10 Nov 2004
I’m excited. The sign I’d prepared (A4 x 6) was stuck up outside the office today, was seen by most people passing through level 2 (it’s a fairly high-traffic area), and resulted in me personally installing Firefox on a computer of someone who’d never heard of it before. The signage consisted of an
enormous-ish logo (PDF, 274.1KB), and a smaller sheet which read:
Firefox 1.0
http://getfirefox.com/
Rediscover the web!
…in moderately enormous letters.
So, rest assured, more people than this one guy saw it. The only reason he asked what it was is because we were installing a wireless VPN client on his PC, and was wondering what the sign outside was for. I whipped out my USB flash drive, and Firefox was installed in under two minutes. Bang.
Next time someone comes up complaining about their WLAN password or whatever it is not working, I’m considering saying that it’s because their client software is insecure, and they should install another browser. Of course, the next step would be to actually fix whatever their problem was, but still… muwahahaha!
Oh, the wonders of frontline tech assistance!
As an aside, I’m impressed by the penetration of Firefox in this environment already. Admittedly, it’s something of a CSE and generic Engineering degree breeding ground, but still… other faculties are fairly well represented, too, and people still seem to have a Firefox icon on their desktop. Whether they use it is another issue altogether, of course, but the install-base exists, at least!
10 Nov 2004
Firefox 1.0, the standalone web browser taking the world by storm, has been released today amidst much anticipation from the Internet community at large. This standards-compliant, secure and cross-platform browser has, even before its final version 1 release, received more than eight million downloads globally.
If you haven’t already made the switch, visit http://getfirefox.com/ and rediscover the web today!
I’ve got a moderately large poster (sized somewhere between A3 and A2) printed out, and plan on propaganda-ing my part of UNSW tomorrow morning… if you’ve got nothing better to do with your time tomorrow, engage in some propaganda-ing of your own!
09 Nov 2004
I’m the number 1 match for “HSC stimulus” (with or without quotation marks) on Google at this point in time. After that, there’s Dale’s post in which a picture of a burning stimulus booklet is displayed. What’s scary, is that I’m ranked higher than the Board of Studies website, and CSU’s HSC Online website for the un-quotation-mark-encapsulated search term!
Fortunately, the search query “HSC stimulus booklet” (sans quotes) returns normal matches on the first page, with my complaint about the difficulty of photocopying the stupid thing coming up on page two (of 34, but hey).
PageRank weightings obviously can’t always be a good thing, if this kind of irrelevant content can be dragged up because of it! (I assume that’s what it was, anyway…)
08 Nov 2004
Don’t suppose anyone has one lying around that they want to sell, or knows where to get them cheaply? Wired ethernet or wireless 802.11b (or c,d,e,f,g,…x,y,z — whatever’s in flavour this month), I’m pretty indifferent. My Xircom ethernet card has gone walkies (I have absolutely NO idea where it is… that isn’t something I’d have packed, either), and I want connectivity on my laptop.
The USB drive has gone some way to alleviating the pain, but still, it’s not as good as direct access to my network, especially in terms of live editing of remote sites… not that I’d ever do such a thing! Best practice be damned. ;-)
Yes… if anyone has one they want to lend/sell (even if it’s only 10Mbit, that’s fine), then get in touch via the contact form, or just email me.
08 Nov 2004
Speaking more regarding my MP3 player/voice recorder/toy in general.
Update: The software listed here doesn’t appear to be working for newer hardware. There is updated software available in a more recent post, here.
I’ve been wondering if it’s possible to do a direct digital transfer of voice recordings made on my little MP3 player thing. Turns out it is. This applies not only to my Pavo PM-505, but also to BenQ’s Joybee range (obviously only those capable of voice recording), and any other player which saves files with an .act extension. The utility I’ve found also handles .rcd and .rec files, however I’m uncertain as to what players save files with these extensions by default… I know I could set mine up to save with different extensions if I fiddled with configuration files, but I haven’t, as I see no point in this.
As you may have imagined, I’ve come across some software which is capable of converting these formats into something rather less obscure, namely WAV or MP3 file formats. The software, named “Sound Convert Tool 2.0″, is available freely for Windows systems from a Geocities website, at http://www.geocities.com/sound_converter/. In the interests of longevity, and given the ability of Geocities to come and go faster than Cities and Thrones and Powers according to Rudyard Kipling, I’ve mirrored the application here. (418.4 KB ZIP archive)
If you’re the rights holder to this application, and would prefer this utility wasn’t hosted here, I’d request you contact me and I’ll take it down. There is a notable absence of any and all attribution on the Geocities page, so not only did I have no-one to contact, I also don’t even know for sure that the Geocities page was the original place this software was published. Dubious ground, and if you know any better, please, get in touch to clear things up.
The readme is fairly self explanatory, and it converted a recording slightly over an hour long (one hour and three minutes twenty-five seconds, to be exact) to MP3 format (which involves converting to WAV, then encoding an MP3) in probably around five minutes… I wasn’t clocking it, though. Tis nifty.
Other manufacturers who may have branded this equipment: JP’s, JNC, Acer, BenQ, Pavo, iRiver, EFX, .BXCUTE, Digital, DX, Speed, Datum and probably others. Yes, that was blatant Search Engine suckery, but there’s a distinct lack of clear information out there regarding this conversion, and these MP3 recorder type things are popping up everywhere. If your player/recorder isn’t there, and records ACT, REC or RCD files, let me know and I’ll add it to the list.