Category Archives: Misc

Things that are not techie stuff, but I feel like I want to talk about anyway.

Midnight ramblings – probly shouldn’t even read this

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It’s pretty strange to me that on those rare occasions when I watch TV I see lots of commercials on from Microsoft comparing Bing to Google claiming that Bing is better when really, it’s a matter of personal preference and taste. I mean, people search the Internet for various and different things and sometimes even the same things but that doesn’t mean that they are seeking the same thing, and even if they are seeking the same thing, they may not want the same results. That’s one of the beauties of the ‘net, it’s ALL subjective! Bing is no better than Google, no more than Google is better than Bing. It’s up to the user, not some fake dork looking geek yelling “Bing it ooooooon” through a megaphone. Give me a break.

It’s about like the Internet Explorer commercials saying that they give you the power to do more, or something about family moments or whatever. I mean, Internet Explorer is pre-installed (or included, or built-in, or whatever, take your pick) on EVERY Windows™®© installation everywhere, and it is still a solid third place contender. For a long time it was second place behind Firefox, but then Chrome surfaced from Google, and now IE has slid to third. Currently, and since about March 2012, the list has Chrome in the lead with 53.2%, Firefox holding on to second with 27.8% and Internet Explorer in third with 12.1% – and that’s while still being the default and only browser on new installs of Windows. If someone wants Chrome or Firefox or anything else they have to use Internet Explorer to go get it! I know, I know, you all already know that. I just don’t know how Microsoft can even think that they have the top end product when it STILL won’t render HTML5 properly.

When we shift the subject to operating systems, the subject becomes even more based on the user and their personal preferences. But then, that’s really yes and no, because most users are pretty much held captive by Windows, and that’s nothing bad or nefarious on Microsoft’s part. It’s just that the majority of computer users out there just don’t know enough to use any other operating system. They know enough about Windows to use it, to get along, and so that’s what they choose. In most cases it’s not even a conscious choice, it’s the only choice, most don’t even know there’s an alternative. Although that’s starting to change a bit since Apple and OSX came to town. Apple took a page from Jean-Louis Gassée’s book with OSX. Jean-Louis Gassée is the man who created the best operating system known to mankind, BeOS. He had the idea that it would be easier to make UNIX user friendly rather than make Windows stable, and created a UNIX based operating system with a beautiful and incredible use interface. Ultimately BeOS didn’t make it, but OSX followed in the same foot steps in my opinion, it’s a UNIX based operating system that is beautiful and easy to use and is becoming more and more popular to date. A year or two ago (I don’t know if it’s still true), Apple was the largest seller/distributor of UNIX based computers in the world. Not bad for a company that almost went under a few years prior!

What does all of my useless rambling mean? Not a darn thing! LOL Except that ultimately, despite what big companies might try to tell us, and what we might believe ourselves, it’s the consume that has the power in the end to drive the industry, and we simply have to vote with our dollar bills. Buy the good stuff and ditch the bad, and for free stuff and open source stuff, it’s pretty much the same, support the good and ignore the bad.

It is my opinion that the Internet is the great playground leveler. Whether it is technology, or entertainment, singing or playing an instrument, dancing or whatever on YouTube, if it’s good … people will like it and view it and share it and it will come to the top. Whereas the bad will fall off into obscurity. The Internet gives even the little guy the chance to be a star at whatever it is that he has chose as his arena fight in. Now, go get some sleep!

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Is Wi-Fi Sniffing Wiretapping?

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wardialingIs Wi-Fi Sniffing Wiretapping? The (not so) Supreme Court thinks so. They seem to be looking at this from a … well, I am not sure what point of view they are seeing this from. Surely not a logical point of view, nor a technical one. How about we let someone with a brain look at this question, shall we? Good.

First of all, before we even go into the technical parts of each one, or should I say the differences, one must look at the intent behind the act. When you “wire tap” someone, or in more general term, “tap their phone”, you are specifically singling out someone and then taking measures to specifically monitor that person and their communications. In most cases you must have some type of legal paper or permission before you can do this, although we have seen that, naturally the “Government” can always find ways around that little detail. No one wants to hinder their fun, ‘eh? The point is, in the case of wire tapping, you are specifically choosing someone for some reason, one person or entity that you want to monitor. You then take action to monitor that person. You take specific action to monitor that person or entity and that one only, no one else. You don’t tap the phone at 405 West Chester Street and in the process say “Oh, hell, let’s just tap the whole damn street while we are here!” No, you focus on that one person.

Now, in the case of Wi-Fi sniffing, it is much different. In fact it couldn’t be more different. With Wi-Fi sniffing, you are simply sitting there, or you might be mobile, wandering around “sniffing” (testing the location to see if a Wi-Fi signal happens to be available) to see if something pops up. If it does, if you happen to catch hold of a signal, you take a look and see what you have found, kind of like fishing. Sometimes you get a good one, and sometimes you throw it back.

The point is, that unlike wire tapping, with Wi-Fi sniffing you are not focusing on one specific person or entity. You are not specifically taking measures to monitor any one thing, or any thing for that matter. You are simply catching whatever signals are out there to be caught. If I am sitting at home and I see that there are several Wi-Fi networks around me that I can access, am I wiretapping? Hell no!

It really comes down to the people that are responsible for that Wi-Fi network. If you are responsible you will make that network secure so no one can come along and sniff it, find it, and do anything with it in the first place. Wi-Fi sniffing and wire tapping are two very different things and that the Supreme Court can’t seem to figure that out shows just how out of touch they really are, not just with technology, but with reality as well.

DVI De-Mystified – Dual-Link DVI versus Single-Link DVI Explained!

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DVI Dual vs SingleToday I was doing some spec hunting for my PC, trying to track down exactly what make, model and frequency were supported by the Wi-Fi card that came with my machine. As I was doing so, and eyeballing the rest of the specs, I ran across the information for my video card. One thing that caught my eye was the description of the video or DVI port. Specifically it mentioned that the DVI port was a ‘dual-link’ DVI port. Well now, I consider myself pretty knowledgeable about computers, including hardware, but I hadn’t heard of a ‘dual-link’ DVI port before. Now, in my defense, I have spent the last many years concentrating on hardware by Sun, Hitachi, NetApp and the like. Things you will find in a full up data center, not at home in your desktop PC. I haven’t been knee deep in PC tech for a while, but I have kept up with most things.

So, naturally, I had to find out what ‘dual-link’ meant. I did some searching and found a wonderful article that explains what ‘dual-link’ is, what ‘single-link’ is, the differences between them and more. I am going to give you a brief summary (I don’t want to keep everyone in suspense), but I am also including a link to the original article, go read it and really get learned up.

Basically, the way I see it (the quick version) is like this:

  • Dual-Link DVI –
    • Has 24 pins in the plug instead of 18
    • It uses two TMDS digital signal transmitters instead of one
    • It can transmit data faster using 8 wires instead of 4
    • It can support much higher resolutions up to 2560×1600
    • There is an increase in signal quality and refresh rates

 

  • Single-Link DVI –
    • Has 18 pins in the plug instead of 24
    • It has one TMDS digital signal transmitter
    • It transmits data of 4 wires instead of 8
    • It cannot support resolutions beyond 1920×1200
    • Basic signal quality and refresh rates are observed

And there you have it, a run down of the basic differences between ‘dual-link’ and ‘single-link’ DVI. I think finding out and learning information like this is way cool. I love to learn new things and figure out how stuff works, it’s a lot of fun in my book – but then, more than a few people have called me crazy because a day of fun to me is sitting and coding all day! LOL

DVI All Types

DVI Plugs
All Types
(Click to enlarge)

DVI - All Types of Plugs

DVI Plugs
All Types
(Click to enlarge)

Now, for the sake of completeness, even though this doesn’t really apply to the dual-link or single-link question, I wanted to include another image or two that show other versions of the DVI plug. Since you are likely to run into one or all of these plugs out there somewhere, I figured you might want to know what you are looking at. These two pictures (click to enlarge), show you that aside from the digital DVI-D plugs, there are also DVI-I plugs that are analog and digital, plus some other older plugs. Of these older plugs, the Super-VGA there on the bottom is very common and one that you probably will see a lot. It was used for many years before the DVI option became common. I have seen many video cards that have DVI and VGA on the same card.

Check out the article on DVI dual-link versus single-link here.

Who’s Been Viewing My Facebook Page?

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Facebook UnfriendI thought I would put up a quick post on this topic because I keep seeing it make the rounds on Question/Answer sites like Askeville, Yahoo and the like. It’s interesting to see the answers that some people provide, from it cannot be done to it can just do this or buy my special software tool and see everything! I am not sure why people are all that tied up about who is looking at their Facebook page, but, it seems to be important to a lot of folk. Here is what I have been able to find out.

According to Facebook technical folks, the truth is, no one can see who’s been on your Facebook page. There are no features buried in the Facebook settings with that data, and there are no apps that can unearth that information for you. Facebook says that this is one of the most common scam tactics that is used to defraud users of the site. Don’t fall for it; you cannot see who is or has been looking at your profile, and no one can see if you have been looking at theirs.

LOLCat UnfriendIn other news, there are apps and tools to see who’s un-friended you. Facebook tries to minimize these apps, but they can be found. There is one that you download to your computer called UnFriend Finder and another for Android called Friends Checker. Sign in, and they store a list of your friends.  Then, every time you check back, it tells you who’s no longer on the list.  UnFriend Finder also reminds you of friend requests you’ve made that haven’t been answered. For Twitter, Qwitter does the same thing, telling you who’s un-followed you each week. Naturally, the earlier you employ these tools, the more effective they will be.

Please note that mentioning any tools in this post is not an endorsement of those tools, no one here at Solarum has seen or used them in any way and therefore are not recommending them. They are listed for informational purposes only. Hope that helps!!

Check out this cool service – Pastebin

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I just recently found this, and I know, a bunch of you probably already know about it and maybe have for a long time. But hey, I just found out about it and it is so cool I just had to tell everyone! The site is called Pastebin and it’s a cool site (the site is very well done!) and service for anytime you are working with code, log files, and/or other gobs of strangely formatted text.

We all know how tough it is to try and past the source of our scripts, or contents of config files or log files into regular forum input boxes. Heck, for that matter, let us not forget how tough it is getting that kind of stuff posted correctly in WordPress itself. This Pastebin site allows you to past your copious amounts of text there, where it has all of the magic juju to display it properly, even formatting code correctly with syntax highlighting. All you have to do, once you paste your text into the bin, is add the link to your post or article or whatever. Then anyone reading it can go check it out at Pastebin and not try and decipher the text in whatever manner it would have gotten mangled on the screen in the first place.

I think this is going to be a great headache save for lots of us as more and more communication goes online, especially in the tech crowd.  Go check out Pastebin [link]now and see for yourself.  They have a Pro option with extra goodies, but you most certainly can use the service for free too.  If you like it, tell your friends too and help ’em out!

Komodo IDE Snippet Variables

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Here we go, for anyone out there using Komodo IDE (and maybe Komodo Edit, not sure if this is available in the free version).  Aside from being the coolest and best IDE I have found for editing PHP, PERL, SHELL and other scripts, the environment itself has lots of features.  One cool thing is that you can create “snippets”, which are text files that you can insert into your code files with one click or assignable hot keys.  When you create these snippets you can use variables to add to their functionality.  Some variables get substituted with information at the time you submit them, and some will ask you for information so you can tailor your snippets to suit whatever need you have.  Listed at the end of this post are the variables available for use in snippets, sometimes it’s hard to find them, so I thought I would post them all here.  All snippets aside, I highly recommend that any developer out there working with the earlier mentioned PHP, PERL, and the like, go check out Komodo.  You can start out with the free version, Komodo Edit and see what you think.  Remember, I don’t get paid to tell you that, I am just a very happy user of the product and recommend it to anyone who needs something along those lines.

[[%f]]: file base name
[[%F]]: file path
[[%d]]: directory base name of file
[[%D]]: directory path of file
[[%P]]: path of the active project
[[%p]]: directory path of the active project
[[%L]]: current line number
[[%s]]: selection
[[%S]]: URL-escaped selection
[[%w]]: selection of word under cursor
[[%W]]: URL-escaped selection or word under cursor
[[%guid]]: A new GUID
[[%date]]: Current date
[[%ask]]: Ask when snippet is inserted