Steve's Notebook Blog

Well, at least I gave Internet Explorer 8 a chance.

After 2 months living as a Microsoft fanboy, I’m going back to using Google Chrome as my default web browser.  Microsoft Internet Explorer is simply way too bloated with all of Microsoft’s proprietary “features”.  While some of the features of IE 8 looked possibly useful, they were also distracting.  Microsoft is simply trying too hard to keep their client software relevant, when people today want everything to be hosted, like the way Google does things.

I’ve also used Firefox for a couple years, but even that was starting to feel clunky.  Don’t get me wrong — Firefox is a great web browser and I’m sure many people would prefer it over Chrome because of its customizability, but Chrome just has a more simple and streamlined interface that doesn’t distract users from the web pages they’re browsing.

Ultimately, it’s all about the user experience when browsing.  Web browsers have come a long way and every one of the major web browsers are pretty good at what they do, but each one presents the web with a different frame.  For me, I really like the speed and undistracting simplicity of Chrome.

You know, Google is going to take over the world…

Microsoft Windows XP did its job so well that many people, including me, completely skipped out on the Windows Vista bandwagon. However, Windows XP is an 8-year-old operating system that’s due for a serious upgrade. So is Windows 7 the next operating system for you? I recently bought a copy of Microsoft Windows 7 64-bit Home Premium and spent a week exploring it. 

Read on…

It’s been over 6 years since I upgraded my computer from Windows 98 to Windows XP.  Last night I finally upgraded my aging computer equipment and installed a clean copy of Windows 7 onto it.  So far it’s been running very well and I’m actually excited to turn on my computer each time and learn more about it.

Knowing from previous experience that installing new operating systems on old equipment can lead to frustrating and time-consuming problems, the first thing I did was upgrade my hardware.  This is what I ended up buying and installing:

• GIGABYTE GA-MA790X-UD4P AMD Motherboard
• AMD Phenom II X4 940 Deneb 3.0GHz quad-core processor
• G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 800 SDRAM Dual Channel Memory
• EVGA GeForce 9800 GTX+ 512MB 256-bit PCI-Express 2.0 graphics card
• CORSAIR CMPSU-750TX 750-watt Power Supply

What does all that mean?

Well, my old computer ran at 2.0 GHz (single-core), had 1 GB RAM, and 128 MB video memory.  The new computer runs at 3.0 GHz (with 4 cores), has 4 GB of RAM, and 512 MB of video memory.  It’s ready to handle whatever sweet graphics Diablo III throws at it!

The other neat thing is that I installed the 64-bit version of Windows 7.  Most people today are running 32-bit Windows XP.  The difference between 64 and 32 bit is that your computer can efficiently address more memory, meaning all the caps on the computer’s memory are pretty much removed for the foreseeable future.  Windows XP can’t handle more than 4 GB of RAM and 128 GB of disk space per partition.  With a fully 64-bit operating system, I’m free to increase my RAM to an insane 16 GB and keep my 250 GB hard disk unpartitioned.

Now I can’t wait to try some graphics-intensive games!

Today all of the sudden Firefox would crash whenever I clicked the “Add an Image” icon in WordPress.  This has always worked for me before and I didn’t install or upgrade any software today.  Frustrating.

After 30 minutes of rummaging around the Internets and trying a few standard troubleshooting practices like clearing caches, shutting down the processes, etc, the problem has been resolved.

The Solution:

In Firefox, go to Tools -> Add-ons and disable Google Gears.  Restart Firefox.  Your problem is gone.

Nobody seems to know why Google Gears suddenly isn’t playing nice with WordPress in the Firefox playground, but there are a lot of smart adults working on the problem as you read this.  Hopefully some fixes will be forthcoming.

You can thank thesacredpath for finding the root of the problem.

BYE BYE…

HELLO…

I’m unhappy about the way the popular web photo-sharing software Gallery has turned into ugly bloatware, so I’m ditching it.  The one I had installed on this site was about 60 MB, even though it only had a couple pictures uploaded to it.  It took me about 15 minutes just to delete the files from the server.  The interface is ugly and confusing as well.  Good riddance.

Luckily, a replacement wasn’t too hard to find.  I went down the list of photo gallery software in Wikipedia and found one that has most of the features I want, yet is not too bloated or ugly.  It is ZenPhoto, and it is a free download (free, as in GPL).

I’ve installed it on this site and uploaded a few test photos.  Watch it action!  Much nicer than Gallery!

Windows XP Service Pack 3 is here, supposedly fixing 1,174 issues with XP.

So far I’ve had one problem after the installation. Upon startup, I was getting two error messages:

AirGCFG.exe – Entry Point Not Found – The procedure entry point apsSearchInterface could not be located in the dynamic link library wlanapi.dll.

WZCSLDR2.exe – Entry Point Not Found – The procedure entry point apsInitialize could not be located in the dynamic link library wlanapi.dll.

Solution: I got these errors because I am using the D-Link WDA-1320 Wireless G Desktop Adapter. The solution is to install the latest drivers from the Product Drivers page.

Since I haven’t had the time recently to do any kind of intensive coding, I’ve decided to make good use of WordPress to get some of my other concept sites up and running.  So far these are my Answers site, my Drinks site, and my Books site.  Hopefully in the future I will find time to develop those sites with my own code.

We had a little get-together on New Year’s Eve to celebrate the coming of 2008. Naturally, we wanted to take some pictures, so we brought out the new Canon Powershot SD850 IS we got for Christmas and snapped a few shots on the 35MB SD card that came with it. We got some great pictures while the 35 MB lasted.

Last night I plugged the camera into the computer to marvel at our exceptional photography… and all the pictures were gone! Erased from the camera somehow!

Luckily, I am a computer nerd.

Before I start babbling about the technical details, let me first explain a few things.

Both your computer and your camera store documents and pictures the same way. Deleting a file on your computer is just like tossing it in the waste basket. Then when you empty your computer’s Recycle Bin, that’s just like taking out the trash and setting it on the curb for the garbage truck to pick it up. Erasing the pictures from your camera is just like throwing the pictures in the trash and then immediately putting it out on the curb for pickup (because your camera doesn’t have a Recycle Bin). So, when you erase your camera accidentally, you still have a chance to recover the pictures if you act fast – before the garbage truck hauls it away. You’d have to run outside and dig through your trash. Now, on to the technical babbling…

I did a quick Google search online and found a number of “Shareware” SD card recovery programs available for download. I tried the first one I saw, CardRecovery. I plugged in the camera, loaded up CardRecovery… and found out that it couldn’t find the attached camera because the camera doesn’t load in the computer as a new drive letter. Hmm…

Then an idea came. What if I plugged the SD card into another device that would load as a new drive letter? I have a another camera, my Canon Digital Rebel XT. Nope, that won’t work because it uses a CF card instead of an SD card. What else is there? Thank God (or whatever you might believe in) that Garmin decided to add the useless feature of viewing pictures on your GPS device. I plugged in the SD card and connected the GPS to my computer, and it loaded as a new drive letter.

Then I loaded up CardRecovery. Awesome. It dug through the trash and found the pictures. I clicked the “Recover” button… and a pop-up dialog box informed me that I need to send them some cash before they’ll hand over the pictures. I guess “Shareware” is akin to blackmail.

I uninstalled CardRecovery.

That’s when I went to SourceForge and found a free open source SD card program. CardTest detected all the pictures and downloaded them from the card. It took about half an hour for CardTest to rescue those 12 pictures, and 3 of them were already damaged, but it’s better than losing them all outright.

Phew! The new year might turn out alright after all.

Apple Safari for Windows

People are still puzzling over why Apple released Safari for windows.  It doesn’t really give Windows users any new powers over their computer.  It’s a good solid browser that’s simple and has a lot of speed.  I would recommend Safari to people who just want to use their web browser to do basic web surfing, because it is faster than the other browsers.

Steve’s Rating: 7/10

Mozilla Firefox 2

This is the web browser that all the geeks are secretly installing on the computers of friends and family to stick it to The Man (Microsoft).  It’s the most customizable browser, so it’s the ideal geek toy.  It might even be more secure.  I use Firefox as my main browser (because I’m a geek).  If you get to know me well enough I might just secretly install it on your computer too

Steve’s Rating: 9/10

Microsoft Internet Explorer 7

And finally, “the winner” of the browser wars – Microsoft Internet Explorer.  Internet Explorer 7 is much improved over the last version, but it feels like it was thrown together quickly.  It doesn’t offer anything over the other browsers except that it’s made by the same company that made Windows.  Personally, I think the new user interface makes it harder to use, but at least it looks prettier.

Steve’s Rating: 6/10

I just installed the thing and there’s already an update?  If you’re using WordPress, be sure and get 2.2.1 to fix the bugs and security holes.

phpMyAdmin is a tool written in PHP for managing your MySQL databases over the Web.

I have been using phpMyAdmin to manage my MySQL databases for a long time. Today attempted to upgrade to 2.10.2, but failed. It sure ain’t as easy as the WordPress installation. The phpMyAdmin installation isn’t really that bad. I blame it more on the phpMyAdmin documentation and GoDaddy not giving free access to the server log files.

I went through the phpMyAdmin configuration and upgraded everything to the latest and greatest, only to get pesky “Internal Server Error” messages every other time I try to load phpMyAdmin. The installation works, but I get the “Internal Server Error” the first time I try to load it. When I hit the Refresh button it works. Then when I hit the Refresh button again it doesn’t work. Then when I hit it again, it works again… and so it continues. I’ve tried everything I could think of, and Googled all over the place for the answer. Other people get the same problem, but nobody seems to have the answer.

I could probably resolve the problem if I look at the server logs, but apparently GoDaddy holds them hostage for $2.95 a month. Yeah, for $2.95 a month you can look at your GoDaddy server logs. I thought those were supposed to come with hosting?

Anyways, I aborted the phpMyAdmin upgrade and if I have more trouble in the future, I might just shell out the $2.95 every month for GoDaddy. Back to phpMyAdmin 2.9.0!

Here it is, my new WordPress blog. It always feels good to install shiny new software. I realize that changing the URL of a blog is sort of like changing your email address, so it must get annoying for the (1 or 2) people who were keeping track of my previous blog. But this change is because I’m moving to a new domain (StevesNotebook.com), so I guess that makes it okay

I’ll go ahead and make this my first “software” category post by writing a little about WordPress 2.2. WordPress 2.2 offers a bunch of new features:

• WordPress Widgets
• Full Atom support
• New Blogger importer
• Infinite comment stream
• Speed optimizations
• WYSIWYG support for a future version of Safari

The full list and more details can be found at the developer blog announcement.

The main thing that I was impressed with was how easy it was to install. The Famous 5-minute Install really works and really took me 5 minutes! If only all PHP software installed that easily.

I did some searches Google, Yahoo!, and MSN to determine what the most popular blog software on the internet is right now. I just did a few searches and looked at how many results were returned, so the results are completely unscientific, unofficial, and perhaps inaccurate. My conclusions for the top 3 most popular blog software right now are:

1. Blogger
2. WordPress
3. Movable Type

I did the same test last year, and WordPress came out on top. Looks like Blogger is on the rise in popularity.

Flickr Uploadr v2.5.0.14 is a simple app that lets you easily upload pictures to your Flickr account by dragging and dropping, or by right clicking the pictures and selecting from the menu.

Many people don’t know it, but you don’t really have to buy software anymore these days. I’m not talking about piracy. Software to do most things are free and available on the Web. One good site to find good free software is The 46 Best-ever Freeware Utilities. Another site I like getting free software from is SourceForge.

Wget is a really nerdy program that can do great things in automating downloads if you can get past the nerdiness. Lifehacker has a great tutorial on how to use this command line program. You can use Wget to automatically mirror websites, download music, continue large downloads, and many other things. My most recent use of it was to automatically download all the pictures that a friend put in a web server directory.

After getting frustrated and burned from writing down dozens of passwords in random places, then forgetting where she wrote them down, my wife asked me this afternoon if I knew of any good software for managing passwords. I already had my own nerdy system of securely managing passwords. I kept two floppy disks around my computer, each containing a copy of an Excel file that had all my passwords. I kept two disks simply for redundancy, you know, in case one disk suddenly becomes unreadable. I kept the passwords on floppy disks so I could keep them 100% disconnected from the network, and thus unreachable by remote hackers. The only problem was that it was a pain to update the passwords list this way, and also the little problem that if anyone stole the disk sitting on my desk, they could easily access any account I had.

I went onto Sourceforge, typed “password” in the search box, and sorted the results by popularity and BINGO! KeePass Password Safe! This software maintains an encrypted database of passwords and locks it under just one password. Alternatively, you can also store a secure key on a disk, which is what I did. Now those two disks I used to store passwords are my key disks, which must be in the drive in order to unlock the password database, and I laugh at the foolishness of my old system. My wife loves it too… especially how you can change the icon for each entry in the database

I just happen to have an extra 100GB external hard drive that I bought to store backups. Until now I’ve been manually moving files to the drive (and often forgetting certain important files or getting lazy). Now I finally automated the process with SyncBack Freeware V3.2.14. Lifehacker has a full explanation on how to use SyncBack to automate your backups.

While I was scheduling tasks in Windows, I also went ahead and scheduled a quarterly defrag. Though Lifehacker recommends a monthly defrag, I think that will cause unnecessary wear and tear on your hard disk. I tend to agree more with HP. They recommend 4 defrags per year unless you regularly work with large files.