Tom McGee's Blog

The “Orton Effect”

October 25th, 2008 | 4 Comments | Art, Tech Stuff |

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I’ve had it

September 28th, 2008 | 0 Comments | Tech Stuff |

Apologies for the blog being down Saturday. This is the second time in as many weeks that my totally useless hosting service has allowed a service to crash and stay crashed. In the process, I lost one short and one long post I’d written, plus a few comments. I’m really livid about this. I noticed [...]

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…And We’re Back

September 16th, 2008 | 0 Comments | Tech Stuff |

We’ve been having some problems at our hosting service, where the database server has been down for the past 24 hours or so. Sorry about that, but it’s good to be back on-line again. I should have some new material before long, so please check back!

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WordPress vs. Movable Type

September 10th, 2008 | 0 Comments | Tech Stuff |

Monday I updated The Company’s Movable Type blog platform to the latest (4.1 to 4.2). Problems galore in the installation, which had to be done manually, with permissions. It took a solid half hour. Then the real problems hit: missing redirects, broken search. We’re still hammering out the kinks. Tonight I updated my WordPress blog [...]

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Fun With Google Earth

August 14th, 2008 | 2 Comments | Home, Tech Stuff |

True, Google Earth is old news. But it’s fun to explore a little and find some unusual sights (sites?), beyond the usual Pyramids and Taj Mahal kinds of landmarks.

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Not So Cuil

July 30th, 2008 | 4 Comments | Tech Stuff |

Who are these people, and what are they doing in my blog posts?

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Semantics and Artificial Intelligence

July 18th, 2008 | 0 Comments | Tech Stuff |

Well that may be overstating things a bit, but now that I’ve got your attention take a look at the Calais Viewer. Paste some text into the entry field and submit it, and it parses it for the specific meaning using natural language processing. My friend Eric Hoffer was a guest speaker at the Web [...]

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Greetings From Lewisburg, PA

July 10th, 2008 | 4 Comments | Tech Stuff, Travelogues |

Yesterday I was out at Bucknell University in Lewisburg for the Mid-Atlantic Digital Library Conference. It was a terrific event, a full day of concurrent sessions on a lot of topics surrounding the digitization, archiving and presentation of archival materials. It was especially relevant because some of the key DSpace people were there, and it’s an application I’ve been trying to get my arms around for a few months now. But this isn’t about the technical stuff, let’s move right along to the travelogue…

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IE6 Gets A Push (Off The Cliff)

July 6th, 2008 | 0 Comments | Tech Stuff |

37 Signals, a developer of web-based groupware, is officially phasing out support of IE6 in its next generation of development. The product of theirs I’m most familiar with is Basecamp, a project-management application which is used in a couple of places I’ve worked. Unlike the XP-to-Vista migration, IE6 to IE7 is pretty easy across both [...]

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Borderline Libel

July 3rd, 2008 | 0 Comments | Home, Strange Sites, Tech Stuff |

Here’s another interesting Googlemaps mash-up, rottenneighbor.com. Useful information no doubt; but also no doubt than somewhere sometime it’s going to lead to something ugly. Enter in an address or zip code and you’ll see a map of the neighborhood with little red, yellow or green (mostly red) Monopoly-style houses with comments about what makes that [...]

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Vista Service Pack 1

June 20th, 2008 | 0 Comments | Tech Stuff |

After the nightmare of trying to move about a gig of photos off to my external drive, and seeing a transfer rate of something like 50K/second (that’s right, 50 Kilobytes per second), I was pleased to see that the long-awaited SP1 was available for installation, and that it was supposed to fix that nagging problem. [...]

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Internet Explorer Is Doomed

June 19th, 2008 | 4 Comments | Movies, Tech Stuff |

At least that’s the impression I came away with. After three sessions today walking the university’s incoming freshmen through their new computers, a couple of trends were apparent. One was, at least half of them already use Firefox. There was also a substantial minority (which is to say, more substantial than the overall market share) [...]

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