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I was installing a defrag utility today on my work machine. The installer went through the usual installing stuff, then I got asked if I wanted to install the Yahoo! toolbar. Absolutely not. If I had wanted it, I would already have it installed. I was greeted with this:

The installer states:

By clicking the "Next" button, you agree to these software license terms

Technically if I don't agree to Yahoo's terms, I can't install the software I downloaded. Sure I can uncheck the two Yahoo related checkboxes, but by clicking next I am still agreeing to their terms.

Maybe I should uninstall that defrag utility and email the author and let him know why.

A while ago I read about Jeff Atwood donating a sum of money to an open source project. It got me thinking about all the tools and utilities that I use at work on a daily basis. I find lots of open source apps to help me work better, to enhance my computer (which helps me work better), and to manage my data.

Last year I decided that in 2009 I would purchase a licence or donate to an app's author each month. Lots of projects have a donation button, and for those I am still trying to figure out an amount that makes a difference. I want to let the author know that their app makes a difference to me, but I can't break my bank account doing that. I had this idea before the economy started its downward slide, and now I think it is more important than ever to do this.

Some of the commercial apps I will be buying a licence for can be pricey. I think that for the year I will end up spending close to $350. Stay tuned to learn about where I spend my money.

After moving my technology books from one house to another and giving many outdated ones away to charity, I've decided that something has to give before my back does. I have also been thinking a lot about what I want to take to read on my next vacation. Do I take magazines, novels, geek books?

Dead tree tomes for geek topics really need to be in a digital book format. I've heard good reviews of the Kindle from Amazon, but I will not be tied down to their DRM. The other ereader that I have read about is from Sony and is too expensive for my taste (and Sony has a history of proprietaryness).

Then I saw the eSlick by Foxit (I am a fan of their software). I hope this device comes to market. It has the features I want at a price that is more reasonable than others. No DRM is huge as well. The downside to all e-ink displays is that currently they are only black and white. This is excellent for novels and reference material, but not so good for magazines that I like to read.

For me the sticking point is that we need more publishers to sell a PDF version of books at a reasonable price. I will not pay the same amount for a digital book that I will pay for the paper version. The resources needed for a digital version are a lot less, and the price needs to reflect that. Give me a good price and I will buy more books.

I hope Foxit can get publishers on board. Perhaps we need Foxit to open a digital book store?

via Gizmodo

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