| Life of a Server Admin | |
| By fiona on5/8/2008 5:53 AM | |
| I just had to wake up our webmaster. The site had been down for fifty minutes and that was enough downtime. He had said to call, what ever time of day it is, if the site was ever down, so even though I felt bad for waking him in the wee hours of the morning, I made the call. Sorry to anyone who tried to visit when it was down. I don’t know what Stuart has done but just minutes after speaking to him, it’s back up and working again. :/ The life of a server admin must be a drag at times. It is a 24 hour job. Huge hosting companies must have several employees on 24 hour call. Maybe they even have people who work a night shift in case of hardware failure? It probably doesn’t have quite the allure of a surgeon – no hot doctors or nurses, and it’s not exactly life or death - but someone’s got to do it. I probably watch too much Grey’s ... |  | |
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| Virus Logic | |
| By fiona on5/7/2008 6:33 AM | |
| A friend of mine was using USB flash drives to cart her homework to and from college. One day there was a problem. She wasn’t sure what was going on but she did the smart thing and stopped what she was doing to run her virus protection software, in her case, AVG. When it completed the scan she found that sure enough, it had found something – delete, quarantine or ignore it asked? She did what would seem to be the most logical thing to do – she chose delete. Problem is that it was a worm virus that attached itself to a dll file for Windows Explorer, so by choosing delete, she could no longer navigate through her files. Opening My Computer and then double clicking on one of her hard drives now just ... | | |
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| Tired | |
| By fiona on4/23/2008 7:31 AM | |
| Wow am I tired! I think the anti-biotics I’m taking for the ear infection are messing with me. The ear is almost clear but I feel like a slug – a tired slug, without the gooey coating. Could also be the long hours at the moment? The new tkArena office renovations are finished so we’re starting to move all of our kit into it. Mayhem rules in the current and future work spaces as we sort it all out. But we plan on shooting a vlog in front of the new blue wall tomorrow, or actually a bit of a pan and scan of the new workspace might be in order. The desks aren’t out there yet. It’s hard to know how to approach the move. If we unplug PCs to move then we don’t have them to work on but they’ve got to mo ... | | |
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| Boy did I stuff up! | |
| By fiona on4/22/2008 6:44 AM | |
| I started using gmail in January and ever since I’ve told anyone who will listen how superior it is to using a regular email application like Outlook. I have four email addresses routing to gmail, as well as my actual gmail account. Over the past week I have noticed that I wasn’t receiving as many emails as I usually do. And all of the email notifications I get from other sites about their new content seemed to be a little thin on the ground. Must be a slow week, I thought. It was just as well, I was battling a bad head cold last week that turned into an ear infection. I couldn’t really hold an intelligent thought long enough in my head last week to actually act on it, otherwise I might have realized there was a problem with my email sooner. This morning as I surveyed my inbox and looked over the items that were starred and waiting for responses, I surmised that I wasn’t receiving all my mail. It wasn’t just a slow week, there was a bloackage in the pipeline so ... | | |
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| Blog Hate | |
| By fiona on4/8/2008 11:31 PM | |
| OK, I haven’t blogged for a few weeks. Actually I think blogging is highly over-rated to be honest. That’s right, the truth finally comes out. Who the hell wants to read about my lame computing experiences, Jo Smith’s reading habits or Felicia Tries-a-lot’s diet?! Maybe journal style blogs should have stayed down the side of the bed in notebooks with cheap locks – private, and more importantly, not cluttering the Internet with precocious drivel driven by miss-diagnosed self importance! Or am I on the wrong track – maybe that’s not what blogs really are? Blogging was originally a web log, an online journal that, due to its technical nature, was easy for others to link to. These were all IT geeks. There evolved a community of bloggers who made each other’s blogs more widely read by their collection of reciprocal links. Now, bloggi ... | | |
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| Home/Work: The Ten Meter Difference | |
| By fiona on3/15/2008 4:32 AM | |
| It's either a drought or a flood. Or at least that's how my work-load can seem at times. Actually, there's never really a drought, just a manageable stream that allows you to sleep at night as you're carried along - no terribly sharp turns and certainly no rapids, until the dam gates rise and flood-waters gush in. I was almost getting into a rhythm of handling the generation of content for tkArena and everything that goes along with that, when suddenly one day one writer is no longer able to be part of the team and as soon as I'd let out a big sigh over that disappointment I have more writers and topics and products being hurled at me than I can handle! Actually, this is great. I just have to learn to shut off properly at the end of the day - to turn work off and quiet down my busy mind. I often find myself running into my study when I'm cooking dinner at night or making school lunches in the morning, so that I can hurriedly write down a reminder about something that needs doing f ... | | |
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| Internet Explorer 8 Beta Released - Microsoft Tries to Rule Web Services | |
| By fiona on3/7/2008 5:42 AM | |
| Microsoft has seen fit to publicly release a beta version of Internet Explorer 8 (IE8). Although the main purpose of the release is for web developers to be able to test their code and platforms on IE8, anyone can download a free copy. There are different downloads for different operating systems and all available Windows updates must be installed. Ironically, if you have the beta download of Vista Service Pack 1 installed, you can't install the beta of IE8. After the download and installation you are asked if you want to set IE8 up as a by default install, or whether you want ... | | |
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| What You Should Know About HDMI Cables | |
| By fiona on3/4/2008 11:24 PM | |
| Some time last year we came close to buying a HD TV. We currently have a rear projection TV that’s about five or six years old, but it’s 102cm, so it’s a good size. That was ultimately why we didn’t bother upgrading at the time. That and the fact that in Australia, there were only about two HD free to air channels available. Now there is at least four and many channels. But we did have a good look at the options and of course a friendly (read pushy) sales rep made his pitch to us. Having looked at the screens themselves he took us over to a wall of cables – HDMI cables with all sorts of variations or promises to be clearer or more colour rich. And they all came with pretty hefty price tags. Buyin ... | | |
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| PC Prototypes | |
| By fiona on2/26/2008 2:35 AM | |
| As the computer industry has grown, I’ve noticed two different approaches to PC designs. PCs are either being pimped as all-in-one solutions – PCs that can be used for word processing, gaming and multimedia OR PCs that have a specific purpose – a UMPC that is for on the road use and doesn’t replace a desktop and Home Theatre PCs that are never more than a metre from a TV. | |
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| Seasoned Internet | |
| By fiona on2/11/2008 10:51 PM | |
| There is a story circulating the web that five major Internet cables, mainly around the Middle East and South East Asia, have been cut since the beginning of the year, disrupting millions of users. Even in this report on PC Mechanic, the details are all contradictory in terms of how many people were effected and even whether this represents a curious mystery or just a common problem with under-water cables. I remember seeing a TV show once, I can't remember what it was called. It starred Eliza Dushku, who played Faith in the Buffy The Vampire Slayer series. Anyway, the scenario was that solar flairs from the sun had disrupted all electrical appliances in the United States and in the aftermath, the economy had collapsed and with it, social order. So all these rumors and conspiracies about these cut cables got me thinking about what i ... | | |
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