Author Archives: David

Six Degrees

OK, this is a bit of a stretch … but the connection between IBM i and IBM Watson just got a tiny (very tiny) bit smaller.

Many people (especially those in the IBM i community) know that Watson runs on the Power 7 CPU (Power 750 to be exact) … the same chip that IBM i runs on.

Well, it turns out that the blog that IBM is discussing Watson on, ‘A Smarter Planet’, is running the “WP Tags to Technorati” plug-in for WordPress that I wrote.

OK, so it’s a BIG stretch … let me live my illusions 🙂

Trying Multisite

I’m in the process of experimenting with the multi-site capability of WordPress.

This allows me to run multiple blogs on a single instance of WordPress.

Right now I’ve moved this blog and Eclipsey Ramblings to multi-site. I’ll probably be moving Fallingrock Photography to it also (after I figure out the bug that’s causing the photos to not display correctly).

A few observations about the migrations that I’ve done so far … Continue reading

Copyright

The other day I was discussing the nature of Copyright with my sister-in-law Gloria (who is an attorney) … I stated that “Copyright is automatic upon creation of a work”.

Gloria said I was incorrect … that you had to register for a copyright … and that you had no basis in court unless you do register the copyright.

This was quite a shock to me … so I decided to do some research.

Turns out that Gloria was partially right in a technical sense … and completely correct in a practical sense.

According to the Copyright Office

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Confidential Information

I saw a very interesting mail reject message today on one of my mailing lists …

You are receiving this message because you have attempted to send an e-mail containing confidential information. Examples of confidential information include, but are not limited to social security numbers, birth dates, account numbers, policy numbers, medical history, financial history, personal phone numbers and user IDs. Another example of sending confidential information would be combining any two or more of the following: name, address, identification numbers (employee number, phone number), organizational affiliation (place of employment). This information may be contained in the body of the message or any attachments.

I looked at the body of the message it was rejecting (which was included in it’s entirety), and noticed that the message referenced dummy social security numbers (the message discusses SQL techniques).

Of course, based on the warning message, it would probably reject ANY numeric text that was included in a message at all.

I suspect that the company, who’s server rejected the message, does not have a problem with email volume … since the majority of email sent to them is probably rejected.

I really wonder about companies that have such incredibly draconian content rules.  How do they stay in business?

Snow Days

Garage ViewAs you might have noticed (or heard), the Chicago area has had a bit of snow recently.

Lots of people are off work because the the streets are impassible.

Ginny’s home, there’s just no way she could have gotten to her office.

Due to this contraption they call “The Internet”, and an invention called “VPN“, I have no excuse to not work.

In fact, I’m pretty sure there isn’t anyone in our office right now.

Bill O’Reilly : Comedian

This is absolutely hilarious … Bill O’Reilly has a great future in comedy (if only he were actually joking):

The Colbert Report Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Bill O’Reilly Proves God’s Existence – Neil deGrasse Tyson
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog</a> Video Archive

Bill O’Reilly proves God exists, but Neil deGrasse Tyson knows what causes the changing tides.

Thanks to the Friendly Atheist for the link.

VOIPo

I recently signed up with a new VOIP service for my home phone.

I’m using VOIPo … so far I’m really impressed.

The call quality is great, it’s got a lot of nice features, and the rates can’t be beat.   For a 2 year contract, the price is only $7.50 / month with free hardware & setup.

I’m going to give it a few more days before I start the process of porting my 2nd phone number from Vonage to VOIPo.

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Chase Bank Win!

Yes, you read that correctly.

Chase Bank gave me some good customer service.

Of course it was in the branch, face to face, so it’s harder to be lackadaisical about customer service when the customer is right there.

Recently Chase announced they were implementing higher fees at lower thresholds for their basic banking products.

I have a number of checking accounts at Chase … and want to avoid fees entirely.

So I went to the Hoffman Estates branch to talk to someone about my accounts and what I could do to avoid fees or close accounts.

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Adding Help to Dialogs

I’m in the process of updating the help text for my RCP and have found that some of the dialogs that I’m invoking don’t have the ability to directly add help context id’s.

After a bit of digging, I found it’s not that difficult to add help to an object that extends Dialog.

For this example, I’m going to add a help id to the InputDialog class.

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