Bnpositive's Blog

Sometimes the best sites and resources end up being the simplest ideas executed to perfection. Google has a lot of fans because of the simplicity in the way it does search. I believe one of the reasons the iPod design is so popular is because of the simplicity of the controls. The same simplicity in design also works well for websites.

The downforeveryoneorjustme.com site does exactly what the domain name suggests. It quickly lets you know if a website is offline for everyone or just you. This can come in handy when you’re developing a new site for a client and aren’t sure what you’re getting. Is it a problem with the servers or something in your coding that’s making it night work. Add the challenge of figuring out if it’s your ISP’s domain name resolution services and you’ve got a few questions up in the air that need answering.

Simply visit www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com and input the domain name in question as shown in the image above. You’ll be immediately presented with whether or not the issues are impacting the website across the board or if it’s just a problem being experienced on your machine or your Internet connection.

Uncover the quick, simple answers for your website being on or offline by using www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com

Image: Custom image and Snagit of featured website interface

I’m in SQL just about every day of the week. Supporting multiple clients with multiple SQL servers in operation, we’re regularly working on databases. Part of that process is to backup and restore databases on our local machines for development.

One of the annoying items about SQL for me is that it wants to bury your database files deep within the Windows program folder for your SQL install. I really don’t want to dig down 7 levels of folder structure to get to my files. I can see how that might be handy and serve as a layer of protection, but for me it’s just annoying.

It took me awhile to find it, but I’ve now found where you can set your default file locations for databases. It’s actually pretty obvious where it is now, but that makes me think they’ve changed how you set this preference. If I didn’t find it before, surely it couldn’t have been that easy initially.

Right click on your main SQL server database and select “Properties” from the right-click menu. Then click on the item labeled “Database Settings”. Almost to the bottom of the screen is a location to specify where you want to keep your database files. You can select different locations for the data and the log file, which could help with management in the future as well, depending on your personal use preferences.

Hopefully that may help you if you’re looking for this in the future. I’m now debating on storing my database files on a removable USB external drive. Just not sure about the risk of storing them on that type of device instead of the main computer hard drive. Does anyone else have experience with SQL databases in this format?

I know I should, it’s got lots of handy features, but I just haven’t gotten used to using FriendFeed for anything. I know it consolidates and organizes much of the updates that I’m interested in across a variety of social networks. I’m just not using. Why not?

Maybe I just haven’t spent enough time really playing with it to figure out how it could really change the way I handle social media. I love using twhirl to update my twitter accounts, and I’ve got my FriendFeed account setup in twhirl, but I just don’t use it.

I like the grouping functionality that’s available and the ability to tag certain users as my favorites. I could see using this feature with that handful of friends that I really don’t want to miss any updates from during the day.

How do each of you use FriendFeed? Is it a replacement for other micro-blogging services for you? The one thing I know I don’t want to do and I don’t like is to send out an update that’s just duplicated as the same thing across multiple destinations. To me that’s just noise. Where do I find the balance between using multiple services like this?

I do like some of the tools that FriendFeed has for integrating in with your website and blog. That may be the angle I need to really approach this from to move forward. We’ll see what happens next.

I found an amazing little application today as I was working on a client PC. I was looking for something like Belarc Advisor, that Milo just reviewed and I regularly use on PC’s. The problem was I wanted something that didn’t need an installation, but that could just run off of a thumb drive hopefully. I FOUND IT!

As you can see from the image above, you just click the type of information you want inventoried and click “Go”. The great part is that it builds the report into Excel so you can easily work with the data in a format you’re probably familiar with already for data collection.

The application is a single HTML Application (.hta) file that’s only 99KB in size. It runs from a USB drive and works on machines you don’t even have to have admin access rights too. Which was another requirement I had in my search.

System Inventory Lite worked absolutely perfectly for my needs. Don’t get dismayed by the “Lite” portion of the name either. It merely refers to the fact that you can get as much or as little information as you want in your system inventory.

As you can also see, if you have a network of machines and you can access the machines, you can tell the application to grab an inventory off of those networked machines as well.

What an amazing little application in a 99KB package. I couldn’t have asked for much more than this.

Image: Screen grab of Excel spreadsheet and System Inventory Lite interface

My friend Patric Welch, a.k.a. Noobie, just found this blog post that lists the writer’s top 10 applications to install on a new PC to get things started out on the right foot. The other nice benefit of this blog post though is that all the applications listed are 100% free.

The article shares a a list of 10 applications that you can get completely free. The apps vary from security, image and graphics or office productivity. Dustin Wax provides a full description and reasoning behind his choice for each of these applications. Be sure to read his entire post for that information, but here are his top 10.

• Panda Cloud Antivirus
• Mozilla Firefox
• OpenOffice.org
• Mozilla Thunderbird
• Picasa
• Skype
• VLC Media Player
• Handbrake
• Digsby or Pidgin
• CDBurnerXP

One of the great things about blog posts and articles is the comments section. For example, I don’t remember hearing about Panda Cloud Antivirus, so I was interested in reading through the comments to see what other people had to say about Panda if they had experience. In the meantime I heard of other suggestions for virus and anti-spyware.

What are you required choices for applications to accomplish those tasks you need every day? Let us know in the comments and maybe someone will find an application they’ve never heard of before that will change the way they work and use their computers. Your app doesn’t necessarily have to be free, but that’s always a plus.

I’m pretty public on my use of social media applications like Facebook, twitter and my own personal blogging. Normally I’m not too worried about what I share on these sites or who reads. I’ve not got much of anything to hide so I don’t think about it what people may think or see when they read something of mine.

Speaking with a friend of mine though and they were amazed at how easy it was for someone to find everything they’d said on twitter. Now, let’s clarify, unless you specifically have all of your updates protected, everything you tweet is going into the public timeline for ANYONE to read, not just those who follow you. People need to be aware of this.

Here’s the challenge though, even if you individually block someone from subscribing to your updates or "following" you, they can still follow you on your public timeline and see what you’re saying. Yes, this activity would be very stalker-ish and it’s annoying we have to worry about it, but it is what it is.

I normally am a little irritated when I’m followed by someone that has their updates protected as I believe twitter should be an open forum to some degree. This issue though has me really re-thinking how I feel about that. I would hate to exclude anyone that might have a reason to really be hiding from other individuals from using the service, but I’m not sure what the best answer is for everyone.

Perhaps it’s just education and let people know about the opportunities and risks. Perhaps you have an online persona like I do in "bnpositive", although it wouldn’t be hard to link the too in my case, there’s nothing specifically in my twitter profile that ties that account to my real name.

What do you think is the solution? Were you aware of the issue? Very interested in hearing your feedback and comments.

Image: Edited image from sxc.hu

If you’re on twitter but you regularly use a twitter client like twhirl, tweetdeck, Destroy Twitter or even Seesmic Desktop, you’ve probably not been to the twitter website recently. If you have been on the website you probably haven’t seen the homepage because you have to sign-out to see it.

Did you miss it? Yep, that’s the new homepage. It’s quite a significant design change compared to what was there before. There’s more of an emphasis on what’s being talked about on the network and even searching for your own keywords that maybe you’re interested.

I think this helps those people that are new to micro-blogging network and they can immediately start seeing some of the power of what’s available as a resource. I see twitter as more of a social search engine than a micro-blogging platform that everyone just shares what they’re doing and where they’re at during the day. There is that component in the service, but for me it builds on the relationship and trust I put in those I follow. I’m interested in learning more about these individuals and hearing those items, introduces me to more of who they are.

The power of twitter is the network itself. Determine the way you want to participate and use the network for your needs and you have the power of twitter at your fingertips.

I’ve been blogging a bit lately about how we have this unneeded fascination with the size of our technology devices. I’ve argued that for my personal preference having the smallest version of something doesn’t really matter to me, in my daily work, portable is more helpful than completely mobile.

I’m going to contradict myself a bit now with that argument. When it comes to screen real-estate, I want an effective use of space. This argument may be less of a rant on size though and more of a rant on flexibility and personal preference.

This was recently made clear to me as I was trying to customize the display and organization of my toolbars in Mozilla Firefox.

If we take a look at the graphic above, there’s an illustration of what I’m talking about here. Layered towards the back of the graphic is how my collection of toolbars currently display in Mozilla Firefox 3.5.1. Taking up quite a bit of screen space.

My preference, after manually editing how I’d like things to be organized in a graphics program, is the way the color graphic is displayed. It’s a little hard to tell perhaps, but my Firefox related toolbars are stacked horizontally at the top, with the bookmarks bar below, then followed by my Google Toolbar and StumbleUpon toolbar’s stacked horizontally at the bottom. Three lines of toolbars instead of the previous five lines of toolbars.

From what I can tell, in Firefox, toolbars are locked and cannot be stacked horizontally to save space. Am I missing something that will allow me to do that?

There seems to have been something wrong with AT&T’s pipes to the Internet today. A number of websites seemed to be down and wouldn’t load for a variety of people. Through all of the discussion I heard many suggestions to use OpenDNS to get around these challenges.

"DNS" stands for domain name services or system. The service that’s provided is the translation of all of those domain names people register to the IP (Internet Protocol) addresses of the computers/servers that are hosting the files that make-up that website.

The challenge is that many hosting providers use their own DNS translators and if something goes wrong with their own service, anyone accessing the Internet through their pipes isn’t going to get directed to the right website and the site will appear dead.

OpenDNS works on its own your Internet browser or router gets the translation service directly from them. Both avoiding the bottleneck at your own ISP and going to an independent 3rd party insures that you’re not broke-down on the side of the road on the Information Superhighway.

It’s not the first time I’ve seen this type of video projection work done, but I’m still impressed by it. The transition from what’s "false" onto something that’s very real and massive in your perspective is mesmerizing to me.

[vimeo video=5677104]

555 KUBIK_ extended version from urbanscreen on Vimeo.

I can’t wait until more of this type of thing becomes more mainstream. However, my concern would be that it would either get lost in the noise of it being overdone, or that it would be more of a distraction instead of an appreciation of the design of it all.

What do you think?

I don’t really have an office that I work from on a daily basis. I’m normally either working onsite with a client most of the time, or if I’m not onsite I usually prefer to work from my local independent coffee shop or Starbucks if I need an office that’s "open late".

When I’m working onsite with a client though I’m almost always packing in a Dell 17" LCD monitor with me to setup and work with while there. You see, I’ve started working with dual-monitors and now I can’t hardly stand to work without them. Thus always carrying around a monitor in addition to my laptop bag. I do get a few looks from people that either think I’m stealing a monitor. Many of them I’m sure have never worked with dual-monitors though and just don’t get it.

The ability to have in my case 32"+ of screen real-estate is extremely valuable to me. I’m not worried about travelling light and mobile with the smallest netbook in my pocket. I’m interested in having as much computing power as I can, including monitor, in as portable a fashion as I can imagine. That doesn’t necessarily mean light.  What’s more important to me is quick and easy deployment.

I’ve been working on an idea for a self-standing monitor case that would protect the screen during transport and unfold around it to serve as a stand when you’re setup. Of course that is until someone develops me a laptop like this one.

Since I’m unpacking and packing up almost daily, I’m more interested in a monitor where the cables are quick to attach, remove and store. The same goes with other peripherals too, but improving the experience for those of us addicted to working with two monitors would be my priority.

PC World has come up with their list of Gorgeous! 15 of the Greatest Tech Designs Ever. Among those items that made their list are the MacBook Air, an Alienware gaming desktop, LaCie 5big Network and the MoGo Bluetooth mouse.

Let’s start the discussion on what you think the best examples of technology design are these days and in recent history. We don’t have to focus on items that are just beautiful aesthetically either. Great design can also encompass a great user-interface too. I don’t like iTunes to manage, but the simple interface of iPods are a great example of design in my opinion.

I’ve mentioned before my love for my first personal desktop computer with the Toshiba Infinia. It was one of the first non-beige desktops. Bummer that my monitor for that machine is no longer working. It’s got a short in it or something. Doesn’t detect a signal sometimes and doesn’t turn on.

What’s more important to you with your devices? Should it look great or work great? Nice to have both, but would you give up features for a flashy design? Would you forgive a little ugly if things "just worked" like you expect?

Let us know in the comments.

Image: Product images from product websites