Rocket Science

Ok, I’m spoiled at MIT. We have a completely open network, anyone can connect for up to 14 days through self registering. And once you’re on the network, you can run any and all network protocols and services. This has been explained to me as, every time IS&T tried to lock down the network, the students promptly circumvented the protocols. So instead of protecting the pipes, they protect the servers (I’m guessing).

I’m at yet another university that has locked down their network so far that it gets in the way of doing simple things — like IM. For some reason the firewall and/or routers are not routing those ports. Great, thanks.

This is one of the reasons I like Google, they do everything in a web browser over port 80.

But, the point of this post is that AIM has made available AIM Express which does the same thing for AIM–yay! I can IM with people.

(I really wish I could have my friends that can break through these network blocks in my bag when I travel to other universities to show folks how silly all this unnecessary security is…)

So, I run Office 2008 on my Mac. Recently Microsoft released the 12.2.3 update, and I had lots of problems upgrading my installation.

Turns out, I had to put the Microsoft Office 2008 folder directly in the Mac OS’ named “Applications” folder and not a sub-folder. Why?

Why do I have to put the folder in a specific location–and why now? I’ve been able to successfully upgrade through 12.2.2 with the “Microsoft Office” folder in a sub-folder within the “Applications” folder.

I really hate programs that require a specific folder/path location. It’s my computer and I’d rather have short listings of files in folders, than crazy long listings.

Consider the case of the 12.2.3 updater, it searches on other drives for a copy that’s upgradeable and given how slow it is, it must be searching in more than just the “Drive:Applications” folder. Ok I suppose it could be really inefficient, but that just makes things worse I think.

Thanks Again, Microsoft

Well, so did I! A quick search of Google led me directly to Browser Shots.

You can submit the web page that you’d like to check and have it rendered in a number of different browser. A whole lot of different browsers (just no Mac-based browsers). The site is scripted to launch a virtual machine, open the webpage in the browser you’ve selected, create a screen shot and move on to the next browser.

Pro Tip: There’s a 30 minute timer on your requests. So if you’ve selected a lot of browsers and/or their servers are busy, your job may time out. So check back in 29 minutes after you’ve started your job. You’ll be able to extend the job if it’s not complete, but you have to click something on the website to do that. (Or you could purchase a month of “priority processing”, but if you’re like me, you’re just doing a one time test of a site.)

This was really bugging me…here’s how to “set” list view for Mac Disk Images.

1. Open the “root level” view of the disk image – for me, it always opens in icon view. Then, select “Show View Options” from the View menu.

2. Check the “Always Open in Icon View” box. While leaving this dialog open, select “as List” from the View menu.

3. Uncheck the “Always Open in Icon View” box. It will instantly turn into “Always Open In List View”. Recheck this box immediately, then close dialog. This will make the setting stick.

DKH47. (2009, September 21). Re: “Always Open In…” View Options for Root Level of a Disk Image File. Retrieved on November 21, 2009 from Apple Support Web site: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=10588157

I read this article on O’Reilly’s Radar about whole house energy monitoring.

The Energy Detective (TED) is a current measuring device that you connect in your electrical service panel and can be used to monitor energy usage in real time.

When I owned my house, I started a high-level tracking of my energy usage (comparing overall kWh usage for each month) to start to understand how my use of air conditioning in the summer, or say my computers and A/V equipment impacted my overall use of energy. With TED, I really could have fine tuned that.