Tag Archives: Software

General

“Remember mismatched domains” extension for Thunderbird

2006/01/08 – 18:52

Oh yeah, once again the open-source world provides abundantly for me. Thank you Andrew Lucking!

I have a shared webhost for my email domains, so when I turn on SSL for my POP3/SMTP connections, I get an error dialog at every first connect that tells me the domain name is mismatched, because the shared host’s SSL certificate is for the host’s domain rather than mine. This extension lets Thunderbird remember these mismatches and the fact that I’ve OK’d them, freeing me from having to hit ‘OK’ about twenty times a day, and in the process making my connection a bit more secure (since I’d hit OK on that dialog even if it really was a security risk).

Anyway, if you know what I mean, you know what I mean, and will love the extension. If you don’t, don’t worry about it.

Remember mismatched domains at andrewlucking.com

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General

Tabbed browsing

2005/12/25 – 15:40

Ya know, when I first heard people talking about tabbed browsing, I was skeptical that there was any real value to it.

But now I’m rather addicted, and I’ve also kinda figured out why. What’s good about it is that it allows me to better manage my attention within a hyperlinked space. I can set the browser to work fetching a linked page of interest while minimally disrupting the reading flow on the current page. I can pop back and forth between the linked-from and linked-to pages as necessary. And I haven’t disrupted the history mechanisms in the meantime. So I’ve basically got a multidimensional space of recently-requested pages, instead of a linear one. That’s cool.

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General

HD upgrades are easy

2005/12/13 – 21:03

Being a veteran of a number of hard drive replacement-upgrades (probably 15… not a huge number, but not a little one), I’m accustomed to a good deal of annoyance in the process, especially with laptops. But the technology has settled down somewhat and I’m happy to report that my recent HD upgrade in my laptop was a relief relative to my other experiences.

I used Hitachi’s Notebook PC Upgrade kit. It was only $20 more than the competing product that didn’t include an outboard enclosure, and I can always use another enclosure if I’m going to be orphaning a hard drive anyway.

The enclosure and software came from Apricorn, a company I hadn’t heard of but am now suitably impressed with. The software was miles better than any other bundled drive migration software I’ve used before. This product isn’t the only positive factor in my success today (for example, OSs are better at dealing with changed hardware and connectors and compartments are more standardized), but I’m still impressed.

Here are some of the pains I didn’t have to deal with in this upgrade that I’ve had to live with in the past:

  • having Windows get confused and fail to boot because the drive letter changed
  • having to clone my Windows and Linux partitions with completely different processes
  • having to boot off a rescue CD and restore the boot loader to get dual-boot back
  • dealing with file-in-use problems
  • waiting 3 hours for the clone to finish
  • cursing myself for having trusted the bundled software and restarting the entire process
  • having a drive hanging out the side of the machine attached by an IDE connector (I assume those things aren’t made to bear a load…)
  • having to image the drive to a network drive and then back because there was nowhere else to plug in the new drive

Ahhh.

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General

“LEDhead: Classic Electronic Handheld Game Simulator”

2005/12/11 – 16:33

Cool enough idea, though I never did like these things that much.
Peter Hirschberg – LEDhead Classic Electronic Handheld Game Simulator

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General

Oh, patents

2005/11/08 – 19:34

You could claim that it’s a result of having lived in the world in which this had already been invented, or something like that, but the first time I ever thought about hot-swapping software modules, this is the basic scheme I came up with in about 10 minutes of contemplation. To think that I might be legally unable to use such a method because someone else wrote a massively oververbose document about it just seems wrong…
Real time control system and method for replacing software in a controlled system – US Patent 5421017

Patentstorm looks like it might be a useful resource.

(I happened upon this while doing the search for ‘entitization’ mentioned in the last post.)

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General

“Sony, Rootkits and Digital Rights Management Gone Too Far”

2005/11/02 – 09:05

Urgggh, is all I can say:
Mark’s Sysinternals Blog: Sony, Rootkits and Digital Rights Management Gone Too Far

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General

Scrapbook

2005/10/29 – 00:06

Speaking of learning, why wouldn’t you have already installed Scrapbook, if you indeed haven’t already? Excellent tool for browsing, which in turn makes it an excellent tool for learning.

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