2005 December | The Tlog - a technology blog

Monthly Archive for December, 2005Page 3 of 4

Misadventures with a new power supply

Published

2 years, 11 months ago

. 0 Comments

My gaming PC at home, which runs Windows XP, had been having random crashes for months. Not a lot of them, but at least one a week, and always at the worst time. What was weird was that, seconds before it crashed, both my mouse and keyboard (both USB) would stop working, and XP would play the common “device disconnected” sound.

Since I have a lot of stuff connected to that PC, and only a “puny” 300W supply, which, besides, was guilty of making an increasing amount of noise, I thought that maybe the power supply didn’t have enough power for so many devices. I don’t know whether that was it or not…

So, yesterday, I bought a new 400W “silent” power supply, and replaced the old one with it. Several things happened as a result of that.

First, I cut myself under a nail. Quite painful, trust me.

Second, my 3Com 905B network card, for some reason, stopped working. Really. Weird thing: on first boot, it didn’t even recognize what it was, just identified it as a “network card” for which it didn’t have drivers, and was unable to configure it. On next boot, it was recognized, but had no connectivity at all. Removed it, booted, inserted it again, booted, and same symptoms: “unknown network card” on first boot, then correctly identified (but not working) on the second one.

Luckily, I had a couple of other network cards in a drawer…

Third, while the power supply’s fan was the noisiest one, now that I replaced it, I discovered that the CPU fan is making almost as much noise. I had stopped each fan by hand to find out which one was making all that noise, and came to the conclusion that it was the power supply’s fan, which I couldn’t stop since there’s a grid in front of it (all right, technically I could open it, but…). It was the worst, sure, but the CPU fan is still bothersome. I have to buy a new one.

Well, so far, it hasn’t crashed. Let’s see what the future brings.

Mouse 1.0: Escape to Windows

Published

Pedro Timóteo

2 years, 11 months ago

in Fun stuff and PC games

. 0 Comments

I have to admit, Mouse 1.0: Escape to Windows, a flash game, is quite fun.

Saw the link on Mário Lopes’ blog.

New “Top posts” page

Published

Pedro Timóteo

2 years, 12 months ago

in The Tlog (site)

. 0 Comments

Here it is (drumroll…): Top 10 posts at The Tlog.

Comes from the top accessed pages, from day one until today. Includes short descriptions of every entry.

I’ll try to update it every month or so.

Web design: the ugly, the bad and the good

Published

Pedro Timóteo

2 years, 12 months ago

in Browsers and World Wide Web

. 6 Comments

The ugly:

You use FrontPage or something like that to create a web site, which produces highly broken code that, for some reason, works in Internet Explorer 6. It “works”, so you launch it. You lose 20% of your potential clients, and more of 50% of the “tech-savvy” ones.

The bad:

You use FrontPage or something like that to create a web site, which produces highly broken code that, for some reason, works in Internet Explorer 6. You see that your site doesn’t work in Firefox, Opera, Konqueror, and/or Safari, so you waste days trying to fix hundreds of HTML bugs. After that, you find that it no longer works properly in IE 6, so you end up using Javascript to detect the browser, and giving different versions of code to each. You curse those pesky Firefox / Opera / Konqueror / Safari “weirdos”, who just have to be “different”, refusing to use the “standard browser,” Internet Explorer, and only increase your workload.

The good:

You code a web site according to standards, which, assuming you didn’t make any mistakes, means that it works in Firefox, Opera, Konqueror and Safari. You test it in IE, and find that some parts don’t work properly due to IE bugs or lack of support for parts of some standards, so you work around those — sticking to the standards — and ensure that it works in IE as well. Again, assuming you didn’t make mistakes, it still works perfectly in the standards-compliant browsers. Furthermore, the site degrades gracefully (that is, it may not have all the bells and whistles, but it works, and all the content is accessible) in cell phones, Blackberries, PDAs, Sony PSPs, etc..

The order of titles

Published

Pedro Timóteo

2 years, 12 months ago

in Blogging and Search engine optimization (SEO)

. 0 Comments

Which of the following titles (let’s say, as a result of a Google search, or in some list) is more appealing, to someone interested in WordPress 2.0:

The Tlog - a technology blog » What’s new in WordPress 2.0?

or:

What’s new in WordPress 2.0? » The Tlog - a technology blog

I believe anyone would prefer the second choice. Right? However, WordPress creates titles in the first format, by default. And, until a few hours ago, that’s what the titles in my blogs looked like.

Continue reading ‘The order of titles’

What’s new in WordPress 2.0?

Published

Pedro Timóteo

2 years, 12 months ago

in Blogging

. 0 Comments

No, it’s not out yet. But there was a link in my WP dashboard to a post by one of the developers, which has a lot of info about what’s new in WordPress 2.0.

A lot of it is “under the hood”, but there will be “visible” improvements as well. Looks quite promising.

Report: “Why You Should Consider Budgeting a Site Redesign for Firefox 1.5 Now”

Published

Pedro Timóteo

2 years, 12 months ago

in Browsers, Search engine optimization (SEO) and World Wide Web

. 0 Comments

Seen on ProBlogger, an interesting report: Why You Should Consider Budgeting a Site Redesign for Firefox 1.5 Now. It’s not really a tech report, but, instead, a report for marketers.

Which I am not. But I found it intriguing anyway - seeing how “the other side” thinks, and which arguments can affect them (since they’re not that concerned with “the standards” or “doing things right”, or even “using and supporting the best software”, like I am.)

More about the Nintendo Revolution

Published

Pedro Timóteo

2 years, 12 months ago

in Consoles

. 0 Comments

All of the following are rumors, coming from my “Nintendo” subscription in Google News:

The Revolution should be released around Thanksgiving 2006 - which, to non-Americans, means November.
The “Revolution” name still isn’t final, though I personally love it.
It will use 2 kinds of DVDs: single-layer (4.7 GB) and dual-layer (8.5 GB). It will also read GameCube mini-DVDs (1.5 GB), as it’s fully backward compatible.
Specs-wise, it doesn’t look too impressive compared to the Xbox 360 and the PS3 - it’ll be basically a “Super GameCube”, with about 2-3 times the power as the GC. Still way ahead of the first Xbox, though - and, knowing Nintendo, they’ll be able to do more with less. Remember that the “tiny” ‘Cube had games, such as Metroid Prime and Resident Evil 4, which looked better than anything on the (better on paper) Xbox.
It’s also rumored to be ridiculously cheap - $200, or even $150 - at launch. Wasn’t the PS3 going to cost $600?
Nintendo has also stated that the ways in which people moved the controller in the demonstration video were exaggerated - instead of arms swinging wildly, it will be more like using a mouse (in 3D, of course). For most games, at least - in some, however, the point will be to do realistic movements, such as in a swordfighting game.
Confirmed games include a new, seamlessly online Super Smash Bros., a new Hideo Kojima game, and Metroid Prime 3.

SEOmoz: Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization

Published

Pedro Timóteo

2 years, 12 months ago

in Blogging and Search engine optimization (SEO)

. 1 Comment

At SEOmoz, there’s a new Beginner’s Guide to SEO. While (assuming it’s a subject that interests you) you probably already know a lot of what’s there, it’s still likely that you’ll learn something new, and it’s nice to have so much information so well condensed.

How a simple design change can make a difference

Published

Pedro Timóteo

2 years, 12 months ago

in Blogging and The Tlog (site)

. 2 Comments

Due to both laziness, and a lot of my own customization that I don’t want to have to do again, I use variants of a single WordPress theme on all my blogs. And one thing that had been bothering me a little was that individual posts’ pages didn’t show the sidebar.

Today, I finally did something about it, because, after a little thinking, it came to me that it was “hurting” my blogs a lot.

And I don’t mean that in the sense of “not showing the sidebar ads”. It’s a lot worse. The sidebar shows categories, static pages links, links to archives, and other navigation stuff. Someone who arrived at a single post from a search engine, or from the RSS feed, or a link to an article in another site, never saw the sidebar.

Now, it’s true that you can browse to the blog’s front page by clicking on the blog’s title, but it’s not obvious to many people. Including the navigation stuff on every page is very important.

One advantage of having variants of the same theme in every blog is that changing this required just making a diff file after editing the first blog, and using it to patch all the others. I had to also change a few ads (the “leaderboard” ones), because they no longer fit on the page.

I just changed this a couple of minutes ago, so it will take some time to see what difference it makes - but I expect a rise in “pages browsed per visit”, and in ad earnings as well.

Firefox extensions: which ones do you use?

Published

Pedro Timóteo

2 years, 12 months ago

in Browsers and Firefox extensions

. 7 Comments

I thought it might be interesting to compare which Red Panda extensions we use… we may learn about some we didn’t know existed.

Here are mine:

SearchStatus: shows PageRank and Alexa ranks for the current site on the status bar; you can also right click on them to go several information pages on the respective sites.
ForecastFox: weather information; highly customizable.
BugMeNot: accesses a “throwaway” username/password database to enter stupid “registration required” sites (mostly news ones) quickly, without having to give them the most intimate details of your life.
AdSense Notifier: gives almost real time stats for your AdSense earnings; also allows quick logon to the AdSense site
CuteMenus: Crystal SVG: adds nice colorful icons to Firefox’s menus; becomes more user-friendly and pleasant to use
SEOpen: adds many SEO options to the context menu, such as checking for backlinks in several search engines, and more
del.icio.us: adds quick and comprehensive del.icio.us integration to the Fox