Looks like WordPress 2.1 (code name Ella) was released a little less than an hour ago. Look at me with my breaking geeky news.
Anything good in the new version? Let’s take a too-much-time-on-my-hands point-by-point look, just because I can.
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Dreamhost recently started something new where they are reducing the amount of disk space and bandwidth that you get with each hosting plan every day. For example, right now for the “Level 1″ hosting plan, it says you get 194.5 GB of disk space, and “On Jan 15th starting Disk drops to: (Sign up TODAY!) 194 GB.” Bandwidth for that plan is 1.945 TB today, and 1.94 TB tomorrow.
Of course, they keep adding to your disk and bandwidth every week (1 GB disk and 16 GB transfer for that plan), so the 1 GB of starting disk that you lose if you wait two days will be added back after a week, but you’d always be 1 GB behind someone who signed up two days before you.
I’ve been thinking about signing up with them, because that much disk space would be great for off-site backups of my irreplaceable data. And so I did.
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I installed wipfw today, because I needed a simple Windows firewall that could do egress filtering to block traffic to certain external IP addresses, and with my Windows XP SP1 setup, that’s just not possible. SP2 adds some better outgoing filtering to the firewall, but you still can’t just plug in an IP address.
But after installing wipfw, I just couldn’t find the config file. The install.cmd installer said, at the very end:
SUCCESS. Default action is ALLOW
Log files are located in C:\WINDOWS\security\logs
Change wipfw.conf file for your taste.
But I couldn’t find a file called wipfw.conf anywhere on my system, and the documentation online and in the zip archive didn’t mention anything about that file, which seems like one of the more important configuration items to mention.
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I’ve had a weird problem ever since upgrading to the latest version of Mozilla Firefox, version 2.0.0.1. The browser’s CPU usage would keep going up the longer that Firefox was running.
So after a day or two of the browser being open, it would be using 20% to 30% of the CPU. I’ve seen that once or twice before with some Flash advertisement that used a lot of CPU, and when I closed the page with the offending ad, the CPU usage dropped back down. But with this issue I could close every tab and just have one blank one open, and the CPU usage would still be high.
I had to close Firefox completely and restart it to get the CPU usage back down. I wound up killing firefox.exe from the Windows task manager once or twice a day rather than close Firefox normally, since if I killed it unexpectedly it would give me the option of restoring my session and getting all my tabs back.
Today I finally broke down and searched around for the answer.
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It looks like Google’s Webmaster Tools are acting up tonight. It’s taking forever for the main webmaster tools page to load in the first place — approximately 90 seconds — and then the information looks pretty outdated and just wrong.
Firefox 2.0’s tabs are way too wide for me. I want to be able to see all of my tabs on the screen at once. With 2.0’s default tab size and my usual window size, I can only see nine tabs at once (yes, I need a bigger monitor that can do higher resolutions, but that’s besides the point.) It’s tough to skip around between tabs, and if I middle-click a link to open it in a new tab, I don’t get any visual confirmation that it’s loading, since the new tab is off to the right side of the visible ones. I’d need to scroll to the right to see that yes, it has opened that page in a new tab.
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I noticed an LRecvTrap.exe process running on my computer, and didn’t know what it was. So, like I usually do in this case, I searched for it on Google. But for this one there are absolutely no results on Google. So I looked into it myself, and I’m posting this so that there’ll be at least one result for anyone else who’s curious and searches for it in the future.
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I had some Windows XP icon weirdness going on today. About a week ago all my icons went blank. That happens once in a while, and I know that I need to reboot to fix it, so I was just waiting for a convenient time to reboot.
Today I finally did that. But after the reboot I only had a few icons looking right. The rest were all the Windows default icon that it uses for files that it doesn’t have a special icon for. Most applications, folders, the recycle bin, My Computer, etc were all that default icon.
I tried a few different things and couldn’t fix it, so I took to Google to see what it said.
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Wow, have I been out of the geeky technology loop or what? I knew that 500GB hard drives were out and available, but I had no idea that there was a Seagate 750GB SATA hard drive out there and shipping.
I keep thinking I’d love to get three or four good-sized hard drives to replace my current RAID-5 array. Right now it’s three 60 GB drives diving me around 120 GB of usable space, which is completely full. Three of these 750GB drives would be 1.5 TB of usable space. With that kind of fault tolerant space online, I could put all my digital pictures on there. Since I’m doing RAW shooting, each picture I take is around 8MB, so they fill up drives pretty quick. Right now I have a lot of small hard drives (20GB or so each) sitting around, and I plug them in with a USB adapter if I need something off of them. Having everything on line would be easy.
I’m also getting fast enough transfers on my wireless that I could possibly record shows with my DVR over the wireless to that RAID array. I’d be worried about the occasional wireless glitch messing things up, though, if it can’t maintain the throughput needed.
Of course, since the machine I’d be using for storage is old, it doesn’t have SATA and doesn’t take IDE drives bigger than about 72GB or so. So I guess that means an add-on SATA card and hope for the best?
Anyone done anything like this and have any advice or thoughts?
Looks like TigerDirect also has the drive with a program called Drive Scrubber (see spiffy picture) for free after rebate, or you can get just the hard drive. That’s an interesting idea for a program: something to wipe a drive completely clean. I guess it’s for people who don’t have a Linux boot CD handy?
According to the eRightSoft web site:
SUPER © (Simplified Universal Player Encoder & Renderer) a GUI to ffmpeg, mencoder, mplayer, x264, ffmpeg2theora and the theora/vorbis RealProducer plugIn. Player and Encoder of various types of multimedia files.
So, first of all, is the name supposed to be SUPER, and the © is just always around to make sure we know that it’s a copyrighted program, or is the name actually SUPER ©, which is the way it seems to be from all of their web pages? I’m assuming it’s part of the title for some inexplicable reason, since none of that company’s other software has that.
Anyway, I was looking at it, and it looked useful. But it’s a little suspicious looking, what with their free.fr download links and the often-repeated text saying
Downloading this file from other sites IS NOT RECOMMENDED as you may get an outdated file. While from here, you can be sure to always download the latest updated virus-free spyware-free version.
Sorry, but that just sets off alarms. Poor English, free domain names for download links, and advertising the fact that there are no viruses or spyware? Not the most reputable-looking piece of software I’ve ever seen.
So I took a closer look.
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