I’ve always said that there should be a way to power devices wirelessly. Now MIT has proven that it can be done. Just think what that will mean for the world of mobile devices.
Categories
Category: technology
I know this is a sidetrack from my normal topics, but I guess I’m testing the community out there. I have not been able to get reliable help on this problem even with Google.
I got PHP working on IIS 6 and then it magically stopped working. I got it working again (not sure what changed) and then it stopped working again as soon as the server got rebooted. Does anyone know how to make IIS play nice with PHP?
P.S. Let’s just pretend that I have no choice about IIS or PHP. It won’t help me to hear anyone suggest their favorite alternatives to either of them – if I could change the setup I would not bother with this combo.
Categories
The Way Things Work
I spent a great deal of time working on a post that I thought might become a classic on my blog. The day after I posted it I got comments (real comments, not spam) on another post that was not even on my front page anymore. The comments quickly built to the point that it was obvious that the older post was a classic. I found myself wondering why the old post had suddenly been discovered. Then I noticed that the old post was listed as a related post to the one I had just posted. Obviously people were reading the post and got interested enough to look at the related posts. Apparently this helped some readers discover the post that would become the classic.
This just goes to validate the effort that I went to in adding plugins to show related posts. Hopefully the classic-posts plugin will help to assure that those posts which are of interest to my readers will never be lost in the archives. This all just goes to prove that Joshua Porter was right in his lessons for would-be bloggers about the value of linking to other posts and displaying your best work even after it is off the front page.
Categories
New-Tech Day
I think that today marks the first time that three new technology concepts that I could get excited about have land on my desk in one day. Two of the three are quickly spreading around the internet while the third has yet to gain a widespread following (as far as I know). The first item is Livescribe. The idea of smart paper infused with an invisible grid is not particularly new, but the people at Livescribe expect to have a time-synchronized audio recording to go with the smart paper and they hope to have the smart paper available at prices comparable to regular paper. The pen would be a scant $200 and they expect to be in the market by the end of this year.
The second item is an addition to Google Maps called Street View. Some members of my family will probably be familiar with the view I linked to. I can’t wait until they expand the coverage of this. It will make trip planning much different. As it is, I can sit in my own home and explore New York City.
The third item is Microsoft Surface. The concept of multi-point interactive touch screens that this is based on was demonstrated in February of 2006. I have been excited about the possibilities of this technology for months now, but Microsoft has added the interaction with objects on the surface which makes this idea even more appealing. Like Livescribe, they hope to have this to market by the end of this year although it will not be targeted at the consumer market by then.
Categories
Places I’ve Been
I have been enjoying reading Mark Hanson’s blog and there I stumbled upon this way to show what states I’ve been to. I can’t count the number of times I been in discussions with people about who has traveled where so I thought this was fun. Since I’ve never been outside the United States this is, sadly, a complete map for me.
Categories
Protect Your Credit
I got a “please pass it on” email that actually looked useful. Being generally unwilling to pass emails on, and considering that most of my email contacts would already have a copy from the person who sent it to me, I thought I would post a condensed version of the information here. I have verified the numbers at the bottom of the post. These are suggestions to protect yourself from fraud and identity theft in case your wallet or credit cards are lost or stolen.
- Do not sign the back of your credit cards.
Instead, put “PHOTO ID REQUIRED.”VISA requirements state that merchants should ask cardholders to sign their cards even if they have written “see ID” on their cards. My brother also tells me that stores where he lives won’t take unsigned cards even with Photo ID. - When you are writing checks to pay on your credit card Accounts, DO NOT put the complete account number on the “For” line. Instead, just put the last four numbers.
- Put your work phone # on your checks instead of your home phone. If you have a PO Box use that instead of your home address. Never have your SS# printed on your checks.
- Make a photocopy of both sides of any ID you carry in your wallet and keep the copy in a safe place. This preserves any information you might need to report fraud or place a hold.
If your wallet is ever stolen:
- Cancel your credit cards immediately – the key is having the toll free numbers and your card numbers handy.
- File a police report immediately in the jurisdiction where your credit cards, etc., were stolen.
- Call the 3 national credit reporting organizations immediately to place a fraud alert on your name and also call the Social Security fraud line number. From the email:
I had never heard of doing that until advised by a bank that called to tell me an application for credit was made over the internet in my name. The alert means any company that checks your credit knows your information was stolen, and they have to contact you by phone to authorize new credit.
By the time I was advised to do this, almost two weeks after the theft, all the damage had been done. There are records of all the credit checks initiated by the thieves’ purchases, none of which I knew about before placing the alert. Since then, no additional damage has been done, and the thieves threw my wallet away this weekend (someone turned it in). It seems to have stopped them dead in their tracks.
Now, here are the numbers you always need to contact if your wallet, etc., has been stolen:
- Equifax – 1-888-766-0008 (Place a fraud alert)
- Experian – 1-888-397-3742 (Place a fraud alert)
- Trans Union – 1-800-680-7289 (Fraud Victim Assistance Department)
- Social Security Administration – 1-800-269-0271 (Fraud hotline)
One thing that I thought about was that having a photocopy of all your credit cards (front and back) would be a little bit like keeping post-it notes with all your passwords. I think that credit card companies should send a fraud card that you could keep and even copy which would look like your regular card, except that it would be changed.
They could include a bogus name on the card (since you know your real name) which would have the same structure as your real name – John Doe or John B Doe. If they wanted to include a magnetic strip on the back it could be encoded to indicate that the card was fraudulent. They could include exactly as much of your real card number and expiration date as they would want if you are reporting a stolen card – the rest of the numbers would be bogus. Even if that was the full card number, the card would not have the correct name so thieves would not be able to use it. The back of the card could include the phone number to report fraud rather than the phone number for account maintenance (assuming they are different). They could also include a falsified CVV2 number – that would be on the front of American Express cards and the back of other cards. I imagine it would look similar to the card below.
UPDATE: As suggested in the comments – make sure to call your bank right away if you have checks or a debit card stolen.
One of the problems that I have been thinking about with the growth taking place in Utah County is the balance that we need to strike between addressing the current needs and preparing for future needs, all with current resources. I am a vocal proponent of getting good transit here now and in the future, but how do you justify running light rail out to Cedar Fort when there are so few people living in Cedar Valley right now. Thankfully I was introduced to DMU’s which narrow the gap between no transit and transit that can’t be justified without large populations. DMU’s are being considered as a way to connect people outside the most populous areas of the Wasatch Front to the Frontrunner system that is being built to serve the main population bases north and south of Salt Lake City.
Essentially a DMU (diesel multiple-unit) is a single-unit self propelled vehicle that runs on rails. If the rails are compatible with light rail or commuter rail systems (and I’d like to find out if this is the case) they could be used as an introductory transit option in areas where the population is not yet dense enough to support the larger systems – especially in areas like the north and west parts of Utah County where we know that the population will become large enough to support a transit system like Salt Lake County already has. They can also be used to connect the further outlying areas with the main transit systems that serve the larger population centers.
Categories
Looking to Europe
I do not look favorably on many of the traits common among many European countries (higher taxes to fund broader social programs, shorter workweeks, that kind of thing). However a brief mention of Europe in Transportation Watch reminded me that there is one area where we could learn from Europe. They have learned to make use of transit systems so much that many people have no need of cars. Admittedly their population density almost demands this, but our population density is not decreasing so we should be planning ahead.
California is looking at a high-speed rail line that would make lots of short-distance air travel obsolete between San Diego and Sacramento. Here in the States we love to fly everywhere. It’s so bad that Amtrack is almost useless because we are not willing to take the extra time to ride the train that is slightly cheaper. If California actually puts in the funding to build this high-speed rail line they will have a train that is cheaper than the planes and faster than airport security. If that could be done in a number of other travel corridors as well we would have fewer planes in the sky, less fuel being used, and faster travel through airports due to lower volumes of travelers when most air travel is for longer distances.
Similar benefits could be realized on a smaller scale by implementing good transit options in population centers so that we would not be so reliant on cars for all our local travel. At least on those we can look to some examples of good transit systems here in the States rather than wondering what the rest of the world knows that we have not figured out yet.
UPDATE 5/14/97: I stand corrected – as Hyrum points out, Amtrack is not slightly cheaper than the airlines on cross-country trips.
Categories
Posting Rich Text Email
I have created a hack for wp-mail.php that allows rich text emails to be processed. I call it wp-mail-rich. To use it you simply copy the wp-mail-rich.php file in the folder where WordPress is installed (where the wp-mail.php
file is) and use wp-mail-rich.php in place of wp-mail.php. If you have a cron job, just point it to the new file. To rollback just point it back to the old file.
I have also included some files that I used to test and develop this – in case anyone wanted to make further modifications. Instructions are in the readme.txt file.
Download wp-mail-rich.
I have only tested this with Gmail so it is possible that other rich text emails might not be exactly right coming from Yahoo, Hotmail, or your company mail server. Let me know if this is the case.
Categories
Behind The Caucus
Random wanderings took me to the code view of the New York Times political blog – The Caucus. Like the Library of Congress blog, it is based on WordPress. They have modified it enough to make it difficult to detect, but they have left some small clues and they use a very popular WordPress plugin – Ultimate Tag Warrior.