Pointman’s Page

I know I mostly post about politics, motorcycles and firearms but the part of my life that pays for those things I’m a technology guy. It’s not too often I do much code work with other things being more entertaining but of late a friend brought the project FullCalendar to my attention as he […]

Years ago I started recommending Avast anti-virus for non-business home users. Today Avast is still a good product which I still highly recommend. But an relative new kid on the block, or more accurately new product, has taken over my most recommended free anti-virus, Panda Security’s Cloud Antivirus….
Panda Security is by […]

The Daily Mail’s David Rose has a nice article today, The mini ice age starts here. Why must any current event, especially historically proven cyclic events, be assumed the new status quo? Well, besides that there’s money to be made in the next-big-emergency…
It’s really to bad, too, as I was looking forward to global […]

I have an embarrassing admission to make: Windows 7 (Enterprise) isn’t terrible. Having gone from Windows XP to 7 on my laptop and thus avoiding Vista I missed most of the horror of Microsoft’s ME2.
Of course this doesn’t mean I’ll be booting to Windows 7 any more often than I have in […]

The local police are wondering what exactly happened to common sense as 3 are rescued from their GPS routes.

Recall my recent comments on our dependency on technology? Well, here’s another example.. a couple gets stranded 3 days after GPS takes them down a seasonal road. In the wrong season, naturally….

I can’t begin to recall the number of hours I spent in the dungeons of Zork…
ht: Tam

I think GPS is cool technology but I don’t use it much. Really, I have very little desire to have one in my vehicle or on my bike. The problem that I have with it is a simple matter of wishing to retain my skill with a map, routing, planning.. so many new […]

Nothing like last minute notice but it IS System Administrator Appreciation Day so where is my tribute of coffee and jerky??
Yeah, right…

Seeing the headline about Airbus jets crashing more often recalls an old pilot axiom a commercial pilot friend repeated to me only recently: If it ain’t Boeing, I ain’t going…

How many times have you found yourself telling someone “Google is your friend” when they ask you a question? I know I must say that to people on a daily basis. And it’s not necessarily that these people aren’t smart, just not tech - non techie people are not as likely to use Google to […]

… no analog television signal as of this Friday.. and unless they boost the digital signal power there is going to be hell to pay for those refusing to PAY for broadcast television. At 40 miles out to say digital is “spotty” would be an understatement. And unlike “snowy” weak analog signals digitals “static” […]

Scientists at the University of Rochester have found a way to make Regular Light Bulbs Super-Efficient. If this technology can be moved into production scale, the increased efficiency plus the toxicity of CFL’s maybe America really will become Pro Choice - for lightbulbs…

Being impatient I’d hooked my local systems to the kde.org repositories and upgraded the pathetic kde4.1x that comes on 2009 to 4.2 - which while still plagued with problems worked better than 4.1 which was virtually unusable to the point I was reverting to version 3.5 altogether. Considering Mandriva is still installing 3.5 in parallel, […]

Years ago I bought a hot new model Nokia phone (2160?) that allowed you to record a voice title in the contact card. Then you could press a button and say “call Joe” and it would dial Joe. Now sometimes, if you didn’t say it close enough for the phone to match you had to […]

A few quick points on the HTC Touch Pro now that I’ve used it a couple of days. First, the HTC touch flow 3d software uses a lot of system resources, might be why Verizon ships the phone with this disabled.
Second, the bluetooth works almost flawlessly!!! That may not seem like much to a […]

After 3 years of the Treo I finally have something new, an HTC Touch Pro. I’ve only been considering the HTC phones for a year or so but being the cheap skate that I am I’ve resisted the upgrade even on the company’s dime. But another Treo failure at the office pushed me back to […]

It’s a tough job market out there and as our company lets go people we would much rather keep helping them along on their way is the least we can do. A reference letter, even a simple one, could easily make the difference for that employee. If you’re like me, unimaginitive with writing […]

Like your inexpensive wireless? Well if Obama has his way you’d best not get used to it… he has to find all that money he’s spending somewhere and it looks like one of the many new taxes he’s proposing is a New Wireless Spectrum Fee. They can talk all they want about this being […]

If you’ve noticed this site has been offline on and off the last several days its because my server board died a slow and lingering death. So I’m back up on a new P4 board and the latest OS revision.

Sometime today Lucianne.com, a conservative news site, was blocked by Google as an “attack site”. Viewing the why was this site blocked link initially showed there were no problems but in the last few minutes they added information on a trojan linking to a 9966 domain. So… Google censorship? Or a typical concerted effort […]

Windows “Vista” has been so popular (not!) Microsoft is dropping feel-good naming for Windows 7 which they’re creatively calling Windows 7…. I have to think Vista is to follow in the path of Windows ME. Haven’t heard of Windows ME??? Exactly…
The up side is there are some good features in Vista but the bad features […]

A language we’ve thought dead or dying for a couple of decades just won’t die. This is one of those things that drives the younger developers crazy since anything older than 6 months old is “old school” and not the “right” way. I, on the other hand still have my college COBOL books - […]

An interesting blog entry on O’Reilly, Why Corporates Hate Perl touches on the knowledge barrier between technology and non-technology in corporations and how a lack of understanding technology at the business level can contribute to the silo mentality so prevalent today.
The biggest point to take from the article is that programming languages are only as […]

I don’t “hate” Flash but I frown on it for casual use such as site navigation, headers and especially advertising. And here comes another malicious use of Flash through advertising which steals what ever you copy to your clipboard.
Advertising presents a larger problem to police mainly because the content is sometimes a couple […]