My Thoughts, My Finds, My Journey

Great AMA question

So, if you’ve never been to Reddit, they’ve got a section called “Ask Me Anything”, where someone qualifies themselves and then encourages responses (e.g. “I’m a nurse in an ER, AMA”). Plenty of people have participated – celebrities, politicians, armed forces veterans (some WWII guys have made it). The all-time most commented was the one from President Obama. There’s endless reading to be found there.

Well, the developers of Microsoft Excel did one back in November. Lots of great stuff in that thread, but my favorite was this one:

I sometimes accidentally open up Excel when attempting to open Eve Online, and I usually can’t even tell the difference for several hours. Thanks for the great clone/simulator for Eve Online!

My questions are:

Did you have any contact with CCP Games or the Eve Online team to help them develop their famed Massively Multiplayer Spreadsheet Simulator?

Is the move to subscription-based pricing in Office365 because of complaints by CCP that they didn’t want your software acting as a free clone/interface for Eve online?

Are there any plans to bring back one-time purchase? I always appreciated being able to play Eve/Excel whenever my subscription to CCP Games expired.

Are there any plans to port Excel/Eve to Xbox?

How did you manage to get around the extreme video card requirements that are required in Eve but not Excel? It is fantastic to be able to play it on netbooks and other lesser computers.

If this doesn’t make sense to you, then you’ve either got no sense of humor, or you’ve got some Googling to do…because that right there is FUNNY.

January 19, 2016 by Uncategorized 3

My first rant…

Whoever designed Sonicwall devices, and thought they were a good idea, needs to spend a year in Gitmo. After that, they need to go back to first grade for a year…but with an old-school Catholic nun with a ruler in her hand and a trigger finger. Once they graduate from first grade again, they must go back to high school for the math chapters in logic, they must join debate team (and win a championship somewhere), and they must go through Professor Maurer‘s critical thinking class. Then, they need to spend some time with the folks over at pfSense, taking copious notes on how to make a useful UI, and take every word they say as if it was spoken by God Himself. Then, and only then, will they be granted the privilege of being allowed to pay for their sins by rebuilding the Sonicwall UI, from the ground up.
The final test will be to give them a week to show their first grade class (now third graders) how to configure a Sonicwall. If they finish their tutorial, and not one of the students can figure it out, the process repeats again.

I have spent far too much time this weekend reconfiguring Sonicwall devices and it’s starting to get to me.

</rant>

January 18, 2016 by Computers and Tech Microblog 0

#ThrowbackFriday

Why thirteen-year-olds shouldn’t be allowed on the internet:

I NEED CHANNELWOOD HELP!!!!!

I STILL NEED CHANNELWOOD HELP!!!

And yes, that thirteen-year-old was me. This, dear readers (all four of you) was me, on Usenet, back in 1999. At the time, my dad and I shared an e-mail address, and Outlook Express for Windows 95 was also setup for Usenet access (thank you, Suffolkweb!), which helped me get through the game Myst. All caps, lots of exclamation points, and plenty of obnoxiousness in the posts. I was terrible at internet communication back then. Luckily, just a few things have changed…

Side note: if you’re going back in the Google Groups to the point where your browser crashes, check out the excellent NoScript plug-in for Chrome or Firefox. Google Groups will give static HTML links with zero window dressing, 20 at a time. You can jump ahead by tweaking the numbers in the address bar, as long as they’re exactly 20 apart. It’s ugly, but the ‘next’ buttons load *instantly*.

January 15, 2016 by Computers and Tech Microblog 0

Wisdom from Steve

Not that you’re supposed to have “cheat days” on a fast, as it generally defeats the point…but I swung by Facebook briefly, and loved what my friend Steve Goad had to say…he’s one of the few folks who has insightful, original posts…like this one:

Have you prayed for your enemies today?
Have you prayed for political candidates you disagree with?
Have you prayed for the illegal immigrant?
Have you prayed for the thief, the murderer, the rapist?
Have you prayed for the terrorist?
Jesus said “Love your enemy, and pray for those who persecute you.”
Instead of cursing them… pray for God to bless them, and show them love… even as God has shown us love.
If all Christians did this… I believe amazing things would happen in our world.

And y’know what? He’s absolutely right.

January 13, 2016 by Philosophy and Faith 2

Dear Canon

Dear Canon,

I generally love your printers. Your copiers are a different story. In addition to being problematic work emailing via SSL on non-standard ports, it’s 2016…and changing the IP address requires a full restart of the copier, a problem solved by Windows in 1999. Firmware updates, please!

January 12, 2016 by Computers and Tech Microblog 0

Funny

Via Reddit:

A priest and a rabbi buy a car. The priest walks out and sees the rabbi sprinkling water over the hood. “What are you doing?” Asked the priest. “I’m blessing the car,” said the rabbi. “Oh, as long as we’re doing THAT…” The priest walked into the garage. He later came back out with a hacksaw and cut 2 inches off of the tailpipe.

January 9, 2016 by Uncategorized 0

Altaro’s ‘Gotcha’

A client at work has had an issue with the Windows Server Backup application destabilizing his server. I’d like to actually poke around and resolve the issue, but with the time factor involved, I decided to try out the excellent Altaro backup program. It’s pretty, it’s intuitive, and given that he only has two virtual machines, the free version perfectly fit his needs…or so I thought.

Protip for everyone: “Offsite Backups” are one of the features that are not included in the free version. Initially I thought that statement simply referred to WAN-based file transfers, but it apparently also applies to hard disk rotations, so it you use multiple hard disks for backup, you’ll be stuck getting the paid version. That being said, at $395 for the standard version, it’s one of the least expensive server backup programs available.

January 7, 2016 by Computers and Tech Microblog 0

Judgment

I write this blog entry from the checkout line at a local supermarket. My grocery list consists of: a bag of granola cereal, a box of Star Wars cereal, and three of those $0.50 Jell-O cups. My cashier will likely judge me as she rings me up, and deservedly so.

Perhaps I only sense this vibe because I was a bit judgmental when I was a cashier, and this is simply karmic projection.

January 5, 2016 by Microblog 1

Reader Interaction Poll / Ask Me Stuff / Topic Suggestions

It’s been amusing that I’ve talked to a number of people who have indicated that they’ve read things on my blog. My stat counter isn’t incredibly useful with respect to visitor numbers, since all the bots and site scrapers are included, yet precisely four different people have commented on things here since I’ve started the blog. Moreover, what was intended to be a blog with a bit more diversity of topics has turned into an admittedly soapbox-like pulpit where I spend more time complaining about technical things than not. My ‘Food and Cooking’ category still doesn’t have an entry in it, though I have a planned entry for it.

Having said all that, I’m open to topic requests and suggestions, questions to answer, and matters to research. I can’t promise I’ll honor every request (points to ToS), but I figure that most of my loyal readers would be interested in a change of pace from the technical rants and rallying cries for adherence to the Bill of Rights, so I’d at least be interested in knowing what sort of content you’d like to read.

January 4, 2016 by Microblog Uncategorized 0

…Spreadsheets are no better.

So, I’m certain you’ve read my prior post regarding how shopping for self-hosted chat/collaboration software is a pain, right? Well, browser-based office suites aren’t much of a picnic, either…

OnlyOffice was my frontrunner, even if it did require 6GB of RAM on my server. Yes it’s shiny, yes it’s got a Linux base to it, yes it does users and groups and has a web server and a database server powering it…but Lotus 1-2-3 required 192K of RAM (yes, Excel had a predecessor that single-handedly transformed desktop computing, you young whippersnapper), so a thirty thousand fold increase in RAM requirements would understandably seem a smidge excessive…but even with eight CPU cores and 8GB of RAM allocated to it, the software *lagged*. Not just ‘a smidge sluggish’, I mean ‘one-minute-per-page-load’ sluggish. I want to try it on my laptop at some point, but I’d rather rant on my blog at the moment. Suffice it to say, OnlyOffice didn’t last long.

FengOffice was my next attempt. It had a slim installation, ran just fine in 1GB of RAM, simple interface, good administration…and a patent inability to use relative URLs. Thus, it kept trying to direct me to 192.168.0.146, even when I accessed it externally through an opened port and used a dynamic DNS address. I went so far as to reinstall it using the DDNS URL when prompted…but even then it did a reverse DNS and forced itself to be tied to the external IP address, rather than the URL, which made no sense…something that further astounded me when I did a port 80 redirect. So, Feng is great for internal use, but external use clearly requires a static IP. We’re working on that.

eGroupWare seemed to have a spreadsheet module involved…but it didn’t…and I think the people who made the software went out of their way to make it as ugly as conceivably possible. Now, to be fair, their installation process was all of three cut-and-pastes on a plain Debian install, so props to them for having the simplest installation here (Really OnlyOffice? creating an OVA or including a VMDK file in the zip archive was *that* hard?). While Lotus 1-2-3 may have been the spreadsheet that brought a computer to every desk, eGroupWare brought flashbacks of Lotus Notes…and if you’re blissfully unaware of what it’s like to use Lotus Notes, thank your IT department for showing you love and care and concern and respect.

ZK Spreadsheet Server is what I’d love to go with…if I could. It’s a one trick pony that is *beautiful*…I mean, it is the most visually appealing spreadsheet software I’ve ever used. Every useful thing that Johnny Ives has ever said was distilled into what would make this software be desirable to use, and then implemented perfectly, with no middle management getting in the way. Moreover, the Windows installation couldn’t be simpler – a single executable Installshield wizard that installs a service that has a small config panel. Couldn’t be simpler. Unfortunately, Mr. Ives clearly had no say over the website. The site indicates that the download is simply an evaluation, but nowhere does the website list a price, or have a ‘buy now’ button, or anything to that effect. I have no idea how much this thing actually costs, or how it’s licensed. Also, there didn’t seem to be any way to assign users and groups, so a login ends up being a direct path to making a spreadsheet…not the best for security.

I probably should have spent the last six hours editing and uploading the podcasts and just using our access to Excel Online via our free Office365 subscription.

But where’s the fun in that?

January 3, 2016 by Computers and Tech Uncategorized 0