As you all probably saw a bit ago, the One Laptop Per Child project officially announced consumer sales of their laptops starting November 12. The way it works is that if you donate $200 to buy a laptop for a child in a developing country, you can buy one for yourself for $200. In other words, for $400 you can buy the $100 laptop.

See that last sentence up there. That’s me being cynical. I see where they’re coming from here and hope they sell many of these. I really do believe that getting technology into the hands of those who otherwise wouldn’t is a great thing. I’m just not sure it’s for me.
As I’ve said in a previous post, these are actually pretty cool devices technology wise. They’re durable, have crazy battery life, and some interesting charging ideas. They are small enough they might even make a decent e-book reader. I’m just not sure it’s worth $400 to me. I’m all for donating to charity, but I’ll probably pass on this deal.

I’m curious to what others think about this. Is anyone out there going to buy one (or should I say two) of these devices?

I saw an article the other day on one of Science Fiction writer John Scalzi’s blogs about how the world almost ended 24 years ago. What happened was that an officer stationed at a secret bunker outside Moscow that monitored the Soviet Union’s early-warning satellite system was monitoring things when an alarm sounded. One of the satellites he was monitoring was signaling the United States had launched five ballistic missiles at Russia.

The officer, Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov, luckily and correctly decided the alarm was a mistake (it was later found that the satellite in question had picked up the sun’s reflection off the cloud tops and somehow interpreted that as a missile launch) and did not escalate matters.

It’s just so amazing that a system error could have led to a war the likes the planet has never seen (and probably wouldn’t survive). We are all lucky there was a human being there with enough sense to think things through before acting. Technology has improved our lives in so many ways, but we can’t forget that just like humans, technology is not infallible.

You may have seen this on Digg, but I figured I would be remiss if I didn’t mention it here. The title of the post at Digg was a little bit dramatic (“Critical Excel 2007 bug cripples users“), but the problem is real. The bug doesn’t exactly cripple users, but it is a pretty big flaw in Excel 2007.

The problem occurs when you try to multiply 850 and 77.1. A calculator will tell you the answer is 65,535, but Excel reports the answer is 100,000. Go ahead and try it.

In fact, there are other number combinations that should result in 65,535 that wind up incorrectly displaying 100,000.

Anyhow, as I said at the beginning, this has been reported elsewhere. I just wanted to make sure as many people knew about the problem as possible. Hopefully Microsoft will correct this soon.

I’ve recently gone through an upgrade at work to Office 2007. This is obviously a pretty big change for our users (as you’ve probably seen, the interface is totally different), and we’ve heard our fair share of “feedback”. In the end, though, it was decided at the top we were going to upgrade so that’s what we did. Having gone through the process, I thought I’d share some some thoughts here on how to make the upgrade go smoothly. If you’re thinking that Office is junk and everyone should just use open source (I do use Open Office at home), you might want to stop reading here, because that really isn’t relevant to this post.  Anyhow, here is what I’ve found:

1. Don’t just upgrade to Office on the weekend without notifying any of your users about the switch. People got to work on Monday morning expecting to do their jobs, and were met with an entirely new Office interface. Yes, this really happened.
2. Have a few pilot or beta users test the software. Pick a nice mix of users that use each piece of software in the Office suite. Make sure you choose “power users” as well as people who just use the basics of the software. This should generate a representative sample of questions as well as test any code that might break.
3. Schedule a training session with your users before they are upgraded to just go over some of the basics of the software.  If you are completely new to Office 2007 it’s not immediately evident how to, for example, save a document in Word.  The entire File menu is hidden. The more information people have before you upgrade the less problems you will have and the happier everyone will be.
4. Finally, be ready for questions, comments, and complaints.  As with any change, you will have those who insist things were better the old way.  Just be ready for this and help them work through it.

These are just a few things I’ve noticed from our Office upgrade.  I’m sure there are other tips out there and if any of you have any tips, please feel free to leave them in the comments of this post.

I saw this on Gizmodo the other day and just thought it was too cool not to mention. Apparently there is a Sony Vaio concept design that look like the picture below:

When the monitor is turned off, the screen goes transparent. They go on to say that this isn’t an official concept, but now that the idea is out there I’m sure someone will find a way to make it happen. I guess there’s isn’t any real function to be gained from a transparent screen, but it looks really cool.

I’d imagine a machine like this would cost a lot of money, but a guy can dream can’t he?

My laptop came pre-installed with a demo copy of Microsoft Office 2007, which was set to expire after a month. I’ve got Office 2007 at work and think it’s fine once you get used to the interface.  However, once the trial period expired on my home laptop, I decided I really didn’t need Office 2007 and furthermore didn’t want to pay for it. In summary, I have Office 2007 at work and Open Office at home.

During my lunch breaks at work, I do a little fiction writing.  Nothing too spectacular, but it keeps me entertained.  Normally, if I know I’m going to want to work on the piece at home I either upload it to Google Docs or make sure I save my word document as a .doc rather than .docx (the new office format).  As you can guess, I forgot this time and saved as .docx.

Once I got home, I double-clicked on my file and it launched Word 2007 (it of course told me my trial had expired).   I cursed my stupidity, opened Open Office and tried to open my file.  Of course Open Office can’t handle the new .docx format.  No problem, I thought. Then I opened Word 2007 again (it again told me my trial had expired, I need to uninstall)  and tried to copy my text and paste it into Writer.  It turns out that one of the functions in Word that is disabled when your trial runs out is the Copy function (including Ctrl+C).  I could see the text, but do nothing with it.  I wound up re-typing the entire thing. In other words, Microsoft owned my content.

Not only did this make me mad, but it turned me off from buying the product.  I think I’ll just stick with Open Office for now.

In addition to my love of technology and love of things for free, I also have a love for books. Today I found a site that in a way combines all three (link via the excellent entertainment blog Pop Candy). The site is called Wowio, and they offer free legal book downloads (.pdf format). These books include ones that aren’t in public domain.

For example, several of author Kurt Vonnegut’s novels are available on Wowio. In fact, I signed up for the site today and downloaded his book Slaugherhouse Five, which I’m enjoying already.

You may be wondering how they can offer books for free on the site. I was. According to the site, “WOWIO is a new kind of online bookstore that enables readers to download ebooks for free, using commercial sponsorships to compensate authors and publishers”. In other words, advertising.

Signing up for the site is pretty simple, though you do have to give them some information. You can either give them a non-anonymous email address, a credit card, or a scan of an ID (driver’s license or whatever). I opted for the email address option, though I couldn’t use my gmail address. It had to be a non-anonymous email address.

Once registered, you simply add the books you want to your queue and download them. There is a limit of three book downloads per day, but that isn’t a big deal for me. I can’t envision myself reading more than three novels in one day.

This really makes me wish there were an affordable e-book reader available. A pda is an option, but the screen size is just to small. Reading on a laptop isn’t too bad, but not the same as reading a paperback in bed. The Sony Reader seems pretty cool, but at $299 it has a little too much proprietary crap going on for my tastes. Supposedly Amazon is planning an e-book reader, but those are supposedly going to be in the $300-400 range. I guess I’ll have to live with reading on the laptop for now.

Anyhow, if you want some good, free, reading check out Wowio. It’s a pretty cool idea.

Countless words have already been written about the new iPod, but I thought I’d take some time off from writing about Microsoft (boo, hiss) and SQL Server (yay, what it’s a Microsoft product? I mean boo!) to regale you with my take on Apple’s new iPod Touch.

I’ll admit I haven’t really gotten what would posses someone to buy the iPhone, other than a sexy interface. I just couldn’t justify spending $600 (plus $50 or so a month) on a device whose primary function is to make phone calls and which locks you into a single phone company for two years. I’m happy enough with my MOTOKRZR, even though it doesn’t have any hip commercials devoted to it. Knocking $200 off the price doesn’t change anything for me.

The iPod Touch is different. Though it’s still expensive by my budgetary standards, $299 doesn’t seem excessive to me. After all you’re getting 8 gb of storage, Wi-Fi, and the sexy interface, all in a pretty cool piece of technology. Plus, you have no monthly fee. It doesn’t make phone calls, but I already have a phone for that.

I’m interested in what iPhone owners think about this. Would you rather have this than your iPhone? For the record, I’m glad Apple has decided to give iPhone early adopters $100 Apple Store credit, though that really just goes back to Apple.

I have posted this elsewhere, but it was too good not to post here. For all of you fans of old school games, there is a website that allows you to create your own authentic looking Atari 2600 style cartridge labels. The name of the site is Label Maker 2600, and I found the link on the ClassicGaming Site.

The site is very easy to use. All you need to do is upload an image file, type in some text, choose a font color (if you don’t want the defaults), and press the Create Label. The site will then display a logo that you can download. Here’s one I whipped together in a minute:

Anyhow, play around with it and let me know what you think. Now to brush up on my Assembly Language programming skills and create the game…

Let me first state for the record that I’m a Firefox user. I’m sure I’ve lost enough street cred by admitting I’m a Windows user. Honestly, my primary browser is Firefox. That said, I still have to support Internet Explorer in my day job.

As I’ve recently discovered,Firefox and Internet Explorer don’t handle the min-height property in CSS in the same way. For example, I manage a website at work that is stable for the most part. I didn’t develop the style-sheets for this site, but I know enough about what is going on. Recently, a user came to me and told me that when they did a print preview in Internet Explorer 7, IE would act as though it was going to print hundreds of pages, rather than the three that were actually there. In Firefox, everything is fine. After much headache, it turns out min-height is the problem. Anything above a min-height or 900 px or so and IE chokes on Print Preview.

For exemple, we have a div that contains most of the page and we have the following code (css in-line for demo purposes only):

<div id=”container” style=”min-height=1200px;”>

Firefox has no problem with this. If you do a Print Preview in IE 7, however, it will choke. If you change from min-height to height it will work. I’m not sure how standards compliant this is, though:

<div id=”container” style=”height=1200px;”>

Anyhow, if you’re having trouble with printing in IE, you might want to take a look at your style-sheets and see if you have any elements with a large min-height.