The Musings of Colleen & Tim Dearborn - Tim - Technology

San Francisco or Chicago?

nospam@example.com (Tim Dearborn) — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 08:51:17 -0600

I have been at Apple's Worldwide Developer's Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco over the last week. I think the below graphic adequately describes how much I am looking forward to Chicago weather when I return.

Cylon Economic Woes

nospam@example.com (Tim Dearborn) — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 23:07:16 -0600

Automatically Post Recent Photos From Facebook to Your Blog

nospam@example.com (Tim Dearborn) — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 11:04:12 -0700

It seemed simple enough. I wanted recent photos that were posted on my Facebook account to auto-magically be posted my blog. However, due to either my ineptitude at searching or the non-inutitiveness of Facebook, I was unable to figure out how to do this after hours of searching on Google. Finally, I figured it out and was embarrassed by how simple the process was.

Go to your facebook Profile Wall.
Click on "Create a Profile Badge" (on the lower left)
Click "Edit this badge"
Modify to your heart's content and click save.
Copy the resulting HTML to whatever part of your website that you desire.

P.S. I also use TwitterFeed to automatically update my Twitter status when I update my Facebook status.

Code Purple! Never Buy an HP or Compaq Computer!

nospam@example.com (Tim Dearborn) — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 22:06:09 -0700

I am a Mac guy; that is no secret. But my hatred for Windows, or more specifically Compaq (bought out by HP) is growing by leaps and bounds.

Let me back up. A client brought me a desktop machine a couple of weeks ago with a dead hard drive. I ran a hard drive recovery tool, Spinrite, on it and was able to create the most agonizing grinding sounds I have ever heard a hard drive make. The drive was toast. No freezing this one. No problem. I replaced the hard drive. After ordering restore CD's (the original was scratched) and loading the 12 of them (Compaq evidentally never heard of a DVD), the fun began. I got a System configuration error, stating that I should call “Customer Care” with “Error Code Purple.”

Code Purple is the sign of a booby trap placed in HP and Compaq computers that will prevent it from booting if you reinstall the system after replacing any piece of hardware (in my case, a hard drive). I instant messaged HP support. They told me to bring it in to a service center. I thought I was supposed to be the service center! (Transcript included in the extended story).

I found the fix at http://www.billoblog.com. The short of it - if you have Win XP, empty the contents of C:\hp\bin\ConfigCheck\cfgchk.bat and just leave an empty file with that name. I used a Ubuntu Live CD to do so, but could have just as easily transferred the drive to another working Windows (oxymoron) machine, and edited the file there.

The moral of the story: don't buy a Compaq or HP machine unless you like booby traps!

Continue reading "Code Purple! Never Buy an HP or Compaq Computer!"

Facebook is so 2006

nospam@example.com (Tim Dearborn) — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 22:42:26 -0700

Alright, I admit it. I have been sucked into Facebook. I have known about it for years (or at least 4 - it was started in 2004). However, ironically, it was my wife that pulled me into it. She started using it about 2 months ago. That and seeing that Twitter didn't seem to be going anywhere, I decided to create an account on Facebook.

For the uninitiated, Facebook is a social networking website where you can create a network of friends, amongst whom you can post short status updates, photos, notes, and generally stay in touch with each other, all on one messy website "wall".

After a week, I really enjoy it. I have re-met up with friends that I haven't seen in 10-20 years. If you haven't tried it, I encourage you to give it a run. And if you do, be sure to add me as your "friend".

Throwing Tomatoes at Your Router

nospam@example.com (Tim Dearborn) — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 21:58:18 -0700

Most of us have a wireless router at home, usually stuck in some corner or by the sole remaining desktop in the house. Most of us are very content to let the thing sit and ignore it, as long as it is working. But some geeks end up loading custom firmware on it. As mentioned in a previous article, I loaded dd-wrt on my router a few years ago.

Wanting a few more features, I decided this weekend to change to Tomato firmware for my router. So far, I have been very pleased. The upgrade went smoothly. Many settings where transferred over from dd-wrt. Read the docs about the password before you upgrade though! A few of the advantages that Tomato has over dd-wrt follow:

Bandwidth stats and graphs that will save to a SMB share, so they are kept even through a power loss (dd-wrt had bandwidth stats, but they were not saved)
Dynamic DNS will update 2 servers (dd-wrt only did 1)
Dynamic DNS will update OpenDNS (I didn't see this on dd-wrt)
Ability to write and save scripts to the router firmware
Very clean, simple interface
Hopefully, stability -- time will tell (dd-wrt would occasionally lock up on me)

All I need now is the Ketchup firmware!

More New Websites

nospam@example.com (Tim Dearborn) — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 23:24:41 -0700

Our church website was just given a face lift a couple of days ago. I wish I could take credit for the design, as it turned out quite nicely in my opinion. The only part I was responsible for was the sermons portion of the site.

Colleen has been working very hard on creating a new website for the library, and it also is turning out very nicely.

New Website Finished

nospam@example.com (Tim Dearborn) — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 21:06:42 -0600

I recently updated our school district website. Our former one, was getting a little long in the tooth, having been designed about 6 years ago. The new design is cleaner and less cluttered.

So far, our district website has 5.4 million hits since its inception in 2002.

New Blog Features - Flickr and Twitter

nospam@example.com (Tim Dearborn) — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 15:27:40 -0600

I just added a few new features to our blog. Look to the right, and you'll see the most recent photos posted to our Flickr photostream. Further down are the last few posts I made to Twitter. With my first mashup, I think I finally made it into the 21st century.

San Francisco and WWDC

nospam@example.com (Tim Dearborn) — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 11:47:14 -0600

I am currently at an Apple week long conference called WWDC. The weekend started off with some sightseeing of the city and surrounding areas, including a trip to Alcatraz. Then the week began with standing in line for 3 hours to get into the main keynote with Steve Jobs. The rest of the week as been made up of technical sessions with 5400 other like-minded geeks (95% male). We will run down to Cupertino, the Apple Mecca of the world, on Friday to visit the company store and then fly out in the evening.

Do You Twitter?

nospam@example.com (Tim Dearborn) — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 10:52:02 -0700

Twit-what? I just started using twitter a few days ago. You post (through web or phone) a brief (140 character max) message periodically throughout the day stating what you are doing, asking a question, or providing an interesting resource. People who choose to follow you will receive these messages via web, instant messaging, or their phone through a text message. You can control who follows you if you desire. Take one-way instant messaging, micro blogging, phone texting, group chat and put them all in a blender and you will of kind of get the idea.

Must people ask, "Why would I want to do that??" You just have to try it for a while in order to get your answer. There is a certain aspect of community through twitter that I find refreshing in this fragmented world. If you want to get a sample of what twitter is like, check out my twitter feed. Or for the more brave at heart, send a text message with your phone to 40404 with the simple message "follow tdearborn" (without the quotes). So I ask you again, "Do You Twitter?"

Update: Check out a 2 minute video explaining Twitter in Plain English.

New Israel Baptist Church

nospam@example.com (Tim Dearborn) — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 22:54:52 -0600

A close friend of mine, *Pastor Gerald Smith, moved about 5 months ago to Richmond, Virgina to start a church. I finally got around to getting a website up for him. None of the pages work yet, but I like the way the home page came out. Gerald's wife, Dorean, designed the page in Word, and then I coded it in HTML, as I dislike the horrendous HTML that Word produces. Church websites are close to my heart, as it was through a website that we found our current church.

*Gerald was my roommate for 6 years, as well as my coworker in ministry. He was the best man in our first wedding ceremony and officiated our second wedding ceremony.

Protein Anyone?

nospam@example.com (Tim Dearborn) — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 23:06:00 -0600

During a majority of the hours of the day, our computers sit or sleep quietly, not exercising their massive computing power to anywhere near their capacity. Yesterday I decided to change that for a couple of my machines for the betterment of humanity. Stanford University has a program called Folding@Home where you can put your unused computer cycles to good use by folding proteins for the sake of research.

I have Folding@Home running on a couple of machines. One, a five-year-old PowerMac, is on a pace to complete its first work unit in about 9 days. My MacBook has a little bit bigger appetite for proteins; its first work unit should be done in about 1.5 days.

Feel free to join in the fun if you so desire. I am part of the GotZ team (#83252 on Folding@Home). You can view our progress here.

Sermons Go High-Tech (Or At Least High-Availability)

nospam@example.com (Tim Dearborn) — Sun, 27 May 2007 17:12:00 -0600

newlifesermons.com is now up and functioning. It is a repository of sermons from our multi-location church, New Life. Now people can listen to messages and sermons online, or (my personal favorite) they can subscribe to a sermon feed via iTunes and automatically receive each message as it is made available (great for long commutes when you sync it to your iPod).

Only a few of New Life's several locations currently have content; there will more to come. I am also working on getting the feeds onto the podcast section of the iTunes Store so they can be found when searching there.

The hardest part of the site was getting IE to play nice with Flash so the "Play" button would work. That part took me about 8 hours, reaffirming a previous post, I hate Windows. I used Audacity to encode the messages (64-bit mono) and a PHPNuke for the site. I added a Podcasting module, but it was buggy and I ended up heavily modifying it to get it to function properly.

My Love/Hate Relationship with Comcast

nospam@example.com (Tim Dearborn) — Sat, 26 May 2007 00:28:59 -0600

A few weeks ago, I upgraded the speed of our internet service, which we have with Comcast. Almost instantly our Internet speed increased to almost 10 Mb down (only 8 was advertised). The main reason I increased it was for increased upload speeds, which doubled to a little above 700 kbs -- not blazing but better than what I had before. Below are the results that I got from a Speed Test Site. What kind of speeds do you get at home?

Later in the day, I had a problem where I could not connect to my brother-in-law. We both have Comcast and live about 40 miles away. I could connect to every other website, and I could connect to my brother if I went from my house through another computer elsewhere to his site. This was obviously a Comcast network issue. (BTW, my neighbor who also has Comcast also could not connect to him). Trace-routes indicated that Comcast was dropping the packets 3 hops out. I spent an hour on the phone going through two levels of support, trying to convince Comcast that they had a problem. They told me it was my computer (even though I was using three different computers runs three different operating systems). They eventually resorting to insinuating that I was doing something nefarious (yeah - like trying to view my brother's webpage). Comcast mysteriously fixed the problem 2 days later with no explanation and they haven't had problems since.