gf-tech.com

One thing I have been experiencing at work lately is that my office is mostly comfortable, but not 100%. The things that bug me are crappy lighting (something I can change), and a finicky temperature.

Currently, the only lighting in my office is one crappy overhead fluorescent. I need to change this, and get a good full spectrum desktop lamp that I can move around to suit my needs. This is sheer lack of time that is prohibiting me from fixing this.

The temperature problem is tricky though. So far today I am comfortably warm and cozy. I am wearing a t-shirt, a thermal top, a hoodie, and a down vest. Yesterday my hands were cold all day, and this was a big distraction. The problem here is that I don't control the temp in my office alone. The control is outside my office, and affects 3 or 4 larger offices. Making myself warm makes others hot. Not sure if there is a compromise somewhere, but having difficulty typing because my hands are too cold is no good.

I find that I can get distracted by my environment. Cold hand and poor lighting make me think about ways to fix it, cause me to fixate on those problems instead of my work, and generally make me not want to go to my office. I think I need to fix this.

I got a new geek book recently: Pro Drupal Development.

I've written a couple modules that I use on my various sites to display comments in a certain way, and to display past articles posted on the current day. I managed to get those modules to work, but just barely. Each new Drupal release meant I had to re-jig things to get them working properly, but I never understood why things worked.

I bought the book on a whim and so far I am really enjoying it. I am learning a lot about Drupal and how it was architected, how it works, and what I can do with it, and I am only in chapter 4.

Reading the book is also giving me ideas about my modules, how I can write them better, and what new features I can add to them. Now I just need to find some time to sit down and write my module.

I'd read about dropbox a while ago and didn't think too much of it. There are getting to be more and more services that will allow you to use their disk space, and synchronize it to all the computers you specify. Dropbox didn't seem to offer as much as Windows Live Mesh but I gave it a shot anyway.

My first reaction was that the Dropbox synch was way faster than Mesh. Dropbox also keeps a history of what has happened, and shows you what is happening at any given time. Mesh does not. In fact, the only thing Mesh can give you is remote desktop access to any other computer in your mesh, which is interesting and helpful.

I was getting ready to uninstall both Mesh and Dropbox, then I read Joel's post on password management. I've been using my thumbdrive and a portable version of Keepass to store my passwords. As Joel suggested, I could keep my password file in my dropbox and use the installed version of Keepass. This way I add a new password, and I can access it from home too.

I then took things a step further and copied the Keepass exe to my dropbox. Now I don't need to install anything except the dropbox program and I have instant access to all my password from all my computers. Very cool. I essentially turned my 2 GB dopbox space into a 2GB thumbdrive that I don't have to carry with me.

While running WireShark I did a follow up post to one of my sites using ScribeFire. Something I learned was that it seems like ScribeFire is doing the right thing.

A portion of the capture:

<value>
<dateTime.iso8601>20080828T16:10:48Z</dateTime.iso8601>
</value>

This means that Drupal may not be handling this correctly. For a while I allowed users to choose their own timezone. I changed my profile to be a little different than the site setting. I thought maybe that would be causing the problem, but I changed the db to revert it back. This had no change.

More investigation needed before I can file a bug report.

I started using ScribeFire to write my blog posts a long time ago. I actually started using the add-on when it was called Performancing. It is pretty handy and allows me to compose at my leisure and to not worry about a browser crashing. Saving my work as I go is nice and easy as well.

A recent version of the add-on has introduced some strange side-effects. Before the new version my posts would be accepted by my site without a problem, and would show up with the appropriate time stamp.

Now when I post, the new posts are showing up with a timestamp 7 hours later than what I expected. My Drupal install has a setting to indicate what timezone I want my site to operate in, and right now it is set to GMT -7.

Perhaps the problem is in Drupal and maybe it is in ScribeFire. When I have time I will install WireShark and examine what is actually posted to Drupal.

I noticed that RSS Bandit 1.7 Beta was released recently. Unfortunately for me, when I tried to upgrade on my work computer, it failed horribly. After clicking OK to the dialog, the Bandit loaded, but none of my feeds were loaded.

I started looking in to this and noticed the DirectAccess.29741.subscription was looking pretty empty, but that the contents looked similar to the old subscriptions.xml file. To test my hypothesis, I added a feed to RSS Bandit and checked the results in the DirectAccess.29741.subscription file. Sure enough the feed was there.

I shut down RSS Bandit, then deleted the DirectAccess.29741.subscription and copy/renamed subscriptions.xml to DirectAccess.29741.subscription. Starting the app again, my feeds loaded properly. I did a diff on the DirectAccess.29741.subscription file and noticed a few xml attributes were added or rearranged, but otherwise the file was intact. So far so good.

I also found that the installed replaced my custom RSSBandit.exe.config in the Program Files directory with a new version that no longer contained my settings. I fixed that up and everything was hunky dory. I am posting this in case anyone else runs into the same issue.

RSS Bandit has a way to synch feeds between computers, but it doesn't work for me. Instead I copy the entire app data directory between work and home. This works the way I like it to. Their synch fails in that on my home computer, my unread items at home can get out of synch with work. Unfortunately this is not a bug, and instead a feature.

I've been using a USB thumbdrive for a few months now. I transfer music to and from work and home, back up personal docs and Firefox profiles, store scripts that I have developed, and run Portable Apps from it.

The 4 GB version I have is awesome, and very handy. Today I learned an excellent way to ensure that the thumbdrive is available at the same location across computers you use. This is especially handy when using back up scripts. Windows only, but that is where I live.

The short how-to: Run "diskmgmt.msc" from Windows' Run/Start Search box, right-click on your plugged-in drive and choose "Change Drive Letter and Paths." Then:

Click on the Add button, select Mount into the following empty NTFS folder and click on browse. Now navigate to the subfolder that you want to assign the USB drive to and confirm the assignment. The USB drive will from now on be accessible from that folder as well if it is connected to the computer

via LifeHacker

I've been using Windows Powershell for a few weeks now. I was wanting to learn something new recently, and this seemed like a good fit since this is something I can apply to work life, as well as home.

Powershell is Microsoft's new command shell and scripting language, that is very .Net like. Pretty much anything you do results in an object, not a string like previous command shells.

To help with learning Powershell, I bought the Window Powershell Cookbook by Lee Holmes. I love this book since it really is a bunch of recipes. You want to do this, then follow these steps. The code snippets are small, and well commented, and help reinforce the topic. They are also all downloadable from O'Reilly, which helps me tinker with them.

So far I am really enjoying working with Powershell. In a short amount of time I have been able to create some scripts that help me with my day to day job. Some things that needed to be automated, but the only way I knew how to accomplish would have been to write a small craplet. Powershell allows me to write a nicer craplet :) Some other scripts I have written at home help me to blog more efficiently, and to transfer RSS Bandit data between computers.

I haven't tackled anything difficult or groundbreaking with Powershell yet, but I am still learning what can be done on this platform.

This site is running the latest release of Drupal. This version is just a release candidate still, but so far I haven't seen much that is too different. The default theme looks the same, and most of the management screens I have seen look the same.

I did notice that the configuration of the categories had a really nice change. The individual categories can be reorganized by a drag and drop method. Very slick. A lot nicer than choosing the weight using a drop down list.

OpenID is integrated into this version which doesn't help too many people right now, but in the future this will be a nice way to stop having to create a new account at every site you visit.

So far so good. I have encountered a couple bugs which is typical of a release candidate, but on the whole it seems pretty stable.

A while ago while I was in Langley recently I visited Future Shop and found they had the Logitech MX Revolution mouse on sale for $80. I picked one up because I am looking for a good mouse for work, and this one seemed like it would be a good fit for my hand, and for my penchant for customizing my computing experience.

The scroll wheel is a great idea in that it had two modes, quick scroll, and normal click scroll. There is also a thumb rocker switch that can be customized for use.

From all descriptions I had read it sounded pretty customizable. Perfect.

Out of the box the mouse is pretty comfortable, and glides nicely across the desktop. I installed the software from the included disc, and immediately noticed some peculiarities with it.

The thumb rocker switch had only one setting for use, and not one for flipping up versus flipping down. That switch could only ever do one thing regardless of which direction you move it.

I also found the software didn't always remember its settings. I would change the configuration click save, exit the configuration software and discover the changes hadn't been applied. Opening the software again I would inevitably find the changes I made hadn't been saved.

The clicking scrolling wheel was too pronounced and I could feel the clicks reverberate through my finger. It didn't bother me for the first few days, but it soon got annoying and distracting. I even found that this clicking bothered my finger so I had to turn it off.

The scroll wheel had a feature where it will switch from clicking to free wheel. The configuration software allows you to determine how much force was needed to indicate when to switch over. What happens internally is when the wheel spins fast enough the clicking mechanism is moved away from the wheel and it spins freely. Unfortunately this switching to smooth scrolling is very finicky. I tried all sorts of setting to find the sweet spot, but I never got it dialed in so I had to disable it, and just let it live in free spin mode.

When the free spin comes to an end, the mouse automatically switches back to click mode. I could physically feel the wheel click into spot. This quite often causes the active application to scroll a couple lines one way or another. Imagine this scenario happening 20-30 times a day. You flick the scroll wheel, it changes to free spin mode, and when you get to the right place in the file you stop the spinning. Then the screen you are looking at jumps up or down a few lines after a slight pause. Dam annoying.

Another option was to click the scroll wheel to get it to change from click mode to free spin mode. It seems like a good idea but in my experience it was an odd feeling that I couldn't shake no matter how many times I tried it.

In the end I configured the mouse to always be in free spin mode for the three reason mentioned above (clicking bothering my finger, finicky switch to free spin, and the jumpy screen when coming out of free spin mode).

The worst thing that I experience with this mouse was that quite often I couldn't scroll down when Visual Studio 2005 was the active application. I could scroll up just fine, but scrolling down would often fail. This only happened in Visual Studio, and only happened when trying to scroll down. A product killer if most of your day is spent in this application.

Battery life seemed very good. I could work a whole week and by Friday afternoon the batter warning was starting to blink. The batteries aren't user replaceable though. How long they will last is a question that is on my mind.

This mouse features quite an ergonomic design, and at first it seemed comfortable. Too soon though I found I was getting a claw hand. You know, my hand would cramp up after using the mouse for a few hours, and when I let go of the mouse, my hand is stuck in the claw shape? Not good. I also found that using this mouse inflamed my tendinitis, so I would have to abandon it for a few days to rest my hand. Whats the point of using this mouse if I can't use it all the time?

One thing about this mouse that I loved was the thumb rest, but I wished there was something similar for my pinky and ring fingers..

I've since stopped using the mouse and switched back to a basic Dell supplied cheap mouse. It fits my hand much better. The Revolution was just a tad too small and that is what caused my claw hand and discomfort. Soon I am going to sell it to try and recoup some of the cost. Good sounding mouse, but just not right for me.