The key to experiencing great HD-DVD is all in the colors. (just doing my part!)

I just discovered a solution to a strange problem I have been having for some time. I thought I would share in hopes that this will get picked up by Google and help someone else out.

Quite often my cursor will act erratically. Jumping all over the screen, scrolling open windows, clicking buttons, dragging windows, etc. This happened regardless of the applications I had open or what I was doing. It would even occur when I did not have my hand on or any where near the mouse . For reference, I'm running openSuSE Linux on a Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop with a wired (USB) Microsoft Basic optical mouse. The source of the problem .... my cell phone (an LG 1400/Cingular)!

I routinely charge my cell phone on my desk close to where my mouse is located. Whenever I receive a call, or more importantly whenever the service provider "pings" the phone, the erratic mouse behavior occurs. The solution .... move the phone further away from the mouse. Or alternatively, stop using the wired mouse all together since the problem goes away when it is not plugged in and using the touchpad instead. I am by no means an electrical engineer so I won't begin to guess why this happens. Perhaps the optical sensors on the mouse are sensitive to the same frequencies emitted by the cell phone? I have not tried this with other mice or cell phones so I can't say if this occurs across the spectrum but it might be something to consider before proceeding down the "what application or service is running that's causing this problem" path.

So there you have it! The lesson today - not all computer problems are caused by poorly written software or broken hardware (unless of course poor mouse design/engineering is the cause). Hope this helps someone else.

October 15, 2006

Trying out some new FREE services. For those of you who know me personally, you know that the FREE part of that statement is most important. My goal is to see if I can provide a map based on the IP address of you the visitor.

First up is the geo data based on IP address provided by MaxMind. They have an open source project called GeoLite City that delivers the country, city, latitude, and longitude for an IP address. They openly state that this information is not as up-to-date or accurate as their paid product (in fact it doesn't even have my home IP address) but what can you expect from a free product. In their own words - "Accuracy: Approximately 97% on a country level and 60% on a city level for the US within a 25 mile radius."

Next up is Google Maps. Quite obviously this will provide me with the "mapping" portion of my project. If you are not already familiar with Google Maps then I suggest you visit the site and see for yourself it's capabilities. For fun, I also suggest checking out some of the strange objects that are sometimes captured by the big eye in the sky.

On to the test.

Your IP address is 38.107.179.228
Your country is US [USA] [United States]
Your city is Washington
Your Latitude/Longitude is 38.9144/-77.0763

The legal:
"This product includes GeoLite data created by MaxMind,
available from http://www.maxmind.com/."

And now the map (let's hope it works!)

I added some "proof-of-concept" code for converting images to ASCII art. Not especially exciting, just wanted to see if I could do it. See it here.

Today was all about useless information. I added some worthless page stats to the left side of the page. For some reason I thought it would be neat to see what operating systems and browsers people were using when visiting this page. Since this page was designed with Firefox in mind (and looks horrible in IE 6/7), I thought I should see what most of my visitors are using. If the page views looks low, it's because I had to zero them out to get the percentages working correctly -- that and I really don't get that many visits to start with! I also added a block of useless information from Gullible Info at the bottom of this page.

"WOW! This site is ugly."

Why yes, it is and thank you for noticing! I have been growing tired of the many graphical interfaces that you find today on the Internet. Most of the time, this eye candy only serves to make it more difficult for me to get the information I need. Maybe I'm jealous because I don't know how to do graphic design very well. Or perhaps, it's just that I'm to lazy to spend the time and effort.

Regardless of the real reason, I recently decided to redo this site and move to a more minimal approach in design --- a.k.a. ugly. There are very few graphics and most of the "effects" are done with CSS and JavaScript. BTW, in case you can't tell, I exclusively use Firefox on SuSE Linux so this may look even worse in the other inferior browsers and operating systems.

This site is used mainly as a repository for code snippets I often use, projects I do for fun, stuff I'm to lazy to remember, and as a "sandbox" for projects I am currently developing so I am less concerned with appearance. I prefer to spend my time doing server side development (mostly php) rather than fudging around with graphics so the site "looks nice". I'm also geek so my spelling and grammer are atrocious - please forgive me!

Poke around, any posted code you find useful you are free to use. All other images, code, etc., are copyrighted by me and are not available unless you receive written authorization from me first.

I currently have the following domain names for sale:

• atomsplitter.com
• kentuckyadvertiser.com
• kyadvertiser.com
• teetucky.com

If interested, contact me at domains@ckorp.net.

Today's useless information provided by: