Monthly Archives: February 2008

Google Sites is live!

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Google has returned JotSpot to the wild after 18 months of seclusion. But it’s now called Google Sites. It’s part of the Google Apps suite and like a wiki allows you to easily create a website that many or just a few can be allowed to create, edit or add to.

I’ve used PBWiki and MediaWiki. Since this is tied into the other Apps I am becoming fond of then I’ll be exploring Sites more in the next few weeks. In the mean time, if you run Google Apps then be sure to go into your domain Dashboard and Add More Services. You will find Sites waiting for you.

So far I like what I see. It’s easy to insert Docs, Spreadsheets and Presentations from the rest of the Google Apps. And the templates available make it pretty simple to create all kinds of pages.

Check out one site I’ve been playing with:
http://sites.google.com/a/mjohnson.net/google-sites-test/Home

USA Navy Satellite Shootdown

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This is video of the U.S. Navy successfully shooting down a damaged spy satellite February 20, 2008. See more DoD video clips at http://www.dodvclips.mil and at http://www.youtube.com/user/DODvClips.

This second video is from a press conference announcing the success.

We talked about this last night on the What Would Jesus Podcast. And you can read more about the Navy Intercepting Non-Functioning Satellite. Pretty cool stuff.

A minor point but a source of local pride is that the USS Lake Erie and the USS Decatur, two of the three ships involved in coordinating the attack on the satellite, were built at Bath Iron Works, in Bath, Maine. My home town.

New Dell Inspiron 530

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With some of out tax return money, we bought a refurbished Dell Inspiron 530 desktop, from the Dell Outlet store, with Windows Vista Home Premium and 2GB of RAM. We took the free shipping and expected it in 5 days. It arrived in 3 days.

It’s 2.20GHz Intel� Core�2 Duo Processor is very snappy. Almost as quick as my MacBook in my wife’s simple test against Webkinz World website. I know, unscientific, but since it will be my wife’s primary machine, any benchmark that makes her happy makes me happy.

We ran it for 24 hours to make sure there was no problem with it. This is my first purchase of a refurbished computer from Dell. I was comforted that is Dell was going to sell it with a full warranty then it was going to be great. But ran it hard just in case. Not a thing happened to give me concern.

So tonight I started up the Windows Transfer Wizard and began the process of moving the 16 GB of mostly photos and music that my wife has over to the new computer. Surprisingly, this only took 92 minutes on my in home 100Base-T network. The instructions are clear and easy to follow. The progress bar on each machine runs at a different rate to show what is happening on each computer. At the end, a simple restart on the new computer is all that is asked for.

Upon first login after the reboot, I checked that many of the documents were where they should be. All photos, music and documents appeared fine. I started up Windows Mail and it automatically converted my wife’s Outlook Express Email to Windows Mail without a hassle. All her accounts and settings came over and she was checking mail in no time.

So far I am impressed with Vista. I’ve used it at school on some computers we have in the Adult Ed lab. It’s a dog on those machines. More RAM and better processor has made this home computer very comfortable in comparison. Tomorrow I have more software to install and the problem of the printer to solve. Our printer is an HP Photosmart 7660. According to the HP website, there is a compatible driver for this model. But when searching for it, I can’t find the compatible driver they state.

When finished with this migration we will be a 4 computer and 4 operating system house for the 3 of us. My MacBook from work, My wife’s new Vista computer, the old Windows XP computer, and an old PIII 1GHz computer currently running Ubuntu.