Alan Le

The sounds of failure

I cringed when I heard these common hard drive failure sounds from Hitachi support. I’ve heard the slow spindle sound, head damage 1, and head damage 2 sounds before.  Luckily the phaser noise, head damage 3, and head damage 4 sounds are totally foreign to me.  I think I'd died laughing if a hard drive made the head damage 3 sound.

Edit: These sounds are converted to mp3 and stored locally on the Vertigo server for your listening "pleasure" (thanks Jeff):
Head Damage 1
Head Damage 2
Head Damage 3
Head Damage 4
Head stuck to platter (Phaser Noise)
Slow Spindle Motor

original link: http://www.hitachigst.com/hddt/knowtree.nsf/cffe836ed7c12018862565b000530c74/4b1a62a50f405d0d86256756006e340c?OpenDocument

Blogging Tools

Let's face it, posting blog entries within the browser's web form sucks! You're stuck with limited formatting, little HTML control and no spellchecker. Using a full blown word processor like MS Word isn't much better as the copied text generated by Word is a mess. The good news is there are desktop blog editing software that makes writing clean blogs easier. Two of these blogging tools are w.bloggar and blogjet. Both of these tools are very easy to setup and support many of the blogging solutions out there. They have a built in spellchecker and supports multiple languages.

w.bloggar vs. Blogjet
Of the two, I prefer Blogjet. Blogjet has a simpler UI and separate the WYSIWYG editor from the HTML editor better. However I'm still on the fence about purchasing Blogjet due to it's $40 dollar price tag.

Setting up w.bloggar
Here's how to setup w.bloggar to work with Vertigoblogs which uses CommunityServer.

1. Select ".Text" as the blog tool.
2. For host, enter "vertigoblogs"
3. For the path, use "/blogs/metablog.ashx"
4. Enter your account info

Setting up blogjet
Similar to the above steps.

1. Select "CommunityServer" as the provider
2. host is "vertigoblogs
3. page is /blogs/MetaBlog.ashx

w.bloggar


Blogjet

del.icio.us

I have been using del.icio.us for awhile now and just love it. Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site; in other words, it is a service that allows you to save, keep track, and share bookmarks online.  Having the ability to save bookmarks online on del.icio.us is really useful if you use computers at multiple locations, in that wherever you go, you still have access to them.  On top of that once your bookmarks are online, you can share your bookmarks with others.  You can also view what other people have bookmarked, how many people have bookmarked a page, and search through all of the bookmarks on del.icio.us.

When saving bookmarks you can add metadata called "tags" to them.  These tags help describe more about the particular bookmark. For example, I added http://www.wikipedia.com as a bookmark to del.icio.us with the tags "encyclopedia", "research", and  "reference". After using del.icio.us for awhile I have many bookmarks with these tags.  Now when I click on my reference tag, I can find all the other bookmarks that has "reference" as a tag. I can also see all the webpages that other people using del.icio.us tagged with "reference" as well as just the popular webpages with that tag.  It's a great and fun way to discover new sites.

I find tagging really helpful in keeping track of my bookmarks.  No longer am I constrained by the categorization of folders used in the browser's favorites menu.  I am free to tag sites that I bookmark with the terms that I want.  I can quickly find the sites I bookmark using these tags as well. For example, I can easily look for all the links I saved about ASP.NET 2.0 conversion by going through the links in "asp.net+conversion" like so, http://del.icio.us/a7an/ASP.NET+conversion . There's also several ways to look at the tags. 

One neat new concept is called a "Tag cloud".  A tag cloud is a weighted list of the tags. More frequently used tags are depicted in a larger and bolder font. It makes finding tags you use often easily.

Some of the others cool things you can do is tag links for other people, sort tags into bundles, and syndicate tags through rss.  There are firefox extensions for del.icio.us as well and you can use firefox live bookmarks with del.icio.us. I'll talk more about that maybe in other post.

Del.icio.us recently went through some growing pains with its popularity.  It's slower than it was before, however don't let this stop you from trying it out and using it to store and tag your own bookmarks.

Setting the height for a Div

For soom reason, IE seems to ignore the height property when set from a CSS class. Take this html for example. It works perfectly in Firefox, yet is still a big
band when viewed with IE.

    <style>
    .thinbar
    {
    background-color: darkblue;
    height: 3px;
    }
    </style>
    <div class="thinbar"></div>


It turns out that the font size property takes precedence over height with IE 6.  To remedy this behavior, simply add a font-size: 1px; property and value.

Windows Vista Homepage Facelift

I saw on Neowin that the Windows Vista homepage had a new design.  It looks more slick than the other pages on the microsoft.com network and contains no flash.  The rounded corners and blue glossy and reflective surfaces matches well with the Vista OS.  I also noticed they've added a community section with links to notable MS bloggers and an rss feed for Vista news and updates. I really like the changes.  Go check it out.



update:  The new windows Sidebar looks so clean.
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/windowsvista/images/image019.jpg