Blogs

Please shop changing your hours every 4 weeks. This is annoying. That is all.

It turns out that Adobe AIR's embedded version in Windows is not the same as the version embedded in OSX's AIR. Observe (click on a thumbnail to enlarge): p=. "!/sites/nickvahalik.com/files/AIR%201.1%20Mac%20OSX_thumb.png!":/sites/nickvahalik.com/files/AIR%201.1%20Mac%20OSX.png p=. The pristine, Mac OSX version[1]. p=. "!/sites/nickvahalik.com/files/AIR%201.1%20Windows_thumb.png!":/sites/nickvahalik.com/files/AIR%201.1%20Windows.png p=. The no-so-correctly rendered Windows version. The biggest noticeable difference is the number "4" in the upper-left hand corner.

On a project for a client, recently, a vendor he was working with dropped the ball, and in a last minute call, he asked me for my "solution" to a problem we had discussed before. I spent a few hours researching the _how_ of solving the problem, VB.Net perhaps (bluh), maybe some snappy C#. I went through the different languages, looking for a solution. Essentially, he wanted to display a full screen webpage on a couple of multi-monitor systems.

So, I’ve been reading on the internet about people who have been modding their iPhone headphones with new earbuds. There is even a company who will do it for you. Where is the fun in that? There is none. Real men take care of it themselves. They get out their soldering irons, wire cutters, and drills and get down to business.

I didn’t take pictures during the bulk of the process. To be honest, it was very frustrating and, in hindsight, a different set of headphones would have been much easier. Explanation to follow.

Why can't people just make the bodies of e-mails the content? Why do they insist on putting an entirely new message in a Word Doc, attaching that to a message, and then sending that message? *Put it in the freaking body of the e-mail!* It's not that hard. I don't want to have to click to open the document and then have to delete the document. It's not like there are graphics or pretty colors. Just names, and dates. *Put it in the e-mail body, where it belongs!*

I've been really busy the past week or so. Leaving on a cruise to Cozumel on Saturday. Woohoo! So everything I've been doing is getting ready for this. I've still got to pack tomorrow and do a bunch of errands. So I finally redid my office since my roommate moved out and I've been using it more. The old was was... well... see for yourself. p=. !sites/nickvahalik.com/files/old_office1.jpg! The desk was there when I moved in. It was falling apart. The black drawers I've had since my college days.

When I started "Netoteric":http://netoteric.com/, I wanted to do everything "my way" (aka better than everyone else). As altruistic as it sounds, it's much tougher to do in practice. One of the big things I've had an issue with is handling backups. For over a year, we've been doing disk-to-disk backups inside our servers. This is great for restoring an accidently deleted file, but if something else crazy happens, we're SOL. Enter "ExaVault":http://www.exavault.com/. I found ExaVault while looking for rsync providers online.

PC Tool's "Secure Password Generator":http://www.pctools.com/guides/password/ is a nifty little online password generator. It lets you generate passwords that: * Are between 4 - 64 characters long. * Have letters, mixed case letters, numbers, and punctation (off by default) * No similar letters It can generate up to 50 passwords at once and can generate phonetic output so you can read it out to someone over the phone. Some uses i've found: generating database, service account, and forgettable passwords (like ssh accounts that use keyed authentication). Pretty nifty.

!>sites/nickvahalik.com/files/Things.png! I'm horrible on keeping track of stuff. I've lost more crap and misplaced more stuff than anyone I know. For a while, "pulling a Nick" involved having something in your hand one minute, and forgetting where you put it the next. Ladies and gentlemen, yours truly is a changed man. Enter "Things from Cultured Code":http://www.culturedcode.com/things/. Things is, by far, the most used program on my Mac aside from "Textmate":http://macromates.com/.

As a side note, the new, druplified "Netoteric site is now live":http://netoteric.com/. The intention was to do a 1-to-1 conversion of the old site (which was just hand-coded... yes I know, tsk tsk). The result was almost a complete pixel-for-pixel duplication of the site. There were some changes made on the newer site: links removed, text changed... but other than that, it's almost a perfect replication. Just in case you were wondering, "Netoteric":http://netoteric.com/ is a company I started in January 2007 that builds and hosts websites and software. Now you know...