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I have been having trouble with Twitter all weekend. There was a server upgrade that they were doing at Twitter on friday night and since then I have only been getting updates from about three of the people that i am following.

I have never been more productive

Anyway, checking the support - help at Twitter it seems that lots of people are having exactly this problem and they are working to get it fixed. I am looking forward to it.

Hey if you want to follow me on Twitter I am at http://www.twitter.com/billnad

If you have not jumped on the Twitter bandwagon and are wondering why you would bother then I can explain a bit. It took me a year to figure out what Twitter really is supposed to be for. Basically you signup and get you twitter page. Now you can follow others and they can follow you. Find people with the same interests and then you can see the updates that they send to you and you can reply directly to them. Update what you are doing, ask questions, offer commentary. Twitter it like a big party where you are one of a bunch of people and no one owns any one conversation.

To make things easier using Twitter you can you a Firefox plugin called Twitterfox or just the Thwirl Windows desktop app for Twitter

Well Yahoo decided that once wasn’t enough and this morning they sent another press release out saying that they still don’t want to join Microsoft.

I would like to see how Microsoft could embrace and extend all of these cool Yahoo products so I am hoping that this deal gets done and done soon.

Apparently the quarterly results for Yahoo will come out on April 17th, Yahoo will get the deal done before then if the results are going to be bad and will stall some more if the results are great, rumor is that the results are bad.

I am so excited that Virgin and Google have announced that they are going to start colonizing Mars.

Although I am very excited to live on earth and have seen many places and had lots of plans here it would be wonderful to make a brand new start on a new planet.

I do have a few questions though:

1. what kind of temperatures should I expect in summer and winter? I am under the impression that winter is really cold on Mars and I suspect I will be OK since i live in Calgary already.

2. What are the schools like? I have two kids, one is 8 and the other is 4. They both need a school and I am not sure how good the schools on mars are like. Do the martians run them? Heck I guess we will be martians.

3. What is the state of TCP/IP going to neighboring planets. I heard an awful rumor that the latency would stop internet access as we know it on Mars and my son really likes to play video games.

4. What kind of electricity will I need. I know that all of my appliances and stuff are set for north american power but it would be really embarrassing to bring my big old 50 inch rear projection TV that weighs so much and then find out that the power doesn’t work.

5. On last thing. Is there good fresh fruit or am I going to have to grow my own garden. I am not much of a gardener or handyman and that would be a bit of a deal breaker.

Anyway. I am really excited and even though I didn’t sign up yet I am going to be talking to my wife tonight and giving notice at work tomorrow so I am really hoping that soon I can catch a flight.

Well if you read this blog for any length of time, you probably recognize that I use Wordpress as the publishing platform. Wordpress is open source and very constantly developed and Matt, the guy that created and runs this platform is young enough not to be scared of big change.

Well today there is another big change with the change of Wordpress to version 2.5 from 2.3. Usually we do not look at a point change in software as much more than a minor feature release and bug patches but in this case there is a lot more.

The interface for Wordpress has been completely rewritten by some of the best minds in Web Interface design. The interface has completely changed and the ease of use has been simplified as well. There are new features like a picture gallery within posts and easier posting interface but the change is a bit daunting for a casual user.

I am not too sure about plugin support yet as I have not moved any of my major blogs to the new Wordpress 2.5 but I will be moving this blog over to Wordpress 2.5 this morning. Wish me luck.

What are your impressions of these big changes? Do you like it? Do you have problems? I am interested in seeing before I have broken plugins or any other downsides. As we as tech guys always know, it is usually better to wait a couple of days or week before implementing a major release of software instead of regressing back to an earlier version.

I ran into problems a few months back with some blogs that I had running Movable Type and never recovered, I moved to Wordpress instead.

I ran into an issue with the Zebra printer in after hours when on call a few days ago and these are the steps that I took to eventually fix the problem. The Zebra printer was a 4Z M Plus. I have had all kinds of problems with these printers over the years, mostly because they are not very strongly built as network printers. First of all is the fact that the printer will only work at a speed of 10Half.

Here was the process in the middle of the night.

1.       Isolated the problem. The problem was that printing worked but 5 minutes later it stopped working for no apparent reason. I logged onto the print servers and there was one print job from the printer hung on one print server. I deleted the print job and tried printing a test page to the printer from the same print server. The print job hung.

2.       I looked at the print server logs. It seemed that there was problem for the last hour on all print jobs on the hg01 server. I stopped and restarted the print spooler service. I printed a test page and it went through. I then logged onto the web interface of the printer and saw that my print job went through.

3.       Called back the users and told them all was fixed. It wasn’t and none of the jobs was printing. I tried again and it did not work. The web interface of the Zebra printer though did show the job has having printed. The printing was apparently working from the application as well as locally on the print server.

4.       Additional Print server checks. Went back to the printer server to see if there were any problems and saw a datawindow error for that printers driver in the system log.

5.       Replaced and fixed driver on the print server. Went to the printer properties for the non working Zebra printer and changed the driver to a different printer, hit apply, switched back to the right driver and hit apply again. Printed a test page from the print server

6.       Heard cheering on the phone and after testing within the application the printer was actually working.

One other step that has worked in the past was to changed the IP of the printer through the web interface and then on both print servers. I also did this but in this case it had not fixed the problem.

I decided to upgrade my Firefox, work is s little slow and I thought a software headache was better than just walking into traffic on the highway. Firefox is my primary browser at work and I am using the latest patch of the 2.0 build.

I installed, allowed the Firefox 3 beta 4 to overwrite my old version and lo and behold I have a bunch of non working extensions.

I found the following fix to get security cut down on the beta of Firefox thanks to Lifehacker so that it could at least try my extensions:

    * Type about:config into Firefox’s address bar and click the “I’ll be careful, I promise!” button.
* Right-click anywhere. Choose New>Boolean. Make the name of your new config value extensions.checkCompatibility and set it to false.
* Make another new boolean pair called extensions.checkUpdateSecurity and set the value to false.
* Restart Firefox.

Well I am not any farther and most of my extensions still do not work.

The interface for the latest beta of firefox seems good, it remembers pages in the address bar instead of juist in the history and seems to be quicker although that may be due to most of my extensions and themes/skins being missing.

Great trying out hte new build and another one is apparently right around the corner. Firefox 3 Beta 5 is going to be released soon as the deadlines for bug fixes passed last week.

Try it out today and go through my pain, we can commiserate together about insignificant bumps in the road.

Apparently on March 22nd from 8 AM until noon eastern time Blackberry service across North  America will be going down.

Database upgrades are being blamed and of course on the Saturday of a long weekend is either the best time or the worst time for this but sometimes you have to have these outages to improve services.

The outage has been planned by RIM but of course it is not very easy to alert all users worldwide when this is going to happen. Hope my heads up puts you at a little more piece of mind.

I have had a great time watching a blog post by Jason Calacanis explode on the blogosphere like nothing that I have seen before. Jason wrote a great post about how to save money running a startup. The article is really more about spending lots of money but at the same time making the work life of a startup employee a lifestyle and at the same time making sure that the process is smooth, taking really good care of employees so that they will want to put in huge hours. I afreed and thought the article was a nice diversion becasue I have in fact never worked for a startup.

Well others did not like the post so much. Duncan Riley at Tech Crunch wrote a great piece about how Calacanis fires people who have a life, Robert Scoble defended Jason Calacanis and  Micheal Arrington at Tech Crunch kind of came up in the middle (look at his comments to see his real thoughts).

So how does a Z list blogger like me look at this? Read the rest of this entry »

OK, what is with this link? I have had two messages in the last couple hours from people who apparently send me a link to

www.blockcheckercont.com

The site seems to be some kind of spam and I don’t trust the spyware that it may give us on our computers.

update: I have confirmed that neither of the people that have sent me this message actually sent it. It seems to be truly spam autogenerated from peoples machines

I have struggled with Twitter for about a year now. I am not sure what it is for and I have no idea where it is going. Essentially Twitter is  just a box on a web page that will send out a max 140 character message out to the cosmos. If people are wollowing you then they will see that “Tweet” but otherwise it is just another random message along the Twitter timeline. Of course the simplicity of the Twitter service is something that gets geeks  crazy. There are all sorts of ways to expand Tweeting with Twitter.

I just ran across an article on Read/Write Web that shows their choice for the top 10 Twitter apps. A list like this is good as it will allow you to see the expandability. You can send others messages so why not send messages directly to a todo list? Send tweets to your calendar? What about syncing others links sent through Twitter to your Delicious?

Anyway I am on there too. If you want to follow me on Twitter I am at http://www.twitter.com/billnad