Monthly Archives: July 2006

Microsoft to Charge for Office 2007 Beta 2

July 31, 2006
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If you’ve been planning to download the Office 2007 beta, better do it now! According to a PCWorld article:

Microsoft says that it will begin charging $1.50 for users to download a copy of the Office 2007 beta 2.

“In just the past two months since its launch, more than 3 million people have downloaded the 2007 Microsoft Office system beta 2,” the company said in a statement sent via e-mail.

“Given how dramatically the beta 2 downloads have exceeded our goals, we have made the business decision to implement a cost-recovery measure for downloading the beta.”

Microsoft will begin charging users starting Wednesday, it said. The company released beta 2 of Office 2007 in May.

Code is Poetry. Poetry is Code?

July 30, 2006
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As those familiar with WordPress probably know, WordPress’s “slogan” is “Code is Poetry.”

Personally, I think it’s a great slogan. And I agree: well-written computer code is like a work of art. Good code creates something that runs beautifully and can even look beautiful too.

So yes, code is poetry; however, I find it kind of annoying to discover poetry in code, or more specifically, I find it kind of annoying when I find Daisy Bell lycrics hiding in my WordPress CSS:

.navigation {
	display: block;
	text-align: center;
	margin-top: 10px;
	margin-bottom: 60px;
	}
/* End Various Tags & Classes*/

/* "Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do. I'm half crazy all for the love of you.
	It won't be a stylish marriage, I can't afford a carriage.
	But you'll look sweet upon the seat of a bicycle built for two." */

I do feel kind of annoyed, but the lightheartedness of it also almost makes me want to laugh. And that’s probably why it’s there. ;-)

Computer Clean-Out and a Hot Hard Drive

July 29, 2006
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If there is one place in our house that has the largest civilization of dust bunnies, it would have to be the insides of our computers.

So in anticipation of the “computer spring cleaning that’s not during spring” that my dad and I were going to do this week, my mom had purchased some “compressed air.” However, after finding that it wasn’t “compressed air” but rather a “compressed chemical concoction,” we returned it to Wal-Mart and decided that we would use my dad’s air compressor.

I got everything unplugged from the backs of the computers; my dad got the air compressor ready. I cleaned the dust caked on the back ports and opened the computers. My dad turned on the air compressor and blasted the air in there.

I wasn’t too sure… that air looked powerful enough to really damage something. This wasn’t air coming from a little can of compressed air; this was air coming from the big thing that you use to blow up tires.

The air compressor cleaned it out really good though. As I look out our porch window I still see the exiled dust bunnies on our porch, looking dejected and fluffless.

Anyway, I repluggified the computers, turned them on, and made sure that they booted up okay. Everything looked okey-dokey-dandy, so I went on to do some other non-computer things.

I came back to my computer after some time and noticed the HDD Health alerts on my desktop: hard drive over critical temperature. Uh-oh.

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After the ATI Buyout

July 28, 2006
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I’ve been thinking about AMD’s purchase of ATI and what it might mean for us computer users.

The big thing that comes to mind limited buying options: I can easily forsee having to choose between AMD/ATI and Intel/nVidia when buying a new computer, instead of being able to mix-and-match your processor and graphics card vendors. If someone was buying a computer a year from now and wanted an AMD processor and an nVidia graphics card, they might be out of luck.

And I have no evidence to prove that this is a possibility; it’s just something that came to mind: wouldn’t it be so weird slash funny slash cool if Intel bought nVidia? I mean, really … that would make things very interesting indeed.

The Importance of Feed Redirection

July 22, 2006
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Sure, I had set up basic feed redirection. I had set it so that the feed/ and feed/atom/ WordPress feed URLs would redirect to my FeedBurner feed.

But when I saw that the Best of the Web blog directory had listed my RSS feed as being http://www.johnlamansky.com/?feed=rss2, I knew I had to implement more extensive redirection.

I had heard of this “WordPress Feedburner Plugin” before, and decided to give it a try. After a little bit of trouble at first, I got it to work and – lo and behold! – the next day my Feedburner subscriber count had almost – not quite, but almost – doubled.

It just goes to show how important it is to make sure all of your feed traffic is directed to the right place.

I would highly recommend the aforementioned plugin to WordPress bloggers who are using Feedburner; and if you haven’t already, be sure to check out Feedburner’s feed redirection tips.

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