2005 June

As I sit here typing this, I am giving more and more serious thought to building a MythTV box for my own use. I have already covered the advantages of selling them from your own repair biz, but will it work with satellite TV listings?

Welcome to Just Ask Matt! Today, Tommy writes:
I am going crazy here! I am constantly being bombarded by customers asking me to train them on basic computer skills. I have shown them where they can take classes for this sort of thing, but am not sure if they want to go that route. Should I […]

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What challenges face women executives in IT? Three successful CIOs - whose experience encompasses the aerospace, biomedical, and high tech industries - talk about their career development, offer advice to aspiring women CIOs, and describe some of the obstacles they encountered in their climb up […]

That’s how to spell assume, isn’t it?
We’ve all seen/experienced/created/fixed situations like this one. One of my small office customers, one I am very fond of, called me late Tuesday afternoon to report their Internet connection was down. I walked one of them through logging into the Netopia Router (don’t cringe, it was a user login, […]

The animated TECHTip tutorial available here.
This is an introduction to smart RF [Radio Frequency] antennas or smart antennas. Many of the antenna design parameters for pico, micro, and macrocell smart antenna system are affected by channel parameters such as Doppler, Delay, and Angular Spread. According to the leading sources such as the IEEE […]

We’ve all had some experience with the Knoppix line of bootable Linux CDs, right? No one can really argue with how effective they can be when you need to do some data recovery. But what about when you need to take it up a level?

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The term ‘egoless programming’ was coined more than 30 years ago to describe a philosophy that advocates putting developer egos on hold in the interest of producing higher-quality, lower-defect software. Since then, the concept has found its way into various methodologies that involve formal peer […]

This Kool Tool saved my bacon when a client’s hard disk crashed. While attempting to recover the data, I accidentally used a system partition recovery disk meant for an IBM ThinkPad on the client’s NetVista PC. (Doh!) The MBR was reporting FAT32, but the partition table said FAT16. I was able to recover the correct […]

Avalara Links Automated Sales Tax Web Service To QuickBooks Pro, Premier, and Enterprise Editions.
QuickBooks users can now automatically calculate sales tax for each transaction, for any of the more than 8,000 North American sales tax jurisdictions, using Avalara’s new edition of AvaTax ST for QuickBooks Pro, Premier and Enterprise Edition 2004-2005 By Intuit (INTU). […]

The animated TECHTip tutorial available here.
802.16 MAC [Media Access Control] is designed for data rates up to 268 mbps each way with provisions for delivering ATM [Asynchronous Transfer Mode] compatible QoS [Quality of Service], Ethernet and other services such as MPLS [Multi-Protocol Label Switching]. The 802.16 MAC uses a variable length designed to increase […]

Well, as Gnomedex came to a close, I found that I learned a lot in addition to making some amazing contacts. In the interest of moving on with current events, however, I will say that you can read tons about all the wonders of Gnomedex both at my Weblog and at Technorati.

Welcome to Just Ask Matt! Today, Malcolm writes:
Hi, Matt. After reading your article about NTFS, I decided to do the change from FAT32. My system is XP Home. I followed all the procedures as advised in Windows Help, but then I got the following message:
“Convert cannot run because the volume is in use by another […]

Dave, I am thinking about taking a course online through University of Phoenix, but I am concerned about the testing process. Truthfully, I test horribly because I always feel time is evading me and I am under pressure. My aunt recommended looking into UoP to earn my degree because this would take some of the […]

I dislike RealAnything. It’s not even limited to the player anymore, is it? It’s RealGames, RealToaster, RealArmageddon. It refuses to limit itself to simply having a system for playing media. RealPlayer is so bloated with advertisements and new ‘functionality’ that trying to play a file is a battle for time and energy. Sort of defeats […]

Everybody reading this should know what shovelware is. It’s all the pre-installed software that major PC manufacturers put on their PCs, aside from the operating system. And I’m sure there will be a fair amount of disagreement over its usefulness. I will let you know where I stand right off the bat: I hate the […]

The animated TECHTip tutorial available here.
The term INTERNET comes from INTER-connection of NETworks or is short for INTERNETWORK. Though there are many kinds of Internet architectures, there is a generally accepted hierarchy of Access, Edge, and Core. Here is a quick review of the key elements in such a Hierarchical Network.

In the last column, we looked at the puzzle of determining if the sum of N consecutive integers is divisible by N. This puzzle and one way of solving it is given here.
Based on some quick attempts to verify the conjecture (i.e. the sum is evenly divisible by N), we saw conflicting evidence when […]

The animated TECHTip tutorial available here.
Triple play generally refers to multi-channel television (video), telephony (voice), and Internet (data) on existing twisted-pair wire, coaxial cable, satellite, BPL [Broadband over Power Lines] or other means including a mix of any of wireline and wireless services. The telephone company’s challenge is to provide existing Class 5 POTS […]

From Aunty’s friends over at the Institute for Spam and Internet Public Policy:
NEW JULY 1st CHILD E-MAIL ADDRESS REGISTRY LAWS A BIG SURPRISE AFFECTING ALL E-MAILERS, WARNS INSTITUTE FOR SPAM AND INTERNET PUBLIC POLICY
“Jail Time, Large Penalties, and Private Actions Facing All Commercial Emailers Who Fail to Comply,” advises ISIPP.

Over the past couple of weeks, the media has treated us to an especially
large number of news items that can impact our basic rights, strike fear into
average consumers, and cause companies of all sizes to sit up and take
notice. In the biggest computer hacking breach of its kind, MasterCard
just warned the public about […]