Teenagers who Web surf, text message and consume caffeine at night are more likely to fall asleep during the day, researchers in Pennsylvania said.
Month: July 2009
Useless Research Of The Day
Time Killer(s) for the Weekend
Some of these I’ve linked to before, but the games listed here should kill off quite a bit of time — and, in theory, make you smarter. Or something. They also help you lose weight and prevent cancer, too. Do not taunt happy fun ball.
Iowa Likes To Be Different
They’re always on the odd end of the Time Magazine polls — and they really like Jon and Kate, for some reason.
Better Late Than Never
In a 1920 editorial, the New York Times ran an editorial saying space flight was impossible. Forty-nine years later, and years after objects, man and beast had been launched into space, they finally ran a correction.
I Feel Old
100 Things Your Kids May Never Know About — and I know or did nearly every one of them (and my kids know about three things on there).
Finding The Printer With Most Operating System Plug-and-Play Compatibility
We have a homeowner at the office that’s wanting to put a printer in his Sunriver home for guest/renter use. Personally, since I don’t want to get (and won’t take) the late phone calls from guests complaining they can’t get it to work because of driver issues or what not (probably my biggest concern), I’m trying to find something compatible with as much as possible without requiring a driver disk. That pretty much eliminates any printer you can find on the shelves now, as I don’t think there’s a printer you can buy new now that doesn’t require you to install drivers either off a CD or from the manufacturer’s web site.
So I’m looking for a list of built-in printer drivers for Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Mac OS X (Windows 98 would be nice, too, but not holding my breath). I’m basically trying to make it so that the folks in the homes can take a cable, plug it into their computer, their computer will recognize it, and go, making it as easy as possible for everybody involved.
I’m digging through Microsoft’s Web site, but it’s obviously a slow process. I’ve found the Windows Logo’d Products List, but I’m pretty sure that includes stuff that has been tested after the release, and encompasses far more than what’s actually included with a default Windows XP install.
Anybody have any ideas? Anybody had to look into something like this before? I know some of the older HP LaserJets will work on just about anything, but not all of them have USB ports on them, and some of them are huge. It’d just be nice if there were a list of built-in drivers somewhere for the various operating systems (and if I can find one for each OS, I’m going to compile it all into one place).
How To Quickly Lose A Sale
If you’re going to sell many thousands of dollars worth of servers to Opera for use in their datacenters, you better dang well make sure that you don’t have code on your product’s web-based administration interface that doesn’t work with Opera.
HTTP Compression in IIS 5 Sucks, But Is Fixable
This is probably going to be a foreign language to most of the folks here, but I’m throwing it out there anyway, and mostly for my bookmarks.
I’ve been experimenting with adding gzip compression to reduce browser load times across some of the sites I maintain. I’ve had it enabled on Bend Blogs dynamic pages forever, as it’s built into Gregarius (working on compression and consolidating some other content on there as well to reduce lookups). I’ve enabled it on this site, as well as my office’s site on most pages (some didn’t do too well with it for reasons I’ll look into later, so I had to do it on a per-page basis with ob_gzhandler instead of on a site-wide Apache basis like I did here).
The one thing I was having trouble was figuring out how to do it on Internet Information Server 5 (IIS5 in Windows 2000). We have an online booking server here in the office that runs IIS5 (can’t be upgraded to IIS6 easily — tried once, blew things up, not doing it again). The directions here didn’t do anything. Was glad I wasn’t the only one that had trouble. Thankfully, I was directed to FlatCompression, which enables easy ISAPI filtering to enable compression on IIS5. Considering that the online booking software our business has to use is already slow (no fault of mine), anything to help speed up downloads is always good.
So if you’re still stuck running an IIS5 server, do yourself a favor and get FlatCompression installed and test here and here to make sure it’s sending gzip/zlib/compressed content properly.
What If The Moon Landing Happened Today?
The news videos might look something like this:
Updated: If you want to see it how it was 40 years ago, watch it “Live” as it aired back in the day (in memory of Walter Cronkite).
Isn’t That The Truth
There’s a reason I use Teracopy:
