Nov 30
Want to Engage your Clients? Ask Them How!
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Nov 27
Bloglines Scheduled Maintenance
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Source: Wools, License
This evening, the Bloglines Plumber and Team will be implementing network upgrades in our data center. The scheduled maintenance is expected to occur on 11/27 from 8:00 PM PST to 10:00 PM PST. During this time, Bloglines will not be available.
- The Plumber and The Bloglines Team
Nov 15
Ah, you’ve got to love those wonderful geeks at Stanford. Lock ‘em in a room with a computer, a case of Red Bull, and two bags of Skittles, and they’ll invent Google before lunch, then go on to solve one of the most intractable problems of graphic design software in the afternoon.
Whatever you call it — Autotrace, Live Trace, PowerTRACE — the ability to convert bitmap images into vector artwork software has been around since at least Adobe Streamline’s release in the early 1990s. In fact, I remember spending hours experimenting with Streamline’s many dials and sliders trying to get the perfect result back in the day.
How often have I put the practice to work? Not often.
The problem was always twofold:
Problem A. The vector artwork produced was always spectacularly chaotic, inefficient and tangled — the design equivalent of spaghetti code — and generally took much longer to clean up than it would have taken to draw the artwork from scratch.
Problem B. The algorithms used to produce the vector shapes invariably impose the same blocky, woodcut effect on all artwork. This was fine if you were looking for a rough-cut, medieval look, but if not… well…
With Creative Suite 2, Adobe mostly eliminated the first issue. Live Trace now does a slick job at cookie-cutting its art into a single-layered, interlocking collection of vectors.
However, it’s taken the input of the Stanford geeks to finally nail the second issue.
Vector Magic is an online, Flash-powered tool designed to convert bitmaps to vectors. Operating it is a no-brainer — everything’s handled via a simple wizard.
Using Vector Magic
After uploading your GIF, PNG, or JPG, you need to answer four simple questions.
1. What type of image is your original (i.e. photo, antialiased logo or non-antialiased logo)?
2. How degraded is your original?
Has your image been damaged or degraded by earlier compression?
3. Does your original image employ a limited color palette?
Obviously many logos get their power from the very limited range of colors they use, while photographic images depend on a more granular approach to color in order to maintain realism.
4. If so, which palette is best suited to the result you require?
The application gives you the option to either increase or reduce the color palette before processing begins.
At each step, Vector Magic makes an educated guess at the correct path to take, so if you’re unsure, accepting the defaults will work for most images.
When you’re happy with the set up, click Finish, and Vector Magic works its … er … magic!
Nov 13
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| The increasing importance of being able to search, retain, and retrieve enterprise e-mail is being undermined by wrong-headed attempts to treat PST files, also known as personal folders, locally. The ultimate outcome of such practices is that companies create more problems than they solve and unnecessarily put the business at risk. Savvy companies, however, are recognizing the benefits of a central archive and are eliminating their reliance on PST files altogether.When it comes right down to it PST files are a bad idea. A mission-critical application, e-mail commonly contains a wide range of vital corporate data such as personal data, customer data, product plans, marketing plans, corporate financial data, intellectual property, etc. Therefore, robust management of these files is essential.In a nutshell, PST files were not designed for the enterprise class workout they’re getting. And policies that minimize the importance of PST files, and the resulting impact on the business of not dealing with them properly, can be severe. The Problem In an attempt to better manage growing volumes of e-mail, administrators and/or users do one or more of the following to move subsets of their mailbox data out of the e-mail system and onto other storage devices: data is moved into a PST file, which can be stored on a file server; stored on a hard drive that resides on a users desktop or laptop computer; is burned to CDs or DVDs; or is moved to a portable storage device such as a USB drive. These actions exemplify good intentions gone wrong. There are many costs and risks associated with this type of PST file management that pertain to storage, legal discovery, and administration. One the first problems created when e-mail from Exchange is moved into PST files for retention is that companies drive archiving underground. In this case, underground means out of sight. Companies are in the dark about how many files exist and what information is contained in the files. Is it precious intellectual property? PST file archives have other problems as well. For starters, this practice puts records into disparate silos or folder files making it difficult for IT to store, find, and manage. There’s also a propensity for data corruption with limited recovery capability that ultimately results in permanent data loss. An all-too-common scenario for dealing with corrupt PST files is that users call on IT support to save the file. Tech support resources cost companies time and money whether it’s to rebuild a corrupted file or go to the organization’s tape backup to retrieve a file, if possible. From a storage perspective, PST files break apart the notion of single instancing. For example, if a group of employees are copied on the same e-mail that has a PowerPoint attachment and archive to PST, the company ends up saving a lot of redundant data. This not only eats up precious storage resources but also drives up storage costs. There’s also a negative impact on nightly backups, as the archive bit for any opened file will be changed, and thus require a complete file backup even if the file has only been viewed. Both underground archiving and search limitations around PST files, mentioned earlier, have a serious impact on legal discovery and compliance. The spotlight on e-mail as the core of litigation should have every company worried about PST files in the organization. When it comes to e-discovery, information contained in PST files falls under compliance management as does e-mail on an Exchange server. Underground archiving may cause a company to miss e-mail discovery during a search and puts the organization at risk. Organizations also may also increase legal liability due to the limited ability to search PST files; a user can only search one PST file at a time, making it almost impossible for an organization to locate and search all PST files for compliance and/or discovery. The bottom line is that PST files add to the risk, cost, and burden of litigation discovery. The manually intensive process of sifting through e-mails to identify for legal holds takes both time and money, and given the ad-hoc nature of PST files this creates pockets of unchecked data. At the same time, from an administrative viewpoint, PST files keep organizations from safely identifying and destroying documents that no longer need to be kept for legal or business reasons. PST files stored on local hard drives or removable storage media are difficult to administer. For example, a laptop that is lost or stolen can compromise an organization resulting in both tactical damages as well as brand damages. Change Something For the long-term management of e-mail archives the vendor offers a multi-step process:
To fully control and manage corporate information, businesses need to review the usage and risks of PSTs, define a policy regarding existing and future use of PSTs and implement that policy. Given the all the dangers of PSTs, the best policy is to locate, eradicate, and prevent PST files in the organization. Page 1 of 1 |
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Lynn Haber is a freelance technology writer in Norwell, Mass. |
Nov 13
Last night a client of mine with good intentions towards cleaning up and speeding up her computer unintentionaly disable RPC Services in Windows XP. That caused quite a few problems due to the fact that many other services have dependencies on the RPC service. Also, it couldn’t be started in services.msc both in standard mode or safe mode. I found the following post that helped get RPC service running and get the PC functioning again:
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=45704
| Subject: Re: WindowsNT RPC Service, Registry From: eyablon-ga on 07 Aug 2002 10:13 PDT |
Hi there, I'm not sure if this will help you, but the reg key in Win2k to set the start mode of RPC is HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\RpcSs. Edit the "Start" Value to "2" for automatic. I assume this is the same on NT 4.0, but I don't have any machines to check this on. -Eric