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Category: TechTalk

Contains posts about technology issues….

Nonsense

Gotta love those nonsense emails one receives trying to outsmart your junk mail filter …and comes with attachments the sender hopes you will open and set a virus, trojan horse or whatever loose on your PC. Here’s one that appeared in my inbox this morning…

shelve
Another tomato accurately eats a pig pen around the tape recorder. Another tomato accurately eats a pig pen around the tape recorder.
Another tomato accurately eats a pig pen around the tape recorder. The linguistic ball bearing satiates the paper napkin. When you see some tornado living with a squid, it means that a salad dressing ceases to exist. “The dope was coming in heavier and heavier waves, and now he just wished she would shut up and go away.

Good Things Come in Small Packages

USB Flash Drives

I bought a new 1GB USB Flash Drive yesterday for US $15.95.  I already had a 64MB Flash Drive that I got with my laptop in 2003.  I don’t recall exactly how much I paid for the 64MB drive, but I know it was a bit more than $15.95.  

So, I sat down and did some math.  Assuming the best case (i.e, that I paid $15.95 each for both drives), the cost per MB at the time I purchased them was:

  • 2003 – $0.250
  • 2006 – $0.016

On the surface, the $0.016 per MB may appear to be quite inexpensive. However, you can get a 160GB hard drive these days for $100.00 or less, which puts the cost per MB in the neighborhood of $0.0006.

So it appears that the cost of “no moving parts” flash memory has quite a ways to go before it becomes cost-competitive with rotating disk storage.  Or maybe it never will.  Wonder what the chances are that both flash and rotating disk storage will be rendered obsolete by some other yet to be discovered technology?

What do you think?

Joomla 1.5 Template Beta Testing

Joomla! 1.5 TemplateI’ve been building web sites of one kind or another since around 1995. These days I do it mostly for fun and very occasionally for profit.

For the past year or so, I have been using an Open Source Content Management System (CMS) called Joomla! (or J! in my shorthand notation) to manage my personal web site. The price is right ($0.00) and it has most of the functionality that I need either out-of-the-box or by adding one or more of the many available third-party extensions.

The Joomla! Project released a beta of their latest software (J! 1.5) on 12 October 2006.  J! 1.5’s outward appearance is not much different than its predecessor (J! 1.0.x), but its internals have undergone radical changes.  And one of those changes was in the way templates are developed.  

J!’s notion of templates is a bit different than the norm.  Most systems define templates as the underlying mechanism that produces the theme, or layout, seen on the user’s screen.  In J!’s case, the term template is used interchangeably to describe both the layout and the logic that produces it.

Now to the point…I’ve been doing some testing of the new J! templating approach and figured as long as I was going to keep some notes about it, I might as well share it with you.  OK…if you look at right side panel, under the Local Stuff menu, the you will see a link to a page called Joomla! 1.5 Template Stuff.  That page and the child pages listed below it contain some stuff I learned about building templates for J! 1.5.

Ray Noorda

Ray Noorda, the founder and first CEO of Novell passed away on 9 October 2006. His management acumen and leadership, along with the technical brilliance of Drew Major, Dale Niebaur, Kyle Powell, and Mark Hurst resulted in Novell Netware. Netware was a “Killer App” that had a profound effect on the rest of the IT industry. Netware dominated the LAN space in the late 1980’s and 1990’s.

Unfortunately, Novell was late to the game in realizing that TCP/IP was the wave of the future. They stayed too long with their IPX/SPX protocol, which is quite inefficient in environments other than high-speed LANs. As a result, the various Unix vendors, Microsoft and now Linux eventually overtook them as the major players in the network operatng system space.

But, in its time, Netware was the standard of excellence and a tribute to the “out of the box” thinking of Noorda, Major and others who developed a new technlogy that changed the way we work and think.

Meat Puppets

Guess one really does learn something new every day…or at least every few days.

There was an article in the Washington Post on Saturday, 7 October 2006 about various marketing techniques used on the Internet. The author used a term I had never encountered before…”Meat Puppet,” along with a number of other more common terms.

After reading the article, I thought about it for a while and decided that the marketing techniques the author talked about were not really unique to the Internet. They have been in use for years. Its just that the media used to deliver them has changed and the results are achieved much more rapidly than in the past.

What do you think?

The New Look

As you can see, I’ve once again changed the look of HR’s halfVAST Blog. And, at first glance, you will probably say “It’s even uglier than the previous layout.” Well think about it for a minute. Using design tools available today, even novices can produce web sites that have colorful graphics and fancy layouts. But not everyone can produce web sites that conform to standards and have a consistent loook and feel across different browsers, physical screen sizes and screen resolutions. Although this site’s outward appearance is quite ordinary, the underlying design is not.

And, if nothing else, hopefully this less than stunning layout encourages viewers to focus on the content rather than the “eye candy.”