blueZhift Blog

Here’s some pure geek gold from xkcd. Just a reminder to us pros to never trust user input! It reminds me of the story behind the naming of Slashdot.

As I had hoped, the attack of the iPhone killers has begun. Verizon has fired the first shot with its soon to be released LG Voyager. First, this is a nice looking phone with a buttload of features, but iPhone killer it is not. Indeed, I’m not really sure that is the true intention anyway. […]

My short answer to the question of whether geeks are cool yet, is no! Indeed, one could argue that by definition, being a geek necessarily means not being cool. Nevertheless, Cnet has launched a geek culture blog that is taking a different view. Maybe times have changed since I first ranted about this, still I […]

The thing that grabbed me about this story was what appeared to be a lot of condescending remarks about Japanese consumers. The Japanese digital media company, Transcosmos Inc., is hoping that their upcoming virtual world, meet-me, will be a G rated alternative to Second Life for Japanese consumers who are so “well behaved and conformist”, […]

With Halo 3 coming out tomorrow, I’m once again wondering if I should do something with the old Xbox which currently gathers dust in the living room. An article at Lifehacker has me thinking Xbox Media Center once again.
Soup Up Your Xbox Media Center
I hear that I can install XBMC without a mod chip, so […]

I’ve been working a bit with RSOAP and one of the required packages is SOAPpy which unfortunately does not appear to be actively supported anymore. Attempts to compile SOAPpy on Windows or in Cygwin always resulted in the following error.
SyntaxError: from __future__ imports must occur at the beginning of the file
I’m no Python expert, but […]

Digital Rights Management (DRM) is widely demonized on the net. So I was a little amused when I got the ad below in the mail. Yeah, I know, software rights management is not the DRM associated with protecting music files, that you usually hear about. But if it has legs like those, who cares!

I’ve been setting up a test installation for a ColdFusion application I’m supporting and dreading having to set up ColdFusion on Ubuntu. I had been planning to install ColdFusion 7 because the earlier 6.1 no longer worked after I upgraded Apache to version 2.2.3. I found instructions for installing ColdFusion 7 on Ubuntu, but in […]

I just read that Windows Vista Service Pack 1 will be out Q1 2008 and weighs in at a hefty 1GB! OMFG, how in the world has it come to this? How do you grow an OS to such size? There’s no good reason that this should be the case and IMHO, Microsoft needs a […]

It’s been a few weeks since my last foray into the virtual world Second Life. I’ll probably logon this weekend having heard that the Second Life Community Conference is taking place right here in Chicago. Even if I wanted to go physically, I couldn’t because the event has been sold out for a while now! […]

While very popular, MySQL is a database with a number of sometimes annoying quirks. On Windows, MySQL stores table names in lower case and does case insensitive comparisons by default. On Linux, it stores table names in their original cases and comparisons are case sensitive. This has obvious implications if one is trying to develop […]

The Consumerist has a video showing a Geek Squad tech charged with installing iTunes on a computer, helping himself to some delicious porn on said computer as well. This was a sting operation set up to investigate complaints of Geek Squad techs copying personal files from customer computers. My my my, stealing porn…Is nothing […]

I just got a link to ifixit’s iPhone Disassembly from my brother in-law who is also into tech gadgets like me. It looks like quite an interesting device inside too. I know, most probably wouldn’t dare think of immediately taking apart your shiny new $600 device! But this sort of tech strip tease has become […]

The iPhone launches today and as I’ve said previously, I won’t be getting one. I’m planning to wait for a cheaper and better one later. But long before that happens, there may well be an army of iPhone clones to choose from. One in particular that has just caught my attention is the Neo1973 running […]

I guess I enjoy hype about as much as the next person. So even though they are plenty of reasons not to buy an iPhone, go ahead, buy one anyway! No really, buy one! Heck, buy two! Why? Oh, I don’t get a commission or anything like that. But I am very selfishly motivated nonetheless. […]