technology

Found: One brilliant article about being a programmer
Source: MeFi

When I got my new laptop a few weeks ago I thought it was pretty cool that it came with Office 2007. The nifty new toolbars and embedded wavey swooshes are slick. I don’t really mind that by default Word and Excel assume you want to save files with a .docx or .xlsx extension. (That’s fine with me; makes it easier to remember to not save something as an ‘07 file if I need to share it with others that are still using Office XP or 2003.)

What I cannot handle is the fact that Outlook 2007 is using over 130 MB of RAM. 130 MB?! I wouldn’t mind that much, since apparently it’s supposed to play nicely with Windows and just use whatever RAM is available. But even using as much memory as it is it’s still slow slow slow. And this is even after I disabled iTunes 7.3’s ridiculous Outlook add-in. 130 MB?! Are they crazy?

I was glad to see ColdFusion make it on this list of the top 10 dead (or dying) computer skills. It’s a ridiculous “language” that I never bothered to learn and used to tell people was craptastic and worthless when it was brand new and everybody and their mother was looking for people that knew it. I clearly remember being told that I just had to learn ColdFusion or I was going to miss the next web wave. I scoffed, learned ASP and PHP, and think I made the right call.

I was surprised to see C on the list, though. I guess I can understand that there aren’t many people actually programming in the original C, but I’d say that the basic principles of the language — including C++ and all of its children — are still pretty important.

Yesterday I became the proud new owner of a Dell D630 Latitude. Today I began the tiresome task of transferring my life from my old D610 to it. The old laptop was Anchor. (Previous computers were Budweiser, Guinness, and Corona.) The new laptop is Maui. Here is a list of the software that Dell decided to install on my new machine that I either immediately disabled or deleted:

• Google Desktop
• Google Toolbar
• AOL Setup
• Intellisonic Speech Enhancement
• the “language” taskbar toolbar
• Dell’s Wireless WLAN Card monitor

Let’s say you want to create a smart playlist in iTunes that will contain the 25 highest-rated Beatles or Bob Dylan songs that you haven’t heard in a while. That would be pretty cool, right? It’s not that simple, but it can be done. I’ll show you how.

The main roadblock you’re facing is that iTunes only gives you two ways of restricting / selecting songs. You can build a smart playlist based on songs that meet all of your criteria or one based on songs that meet any of your criteria. This any / all option really puts you in a corner. First I’ll explain why, and then I’ll show you how to fix it.

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Awesome LifeHacker DOS trick: Give a folder its very own drive letter.

My mom just sent me the following text message:

Attempts to contact my mom via her cell phone have failed. Unfortunately even if I could get her on the phone, the only advice I could give her — after over a decade of working in the computer industry — is to maybe try to shake the liquid out and blow-dry it.

When the revolution comes and the computers try to squash humanity out of existence, hopefully some of us will remember their Achilles’ heel: ill-placed cups of coffee.

A friend of mine sent me a link to an iTunes song he thought I’d like. Of course I was unable to open it because it came delivered as an attachment. (Cue scary music.) Microsoft thinks that I can’t possibly be trusted to not open some flesh-eating virus, so by default Outlook blocks everything. It’s usually one of the first things I “fix” when I get a new computer. Here’s how to do it …

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Zeldman does a spectacular job explaining why I hate when people use Word as their email editor.

A couple of weeks ago I picked up a great linen shirt at Old Navy. It’s so great, in fact, that today I thought I’d go to the website and grab a couple more of them. Alas, I cannot. Their website is broken. This is a multi-million dollar company and they’re currently not able to sell anything online because of a database error. Bummer for them.

I bought a CD today. It was a little bit strange. I can’t remember the last time I bought an actual compact disc. I’m sure this isn’t the first one I’ve bought since I moved to LA seven years ago, but I know that since I got my iPod the number of CDs I’ve purchased is in the single digits. That is somewhat incredible.

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From the Department of Inexplicable Corporate Decisions: Pocket PC integration discontinued with Microsoft Money 2007.

Looking for a way to clear some of your computer’s clutter? Getting rid of empty directories is a good start. I was looking for a file and realized that my machine was spending a long time searching through folders that I knew had nothing in them. A quick Google search returned a handy DOS trick to zap them all. It took me about one minute to delete just over two thousand empty folders. There’s nothing like a little command-line scripting to get something done.

We’re running a Belkin Wireless G router in my office. I had to rummage in my garage for a few old wireless USB dongles, but it’s much nicer than having to string CAT-5 all over the place. (I hate cables.) Some of us were suffering deadly latency and frequently-dropped connections, which was annoying as hell. I flashed the firmware and tweaked every setting on the thing, but the problem persisted.

Then I had lunch with a friend this week and he suggested that I switch the router from Channel 11, which I had thought was the best, to Channel 6, which is actually the strongest. Blam-o! Now we all have a much stronger signal and no drops. Brilliant.