Checksum Arcanius

For those of us out there that like to come in first, Bernie has decided to let us in on his Googlescious secrets. Leading the fray, he suggests lots of machine-readable links and generous use of the title attribute. From his prominence on topics such as The difference between Grey and Gray, it seems to have worked for him. In his famous style (at least its famous around here), Bernie has subtitled his post “Part I” — which of course promises more juicy secrets yet to come.

While I am doubtful that my current computer science class is teaching me how to use Java for meaningful projects (as if that is possible), it is giving me some interesting programs to write that produce fun output. Last week’s random sentence generator was quite funny, and this week’s Anagram discover has found some interesting re-writings of my name:

• Royal men cry
• Many cry “lore” (What some say about religion)
• Mare only cry (The sad female horse)

Since I will be attendig the Seattle Mindcamp this weekend, I talked to the Display group at Microvision and they agreed that it would be a good idea to lona me a Nomad Expert Technician System, the ND-2100 version of Microvision’s wearable heads-up display.

So here I am, wearing sunglasses and a Nomad that has been running for several hours, blogging away like a madman. Dan has photos that might be available on this blog before too long.

At the mindcamp, DAn and I will be pushing the TRC’s fundraising and outreach agendas, as well as geeking out with the 148 other nerds in attendence. It should be a good time, but I’m still planning on taking a break to see my sister who we are expecting up here from Eugene this weekend.

My biggest regret will be missing frisbee (which occurs at the same time as the mind camp’s opening ceremonies), but if we end up getting a million dollar endowment for the TRC out of this, it will all be worth it, right? Or even one year’s sponsorship… I hope the frisbee crew will forgive me…

If the task manager that comes with windows just isn’t cutting it, or if you are just someone who wants more information and control over your Windows-running computer, then SysInternal‘s Process Explorer is for you.

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I decided that I probably really should start backing up my documents on a semi-regular basis. Although I’ve had extraordinary luck with hard drives, I don’t expect any hard drive to last indefinitely, and I’d rather be safe than sorry. I decided to begin with my Documents and Settings folder on my laptop. I first tried backing up using 7zip, my preferred compression program. However, it immediately ran into errors with special Windows files inside of that directory. Not wanting to make a laborious process out of a simple backup, I turned to google, and found this little gem: Windows XP Backup Made Easy. And as the title suggests, the Windows XP backup utility actaully does make backing up easy. Now my entire Documents and Settings folder contents are safe. For now.

Here’s a capture of the backup in action:

Next up is backing up the content of SilverFir.net on a regular basis…

Check out the live comment previewing I just installed. Not only was this the easiest Wordpres Plugin I have ever installed, it is also one of the coolest!

I highly suggest it to users of WordPress, to avoid whoopsie’s like half on my comment disappearing over at Passive Digressive, and shots in the dark like my recent comment at Bernie Zimmermann’s blog (even though that one worked).

This weekend, I took a real stab at Gallery2. It has an immense yet well-managed feature set, it is spectacularly modular, and it is highly configurable. Unfortunately, underneath its glossy exterior, it is depressingly slow, and, if I dare demean a feat that I in no way consider myself capable of accomplishing, the software is very poorly done under the hood.
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