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daily 02/20/2009
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
daily 02/19/2009
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
daily 02/18/2009
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Static Code Analysis Plug-ins – hudson – Hudson Wiki
nice suite of static Hudson plugins
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
daily 02/16/2009
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Very cool construction set.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Why I needed a floppy disk
Last spring, Gina took a typing at home job. When the computer qualifications were “Windows 95, a floppy drive, and a parallel port” I laughed. I figured they needed to print something once in a while and, heck, who needs a floppy drive? So we bought an old computer off her sister that has XP on it and called it good.
Well, I was wrong on all my assumptions. She did need a floppy drive — she saves all her work to floppy every day. Next, she did need a parallel port– the typing program has a dongle hanging on the parallel port. It’s not hard to see that their requirements are getting harder and harder to come by. Most printers are USB now, so parallel ports are disappearing. Most PC makers still include a floppy drive, but who still uses it on a day-to-day, let alone a monthly, basis?
The kicker is that I was wrong on the third assumption as well. I figured that the typing program would require Windows, but it really doesn’t. It’s a straight DOS program! So everything is still using technology of 15 years ago!
One of the many nice things about this typing job is that it can travel with you — if you take the PC along. As I’m loading up the PC back into our van on Thanksgiving weekend, I suddenly remembered this old laptop I have. It’s a Pentium 75 that I picked up somewhere (if you are a computer junkie like me, you tend to accumulate hardware). By the time I got a hold of it, some fool has installed Windows 2000 on it. Therefore it took an hour to boot up, and after that it was still unusable. After I got it home, I managed to install Debian, played around with it for a while, but decided that it was annoying not having a network connection on it. So then I promptly put it on a pile of stuff. That was about five years and one move ago.
