The local technology alliance (TalTech) is proudly presenting its third TechExpo tomorrow. I thought I’d go and see if there was anything interesting. So I took a look at the website and had to laugh, although it’s rather sad, not funny actually.
Here are some of the bloopers I found on their websites. Now, keep in mind, this is an organization “focused on uniting our many technology-oriented corporations, small businesses, entrepreneurs, service providers, investors, civic lenders, individuals and students from all sectors of our community.” Mission and History.
I hope they didn't get the award for best HTML.
Then, there’s this one:
Not to mention creating run-on sentences.
Or:
I think I’ll suggest they hire an IT undergraduate from the School of Library and Information Studies at FSU to help them figure out this new-fangled web-thing.
Working Draft – Please comment.
The Center for Open Source Software Documentation is a not-for profit volunteer organization whose goal is to provide a comprehensive collection of verified, understandable, localized documentation for software available under any one of the open source licenses.
Documentation may also be referred to as a manual for readability purposes.
It is anticipated that all documentation in the collection will be covered by one of the GPL or similar licenses
The main attributes of the documentation contained in this evolving library are:
- Verified — All documentation will be passed through a rigorous process of verification. Every installation step, file name, file location, command, etc. will be checked for accuracy.
- Understandable — Each section of all documentation will organized in parts with short parts written for experts and longer parts written for novices.
- Localized — Familiar in style and usage to readers whose native language is the language of the document.
Manuals will be in one of four stages. The stage a document is in will be prominently indicated.
- Unreviewed — documentation that has not proceeded through the approval process
- In process — documentation that has undergone some review and rewriting but is not considered ready for final approval
- Submitted — documentation that is being considered for final approval
- Approved — documentation that has passed the approval process.
The entire process taking a manual from unreviewed to approved status will be an open process encouraging community participation. The steps in the process are:
The manual may be added to the collection by its author or anyone else providing the rights of all parties involved are respected.
The In Process Stage
- A team of one or more editors will be formed to oversee the transition of the manual to approved status.
- The editors will, either by themselves or with the assistance of others, check all facts and correct any errors found in the document
- The editors will also adjust the style and usage to conform with the goals of the Center.
- Translators may, at the end of this stage, be employed to translate the manual to other languages.
The Submitted Stage:
- The editors will post a notice that the manual is ready for approval.
- During the review period comments and suggestions for changes will be solicited.
- At the end of the review period the editors will decide whether any of the suggestions are worthy of incorporation into the documentation. If this is the case, then the documentation will return to the “In Process” stage.
Approval
- When the editors decide that there have been no significant suggestions the document will be considered approved.
- The approved documentation will be posted in the approved collection.
- The maintainers of the software will be encouraged to notify the editors of changes to the software so that the documentation can be kept up-to-date.
Please contact your system administrator.
I’ve been collecting the increasingly easy-to-find examples of American ignorance for a while now, so I think it’s time to start displaying them. Most of these come from two primary sources, Florida and airports. You’ll see what I mean as the collection grows.
I think I’ll start out with one of the most common indicators that something is terribly wrong with the way we’re educating our workforce. You, no doubt, have yourself seen examples of the kind illustrated here. They seem to plague airports more than anywhere else, except the desktops of the hapless “knowledge workers” who must sit in fear everyday of a similar event occurring on their “information appliance.”
I’m glad the auto industry doesn’t hire the same computer “science” graduates to program the computers that run our cars. Can you imagine what your daily commute would be like if you never knew whether you speedometer might suddenly (and sometimes did) display the message “Please contact your system administrator”?
Some spam is just put out there to make us laugh! Here’s an example that this blog attracted.
“Good Site. Nice work.
I am from Brunei and now teach English, give true I wrote the following sentence: “When you travel to a undercarriage, you are minimized to whatever skills are criticised in your balance, casino royale.”
Regards 
Kadir.
This is a little Mac OS X Automator workflow that I created to help me consolidate files in two folders that may contain some duplicates. What it does is check the destination folder for the existance of each file in the source folder (and its sub-folders) copying any to the destination folder that aren’t already there.
The big trick was figuring out how to pass filenames containing one or more spaces to a bash script within Automator. The trick, it turns out, is ridiculously simple. Just put the built-in argument representing the filenames passed into the script ($@) in double quotes!
You can get the workflow as an application, and as a workflow and a copy of the GNU General Public License in a zipped archive here.
If you’re into astronomy at all, even just a little, If you’ve ever looked at the night sky for more than ten seconds, if you’ve ever been awake after dark, then you’re going to want to get Distant Suns for the iPhone. What? You have no iPhone? Well, get one because once you have it, you’ll be able to run Distant Suns.
This amazing program was first written by Mike Smithwick in the mid 1980′s. that’s right, way back in ’85 or ’87 (depending on whether you read his website or the App Store blurb.) At any rate, it’s been around a while but it still shines (sorry.)
In a nutshell it is an interactive guide to the night sky, showing stars, planets, constellations, deep sky objects, even a choice of foreground landscapes to present a more realistic horizon. Each item in its huge database has information about what it it, where it is, and in many cases (I couldn’t check more than a few) photos. The photo of Saturn, for instance, is just beautiful.
The user interface is a joy to use allowing you to view two preset magnifications plus stretch or shrink the view with the two-finger squeeze gesture. You can turn on all sorts of information like constellation names, outlines, star names, a grid, etc. and then toggle them all with one simple touch of a control. This makes it wonderfully easy to switch between a view of what the sky actually looks like and the sky with the information you’re interested in superimposed on it. You can view the sky from any place on earth at any time in the past or future. It can use the iPhone’s location awareness to automatically adjust the view to your current location. Of course it has a night vision mode in which all of the text pages are in red on black. The list of features goes on and on.
Don’t let the rather “high” price tag put you off. It’s definitely worth every penny of its $5.99 App Store price.
So I got this Sierra U508 wireless broadband card so that I can have internet wherever I go, even in the car on the highway. It has a self-install feature that runs automatically when it is plugged into a Windows or Mac PC that doesn’t already have the software on it. Well, that’s nice but what really attracted me to the Sierra modem was that it has a micro SD slot enabling it to be used (with the addition of a micro SD card) as a USB flash drive. It struck me that this would be perfect platform for a self-contained Linux-based forensic OS. Theoretically it should boot up on any x86 machine including my beloved Macs. I won’t reveal how many hours I spent trying to get Linux installed on the 4GB memory, but I haven’t succeeded yet. You’d think that the USB Install option in Ubuntu 8.10 would have made this task a simple one. Well after much trying both the USB install and manual installations with most if not all of the variations on partition sizes, formats, location, and flags I was getting nowhere. I was using two systems at one point and I noticed that when I plugged the U508 into the system that didn’t have the Sprint Smartview software installed, an icon of a CD appeared in my sidebar. This was in addition to the icons of the two partitions I had created on the microSD card, which I expected to be there. This got me to thinking that all of the I/O errors the gparted and the Linux installer encountered were most likely due to some sneaky way the modem’s memory was configured. It apparently has a hidden partition (or two) for the installers. It, being a read-only device, can’t be modified, and that means its parttion table can’t be either. Or something along those lines. At any rate, I satisfied myself by installing Ubuntu 8.10 on a 1GB flash drive only to find out that apparently Macs can’t boot from USB devices. If I’m wrong, and there’s some evidence on the web that I am, I’ll be happy to be enlightened.
There is a lot of helpful (and some not so helpful) information on the web now about how to configure an Intel Mac to boot up into Mac OS X, or Linux, or Windows. (Don’t ask me why, if you don’t know, then you’re one of the lucky ones!)
One problem that has plagued many people who have tried this, and for which I could not find a solution, is that when everything is done, Windows won’t boot past it’s initial logo screen. It gets there and after few seconds the system restarts. After a long fruitless search, which did yield some interesting clues, I took a look at the files on the Windows partition as it was mounted in Mac OS X. Now, I’m no Windows guru, but I do have a knack for understanding technologyies… if you can call Windows a technology. At any rate, the file “boot.ini” caught my eye. It looks something like this:
boot loader] timeout=30 default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINDOWS [operating systems] multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
So I opened it up in TextEdit and lo and noticed the lines that specify the partitions that the boot loader and operating system(s) are on. Well, I knew that Windows was on disk0s4 or in layman’s term, the main hard drive, fourth partition. I changed “multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINDOWS=”Microsoft Windows XP…” to “”multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(4)\WINDOWS=”Microsoft Windows XP…” but found that the Windows volume (or partition) was mounted read only. No problem, I just rebooted into Linux and mounted the Windows partition as read/write. The nano editor made quick work of making my change and lo and behold, Windows could boot. (By the way, I did make a backup of boot.ini and I used the -w option of nano to prevent it from adding a linebreak in an extra long lines (like the one I edited) that might be in the file.)
So, there you have it. A triple boot Mac Pro running Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), Ubuntu 8.0.4 and Windows XP SP3. Oh happy day!
