No, this isn’t a quote from Little Red Golfing Hood.  I recently needed to install a printer driver from Dell for a 3100cn laser printer.  I’m used to printer drivers being, oh, maybe 50KB or 100KB and every once in a while, maybe a couple hundred KB, but this is ridiculous

Holy cow!  63MB for a printer driver?!?!?!

I hope it comes with a movie.

I’ve needed to figure out a decent backup solution for my personal files.  I haven’t tried, but I’ve read about some of the online backup solutions (the ones where for $5/mo you get [x] amount of space) and it trickles the files you choose to some big drive in the sky. 

My interest is there, but I just haven’t acted yet.  But I know something’s coming up where I’m going to lose my mp3′s or my photos or something.  And I don’t spend the time I should to back them up to DVD.

So I needed something to at least make a backup.  I could go out and buy a huge drive, but I keep procrastinating.  So I remembered that my 1 & 1 account has 150GB of disk space.  I love 1 & 1 for hosting.  I have several domains there (including this blog) and they always keep impressing me with new features and stuff.  I joined, what.. sheesh it must have been 5 years ago or so, so it’s not like I’m a new customer.

As I was looking for tools to sync up my local files to the FTP site, I landed on FileZilla.  I’m happy enough.  It’s free, it works, it resumes, and is very easy.

See the extended entry for more info, including sexy screenshots.

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I know, I know…. 5 years from now we’ll look back at this post and the other one I did when it was $169 and think “(old guy voice) eh, remember way back when, back when it was common to say ‘gigabyte’ and think ‘wow, that’s a lot’?  Now we don’t even bother with anything less than a peta.”

I still think “wow… 500GB”.  It would almost be economical to get two and RAID it up because I just don’t think I can trust everything to a single cheap drive.  Would you?

Ok, my computer started this really annoying habit of not having any networking capabilities after resuming from stand-by. This started in the past week or so… maybe it started when I switched hardware from a D610 with Bluetooth to another D610 without Bluetooth. I don’t know. But it’s annoying as all get out because I’m always docking, undocking, going standby, connecting an external monitor, using a 2nd monitor with the doc, going standalone, using wireless, dock network or onboard nic. I’m in at least two different states each day from working at home, working @ work and working in different rooms.

So what happens is this: I resume the computer from standby, and the network adapter will get an address, default gateway, and all that jazz, but it cannot do anything on the network. No ping, no nothing. It gets an address via DHCP no problem though.

I’ve been living with the problem for a week or so and just end up rebooting. Rebooting takes care of the problem nicely. Except that I have to wait for the reboot AND I have to lose whatever open apps I had going, and that’s the really hard part – Office, Trillian, FeedDemon, Google Desktop, Picasa, VPN, etc. Rebooting takes me out of commission for a while and it sucks.

Today I decided to try to find out what the problem was. Read more below.

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Holy cow.  This is just about good enough to get.  500GB for $169 after rebate?  It actually holds more data than I have to store at the moment, which would be the first time that’s ever happened that I can recall.  However, if I digitized all my DVD’s, it would fill up pretty quick-like.   Oh and it has free shipping too.

The only “gotcha” is that you have to remember to do the mail-in rebate.  Oh, and it’s only valid until 9/29/06.  I didn’t check all the conditions of the rebate but that’s not going to keep me up at night.

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2006/091206-von-sam-houston.html

This is pretty big news.

Primer: VoIP stands for Voice over IP and is the transmission of voice, or phone calls (and faxes, voicemail, announcements, call trees, etc) over a network. It requires a particularly anal network because it packetizes the voice and voice is pretty sensitive to delays. Generally speaking, when voice packets are sent from one phone to the gateway (something voip phones talk to), it only has a max tolerance of about an 8th of a second. Even more important is the preservation of this anality when large problems happen on the network.

Asterisk is ‘free’ or open source VoIP (Voice Over IP). You could use Asterisk instead of a large voip vendor like Avaya, Cisco, etc. News like this is good for consumers because the big vendors have to reduce price and increase features in order to compete, and this news in particular is one of the biggest open source adoptions.

It’s analogous to a large company abandoning Windows and Microsoft Office on their PC’s and using Linux and OpenOffice or StarOffice. It’s big.

We use Avaya (400+ users) but we have a call center. We thought about open source when we made our choice last year but the call center part was so important we couldn’t go open source… There just isn’t anything suitable for intelligent call routing, data dip, etc.

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On an unrelated note, the author’s name sure is similar to the star poker player Phill Hellmuth.

We just failed over our DS-3 to our T1, and I’m thinking it’s a bit loaded J

I just downloaded and installed the Postie WordPress plugin from Economy Sized Geek.  Despite the minor spelling and formatting issues of his options page, I must say I really like this plugin.

• It was mostly painless to install
• It comes with a test button.  More plugins should come with this.
• It greatly enhances the built-in post-by-email feature of WordPress.
• It just does the Right Thing ™ with html+plain text emails, like the kind that Microsoft’s Outlook sends when in HTML mode.  The built-in WordPress feature takes all the base64 uuencode and mime headers and just puts them in the post, which is very ugly.  Postie, however, not only cleans it up but also auto-extracts jpg, png or gif images, whether attached or embedded.  Very nice!
• It allows for WordPress users to post, based on their email address.  I don’t plan on using this much (yet) but I think it’s a good idea.
• It will forward rejected email if you want it to, so you can know when people “know” your secret email address.  Or in my case, it can remind you when you sent from a different email account .
• It’s smart enough to drop signatures, depending on how your signatures start.
• It’s also smart enough to let you configure when to start your message if you want (for when ISP’s prepend info to your email, which isn’t the case for me).
• It supports SSL with both POP and IMAP, which is very nice in today’s security-less world.
• And most of all – it worked in less than 5 minutes! 

Now to test from my daughter’s camera phone and then I’m in business.

I also think maybe the next thing to do is add a sidebar just of cell-pics taken. 

I thought I’d update everyone and set some expectations. I do plan on moving from myBloggie to WordPress as soon as I can easily import the entries. For those of you who use a feed to stay updated, this may provide unpredictable results. I can only apologize in advance.

Some thoughts on the switchover:

• myBloggie served me well and was incredibly easy to set up. My thanks to the dev team (or dev person)!
• I always thought the look and feel lacked something, and WordPress out of the box is just prettier. I don’t want to spend a lot of time on look and feel.
• There seem to be endless plugins for WordPress, and new features all the time due to how many people have adopted it. That only helps my usage and my readers.
• WordPress installed even more easily than myBloggie. Very impressive.
• Like Dave at Blogography, however, I’m underwhelmed by the documentation and the ability to truly customize after the fact.
• I like new things

A colleague recently asked me

I didn’t know the answer, and honestly he didn’t ask like that. But I digress way too early to care, so what I wanted to share with the world is I found the answer pretty quickly at

http://www.computerperformance.co.uk/w2k3/W2K3_server_roles.htm

It’s quite a good little list. Me likey!

and here’s the little snippet I got from it regarding the file server role.