Computers

I have this 8 year old desktop computer that has been an endangered species for some time. It crashes randomly, sometimes once a week, but occasionsally up 6 times in a single day. Sometimes when it crashes it just beeps and reboots, sometimes it's a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD).

So - really boring, and really, really unreliable. Who could like something like this?

Nonetheless, this computer and its web page now has a fan club. You can sign up for a name and password, and leave a comment. A valid e-mail address is needed to activate the account but hey, with Google mail, that is no problem.

Now that the personal website is up and running with the latest version of Drupal, it is with some excitement that I announce that I'm going to Chicago for DrupalCon, a four day conference for Drupal developers. How nerdy is that?

I was originally planning to go the the conference in London, England because it's closer, and London is always fun to visit (though I would never live there again). But there was a conflict. So I'm going to Chicago.

This is the first update to this site in over 10 months but it's a big one!

This web site is now managed by Drupal, a "content management system" (or CMS). It's a program that helped me organize a very messy garage. Pardon the mangled metaphor, but the old website had become a garage so filled up with junk that there was no room to park a car.

I had been fooling around with web technology for about a year and had built a couple of silly web pages just for fun. Once I had registered an official domain name, I needed a car to drive, so I built my own. The first edition looked something like this.

I recently discovered this web site called Stack Overflow, a Q/A (question/answer) site for programmers. It was mentioned in an online article from the NY Times titled Everyone Loves Google, Until It’s Too Big. I came upon it thru a Google Canada / News / Sci-Tech page. There is a certain irony in all of this.

At the time, I was having issues with certain web pages I had created; pages with sounds. Internet Explorer 7 had stopped working with these pages on the 2 computers we have. I didn't know when or why they stopped working, or if it was just our two systems or everybody's.

I Googled everywhere for an answer, including Usenet, but the best I came up with other were other vague queries similar to mine. No answers. So I gave up for awhile and read the news.

That's when I came across the NY Times article and tried out Stack Overflow. A "stack overflow" is a programmer term ( or error message) that is usually accompanied by a program or system crash. It's a great name for a programmer Q/A website.

Stack Overflow has at least 5 answers for each of the more than 100,000 questions posted on the site. It's a public site; all Q/A information posted is available to anyone free of charge. Anyone can post a question or provide an answer. There is also a voting system in place so questions and answers can be voted up or down.

Sure, you say, but that's all been done before, 100 times before. There is more, much more.

Two great discoveries in the last 3 weeks (at least for me).

The first was GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) which lets me create transparent GIF and PNG images (like this one). It does a lot of the same things that the uber-expensive Adobe PhotoShop does, but it's free.

The second discovery was a site called Stack Overflow, a Question/Answer website for programmers.

For those of you that use Microsoft Internet Exploder as a browser, you may have experienced pop-up errors on these pages for the last month or so. I believe the last Microsoft monthly update (Jan 2009) made some changes to the browser that rendered this page, and quite a few others on the internet, broken.

So I finally figured out that site navigation on this page really sucked if you were not using Firefox.

With this update most of the standard links here ave been converted to javascript links. These will open in a different window (or tab) when you click on them. The page tries to keep using that the same window (or tab) when you click on a different link. Too many windows and you can catch a cold.

It was a little over one week ago that I was finishing off the homepage renovations when my notebook computer completely locks up - not even a mouse or keyboard response. I have to press on the power button for about 10 seconds (this is like 10 minutes in internet time) before the laptop shuts down. I power up again.

MBR error appears in white letters on a black screen. I try again.

Disk read error comes up this time, in white on black. This is a bad sign,very bad.

Us old-timers call this the Black Screen of Death (BSOD). It is a sign that either the hard disk has failed or the operating system has been corrupted.

This is my 3^rd BSOD in five years. Dealing with BSOD's on a Microsoft Windows system is a royal PITA.

Today is the last blog on ABCP, or more precisely, the Facebook group called Canaccord and other ABCP clients. It's been fun.

The new JAB pages, our version of a blog site, now offers new navigation buttons Prev blog and Next blog.

And a checkbox selection lets you see an optional 3 month calender of blog dates.

My brother bought a new computer recently and I offered to help set it up. It came preinstalled with Windows Vista, which is the only Microsoft choice available in about 90% of computer stores in Calgary.

If you find yourself buying to a Windows Vista system, and you have files on your old system that you would like to see on the Vista system, use a memory stick, an MP3 player, or even a digital camera to transfer the files.

Only a masochist would do it with Microsoft networking. Please, bear with me.