{"id":1040,"date":"2009-12-16T23:43:37","date_gmt":"2009-12-17T03:43:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=1040"},"modified":"2009-12-16T23:43:37","modified_gmt":"2009-12-17T03:43:37","slug":"odd-lots-93","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=1040","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<ul>\n<li>I know, I know, I&#8217;ve been quiet for a week, but there&#8217;s been a lot to do away from the keyboard, much of which borders on sock-drawer sorting. Focusing on only one project for most of a year almost guarantees that things will get messy away from the target of your focus. So I&#8217;ve been picking up downstairs in my workshop and sorting my office closet. No socks, but lots of loose fileables sitting in a pile, one with a yellowed corner that did <em>not<\/em> come with age. (So much for cacheing data on the floor.)<\/li>\n<li>We have <a href=\"http:\/\/www.spaceweather.com\/images2009\/16dec09\/midi512_blank.gif?PHPSESSID=urpder60de7pbrau0n4a9vj4l5\">a rattlin&#8217; good sunspot creeping across old Sol&#8217;s face<\/a>, and whaddaya know: I spun the dial across 15 meters this afternoon <em>and heard voices<\/em>. &#8216;Course, my fire alarm still does not like the Icom 736, so all I could do was listen, but it was nice to think of this overlong solar minimum as something other than eternal.<\/li>\n<li>If you haven&#8217;t already, upgrade to Firefox 3.5.6. <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.zdnet.com\/security\/?p=5137&amp;tag=nl.e550\">There are a number of newly discovered exploits in earlier releases<\/a>, including a remote code execution item that looks pretty ugly.<\/li>\n<li>I also upgraded to Thunderbird 3.0 earlier today, and so far am most pleased. They&#8217;ve added a profile-wide message search feature that (considering the appalling number of emails I&#8217;ve accumulated and carried forward since 1995) will be extremely useful here.<\/li>\n<li>Speaking of ugly, when a film with the budget and ambitions of <em>The Avatar<\/em> can only do aliens who look like ugly humans, you have to wonder what CGI is <em>for<\/em>. This is the problem I&#8217;ve always had with Trek: A splurch of latex on some extra&#8217;s forhead does <em>not<\/em> an alien make. I&#8217;ll see it anyway, but I call failure-of-imagination based on the trailers.<\/li>\n<li>InfoWorld posted <a href=\"http:\/\/infoworld.com\/d\/virtualization\/infoworld-review-desktop-virtualization-windows-and-linux-heats-500\">a very nice review of the major virtualization products<\/a>, including VMWare Workstation 7, Parallels Desktop 4, and Sun&#8217;s VirtualBox 3.1. VirtualBox is free and installed by default in Ubuntu 9.10, but you have to jump through some inexplicable hoops to get it to recognize USB devices. I haven&#8217;t upgraded to VMWare Workstation 7 yet, but Workstation 6 is cheap and does everything I need it to do.<\/li>\n<li>People argue a little about how useful certain time-honored degunking techniques are (especially disk defragmentation, and double especially defragmentation for SSDs) but the biggest single win in my own experience is degunking the Windows Registry. There are a number of apps to do this, but the best on the free side is doubtless <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ccleaner.com\/\">CCleaner<\/a>. (Its original name was Crap Cleaner, which gets points for truth-in-advertising.) Freeware, and if you&#8217;re ever faced with a Registry that&#8217;s been gathering crap for eight or ten years, you&#8217;ll appreciate what it can do.<\/li>\n<li>Two people wrote to me (a little breathlessly) to tell me that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pvponline.com\/2009\/12\/14\/neal-adams-grandpa\/\">Neal Adams is drawing the next several PvP strips<\/a>, and I had to admit that <em>I had no idea whatsoever who he was<\/em>. I flashed on <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Nick_Adams_(actor)\">Nick Adams<\/a>, whom I saw on a few episodes of <em>The Rebel<\/em> back in 1961&#8230;but a comics guy I&#8217;m just not, even if I do follow PvP. (In case you&#8217;re as clueless as I, here&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Neal_Adams\">a bio on Neal Adams<\/a>.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I know, I know, I&#8217;ve been quiet for a week, but there&#8217;s been a lot to do away from the keyboard, much of which borders on sock-drawer sorting. Focusing on only one project for most of a year almost guarantees that things will get messy away from the target of your focus. So I&#8217;ve been [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[41,18,14],"class_list":["post-1040","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oddlots","tag-astronomy","tag-sf","tag-software"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1040","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1040"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1040\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1040"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}