August 2005 Archives

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About a week ago, my doorbell rings, and before I can get to the door I can hear a large truck driving off, and on the doorstep is a small box. It really irks me when delivery drivers just drop stuff on the porch, but when I found out it was a new goodie to review, I quickly forgot all about that and tore into the packaging.

Behold, the Keyspan PS-4A USB Print Server! Not to be confused with the older US-4A model, which looks identical, the new PS-4A model is bi-directional (printers that can report back ink/paper status can now do so), and includes full USB 2.0 connectivity.

Tonight, I just found out that Movable Type 3.2 is now beta. While reading up on this, a call was made for feature requests for future versions, so here's mine.

Some time back, I wrote in their support forums for some help in finding a way to better control the default number of entries displayed in a blog. Currently you can either have a set number of entries, or entries from a certain number of days, but there was no way to combine these two the way I wanted.

Thanks to an act of Congress, the United States will gain an extra month of of daylight starting in 2007, when Daylight Savings Time begins three weeks earlier, and ends a week later. There are a number of positive askects to this, but for tech types, there may be cause for concern.

Daylight Savings Time was last changed in 1987, since that time, a number of devices have incorporated built in clocks that automatically reset for DST automatically (VCRs, etc), not to mention computers with built in clocks. So, in less than two years, these devices will no longer function properly (during those 4 weeks), which for some might be problematic. It is a given that software updates for the latest operating systems will be updated within that time to include fixes for this, and that most likely previous OS versions may also have minor patches released. But older systems may not receive updates, and devices such as VCRs won't be updatable.

Just days after Windows Vista was made available to developers, the first Windows Vista viruses were already on the loose. Apparently this next-generation platform really delivers on the breakthrough basics and end-to-end experiences promoted on the Microsoft Windows Vista web site. If virus development continues at this pace for Vista, buyers may well find the shrink wrapped CDs already fully loaded with them by the time the product ships, saving customers the time of having their systems infected over the internet...