Neufeld Computer Services

I have samples of the ability to watch TV on my Palm Centro, but frankly I’m not that dedicated to TV watching in the first place, and in general the picture looks too small for me.  But this may be another case where my personal tastes make me miss a real revolution.

According to this MSNBC.com story, mobile TV is taking off, and it’s connecting to another current trend, TV on demand or mediated through your TiVo.  I think the idea of a TV schedule, other than as an initial release notice of various episodes, will become a thing of the past.  And if the story is correct–and it looks like it–then mobile TV will go hand in hand with that, providing the show you want when and where you want it.

Personally, I don’t expect to start paying that kind of money for show episodes.  They’re citing prices around $1.99 which doesn’t sound all that low to me.  But many will do so, I’m sure, and wait for people to start pushing that price downward.

This is an interesting place to post this, as I don’t really do my best work on this blog.  Here I simply put information that is useful to my clients and a few other technical things that interest me.  But for your more integral and important company blog, WebWiseWords at EntireWeb has some good suggestions for improving your blog traffic.

I particularly endorse his recommendation of Wordpress, and quite a number of the plugins he mentions.

“Turned” nasty?  I think hacking is nasty in general.  It has been hard to change people’s attitudes toward hackers and copyright violators, because the damage is generally not physical.  But the fact is that hackers and spammers cost businesses money.  These activities are not some sort of harmless joke–they do damage.  Anyone who works in information management or computer security obviously realizes that.  But even now many in the general public aren’t aware of the kind of damage that can be done.

Now MSNBC.com reports that there has been a hacking attack that is intended to cause physical harm.  A breach in the security of the Epilepsy Foundation allowed the posting of animated images and links to pages containing similar graphics.  These were made to flash quickly and in such a way as to induce seizures in people with certain types of epilepsy–the very people who would be seeking help at the Epilepsy Foundation site.

This is an undeniably nasty sort of activity, but hopefully it will result in a silver lining–more people realizing that breaking other people’s security isn’t a prank and isn’t a crime with limited victims.  It’s a property crime and often an invasion of privacy.

I’m amazed that I still encounter people who don’t realize this after all the identity theft and the amount of spam that people report.  I will have someone reporting to me that they are overwhelmed by spam but at the same time refusing to consider using more secure passwords, for example, or running with inadequate security.  Try almost any apartment building, for example, and you’ll find unsecured wireless connections available.  But do you realize that it’s both stealing and a risk to your personal information to use such a connection?

The law is catching up.  The public needs to do so as well.  Information isn’t optional; it’s at least as important these days as the locks and security system on your home or your business’s physical location.

I would really like to be able to recommend to a small business client that they adopt Linux because it is lower cost.  I have been able to recommend OpenOffice.org to a number of folks, and have even had it accepted.  That is because for most users it will perform all the functions for which they use Microsoft Office, and will do so consistently.

After I converted my own desktop to Ubuntu a few months back, I was thinking that we were getting close to the point where I could recommend to some folks that they just go for broke and run Linux in a business environment.  I’m probably optimistic, but that is what I was thinking.  Gutsy Gibbon worked well for me, and I carried out practically all my regular work tasks on it, with the exception of video editing.

With Hardy Heron several things happened.  First, my sound is less reliable than it was before.  Having done a good bit of searching around the web, I understand part of the reason for this.  PulseAudio is supposed to be wonderful, and my most used sound program, Audacity, doesn’t work with it.  But in addition, the version of Audacity included with Hardy Heron is a beta.  The reasons for including a beta package in your release OS is incomprehensible to me.  It reflects thinking that your OS is only for computer fanatics who will want to be testing the latest stuff.  Between the sound system and a few other things, I’ve gone to doing my audio work on a separate box running Gutsy.

Then there’s this web browser, again a beta version.  It’s not ready for business use yet.  It still has a number of bugs, yet it’s in the release version of Hardy Heron.  I have had enough glitches with it that I know I’d be hearding complaints from a business customer if they had to work with it.

Now don’t get me wrong.  I’m not upset about this for my personal use.  If they hadn’t shipped these betas with the release version I would have installed them myself by now.  But that’s the point.  I’m the type of guy who likes to play with them.  I don’t mind looking around for the answers to annoying problems with sound just because I’m using a card with a questionable driver, a sound system that may not quite be there yet, and a bet audio program.  I have a nice little box across the room that I built from spare parts and on which I installed Gutsy, and I can do anything I need to over there.

Well, anything I need to except to tell a customer who only needs basic office functions that he should save a bunch of money by buying a machine with some version of Linux, OpenOffice, and perhaps GnuCash or something similar.  I could build him such a machine, and without paying even OEM prices for the OS, he could save a few hundred per machine.  The businesses I work with run more than one but generally less than a dozen stations.  They don’t have huge budgets.  Some of them would like those options.

Along the way, I need to play with more Linux releases, and I will do so.  For now, however, I must sadly stick to recommending Windows XP (please not Vista unless I can’t avoid it), and OpenOffice for those who are willing.

OK, here’s what all this testing has been about. On those of my blogs that use MiniPosts, any post received via Postie will not appear on the main index page. If I edit the post and save it again, they do appear.
The reason for this bizarre behavior is that somehow posts via Postie are not getting marked as NOT being MiniPosts, thus they aren’t shown on the main page, and they aren’t added to the MiniPosts list either. One can navigate directly to them.
This needs to be fixed via the proper hooks, but I don’t have time to finish finding them. I will try to do that later. In the meantime I have produced a hack. It is truly a hack, but it does work.
I simply added the following line to postie-functions.php:
add_post_meta($post_ID, ‘_mini_post’, 0);
This goes as line 277 if you’re using this hack, or as line 276 if you’re using Postie version 1.1.1 unchanged. (I’m using the hack.)
My MiniPosts version is 0.6.5.
Keep watch here if you want to see a better fix. Also, if I see that someone else has done one, I’ll post a comment here.

I have produced a hack for postie. If this works, I will post the hack next.

Testing the system!

I’m testing this post. If I’ve acquired a following via RSS, please ignore and forgive this and a couple of following tests.

I’m always on the lookout for good Bible software that is either very low cost or free, so when I got an e-mail from Berean Bible Study Freeware, I put it on my list to review.

Let me note first that I’m not comparing this to solutions like Logos Bible Software.  It’s not intended to compete with that market, and unsurprisingly it doesn’t.  What is does is provide you with a couple of Bible translations free of charge, quick to install and run, and very easy to use.  I am not going to go into much detail on the Windows version, because it really isn’t what I need.  I need to get much more complicated!  I’m guessing that Berean Bible Freeware won’t be replacing e-Sword on Windows or GnomeSword on Linux for me any time soon, and of course none of the above will be replacing Logos!

But I have to tell you that I am much more frequently asked for a low cost, simple Bible solution, something people can use to look up one or two texts, than I am for a highly complex solution that will do anything you want it to, if you can just figure out how to do it.  Thus there will be many times when I will tell someone that Berean Bible Freeware is just right for them.

For me, the attraction of this freeware package is in the version for PalmOS.  There I want something simple, easy to install and use, fast, and without an excessive footprint in memory.  This package seems to do all that well.  I installed it on my Palm Centro with the ESV (download).  You should not imitate me, to wit, don’t install this when you’re half asleep and forget what type of file represents a program on Palm!  The .exe file on the download page I just linked goes on your desktop/notebook to which you sync your Palm, and it sets up the install with no problems.

There are several other Bible versions available, though not all for the Palm, including the KJV, NKJV, and WEB.

In use, the only thing I would add would be the ability to scale the size of the display font.  Otherwise, this is just what I want on my Palm, and I’m happy to have found it.  It feels like my new toy (the Palm Centro) is now complete, since I have a Bible on it!

This guy used it to get out of jail.

Personally, I’d prefer not to have the opportunity to use it in that particular fashion, but at least it sounds useful.

I’m trying to make my use of twitter both productive and fun by mentioning my blog posts but connecting them also with interesting things through the day.  We;ll see if I get any followers.  It may be that I’m just too boring as a person for this to work.