SteveX Compiled

It’s funny watching the race to see who can have the first unboxing, activation and dissembly page online.

I’ve been having trouble joining Call of Duty 3 games with friends, and went digging to figure out why.  Turns out it was my router’s firmware. I have a WRT54G v2.0 router, and I’ve been running the HyperWRT firmware since back when I was fighting with trying to get good quality of service for voice […]

I read this little anti-Rails rant Just say no to Ruby on Rails and wanted to share my experience. I jumped into a couple of little projects using Rails and came away with two key findings. The first is that some of Rails is brilliant and really makes for rapid development.  I’m thinking in particular […]

Because I can take screenshots of things and post them, and because I think 742k/sec download to a laptop via WiFi is pretty good, I’m posting a screenshot. Cool, huh?

One thing that tends to happen in the software business is that the existing players define the market, and define for people the market potential. I guess that happens in any business. For example, I continue to believe that good home design software – stuff that lets you select and position furniture, and try out […]

I’ve been looking for a blogging tool on Windows for a long time that will let me simply paste in an image and post it. Most of them require you to save the image to disk, giving it a name, and then referencing that image in your blog posting. Windows Live Writer supports this, but […]

If you’re a Mac switcher and you’re looking for a tool like the awesome ProcMon or FileMon tool from SysInternals on the Mac, look no further than the built-in fs_usage tool. sudo fs_usage This will start dumping out filesystem activity by any process; man fs_usage to get details on how it works. It’s very cool […]

The DOJ is forcing Microsoft to allow replacing Vista’s built-in search with third party products.  Normally, I’d prefer the government stay out of these waters, but in this case, for purely technical reasons, I’m glad they’re forcing Microsoft to do this.  But I wish Microsoft were doing it right. For some reason, being the desktop […]

Microsoft is a tough competitor, but they’re not the unstoppable behemoth some people think they are.  Every now and then, they enter a market and simply fail. Microsoft’s strengths are recognizing upcoming products in markets where there isn’t already a strong competitor, and occasionally creating a new product where there isn’t already an established player.  […]

I installed Windows Home Server on an old box here at home yesterday, and I am impressed.  This is one well-executed product. It’s basically a Windows 2003 Server, somewhat stripped down, with a server piece that can take a pool of raw storage and turn it into SMB shares that are optionally replicated onto more […]