Archive for 'General'
Earth | Time Lapse View from Space | Nasa, ISS
Posted on November 13, 2011, under General.
Time lapse sequences of photographs taken with a special low-light 4K-camera
by the crew of expedition 28 & 29 onboard the International Space Station from
August to October, 2011.
Missing Site Column
Recently, I ran into an odd issue in a SharePoint environment where a Site Column disappeared on a custom Content Type. I could still see it in the View, and it was holding a value, but I couldn’t see it on the Content Type page or anywhere else. A colleague pushed me into PowerShell, and I was able to do a quick analysis of the Site Column and see that somehow it had been set to Read Only. Once I set the value of Read Only to false, the field appeared like normal.
1: $site = new-object Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSite("http://site")
2: $web = $site.RootWeb
3: $missingField = $web.Fields["FieldName"]
4: $missingField.ReadOnlyField = $false
5: $missingField.Update()
Merry Christmas!
Luke 2:1-14 (NLT)
The Birth of Jesus
2 At that time the Roman emperor, Augustus, decreed that a census should be taken throughout the Roman Empire. 2 (This was the first census taken when Quirinius was governor of Syria.) 3 All returned to their own ancestral towns to register for this census. 4 And because Joseph was a descendant of King David, he had to go to Bethlehem in Judea, David’s ancient home. He traveled there from the village of Nazareth in Galilee. 5 He took with him Mary, his fiancée, who was now obviously pregnant.
6 And while they were there, the time came for her baby to be born. 7 She gave birth to her first child, a son. She wrapped him snugly in strips of cloth and laid him in a manger, because there was no lodging available for them.
The Shepherds and Angels
8 That night there were shepherds staying in the fields nearby, guarding their flocks of sheep. 9 Suddenly, an angel of the Lord appeared among them, and the radiance of the Lord’s glory surrounded them. They were terrified, 10 but the angel reassured them. “Don’t be afraid!” he said. “I bring you good news that will bring great joy to all people. 11 The Savior—yes, the Messiah, the Lord—has been born today in Bethlehem, the city of David! 12 And you will recognize him by this sign: You will find a baby wrapped snugly in strips of cloth, lying in a manger.”
13 Suddenly, the angel was joined by a vast host of others—the armies of heaven—praising God and saying,
14 “Glory to God in highest heaven,
and peace on earth to those with whom God is pleased.”
[1] Tyndale House Publishers. (2004). Holy Bible : New Living Translation. (2nd ed.). Wheaton, Ill.: Tyndale House Publishers.
Zune – Reserved Space fixed with a device restart
This last year, my 8GB Zune has been acting up a little when it comes to the Reserved Space on the device. Every so often I would receive a message that my Zune was full, only to see that Reserved Space was using over 1 GB of storage.
In the past, I would go through the not-too-painful-but-still-tedious process of reformatting and re-syncing all of the content.
I just discovered that I can simply restart the Zune, and when I connect it back up to my computer, everything is back to normal. I guess we still live under the principle of “when in doubt, reboot.”
Library of Congress to Archive Twitter
Posted on April 15, 2010, under Current Events, General.
Library of Congress Archives Twitter History, While Google Searches It | Wired.com.
Really, of all things – Twitter??
Be careful out there with your 140 characters.
VMware Player – Now creates 64-bit VMs!
Posted on January 25, 2010, under General, SharePoint, Technology.
At home, I recently moved from Vista Ultimate to Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit. On my Vista setup, I had VirtualPC installed to set up my own labs, installing servers and learning more about various server applications.
I was disappointed to see VirtualPC is no longer supported for Home versions of Windows. I was also disappointed to see the free VMware Server equivalent of VirtualPC had disappeared.
However, I just discovered the free VMware Player now not only runs VMs, as it always has, but also allows you to create them! You can also create and run 64-bit guest VM’s if you have the appropriate hardware, which I do. VirtualPC can’t do that. Sweet!
Update: A co-worker (thanks Shane!) mentioned to me the free VMware Server is still available. I’m going to try out Player, hoping it is more light-weight, and see how it goes first.
“A Time for Choosing”
Posted on November 2, 2009, under Current Events, General.
“A Time for Choosing” by Ronald Reagan
Harley Davidson has the right idea
“Minority Report” computer interaction is here!
Posted on November 21, 2008, under General, Technology.
g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo
I want one!
Leaving the flower for the Delicious
Posted on October 6, 2008, under General, Technology.
I’ve decided it’s time to leave Magnolia for my bookmarking goodness and move to Delicious.
Originally, Magnolia had the interest and investment (skills if not money) of some people at the core of the web development community. They were focused on building out a bookmarking site that focused on a pleasant, well thought-out user interface. Things started good, but it appears they got distracted over time. Things I’ve noticed over the years:
- It started for me when search wasn’t fully working, and you could only search on tags, not titles and descriptions. This took a long time for them to figure out.
- They have also struggled with tag management, especially when it comes to groups.
- There is no way to do mass tag management in a group.
- It is impossible to match a group’s taxonomy without opening multiple windows to view the group’s tags.
- They have also seen their share of server downtime, which is a bit unfortunate when you are hunting for a work-related resource.
- Now they seem to be focused more on login API’s and an activity stream – which still hasn’t populated for me, my home page has been blank since they launched it – rather than finishing up what I would call phase 1.5 or phase 2 tagging functionality and group management.
I’m sure there are a lot of behind-the-scenes reasons for the above, but my perspective is from an end-user (client). I kept waiting for them to polish up what was missing, but they kept adding stuff that didn’t really matter for the purpose at hand. I think they started developing more for themselves, and began to forget the point of Magnolia.
I liked the concept they were building, with a nicer (ie, more pleasant to the eyes, and easier to user) interface. I really like some of the minor social aspects, like being able to thank users for bookmarks. I also like the concept of groups, although they need a bit more work to see the full value in both user and tag management.
However, the most recent network/server outtage gave me enough time to check out Delicious, and I found my new home. Working through tagging my imported bookmarks has been a pleasure. Very easy and quick. I do miss screenshots of the web sites, but it’s not a huge loss, and would definitely trade for easier tag management. I like the Firefox extension, although in full mode it needs a little work to be able to move icons to different areas of the status bar. Tag bundles are awesome, and I’m just starting to think through how I want to use that. Near-inline editing of an existing bookmark is fantastic. Overall it’s been a great experience so far. I’m also experimenting with the feature to post bookmarked links to my blog. We’ll see how that goes, but I think I like it so far.
