Solving IT Challenges
I ordered business cards and opted for premium Matt paper. I was expecting some premium paper, but was disappointed when I got them. I guess it’s my own fault, because I did not educate myself what exactly does premium Matt paper mean. The shipping was faster than advertised, which was a nice surprise though.
Posted in general.
– May 18, 2009
I was surprised when I plugged my 20″ iMac into an “energy meter” to see that it only burns less than 70 Watts when in normal operation (screen not dimmed, Airport turned on, browsers VMWare open). I borrowed one today and played around to see how much various devices consume (like my Canon printer in idle mode) and just how energy efficient are “energy efficient light bulbs“.To cut the long story short, energy efficient light bulbs really are energy efficient.
Canon inject printer iP4300 consumes 0 Watt when in idle mode (it probably consumes more, but so small, that the energy meter does not detect it).
An interesting observation about light bulbs though: normal, healthy energy efficient light bulb takes a bit to warm up. During that period, it consumes less energy that it’s supposed to when “warm”. I also have a bit “overused” energy efficient light bulb (was frequently turned on/off for short periods of time) and interestingly enough, it consumes more power when “warming up” (an 11Watt light bulb consumes 15-17 Watts when warming up), but then (after 1 min apx) drops to 10-11 Watts. Thought someone else might find that bit of information useful.
Posted in general.
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– May 9, 2009
It is very interesting how usefull the twitter is when a service such as Gmail goes down. You can “monitor” real time updates on Twitter by using a hashtag.
Interestingly enough, Google’s appsstatus shows no problems.
Posted in general.
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– May 8, 2009
Old design
I guess the old blue theme was looong overdue, so I decided to change it. It took longer than expected, but here we are. I don’t know about “better”, but it is definitely different. And that’s a good thing.
On a related note, I do like the new Wordpress 2.7 administration interface.
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– May 8, 2009
When you serialize DateTime object to XML, the XmlSerializer automagically appends timezone info at the end. Consider that you are serializing just the date (DateTime.Now.Date) and that you timezone is GMT+2, then the resulting XML would look like “2009-05-03T00:00:00+02:00“. In order to serialize DateTime without offset, you must specify DateTimeKind.Utc. Like so:
date = DateTime.SpecifyKind(date, DateTimeKind.Utc);
Posted in general.
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– May 5, 2009
Odločili smo se, da bomo preko Kompasa najeli apartmaje v sosednji državi, z namenom da si malce odpočijemo. Ker pri treh otrocih mimogrede kakšen zboli, smo doplačali 3% zneska za morebitno odpoved (bolezen, smrt v družini, ipd). In kot nalašč je naša najmlajša tudi zbolela. Tu pa nastopi drobni tisk, ki ga po lastni neumnosti prej nismo prebrali. Če želiš aranžma odpovedati, moraš plačati 15 EUR administrativnih stroškov — da te odjavijo — kljub temu, da že vnaprej plačaš 3% (ki jih jaz razumem kot neke sorte zavarovanje pred odpovedjo). Dodatno pa v primeru bolezni zahtevajo potrdilo zdravnika. Človek bi si predstavljal, da ti zdravnik brez težav napiše potrdilo da si (v našem primeru naša najmlajša, dojenček) bolan, če si seveda res. In ti tudi ga, vendar se izkaže da je to samoplačniška storitev, ki te stane nadaljnih 23 EUR.
Tako ti Kompas zaračuna 3% za morebitne odpovedi, potem ti v primeru odpovedi zaračunajo še 15 EUR administrativnih stroškov, 23 EUR pa ti zaračuna zdravnik za potrdilo. V našem primeru, ko je “aranžma” stal “le” 63 EUR, nam dejansko različni akterji poberejo več kot polovico (39,90 EUR).
Posted in general.
– April 25, 2009
I hate it when home/end keys don’t work the way they should*. I’ve been using a modified JAR file in the Firefox installation, but every time I got Firefox upgrade, the JAR file would get overwritten and so the home/end keys would not function like they should anymore.
I was lucky to find an improved keyfixer for Firefox, which works on Firefox 3 as well. I’m typing this in Firefox 3.0.7 and my home/end pgup/pgdn keys work as expected. Thanks Matt!
*: I want my home key to take the cursor to the beginning of the line, and end key to the end of the line. I have also configured keybindings in OS X so that is how it works in other applications, but Firefox wasn’t picking that up. If you want to remap those keys, create a DefaultKeyBinding.dict file in ~/Library/KeyBindings directory and you’re good to go. You can download the file and modify to your taste.
Posted in general.
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– March 6, 2009
After using Windows operating systems for a long time (and still am), I’ve assembled my own utility toolset that got installed on every Windows machine I used. With regards to photo viewing, I was faithful to IrfanView for fast, random photo viewing and otherwise used IMatch, Lightroom and Photoshop for more advanced tasks.
On Mac OS X, there is Quicklook (just press spacebar on an image), then there is the Preview, but neither is well suited for ordinary photo viewing, where you sometimes crop an image and convert it to another format. IPhoto wants to import images and is most importantly not fast for viewing a single images now and then (or a folder of images). So, I found Xee, which seems great so far.
Posted in OS X, general, software.
– February 8, 2009
February first marks the start of my own business. I’m open for business. It is not the best timing, but so far, it feels good.
Posted in general.
– February 3, 2009
After I migrated VirtualBox images to VMWare’s VMDK format, I noticed that Windows Server 2008 takes much longer to boot in VMWare Fusion (2.0.1) than in VirtualBox. As I was swamped with work, I didn’t have time to investigate. I was using a MacBook at the time.
Now, on my shiny new iMac, it was still booting slow – now this just didn’t feel right. I noticed in the release notes that this issue can be worked around by converting the image back to hardware format 6 (whatever that means). And lo and behold, it boots really fast now. Go to Virtual Machine menu and choose Downgrade Virtual Machine and you’ll be set. Hope that helps!
Posted in software.
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– January 26, 2009
