Rarb's Tech

Might come in handy someday: Workaround Discovered For "Clean Install" With Vista Upgrade DVDs

Forbes is very disappointed with Vista.

The Gulf Coast's wind is being captured using old oil platforms. This is good, very good.

I stumbled across Microsoft Photo Info (that was just released last week) available as a free download on Microsoft's site. It's very handy if you (like me) have thousands of digital photos to keep track of and want to edit photo meta information, such as location, author and other comments. Windows XP Explorer has had limited functionality to do this for years but this little tool enhances it. It stores the meta-data in the image file (typically a JPEG file), to well-defined standards (as I prefer), rather than in some proprietary database.
BTW: Microsoft have both a basic photography and a professional photography site - I've found them both handy over the years.
Another tool I've been increasingly using over the last few months is SyncToy, a specialised PowerToy for synchronising files between machines. I use it mainly to backup many of our documents between our home machines and copying new photos from our camera flash cards. I also used it, with limited success (due to its restrictions managing very long path names) when synchronising some servers at work. It's useful because it not only determines all the differences between 2 directory structures but it also assembles a list of operations to perform to resynchronise those structures. The list can be previewed and edited before it is actually run.

The title says it all really: water cool your computer(s) with a swimming pool. Of course, reading the comments suggest that this may be a bad idea.

This is excellent news.

I couldn't resist posting some facts on MSN's coverage of the wonderful Tesla.

Ditch the plasmas & LCDs, Laser TV is just around the corner.

Dallas Business Journal ran an article last year about Mag-Wind a Plano, Texas, USA company that builds a turbine for individual homes. Efficiency is increased by taking advantage of "Roof Effect". There are some doubters though.





I doubt though, that Mag-Wind is responsible for Texas overtaking California as the top wind state; there are some industrial-sized sites particularly the largest in the world, around Abilene.


Meanwhile, the defense department is putting a spanner in the wind-farm works.

From Wired News The Straight Dope on the IPod's Birth.

Took a look to see how the JBoss App Server 5 is coming along and wondered why my company doesn't use Atlassian's excellent JIRA for project issue tracking. Atlassian also produces the reasonably well known Conflunce wiki.

Dr. Dobb's October 16 article: App Server Powers Race To Embed Java EE 5 Support indicates that IBM is behind.

Saw this article on CNET News.com: Home wind turbines turn fashionable in Britain and it made me proud to be English - this is a very positive move. Then noticed that CNET News has lots of "Green Tech". That took me to a video of The Tesla Car that I've been excited about for a few months now. And yes, it will sell. Meanwhile, here's a discussion on the merits of plugging in that hybrid. And finally, Google's going solar.

From FARK.com: Some of the strangeness found on Google Earth. Here's the biggest insect ever, explained here.

Had to deal with some spam in my Verizon inbox this evening (from domain vms045.mailsrvcs.net). That got me reading Rick's spam digest where he explains that the empty eMails I'm receiving are effectively the result of "ping" requests to determine if our cherished eMail addresses exist. So if there are empty eMails in your inbox, tough, you've already been pinged and your address is now known to the spammers. Once they know you exist you might get eMails with strange wording; that's to defeat the Bayesian filters which are improving.

What a lovely thought: Best Buy to end rebates, reports earnings

Happened to see an article on ServerWatch about Sun's new OpenSolaris initiative that is currently hosting a teaser application DTrace (Dynamic Tracing).
That led me to a brief BusinessWeek article in turn referenced Jonathan Schwartz's (Sun's President & COO) blog.
Currently Jonathan is asking Sam Palmisano of IBM to join him in breaking down the barriers of product/platform support by requesting IBM support Solaris 10 with WebSphere, DB2, Tivoli, Rational and MQSeries products rather than locking customers into IBM's proprietary Power5 platform - which, of course, sounds a little ominous.
While I was there I took a peek at Adam Bosworth’s blog article on simplicity and noticed that Don Ferguson had also commented.

281336 - How to determine which program uses or blocks specific transmission control protocol ports in Windows

This might be handy for Web Site creation.

A few pictures from the Hubble

In the beginning ...