Archive for February, 2006

Cisco VPN Mac Problem Workaround

Wednesday, February 15th, 2006

I’ve been getting this error recently using the Cisco VPN Client on the Mac: Error 51: IPC socket allocation failed with error 4h. This is most likely due to the Cisco Systems, Inc. VPN Service not being started. Please start this service and try again. Turns out that for me, turning Internet Sharing off makes […]

I’m Not Buying an Intel CPU

Monday, February 13th, 2006

Here’s the reason, in a nutshell.  Intel is paying Skype to disable features when the user is not using an Intel CPU. I’ve been looking at buying a new system, eyeing the prices of the new Dell XPS systems.  I’ve been doing more video processing lately, and my current system just takes too long.  I’ve […]

Engineering Graduates in China and India

Monday, February 13th, 2006

It’s been commonly accepted in North America that India and China are graduating more engineers than we are and that this is going to lead to a shift in the balance of innovation in the future. But a Salon article cites research that shows that the comparisons aren’t exactly fair: Typical articles have stated that […]

Long Tail Facelift

Friday, February 10th, 2006

I just gave the Long Tail site a bit of a facelift.. I’m getting better with CSS now, to the point where I can usually get the effect I want with CSS rather than using tables and old style font tags for everything. It’s still ugly, mind you, but that’s more because I’m a crummy […]

RSS Certification

Friday, February 10th, 2006

Every half hour, a bot at Bloglines (Bloglines/3.0-rho) requests my feed from it’s old location, gets told the new location via a 301 redirect, and probably doesn’t follow it. This means readers who subscribed to my old blog via Bloglines (all 21 of you) just aren’t seeing anything I write anymore.  (No big loss ) […]

Embraer E170

Friday, February 10th, 2006

I’m back home again.  The temperature change (from +20 celsius to -20 celsius) is far worse than the time change.  Brr. Last time I flew, the regional jet that I flew from Ottawa to Chicago was equipment code ER4, which is an Embraer ERJ-145.  The ERJ-145 doesn’t have much room overhead for carry-on material so you […]

Adobe Tech Summit

Thursday, February 9th, 2006

I’ve been in San Jose for an internal Adobe event this week. The event was the Adobe Tech Summit – it’s like a PDC for Adobe developers. I’ve never been to a developer conference for internal developers only, so this was a new thing for me. To me it was better than the PDC in […]

Google Scholar

Friday, February 3rd, 2006

Trying to find real information online these days is difficult.  Many topic searches lead you to advocacy groups and biased information, often disguised as serious, unbiased information. Google Scholar is a different kind of search than the main Google index.  It only searches research materials, not the whole Internet. I’ve found that when I’m you’re trying […]

Google Desktop doesn’t respect 301

Friday, February 3rd, 2006

Of all the people you’d expect to know how web protocols work, the Google Desktop client doesn’t respect a 301 permanent redirect. From the HTTP 1.1 Status Codes Spec: The requested resource has been assigned a new permanent URI and any future references to this resource SHOULD use one of the returned URIs. Clients with […]

Heap Fragmentation

Thursday, February 2nd, 2006

Heap fragmentation isn’t something I think much about but this war story by Rico Mariani is good reading: Unmanaged Heap Fragmentation.