It’s not every day that a person has friends generous enough to give them a nice piece of electronic gear. Our worship leader, Stewart, just got an iPhone a couple weeks ago to replace his old Blackberry Pearl Flip 8220, and though I offered to buy his old phone from him, he decided to bless me with a gift and just give it to me. Needless to say, I was very excited and grateful! I couldn’t wait to get it home and play around with it. My old Samsung slider phone has been giving me so many problems I was about to toss it out the window, and I was glad to have a good replacement, plus the productivity tools that come with a Blackberry were a big bonus. Since Stewart had wiped the phone before I picked it up, it had to be set up again. And the battery was pretty low so I let it sit & charge for a couple hours before messing with it.
At the place I work, new computers are few and far between, especially now with the economy like it is. Our CEO is very frugal, and I appreciate it more now that I’ve seen him steer the company through this crisis that’s affecting our country, and to an extent the whole globe. Continue reading »
Being a geek, I never know what’s going to happen in the course of a day, or what I’ll be asked to fix. At work a couple weeks ago, someone noticed that our file server was down. This was unusual, because the machine runs Debian Linux, is on a UPS, or Uninterruptible Power Supply, and has made it through several power spikes and brownouts just fine. On further inspection, we discovered that the power supply had failed. Continue reading »
Welcome to WordPress!
I’ve finally done it. Like pretty much everybody else who blogs, I converted my site to WordPress. This may not matter much to anyone but me, but the decision was not easy to make. The previous site was created using Joomla, which is an incredible content management system. I didn’t realize it when I was initially designing the site, but what I really needed was a blog-type website. I got confused with what I wanted and tried to create one with all kinds of menus and stuff and while it looked pretty cool (at least to me) it was actually a little much. I found the things I was writing could be broken down into four different categories, and I didn’t need all the sub-menus. Not to mention that actually creating a post or article was a little more difficult than I realized at first. Doing one post every week isn’t a big deal, but creating four or five a day and figuring out where to put them was getting to be more than I wanted to deal with. I didn’t even want to write anymore. The tool was getting in the way of creating, and it wasn’t right. WordPress and Joomla are tools used for creating websites that have a specific purpose. Joomla would be perfect if I had a photo gallery, some videos, a download center, and the like. WordPress is designed to let you just write and concentrate on that. It’s really pretty simple to use once you get it set up. And in reality, once I got used to the differences between how WordPress and Joomla do things, and figured out how to make it do what I wanted, it was a no-brainer. It really was easier than I thought. Will I use Joomla for other sites in the future? Absolutely. It’s an incredible piece of software that can do just about anything. At this point, however, blogging isn’t it’s strong suit. I understand that the next release (1.6) will have several improved features and should make blogging easier, along with more granular user account controls. Until then, I’ll keep using WordPress. It suits my needs very well, and I’ve been very happy with the result. I hope you are too.
Dying daemons
If you’ve read my “About” page, no doubt you’ve seen that I’m a devoted Christian. So you’re probably wondering what this “daemon” stuff is all about. In UNIX/Linux parlance, a “daemon” is a process that runs in the background, waiting for some event to happen so it can act on it. The Windows equivalent is called a service. We’re not talking about the minions of Beelzebub or little red guys running around with pitchforks. More specifically, the daemon is the mascot of my operating system of choice for servers, which is FreeBSD. Now on to the topic of this blog post. Continue reading »
Simple machines
This weekend, we had a birthday party for my father-in-law. After lunch, while we were sitting around talking, my wife’s brother-in-law asked me a question, one that no doubt thousands of other everyday computer users wonder about:
“You know all those popup windows and stuff that comes up all the time? Every time I use the computer I have all this crap in the way. Isn’t someone working on a system, or something, to get rid of all these?” Fair question. I know his frustration. What he’s talking about is the flurry of pop-up windows warning users that Windows is out of date, that their antivirus is out of date, that attention is needed somewhere. For someone who just wants to get something done, like write an e-mail or check the Monday night football scores, they are a nuisance, an unwelcome intrusion into the train of thought. Dealing with them is frustrating because they take focus off of what we really want to do, and they assume we know what we should do next. Many users do not, and this intimidates them. You shouldn’t need a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science to write an e-mail, find a recipe online, or understand what your computer is trying to tell you. Because he drives truck for a living, and takes very good care of his rig, I’m sure he’s used to reading the gauges and looking for signs that something is going wrong. That’s all these things are doing, is alerting the user that something needs attention. The problem is that they really aren’t very helpful. My favorite one is the generic, “An error has occurred.” An error has occurred? Really? Oh, crap! What kind of error? What caused it? What do I need to do? These are the questions that need to be answered by error messages. They need to tell you what happened, in plain English (or whatever your native language is) what caused it, and give you a clear course of action to fix it. As it stands now, they seem tailored more for programmers and technicians than families and housewives, but things are slowly improving.
The question he asked is a very fair one. For the money we pay for a new computer with a new operating system and software, and all the man-hours invested in creating it, it should be doing a much better job of helping us keep the machine in good working order. No doubt, the knowledge he has of reading his truck’s gauges and keeping it well-maintained has come from years of experience. Compared to a computer, its gauges are pretty dumb. They give you a number which you have to interpret. If you don’t know what the numbers mean, they’re useless. Computers are far more complex and capable of communicating in a more efficient manner, if programmed to do so. And I think that’s the answer he was looking for: Computers are too difficult to understand for the common person. Why can’t it be simpler? Why hasn’t somebody got this right yet? Computers are only as useful as they have been programmed to be. More thought should be put into information messages for those who will be reading and acting on them, and not those who program them. They already have debugging tools. In the meantime, though, we just need to pay attention to what the messages tell us. Use Google if necessary. Just like the gauges in the truck, if they are ignored long enough, it will lead to disaster eventually. Ask anyone who has run their engine out of oil or water, or run out of gas!