Category Archives: technology

DTV released as Democracy (Linux Preview)

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The long awaited, open-source Democracy platform is a project of the Participatory Culture Foundation allowing you to subscribe to video RSS feeds (including podcasts, video blogs, and BitTorrent feeds), watch fullscreen and share with friends.

So I checked out Democracy and was impressed at the layout and that I was actually able to download content right away from the predefined feeds. I started watching a recent rocketboom without a hitch. That isn’t to say that there are no bugs. Full screen works, but with multiple monitors it scretches across both screen thus not supporting xinerama. The channel menu does not work for me and when I went to the channel guide and clicked on “more…” for a channel it bombs out. I later found out that I needed to make sure you add the mozilla prefs as specified on the DemoTV wiki. There are alot of options for IPTV and I’m sure it will only grow. Democracy allows one to view all of these options easily and subscribing to feeds is straight forward and the interface seems intuative. It looks very promising and I look forward to a stable build soon. See screenshots inside….

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Windows XP Network Problem Solver

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I have a client who has 3 Windows XP home computers. They were sharing Quickbooks Pro across these three by using one computer as a “server”. Well this “server” ended up getting multiple trojans, viruses and spyware installed onto it making it non accessible from the other 2 machines. We ended up working a few hours off and on each day for the past week trying to get this thing back on-line. We used HP’s recovery partion, XP’s restore point, and many other winsock and network reset utilities to no-avail. It wasn’t until I broke down and took the computer home did I stumble upon the Windows XP Network Problem Solver page by Hans-Georg Michna tht I was able to crack this problem. This computer was having the infamous “Logon failure: The user has not been granted the requested logon type at this computer.” message when connecting from another PC. It wasn’t until I followed the instructions of the aformentioned page did I fix this problem. Here is the code (note: you must first download the “Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit” to use the ntrights utility. See the link above for instructions)

net user guest /active:yes
ntrights +r SeNetworkLogonRight -u Guest
ntrights -r SeDenyNetworkLogonRight -u Guest

So simple and intuitive right? It had to be done because XP Home as limitations on networking built in that XP Pro does not. The moral of this story has two parts: 1) Always use XP pro in a networked, business, or home office environment and 2) never do work for a client who is having file sharing and networking issues in XP Home MAKE them upgrade or tell them to call someone else!

VueScan 8.3.05

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All I can say is wow. The latest VueScan takes advantage of GTK2 on linux and is an awesome app (also runs on Microsoft Windows and Mac OSX). It makes scanning as easy or advanced as you would like and helps turn old pictures and faded shots into photos like they had just been printed. I had been using the trial version for some time and decided to step up to the Pro version to take advantage of it’s profiling capabilities. It’s a bargain at $49.95 for Standard and $89.95 for Pro and works great on my Epson Perfection 3170 Photo scanner (400 scanners and 185 digital camera raw files. VueScan 8.3.05 was released on October 21, 2005, and you can read about what’s new in this version.

Bookmarklets!

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Bookmarklets are the greatest! They allow you to do interesting things just be clicking on a bookmark you have in your toolbar or bookmark menu. Here is a description from Stephen Ostermiller page of bookmarklets:

Bookmarklets are useful pieces of JavaScript code that you can save in your browser’s bookmarks. When you then click this bookmark it will run the code against the current page rather than the usual “go to the bookmarked page” behavior of bookmarks.

Here is one I made up to use the Coral Cache for the page you are on CoralThis! I also found another one on Stephen’s PageCoral Cache that is probably better 🙂 but I tried. Should have google’d “coral bookmark” in the firstplace. Oh well. He also has one for google cache as well that I will end up using.

Just drag any of those bookmarklets onto your bookmark toolbar or right click and bookmark the link to start using them. Also check out Stephen’s site or google for bookmarklets to find more.

Microsoft Windows History of 20 Years

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Yes I can hear you saying now “But isn’t Jeremy a Linux guy?!?” Well yes I am and my XP partition on my computer hasn’t seen the light for over 12 months, but Microsoft has done some nice things for the industry and has set the bar (not necessarily high in all respects). Plus Windows turns 20 this year so even the most zealous Linux users have to pay some respect. Here is the breakdown as taken out of Maximum PC mag I read (assume Windows is in front of each item):

  • 1.x (1985)
  • 2.x (aka windows/286 and windows/386) (1987)
  • 3.0
  • 3.1 (1992)
  • NT 3.1 (1993)
  • MS-DOS 6.22 (Last stand alone version of DOS 1994)
  • For Workgroups 3.11
  • NT 3.51 (1995)
  • 95 (1995 obviously)
  • NT 4.0 (1996)
  • 95 OSR2 (1996)
  • 98 (1998)
  • 98SE (1999)
  • 2000 (2000 duh!)
  • ME (2000)
  • XP (2001)
  • XP Media Center Edition (2002)
  • XP Tablet Edition (2002)
  • XP SP2 (2004)
  • XP 64-bit (2005)
  • Vista (????)

Go get the latest (November 2005) edition of Maximum PC to see all the details for each version.

There you have it folks. 20 years of Windows pain glory.

cellphone quality

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I’m sitting here at a clients (Newark, DE) and the employee sitting next to me is struggling to hear the person on the other end because that person is on a cellphone in an airport. Does the Verizon ad “Can you hear me now?” annoy you as well? Technology continues to advance in every area of our lives but with telephone and cellphone quality we settle for less than perfect. Telephone quality was never meant to be good as it was always meant to just transmit voice signals, but with cellphones we were promised digital connections and great quality. Personally I have yet to receive that level of greatness. I’ve used Verizon, Sprint, Nextel, and I am now with Cingular. All of these providers have there shortfalls, I’ve experienced crappy reception, crappy quality, dropped calls, increasing hidden pricing and more. When will we get more than adequate reception even in the most remote places? When will we be able to travel in our cars across state lines and not loose connection? When will we be able to have great quality and not have to pay out the rear for it? I’m not sure this day will ever come, but for the necessary evil of cellphones I’m less than impressed.