickAds Beta at Online Grandma). As a utility, it makes for very convenient post authoring and uploading while browsing the web. As a trojan, consider the latest feature that will help you find illustrations for your posts or the integration with blog advertising. This latest glitch is a ‘reverse trojan’ in that it wouldn’t put the post inserted into the blog.

Scribefire is very useful and very convenient. That means more posts, more timely posts, and more blog content. That can mean a more useful or interesting blog. Now what I have to do is to look into the style and presentation and then, perhaps, check out the advertising possibilities.

Posted in Applications, Education and Support | No Comments »

Rejecting basic concepts

Monday, February 9th, 2009

You can’t even try to explain things without getting into an argument. Pitfals of the Zip File as Folder Metaphor is a case in point.

I recently noticed that people at work often refer to zip files as “zip folders”. In fact, I can’t seem to be able to convince people that these facts they are not in fact folders.

Yes indeed, the handling of file archives has been treated with the ‘folders’ paradigm. Like many conceptual ideas in information technology, this is useful as long as it is not taken too far.

File storage as a metaphor for storing information electronically is a metaphor that attempts to connect with a physical and tangible storage of documents. The problem is that very few people even understand filing systems for documents. Look at the history of library classification systems for literature.

Perhaps even more interesting than the general ignorance is the resistance to learning. In the zip file folder problem, it is noted how much tech support is involved in finding ‘lost’ files. That is an immediate user problem but when trying to teach the concepts to the user to avoid the problem, tech support encounters a rejection of the necessary knowledge and ideas.

It is very frustrating to have a thirsty horse that absolutely, positively refused to take a drink on the water you offer and then attacks you because the world isn’t as he envisions it.

Posted in Education and Support | No Comments »

OpenDNS and privacy issues

Sunday, February 8th, 2009

The Slashdot entry OpenDNS To Block and Monitor Conficker Worm is interesting not only as an example of how a free service can innovate in being useful and in making money but also in how people worry about it.

The story is about how the OpenDNS service can be used to help organizations control Cornficker intrusions by detecting access to problematic web addresses and notifying system administrators. The worry warts take note that OpenDNS can watch every move you make and can re-route your traffic, which it does to its advantage when you try to access an invalid URL.

For some, the OpenDNS assistance in finding proper URL’s and other services is a benefit. The service is often more reliable, for instance, than Charter’s default DNS service. For others, there is worry about being watched and monitored even if they aren’t but can’t tell because there isn’t any way to tell until it is too late.

I think that those worried about privacy should just behind closed doors. If you want to use public resources you are going to be visible in public. Make your presence decent and participate in proper accountability and awareness to help reinforce a trust that is necessary for effective social interaction.

Posted in Networks | No Comments »

« Older Entries