Another Nerd's Blog

AddToRun - add any program to the windows run screen

2011-03-23T12:25:00.000-07:00

http://sourceforge.net/projects/addtorun/ A cool little program called AddToRun will let you specify any program you want with any name you want, and add it to the run menu (windows key + R). If you don't want to clutter up your desktop with shortcuts and don't want to dig through the start menu, this could be a convenient little tool to have. All you do is pick the program you want to run and

Some general comments on backups

2011-02-15T16:04:00.000-08:00

Given my last post about mozy doing away with their unlimited plan, and seeing all the reactions from people, some of which seemed to be in a panic at the thought of possibly not having a full complete backup for a few weeks, I thought it would be good to make a few suggestions about backing up data. The first thing to realize is your backup is exactly what it says - a backup. It should be a

Mozy ditches unlimited backup AND increases prices- time for mozy alternatives

2011-02-01T11:57:00.000-08:00

Mozy sent out an email to (most) of their customers last night announcing they would be dropping their unlimited backup plan in favor of a tiered pricing plan. Mozy has offered their unlimited plan since 2006, so to be fair this isn't a bait and switch type scenario. And I can understand prices increase over time and they may need to adjust their pricing to stay in business. But I think they went

If your prices suck, hide them - seems to be register.com's policy

2010-09-16T15:39:00.000-07:00

One of the websites I host used register.com to register their domain name. I wanted to ask them to allow me to transfer their domain name over to my godaddy account because it makes things easier for me if everything is in one location. Plus if I have admin access to the domain name it makes things easier if I need to make any updates - I don't have to bother them to do it or try to figure out

Thinking of doing business online? Don't use paypal

2009-12-17T12:05:00.000-08:00

http://blog.apparentsoft.com/business/124/is-paypal-good-for-your-microisv-business-a-short-paypal-horror-story/I've had this same experience with paypal several years ago. They closed my account because they thought some transactions violated their terms of use. They would not tell me which specific transactions. They gave me conflicting information when i called them. And they also sat on the

Star Trek

2009-05-13T13:43:00.000-07:00

Sorry, but as a trek fan, i have to vent. (some spoilers if you care)The new movie is a good scifi movie, but barely an ok trek movie. The plot though was just really stupid. A giant mining ship from the future comes back and is able to destroy an entire fleet of ships, but the enterprise by itself was able to destroy an entire salvo of the same torpedoes that destroyed an entire fleet. And the

is google becoming evil? they are breaking website keyword tracking

2009-02-04T10:42:00.000-08:00

Googles moto says not to be evil. But a change to their search page is going to be very evil for a lot of web site owners.Normally when someone searches on google and clicks a link in the search results, the website owner can determine what you searched for that brought you to their site. This is very useful since it makes it easy to figure out what people are interested in and can be extremely

Free disk partitioning tool - gparted

2009-01-21T15:11:00.000-08:00

I've used partition magic in the past, and it's a great tool. But it does cost money, and being able to do the same thing for free is always nice :)It's called gparted. It's free and open source and runs on top of linux (don't worry it works with windows, and you don't need to install anything).gparted.sourceforge.netYou can download it from there. Download the stable cd ISO image. At this point

Windows 7 - first impressions

2009-01-12T12:56:00.000-08:00

So just in case anyone is curious, the next version of windows after vista is called Windows 7. Microsoft decided to go back to just numbering them instead of giving them names.Anyhow, I've been beta testing it for the last week or so. I have to say so far i am impressed. This is the first beta release and so far I've found no major bugs and only some very minor ones. I even pushed my luck and

problems changing a readonly text box

2008-12-11T13:38:00.000-08:00

Just ran into this problem today. I had a page which was running under .net 1.1This page had a textbox which was set in the aspx page to readonly=true. there was a 2nd page which was changing the value of the text using some javascript. This all worked. When i upgraded to .net 2.0 though i ran into problems. The text of the box would appear to change, but the value that actually came through was

New microsoft commercial with Jerry Seinfeld & Bill Gates

2008-09-05T13:58:00.000-07:00

I'd say this is a good commercial for vista - it leaves me with the same feeling i get when thinking about vista - *shrug* eh.

cool service to test website on multiple browsers/os

2008-09-02T17:12:00.000-07:00

I discovered a cool little service that you can use to test how your websites behave on many different browsers and several operating systems. It's called CrossBrowserTesting.com. The service starts off free, limiting you to 5 minutes each session but unlimited sessions. This is usually good enough to give a website a quick once over or to test some specific functionality of a site. You log into

Chrome - the google web browser

2008-09-02T17:01:00.001-07:00

So some of you may or may not have heard by now that google, somewhat suddenly, announced availability of a browser they developed. I'm typing this blog post using it. You can download it from www.google.com/chrome - it will live side by side with IE, FF etc.It does have some rendering quirks on various sites, but for the most part it works. And when it does work, it works fast. It renders pages

competition for google?

2008-07-28T10:45:00.001-07:00

I heard them mention on the radio today some new search engine called cool, although it's spelled cuil. They boast that they have indexed 3x as much content as google has.I've tried 2 searches on them so far and I'm not impressed. Search results took a while to show up on my first search, which was for the maximum memory card size for my camera. It returned just 3 results. The #1 result was for a

Blank form field results in a null insert

2008-07-23T14:20:00.000-07:00

Just a quick little note regarding empty strings and null values.If you are using a sql or object data source you have the option on the paramters to set convertemptystringtonull to true or false. If set to true, then a blank form field will be treated as a null value. Which means that db column has to accept null otherwise the insert will fail.I was running into an issue where the insert was

Microsoft Mobile Live Search

2008-07-22T15:54:00.001-07:00

Ok Google. I generally love all your products. Heck even this blog is done using google. But I have to be honest and say that I think Microsoft has got you beat with their latest version of Live Search for mobile devices.I just discovered this a few days ago after installing a new rom update on my Mogul. Prior to this I've used google maps and goog411 and I was happy with both. But the map on the

Mobile Technology

2008-07-22T13:24:00.000-07:00

I admit I'm one of those people who loves his cell phone. I'm old enough to remember when cell phones were a luxury item. But I'm not so old that I've forgotten when I bought my first cell phone. I was amazed by it at the time. Here's this device that's small enough to fit in a (large) coat pocket and yet with it i can talk to just about anyone, anywhere. And that was about all I could do with it