Month: November 2007

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How to *Quickly* Log on to a New Windows Domain

If you’re not an IT professional, then please skip this article, as it’s? irrelevant.
If you are, and have ever installed a fresh Windows workstation into a domain, or want to switch domains, you may have experienced the phenomenon where the first time you try to log in to the new domain, it takes a long time, I mean minutes, to generate the list of available domains from the Domain drop-down box. This has happened to me on several occasions, regardless of proper DHCP, DNS, etc., settings.
I have found the fix to be to log in with the DOMAIN\username syntax. Instead of taking a chance of being greeted with “Please Wait While Domain List is Created” for several minutes, you can specify the domain you with to log on to in the username box. Without exception, this has resulted in instant logins for me.

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Broadband: Good For Jobs

This article points to a study that shows why we need broadband here. I think it ties in nicely with what Justin has to say about the Bethel economy, and how the big three or four businesses in town would prefer to have a steady stream of uneducated labor at their fingertips.
If you’re interested in discussing this, you can comment by joining us at the new Bethel Forums that I’ve set up over at the town web site.

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Fiber-Optics? Not in Bethel!

You?ve got to love it when the presenter of a proposal to bring telephone, television, and high-speed Internet access at a fraction of the cost of current providers? services (in places where they are even available) asks ?does anyone not want to see these services available??
And one person, in the approximately 35 assembled, raises his hand. And he?s the Town Manager of Bethel. Continue reading “Fiber-Optics? Not in Bethel!”

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E-mail Inbox Management Tips

I frequently run across client machines of all sorts who complain of various problems related to email. Many of them have one thing in common: thousands of messages in their Inbox. I’ve been saying this for years, and I still believe that sloppy email management is the cause of problems on every mail system I have encountered, with the possible exception of Gmail.
Here are the reasons why you do not want to keep all of your mail in your inbox: Continue reading “E-mail Inbox Management Tips”

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Oh What a Tangled Web We Weave, When First We Practice Social Networking…

Scott Willsey recently asked how I am trying to keep afloat in the sea of social networks in which I swim. First off, I’m starting to ignore a bunch of them. I rarely log in to Facebook, Pownce, or LinkedIn anymore. I have never logged in to Myspace since I created my account. I am taking steps to synchronize Twitter and Jaiku, both of which are catch-alls for the rest of my public social stuff. See below:

Peter's Extended Soapbox

The blue links are updated manually, meaning I go to del.icio.us and tag links there when I feel like it. The rest are all automatic. Twitter receives all of its stuff via twitterfeed.com, and Jaiku subscribes to my Twitters directly.Update: Jaiku does not appear to be reading my Twitter feed. I pointed it at my Twitter feed this morning, and over 12 hours have passed with no updates being ready, so it’s pretty much an island.

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Why Can't Gutsy Play a WAV File Without Codecs?

I’m curious as to why I can’t play a .WAV file that I receive as an attachment to an email without installing necessary codecs, but I am able to play .WAV files which are included with Ubuntu by default, like the default system sounds. Whether I try to play the file as an email attachment in Thunderbird or Evolution, or I save it to the desktop and double-click, Totem wants codecs installed. Is there something I’m missing?

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Jaiku vs. Twitter, Round 2

One of our listeners of the Fresh Ubuntu podcast wrote in asking our opinions on Jaiku versus Twitter. Since I hadn’t really played with Jaiku for a while, I decided to give a shot at using Jaiku for a while, since I never gave it a lot of time a couple months ago, as I was already using Twitter and liking it. The first thing I decided to do was publish all of my Twitter notices into Jaiku. I did not do this a few months ago, because I was using Twitter for private (family and friends) stuff, and Pownce (and, by extension, Jaiku) for general notices.
I did have to put a little thought into this. Since I have several web feeds published into my Twitter history via Twitterfeed, as well as into Jaiku, I don’t want to have duplicates (i.e. Del.icio.us posts showing up twice) or make an endless loop, where Twitter would feed into Jaikus which would feed into Twitter into Jaiku ad infinitum. While it may be funny to read for a while, I’m sure it would get old very quickly, and don’t know that Jaiku and/or Twitterfeed have any provision for dealing with such a mess, other than to limit the number of posts they publish in any given amount of time.
After a little fiddling with my RSS feeds, I decided to make Jaiku my primary notification aggregator instead of Twitter, to give it a fair shot. I’m not considering Pownce for this again for now because logging in always requires a couple of steps – their homepage login never works for me and I have to enter my username and password again – and there is still no “Pownce mobile.” Even as lightweight as Pownce is, it’s a pain to navigate on my mobile phone.
Here’s how things break down now.
Reasons to Use Jaiku Primarily

  • Jaiku has built in RSS feed subscription. This means I would not need to use a third-party service (like Twitterfeed.com, (which requires an OpenID provider, which I use idproxy.net for (which uses my Yahoo! account))). Oh, the onion-like layers of indirection!
  • Jaiku has an application for my Nokia e61. Theoretically I’d get better performance out of it than loading a web page to post my updates.
  • Jaiku is owned by Google now, so it’s cooler.
  • Jaiku appears to publish its RSS feed more quickly than Twitter. I put a couple of Twitters in a few hours ago, and they still have not shown up in the RSS feed.
  • Twitter does seem to be down for maintenance a lot.
  • TwitterIM doesn’t always catch every post.

Reasons to Use Twitter Primarily

  • Most of my “social networking” is now done on Twitter, and a couple of the folks on my list only publish their notifications privately. I’m not sure if they will show up in an RSS feed out of Twitter. If they do, that’s bad, because I’m telling the public their private business. If they don’t, that’s bad, because I have to be on Twitter to see them, and if I’m using Jaiku as my primary interface for notices, I’m not likely to look at Twitter all that often.
  • I like the way Twitter works, usually, on my desktop and my mobile phone.
  • TwitterIM is offered by Twitter, whereas Jaiku requires use of Imified to work with AIM, Yahoo! and MSN. Interesting that they choose to work with Google, Jabber, and Livejournal, but not the most popular IM platform.
  • Jaiku is owned by Google, so it’s evil.
    Okay, I’m joking. A little. Seriously though, try and live a single day on the Internet without using anything Google. First off even if you don’t know it, you’re probably using Google search results somewhere if you’re doing any searching. Second, how many times do you interact with someone else who used Gmail to email you (yes, Google can read that email too), a PC running Google Toolbar (tracking your search patterns),or Google Desktop Search (keeping an index of all of your documents and email on their server). Gah, I gotta stop. This is a blog post in and of itself.

Follow my Twitters and Jaikus to see where I end up!
Update 2007-11-06: I’ve gone back to Twitter as my “main” and set Jaiku to subscribe to my Twitter RSS feed. We’ll see what happens.