Damn WiFi

I have some real issues with my WiFi connection some days. Today is one of those days. I wish I could identify what the problem is as occasionally my signal goes from 100% to 0%, stays there for about a minute and then back to 100%. Most of the time it works flawlessly but somedays it happens constantly over periods as long as an hour.

Anyone know of any cheap and easy way to check for signal interference in both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz ranges?

Spell Checkers

Oh how I have become a slave to thee. I read and reread the last post and no little red underline showed up for ‘ownes’. D’oh! It is all part of my on going frustration with applications that do not have consistent behavior. Now I know that MarsEdit, which is what I’m using to write my posts, doesn’t spell check inside of title fields, tag fields or html tags. Yesterday it was iTunes not allowing in field editing of id3 tags for columns that do not show by default.

Note to everyone that does user interface design. If you allow someone to do something, allow it everywhere that is similar. Finally, try to be consistent with your environment unless you have a hard requirement to break the interface paradigm. Even then, try not to break the paradigm.

Who Owns Ideas?

The CBC Radio program Ideas did an episode on copyright. It is probably the best overview of copyright issues I have heard, read or seen. They try to be unbiased in their examination of copyright. They give a lot of air time to people on both sides and the only biased comments I heard was at the very beginning by the announcer and at the very end by the host of the program. The one at the beginning I felt was necessary as it stated that the host was biased against stronger copyright laws.

Very good program, about an hour long. Go listen. With an election approaching, tell others to listen. We are all subject to copyright in our daily lives and it is becoming more urgent that we address the issue before we find ourselves criminals by the very acts we instinctively do.

Who Owns Ideas, by CBC Radio.

It’s the little trips that get you

I go away to Germany for two weeks and when I get back to the office, everything is working perfectly. There weren’t any problems while I was away. I go to DefCon in Las Vegas for five days and everything seems to go wrong.

So I won’t be doing any meaningful update here until the weekend. Too much work to get done.

In the mean time, go watch this.