Google Maps Street View appears black
Google Maps Street View has been appearing all black instead of showing images when using Safari on my Mac Pro running Snow Leopard. I noticed the same problem with FireFox, so I figured it was a Flash problem.
I googled around a bit and found other people had the same problem, and were getting a series of unhelpful suggestions I tried upgrading to the latest Flash just in case, and it did not solve the problem. Also tried clearing Safari's cache which didn't help, but seeing as the problem was occuring in FireFox as well, I didn't have a lot of hope.
A couple of the postings suggested removing Arial fonts from ~/Library/Home/Fonts, and while this didn't make sense to me, I tried it, and it worked. My theory is these are old fonts left over from back when this machine was running 10.5 as my other Mac wasn't having this problem (nor did it have those fonts).
I just had a handful of fonts in that location, and am not really sure why they're even there or why my user needs its own set of fonts, but in case anyone else runs into this I figured I might as well post this.
Video Blogging and Podcasting
I've noticed an increasing trend where both bloggers, and even some larger companies now post an entry on their web site that basically says "download this podcast" or "watch this video" to hear more about XYZ.
This is great, and there is a place for multimedia content, but at the same time I'd much rather read something. It's so much easier to quickly scan a document and get the main points, or go back and read it in detail than it is to watch a video or listen to a podcast.
At the moment Google can't search the words spoken during a video either.
So, for now, I hope people stick to posting content as text and include multimedia as an additional resource for those who want to watch it.
The Joys of Project Management
I'm taking a graduate level project management course this semester. There are a few things so far that may directly apply to my job and would allow for some improvements in how we manage projects, but the political implications of doing so would be...interesting.
The textbooks used for this class really need to give better examples however. I understand the point is that we should focus on the process, and not the actual project, it is still kind of silly.
A tutorial for Microsoft Project 2007 suggests a small CPA firm I work for wants to network its 5 computers with a budget of 50,000 dollars, and a time limit of 6 months. I actually laughed out loud when I read this.
First of all, the book has a copyright date of 2009. This isn't an old book. There are no small businesses who are not networked at this point. Even at minimum, every small business in America has some haphazard network connecting all their machines to a cable modem or something to get out on the Internet.
The whole thing could be done in literally hours cowboy style, and if done properly with structured cabling (as opposed to holes bashed in walls and random patch cables run room to room), documentation, backups, etc , it wouldn't take more than a few days.
So yes, it's all about the project management process, but they really could have chosen a project that has more realistic costs and timeline. This isn't doing any of the non-technical people in the class any favors.
Trying to prevent lab users from forgetting their USB jump drives
One of the things I do at work is manage some university computer labs. Our student workers keep an eye on things, and noticed an increasing number of people were walking away leaving their USB jump drives still plugged into the computer. (It seems like most students call them a "USB" now, which to me is the same thing as calling a firewire hard drive a "firewire," but I digress...)
Anyway, I Googled around a bit, and wrote some VBscript code to add to our logout script to try to detect USB drives. It works pretty well, since we've had a huge reduction of lost drives piling up in our lost and found drawer since the script was put in place.
Set FSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set Drives = FSO.Drives
strMessage = "Please unplug your USB Drive!" & vbcr & vbcr & "Please unplug your USB Drive!" & vbcr & vbcr & "Please unplug your USB Drive!" _
& vbcr & vbcr & "DO NOT FORGET!"
For Each DiskDrive In Drives
If DiskDrive.DriveType = "1" Then
If DiskDrive.IsReady = "True" Then
strMbox = MsgBox(strMessage ,48,"Unplug USB Drive")
End If
End If
Next
Getting Vista to work with older CIFS servers
I occasionally need to connect to CIFS shares on a Samba 2.0 server and an OS/2 server from my Vista machine but it doesn't work by default. The fix is relatively easy.
This link was helpful:
http://www.builderau.com.au/blogs/codemonkeybusiness/viewblogpost.htm?p=339270746
VMware ESX3i now free
VMware made ESX3i available for free today.
https://www.vmware.com/tryvmware/login.php?eval=esxi&t=1
The hardware compatibility list is fairly limited for ESX3i compared to ESX 3. It appears however that the software will work on a variety of machines, but just won't be supported by VMware.
As an example, a Dell PowerEdge 1850 is on the HCL for ESX but not ESXi.
I tried testing the free version of ESX3i on a Dell Optiplex GX620 and it installed without issue. I was able to connect to the web interface running on the host, download the VI client, and manage the server that way. I copied a VM from my desktop to the test host using VMware Converter and was able to run it.
I then tried installing ESX3i on a PowerEdge 1850. During the boot process the keyboard stopped responding. For what it is worth, the keyboard was actually a PS2 Raritan KVM.
I later was able to get it to install while using a USB keyboard. After the installation was over the console refused to respond to the keyboard through the KVM.
So I'm not sure if the keyboard refused to work because ESX3i did not like the Raritan KVM, or if it does not like PS2 keyboards period. Perhaps this is why the 1850 did not make it to the HCL.
But it appears once it has been installed the 1850 works reasonably well as a host machine.
Those are my notes so far anyway...
Considering this product cost $495 retail last week and is now free it is definitely worth a look.