Computing

Topics related to computers and computing

Drupal request

May 20, 2004

Recently I've been working through what I'd like to see in a blogging tool. I'm very happy with Drupal and it is and excellent choice for those left wanting by Movable Type's recent change in pricing. There is a posting on the Drupal site about making the move from MT to Drupal.

Bravo UserLand

May 17, 2004

Dave Winer posted this announcement today. Here is my prediction.... Sales of Manilla and Radio will go up.

Why would the sales go up when the core is going to be given away? For a history I look back at my own history with UserLand's products. I had read a little about Frontier and was quick to start using Clay Basket. Later in 1996 I started using Frontier and quickly fell in love. But it was far more than a product. In those days Frontier was a freeware product (not open source) and there was an active community supporting it. Frontier had a wonderfully logical methodology of editing scripts (outlines) and was extremely powerful after a few quick scratches of the surface. Then came the dark days... with a need to be paid a fair amount for a software package Frontier became a non-freeware product. I completely understand the need for the development to be paid for and do not take issue with the decision. It had, however, unfortunate consequences in terms of the community. At the same time the community became more tightly focused around the brilliant minds at UserLand and in the eyes of an average user withered and changed.

Problem with Airport Extreme Base Station

May 13, 2004

I just posted over on Apple's boards but the theme seems to be constant. There is a problem with the Airport Extreme Base Station and version 5.4 of the Firmware. The problem manifests itself as the Base Station loosing its internet connection every 24 hours. The problem lies in having the base station setup to use the network time protocols for syncing its clock. The clock on the base station really doesn't matter unless you want the dates to show up correctly in logs (and you have remote logging turned on) so there are probably only a handful of people who will encounter this problem. The workaround is to have the base station not report in the correct time and to set the log file to "mark" the log instead.

below is an excerpt of the log file. The times by the way are UTC, not the local time zone, so people will see the problem occurring at different times ranging from about 8am to Noon in the continental US.

Westlaw does RSS

May 7, 2004

Dave Winer points to a note from LawLibTech that Westlaw now supports RSS. I tried it and it works well. The StorageTek feed in the news feeds section is a WestLaw feed.

The good news doesn't stop there though, WestLaw has setup the system so that it readily accommodates feeds for places such as intranets where things can be linked using the firms subscription instead of each user having to log in each time. Very cool. Now I need to get better at using WestLaw.

Wireless blues

April 30, 2004

Glenn Fleishman has a good article about wireless networking in PC World. In the article he suggests how to boost your network's reliability and tells why many problems occur.

It should not be a surprise that an article in PC World is largely focused on PCs and it does spend a great deal of time on the woes of setting up wireless networking on Windows. However it does have good tips and some ideas for users of other platforms as well.

This article follows on several days of wireless problems for one of my clients. Their connection with their Charter Pipeline cable modem has been pretty rock solid since December. For the period between December and April 21 they always had the same IP and things worked swimmingly. Just as they left on a trip the trouble started. Upon their return on April 27 a new address was assigned. On the 28th the connection was dropped again but with a reset of the modem they again got the new address. All of these had been in the same subnet. Then yesterday at about noon Pacific, the network changed to a different Class A network. No longer is it a 66.215 but its now a 24.205

StorageTek continues spiral

April 28, 2004

StorageTek is unleashing trapped profitability once again. What that means for employees is that they will be without jobs. It's a simple methodology that has been practiced for several years by the ex-Xerox Mafia at StorageTek. When times are tough cut your way to profitability. Maybe someday the realization that there isn't any fat left and that having already cut any scraps of meat off the bone that sawing, grinding feeling is cutting through the bones. There are many great people who are, or once were at what was

Mailing List Solutions

April 20, 2004

What are the best mailing list solutions people are using today? We are in need of a better list management solution. In my mind the basic requirements include:

  • Web based administration including Add/Delete/Suspend
  • Web based archive
  • Ability to use the web to change from regular to digest delivery
  • Automatic processing of bounces

What are the best solutions to date for hosting this in-house?

Test Task

April 6, 2004

This is a test task. How well does it work? We will find out. If this works then TasksPro from Alex King now posts to Drupal.Test of Bold

Yup it worked!

To post to a Drupal Blog you have to give it the URL of your add page. For many this will be similar to http://www.example.com/node/add/blog/ and you'll be good to go.

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