Monthly Archives: September 2010

Must not sleep. Must warn others.

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Chances are if you’re a geek meets nerd, semi-anti-social, A&E broadcast family addict – that is to say, anything like myself – you probably enjoy a little bit of  ‘ye olde  paranormal musings’.  If, for no other reason, the stories seem to be well thought-out.  It’s September, which, according to my local Walgreens, means it’s almost Halloween.  Let’s have a little spooky fun.  We’re going to thrash the transmission by skipping the clutch and slamming it into reverse warp!

And now for something completely different… Continue reading →

Automatically starting and broadcasting in Wirecast

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Recently, one of the local radio stations here in town wanted to stream their stuff live over the internet. Being their ISP, we helped them quite a bit. You can read about that and how it was done here: Multiple parallel audio streams from multiple audio sources on one Wirecast license.. Recently, however, we have uncovered a huge flaw in Wirecast: it’s inability to recover from pretty much any error automatically, start automatically, or automatically broadcast. If you don’t have a 24/7 technician who can sit in front of the server and watch Wirecast around the clock, this presents a problem.

A HUGE problem. And Wirecast’s official answer is “it’s on the wish list”.

Nice. I’m done wishing. So here’s what I did…
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Expand your desktop with Synergy.

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The other day, several clients from up north came to visit as we helped them launch a new marketing product. As they sat watching me pound out code on my computers, they were quite curious about my three monitors. They watched me flow back and forth amongst the three, changing this, checking that, saving here, reloading there… normal operations for me, but not for them. One, who had some previous programming experience, asked if I preferred Linux to Windows. I replied that both had their uses and so I was using both. He was somewhat taken aback by my statement and looked closer at my monitors.

Yep, two windows, and one linux…
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Remote computing with Logmein

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There are many ways to connect to your home computer and do some sort of remote control operation. I’ve discussed in the past RDP and Powershell options, but today I’m going to focus on another tool that I find myself using quite a bit. That tool / service is Logmein http://www.logmein.com . Continue reading →

Dearest Halo, I don’t love you anymore.

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Yeah, yeah, yeah.  There’s a new Halo release today and I’m not sick with the Halo Flu.  I’m not even buying it today.  Does this mean I’ve fallen off the gamer wagon?  Absolutely not.  It’s just… Well it’s not you, Halo, it’s me.  Just kidding, it’s you.  ODST was bad.  Don’t lie to yourself.  The only thing ODST was good for was being traded in for credit on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.  Yup.  I said it.

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Google’s Android is not quite ready for the tablet platform

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Google is saying that the current version of it’s mobile OS Android, is not yet ready for the tablet pc platform.  They have said that the current build Froyo is not a platform for iPad rivals, though they are hinting that they will have a tablet oriented OS soon.

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Powershell and Mysql featuring the null byte (x00)

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For those of you who follow our blog, Brett does a lot of articles about PowerShell and how great it is. So the other day when I need to do a mysql dump of some data on a Windows 2008 server, I fired it up. The deep blue background touched my inner California beach bum, and the verbose bright red error messages made my inner programmer smile.

“This is pretty neat,” I thought. “Maybe Windows has finally made something to compete with Unix’s shell in a real and meaningful way.”

The dump finished and immediately my Common Sense began tingling…
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Free cloning software that works well with windows 7 and server 2008

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Cloning a hard drive can be done through a variety of methods, and for a variety of reasons.  In this blog I’m going to make a couple assumptions. The first, is that you the reader, are looking to clone a drive on the basis that you would like to use this as part of a backup solution. The second, is that you are running windows 7, windows vista, or windows server 2008.

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