Jason Nadal

Longhorn and XP Dual-Boot

After a dead-hd replacement (I dread hearing hard drives start to click), I have finally got XP and Longhorn to cooperate.  Longhorn still doesn't seem to like the RAID, but at least I can have XP on the RAID and Longhorn on a normal drive.  The trick is install XP first, install Longhorn, then boot off of the XP CD.  Run the recovery console off the CD, and “FIXMBR“, “FIXBOOT”, and “BOOTCFG /rebuild“, adding the XP install back to the boot menu.  All should be well at this point!

For reference, a full list of recovery console commands is available here. Now I can play with cool longhorn effects again (albeit through a dual-boot).

DOS Syntax

Here's a new DOS command I wasn't aware of:

“for %a in (xls pdf) do dir *.%a “

will return dir's for xls and pdf files...etc. Pretty cool stuff. 

From http://gearbox.maem.umr.edu/~batch/dirx.htm

.Text My Subscribers

In setting up a .TEXT personal website, I'm trying to extend the functionality of the existing software.  Dave Winer has provided an application for users to show what sites they subscribe to, as well as a form to query it.  The “My Subscribers” table will show the other subscribers to the site, and how many feeds they have in their shared OPML file.

My personal blog is mostly a playground right now for blogging things, so it's pretty light on content right now.

XP Security Lockdown

While updating a family computer (you know what that's like ... 15 security updates behind), I realized just how important XP SP2 will be (Paul Thurrott's preview is here.) While it can make initial configuration of some net-enabled apps more difficult (you'll have to add the application), in the end there will be less of those annoying popup programs to clean up on peoples' machines.

Update: In the meantime, users may do any number of things to make their pc's more secure (many are outlined here), such as install anti-spyware software (my favorite is Spybot - Search and Destroy), install a hardware firewall (such as a network router), enable ICF (internet connection firewall), and not to open email attachments.

Longhorn Speech - Context Sensitivity

“The language model describes in a statistical fashion the likelihood of specific word sequences occurring at a given time. In other words, what is the probability of the word "America" following the words "United States of"? These statistics are determined by analyzing a large collection of written and spoken text. Because of their statistical nature, they are flexible - any word sequence has some, albeit small, probability of occurring - but lack the rigor required for high recognition accuracy.”

This I have seen firsthand.  Longhorn seems to have some difficulties understanding me when I say “Get this program on the web.”  However, if I were to say “This program is a simulation of a spider's web,” it has a much easier time.  The human mind processes speech to thought using such contextual clues as well.

Fun Tool: ClipboardSwitcher