among others. Currently searching for a reasonable command line (linux) way to push files up to SkyDrive. If you got this tamed, don’t hesitate to send it along and of course I’ll credit you
Unless of course you want to remain an ‘anonymous coward’ <grin>
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to start cheering solely for one team. But having been in the closed beta, then open, then RC, and now with RTM in hand, I can honestly say that Microsoft got this one a lot more right.
We won’t go back and talk about Vista, aka “Win7 alpha”. 64 bit computing, is good.
Have a look see, and if you (technically savvy dog that you be) are going to be buying more than one copy for self / family, etc. you really might check out MS / Microsoft Technet Plus; the online-only option is relatively affordable, if you work out the cost there.
The W3C is really the de facto standard : here’s some great tests and info from them :
The Basics – what you should run on all your web pages
The MarkUp Validator. – Also known as the HTML validator, it helps check Web documents in formats like HTML and XHTML, SVG or MathML.
The Link Checker – Checks anchors (hyperlinks) in a HTML/XHTML document. Useful to find broken links, etc.
The CSS Validator – validates CSS stylesheets or documents using CSS stylesheets.
The above three can be used all-in-one by running the Log Validator. Unlike the others, this tool helps improve the quality of a whole site, step by step, by finding the most popular documents that need to be fixed in priority. Learn more about this method in the Web Standards Switch document.
Developing mobile-friendly content? The MobileOK checker is a one-stop service to check your Web site and improve its mobile-friendliness.
Also in the works is the Unicorn, our project to build a Universal Conformance Checker for the Web.
Specific Tools – for Specific Needs
Semantic Extractor – Sees a Web page from a semantic point of view. Extracts such information as outline, description, languages used, etc.
We also have developer several human-centered test tools: the Mobile Test Harness (code) is Web-based harness for browsers test suites, that offers users the possibility to record results on whether the browser they’re using passes or not a set of test suites; and MUTAT – an (older) human-centered testing framework developed in perl (code)
Open Source
All software developed at W3C is Open Source / Free software. Which means that you can download and use them for free, if you like. It also means that you are welcome to participate in making them better, cooler, more useful for you and everyone.
Check each project for instructions on how to download their source code, and install them on your system
All the QA tools are maintained by the volunteer developers of the QA-dev group. Why don’t you join?
I’ve got to give all those social networking things their due. Not only are they amazing time-wasters (hey, someone has to pay the bills) but they do allow a lot of folks to reconnect, and keep everyone appraised of some of the things going on in their life. Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, Myspace, etc. I’ve noticed even families using this quite a bit, I think it’s pretty nifty since many of us are spread out over at least one country.
Among tons of other friends I found in the last 6 weeks, one friend has been deployed multiple times overseas. It is indeed a changing world, as she noted.
I can’t personally thank all of the folks who’ve tried to make a difference overseas. Unfortunately, a lot of the great work they’ve done has been overshadowed by politics (from all sides). Trying to get a consensus built is no easy task in that area, not that it is here either. But I have to believe that a lot of these folks have really helped out a lot of folks “over there” and made the world a better place, overall. Thanks!
http://bit.ly/ sure is popular, and has some tracking built in to see roughly how many folks have clicked on what you thought was nifty. Not as heavily into the Twitter thing, but brevity is important there, too.
While I’ve made no secret that I enjoy the Desiderata, I have to say that even Les Crane was right – his popular early 70’s song version is hard to listen to. There’s only so much sunshine there, sunshine
“Today was good. Today was fun. Tomorrow is another one.” ~ Dr. Seuss
“Our kids learn because they can’t help it! It’s like breathing! Life is Learning … Learning is Life … “and Life Rocks!” ~ Dayna Martin
inspiration, yep
“Life is too short to be living somebody else’s dream.” ~ Hugh Hefner
“The children desire freedom! And every particle of their being from their Source says, ‘You are free. You are so free, that every thought you offer, the entire Universe jumps to respond to it.’ And so, to take that kind of knowledge and try to confine it in any way, defies the Laws of the Universe. You must allow your children to be free, because the entire Universe is set up to accommodate that. And anything you do to the contrary will only bring you regret. You cannot contain those that cannot be contained. It defies Law. ” ~ Abraham
“The butterfly flitting from flower to flower ever remains mine, I lose the one that is netted by me.” ~ Rabindranath Tagore, philosopher, author, songwriter, painter, educator, composer, Nobel laureate (1861-1941)
“It’s not that I feel that school is a good idea gone wrong, but a wrong idea from the word go. It’s a nutty notion that we can have a place where nothing but learning happens, cut off from the rest of life.” ~ John Holt
“Not all those who wander are lost.” ~ J.R.R. Tolkein
“The learners shall inherit the earth while the learned will be beautifully equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.” ~ Eric Hoffer
“Children are born with the ability to learn whatever they need to know and will do so, as long as they are not hindered by well-meaning people trying to teach them.” ~ John Holt
“Life is as dear to a mute creature as it is to man. Just as one wants happiness and fears pain, just as one wants to live and not die, so do other creatures.” ~ The Dalai Lama
“The opposite of courage is not so much fear as it is conformity.” ~ Wayne Dyer
“On with the dance; let joy be unconfined is my motto, whether there’s any dance to dance or any joy to unconfine.” ~ Mark Twain
Hey, I only have so many personal favorites to go around, so it’s always nice to see what others value too.
Or at least, how to try. One of the home machine’s primary partitions, when backed up with Acronis and no compression or encryption, was 24.4 gig in size. Using 7zip, and making a nice solid archive, I ended up at 8.58 gig, spread out in (177, yep) 49.9 meg chunks to meet the 50 meg upload file size limit.
More experimentation, you actually can use a client such as Gladinet to push a backup over to Skydrive. You can use the “conserve bandwidth” option while actually using your computer, and crank it up before you leave
(edit – there’s been an upgrade to Gladinet, it’s actually even improved a bit more – was a good investment it seems)
windows live skydrive 25 gig free
I’m pretty confident in leaving things out there in public, as long as I got to choose the passphrase. I’ve verified that 7 zip really does care if one character is off in a 200 char password, and it does use AES-256. Luckily, my data doesn’t consist of anything important enough to expend that sort of resources in attempting to decode.
Reasonably good passwords / phrases can be generated by things such as https://www.grc.com/passwords.htm – as well, 7zip does have the option to encrypt the file headers as well. I remember a business case where someone thought that an old Winzip file was encrypted with their super-secret password (likely their dog’s name) and didn’t realize that anyone, without any password at all could read the name, size, etc. of each file within the archive. Oops, that caused him some issues with their employees.
More pith – 7zip can use the “63 random printable ASCII characters” portion of Steve Gibson’s GRC password page, which is significant, bits-of-entropy wise, because
1;s[&Exv3[-?=c*zX;sgdkHn.J’Y;CWC$.y9ScB*xl’+e9′(G$^Uk\A@loZdiPM is a little harder to try to brute-force than
82FCB457CDB17D9E08F7A1A62BB798046373F9D89EF4DDDAC47224385F7D489 – while both may be 63 characters long in this case, the second string is not quite as “strong”.
Since you put up with the tech, ending with a nice random song lyric for you : Bloodhound Gang, “I’m the root of all that’s evil, yeah, but you can call me Cookie . . .”
This is not some sort of challenge for crackers with too much time on their hands. But in installing all of this good WordPress stuff, I’ve been trying to make it not only quick and functional, but relatively secure.
I’ll detail some of the steps, and come back and update this as I go.
This is something I am certainly checking out. I have terabytes on the home NAS (I know, geek) so it’s not really feasible to back up all of my data this way (quick bunny trail : high speed @ home is generally not so high speed, on the upload side; 15 mbps DSL is only that under optimal conditions; good, but not that good – beats 110 baud though!)
I’m learning there’s more out there than “tech methods” like rsync over ssh, or using 7zip to split files up to store in email, or using GPG to encrypt and chunk things over to a 25 gig free Skydrive account. http://www.gnupg.org/ etc. to encrypt files and store them off-site at https://skydrive.live.com/
P.S. Plug for 7zip. Not only is it open source, it has been both quicker than winrar in my recent use, as well as compressing significantly better.
Boring background bits, unless you’re ready to nerd on. Pics at the bottom.
My buddy Mike told me about 7zip years ago; Open source, freeware.
Here’s an efficiency test I ran on an .iso file; want to get the smallest files for storing remotely, as it doesn’t take much time to compress things with 8 cores compared to uploading over DSL to Skydrive, etc. This below is the .iso for the beta version of Acronis I’m using (Win7 64 bit compatible, and it has a 50g online backup option of it’s own).
I used the “max compression / solid” options, turned up in both Winrar and 7zip, just as high as they’d go (as if it makes a diff, when either program is done in 10 seconds or less). The results were QUITE different.
Now, 7z is not quite as "geeky feature broad" as Winrar is, but there's little that I can't do with it I've found. Just FYI, as the differences are pretty startling. This becomes a lot more obvious in the charts, since it is chunking up my entire C: partition, and the 100 meg pre-partition from Windows 7, in preparation for a "skydrive fly-by" upload.
BTW, while it doesn’t take nearly as much memory to decompress (which is very good, since most desktops for the moment aren’t carrying 12g of ram) as the gallery pictures below show, if 7zip says it’s gonna take a lot of memory to compress, I’d listen to it
Yessir, so there you go! Charts below, you’ll need to click on each picture twice to get the full sized / potentially readable version.
![ms788692.win7banner_technet_EN(en-us,MSDN.10)[1]](http://leveron.com/blarg/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/ms788692.win7banner_technet_ENen-usMSDN.1011.gif "ms788692.win7banner_technet_EN(en-us,MSDN.10)[1]")
