Sometimes technical, sometimes not, never a kitty

When I first bought my SC-101, I loved it.  I had a pair of 200GB drives, mirrored and partitioned into three 50 GB drives each.  This lift 50 GB for future expansion.  A couple years on, and after collecting the photos for our flower shop (The Bloomery in Butler, PA), I started to realize some of the complaints others have had with this device.  The file system doesn't cache the file list, so each time you open a folder, the entire file system has to be read.  As you add more and more files, this time takes longer and longer.  After about 15,000 photos, this was taking a very long time.

Eventually, we ran out of room on the photo parition, and it was time to expand it.  Should be simple enough using the management tools provided, but this is where disaster struck.  The expansion failed, and the photo archive was seemingly lost.

After picking through the help files, I found they include a command-line tool which can be used to recover files from broken partitions.  I ran out and bought a Western Digital USB hard drive, and ran the recovery tool, transferring to the USB drive.  The recovery tool worked perfectly, and I was able to recover all the files, but my confidence in the device was shaken.

The USB drive is a good start, but doesn't really get me where I need to go.  I'll detail some of my next steps in following blog posts.

So I catch this article the other day.  I a little terrified at the idea of the government deciding on appropriate content.  Not that this doesn't sound good in theory, but in practice, they'll screw it up royally.

Senators propose labels for adult Web sites

The requirements appear in legislation announced Thursday by two Senate Democrats, Mark Pryor of Arkansas and Max Baucus of Montana, that they say will "clean up the Internet for children."

The proposal, which the senators describe as a discussion draft, relies on the idea of embedding a new tag--such as <L18>--in all Web pages that the government deems unsuitable for minors. Then future Web browsers used by minors could be configured to reject L18-labeled Web pages.

...

Another section of the Cyber Safety for Kids Act of 2007 would require the owner of any Web site with adult content on it to say so when registering the domain with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. The owner must also give ICANN the Web site's Internet Protocol address and other information.

(http://news.com.com/2100-1028_3-6175549.html)

Oh, if only there was a way to easily indicate an x-rated site.  Something really easy to filter on, like maybe a top level domain.  A TLD could be very easily filtered out, and you'd pretty much know what kind of site you were headed to when you looked at the URL.  Something that industry would fully support...

ICANN rejects .xxx domain registry

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has rejected a controversial proposal to create a new .xxx domain suffix for adult Web sites.

(http://news.com.com/ICANN+rejects+.xxx+domain+registry/2100-1030_3-6172046.html)

Well, never mind.

The Treo 700w comes with Pocket IE.  Were it 1998, we'd be golden.  It'll get the job done for some simple sites, but there's not a lot of functionality there.  Right now, there are a couple of good ideas to watch, but only one replacement browser.

Opera for Windows Mobile just had a new release, and is the only complete replacement for Pocket IE at this time.  It's not free, although there is a 30-day trial.  I tried an earlier version, and liked it.  I didn't take the plunge because the JavaScript and CSS support made things exciting when sites weren't 100% compliant.

One technology to watch is Minimo, which is based on Mozilla, the same guts that Firefox uses.  It's getting better, but at version 0.2, it'll be a while before it's ready for prime time.  I messed around with the 0.1 version, and it showed a lot of promise.

The other one to watch is DeepFish from Microsoft.  Except for input fields, the page is comverted into an image which you can scroll around and zoom in.  This allows you to see sites as they were intended, without weird CSS issues.

Fresh from my inbox:

The 2nd Annual Pittsburgh Code Camp is taking the place of our regularly-scheduled Pittsburgh .NET User Group meeting in April. Details below:

This free, day-long event is put on by the local .NET community to help promote software development, expose attendees to best practices and provide access to content experts. Code Camp is designed as a series of intensive code-related demos and technical sessions to guide the developer to the next skill level. Code Camps have been taking place all over the country with the goal of providing a developer to developer learning experience that is fun and technically stimulating.

All attendees will receive the presentation materials and sample code.

Date: Saturday, April 14
Time: 9:00 a.m.-4:00 p.m.
Location: University of Pittsburgh, Department of Computer Science, Sennott Square
RSVP: Events

View the full agenda Here

A SharePoint User Group is coming to the Pittsburgh area:

The Pittsburgh Area SharePoint User Group  is dedicated to providing educational  and informational resources for Microsoft SharePoint technologies and related products.  Its purpose is to bring the local SharePoint community together to network, and to share tips, tricks, and ideas on SharePoint technologies, as well as to provide a forum for people involved with SharePoint.  The target audience for this users group includes developers, designers, administrators, and power users. 

The first meeting of the SharePoint User Group will be held at the end of April or early May.  To help us define the format, content, and timing of this meeting, and to be notified of upcoming meetings, please help us by filling out a brief survey, at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=495253496362  This survey, which is being administered by the Pittsburgh Technology Council, will only take a few minutes to complete, and we hope to have all responses by March 31st. Your responses will be collected by the Council and kept completely confidential and, without your permission, no material that identifies your response will be distributed.

The Pittsburgh area User Groups have proved to be a great source of information and knowledge for users over the years--and we anticipate that the SharePoint Users Group will be as equally successful.

Additional comments and concerns are always welcome.

This is an outstanding article, full of great advice.  The author (Jill Whelan) is a long time search engine optimizer whose advice I’ve followed for years with success.  I trust her advice over that of many, many other people.

One example:

* The majority of the site will be static, as static pages are easier for search engines to crawl and rank properly.

‘Fraid not. Dynamic pages are just as easy to crawl and rank as static pages. Most websites today are dynamic because they’re simply easier to maintain. The search engines have figured out how to crawl and rank them just fine for many, many years now. It’s true that there are specific things you need to watch out for when creating a dynamic site, but most developers are aware of the worst of the issues. You certainly should consult with an SEO if you’re changing content management systems, or if you’re having problems getting your dynamic URLs spidered and indexed. But there’s no reason to have only static pages on your site because you’re worried about the search engines being able to index dynamic pages.

Full story at http://www.highrankings.com/advisor/not-important-to-seo/

Splogs suck.  We all know that.  And we all know where they are, and why they're there.  And we know Google has been slow to do anything about the problem, since Adwords are a gravy train for them.  Recently, Microsoft researchers have gotten to the bottom of the scum, and may have a way to filter splogs from legit blogs:

The researchers’ specific findings included evidence that some blog-hosting services have permitted an explosion of phony doorway pages. For example, the researchers noted that such pages were far more prevalent in Google’s blogspot.com service than in other hosting domains. The Microsoft Research team has worked extensively with the managers of Microsoft’s Spaces blog-hosting service to detect and identify search-engine spam, Mr. Wang said. Google would not comment for the record on its own efforts to combat such practices.

Full article at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/19/technology/19spam.html?ex=1332043200&en=63a9e5286915f3bb&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink.

(Hat tip: Stephanie's FlowerHaus)

Add to this the findings that blogger.com is riddled with malware, and it seems to be only a matter of time before corporate filters blog blogger.com (if they don't already).

Embedded resources in ASp.NET 2.0 are served up by a file listed as WebResources.axd.  If your validators aren't working, or treeview or sitemap images aren't showing, see if the debugging steps at http://www.rosshawkins.net/rfh/articles/webresource.axd.html fix your problem.

However, if you're running URLScan on your server, you may need to specifically allow the .axd extension in the .ini file.  Once we did that, our sitemap was good as gold.

http://www.vistadb.net/blog/?p=18

I have an HP ScanJet 4670, and after installing IE 7, the HP Director software wouldn't work.  Turns out, IE 7 breaks HP director, and there is now a fix:

Critical update to resolve an issue with HP Director after installing IE7: missing icons and contents of HP Director screens which may not function properly after upgrading to IE7

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/softwareDownloadIndex?softwareitem=oj-46104-1&lc=en&cc=us&dlc=en&product=73501&os=228&lang=en

Hat tip: sandi