Run DOS Software on Your Phone?

Posted on July 3, 2008 by Chris Garrett 
Filed Under Software Tools | Leave a Comment

Emulators are not new. Playing old games is something of an internet obsession, especially arcade games under the MAME system. When a couple of friends emailed me saying their workplace had ground to a halt since discovering a x86 emulator I was interested but not shocked.

I was more intrigued when I found out it was Java based. Most often these things will not work on a Mac.

x86 Emulator Running on Macosx

x86 emulator on macosx


If you go check out the demos you can see a fully functional version of DOS running in your browser window. DIR and check out the games you can play.

JPC - mem:dosgames.img


They are the full, original PC versions, not conversions or rip-offs, the actual binaries running in your browser.

prince of persia on macosx

It’s not all fun and games. This will be useful for anyone who has an old proprietary utility or application they need to run. You can even have a play around with Linux, how cool is that?

This is cool enough to warrant talking about but it was only when I discovered that apparently it should run on your phone that I just had to look closer! Sounds like just the thing for my vacation. You can be sure as soon as I have posted this I will be finding out why it won’t currently run even though they clearly show a n95 working. Next step will be every old DOS game I can. Wouldn’t it be cool if by the time you read this I will be sat on the beach playing Duke Nukem? :)

Get the download here or go to the online demos to have a play!

Easily Copy Music from iPod to Your Mac

Posted on July 1, 2008 by Chris Garrett 
Filed Under Software Tools | Leave a Comment

While making arrangements for my vacation this week I really needed to sort out my iPod library. Since moving from PC to Mac my mp3 collection was in disarray. The only trustworthy set was on my iPod, and I was very worried I was going to lose it through a disk crash or worse.

What I wanted was a software tool to pull my music back off my iPod onto my Mac, and I found it in Senuti.

Copy MP3 Files off Your iPod with Senuti

Hunting around the intertubes there were various tutorials and tips for how you can grab the files off the hard disk, but this solution was the most elegant.

copy files from ipod to mac with Senuti

The main benefit of the application is it talks directly to iTunes and can work with your library to incorporate your music.

It is intelligent enough to know when you have the file already on your hard disk, and to ignore those, even when creating a play list.

Feature List

The only hiccups I found are it seems to not like certain tracks, and an annoying dialog that pops up every now and then for now apparent reason

Senuti

I would love to know the cause of that, it’s not dialogs open on iTunes as it suggests.

If you have a Mac and want access to your music locked away on your iPod, Senuti is the tool for you.

WordPress to Disable XMLRPC by Default?

Posted on June 26, 2008 by Chris Garrett 
Filed Under Blogging | 1 Comment

Three different people have alerted me to a minor storm in a tiny teacup over the news/rumor/allegation that WordPress are to disable XMLRPC publishing by default

In order to protect the majority of blogs which don’t use these protocols against any possible security vulnerabilities we should disable them by default.

Really? Is this what we are supposed to be getting upset about? As westi says:

from WordPress 2.6 onwards you will need to go into the Settings->Write page and enable them individually if you want to use them.

That doesn’t seem much of an ordeal. I imagine half of the readers of this blog are saying “What the heck is XMLRPC?” and the other half are quite aware of what XMLRPC is and do not much care if it is off by default.

XMLRPC is the way that you can control your blog without using the blog user interface. It’s the method that offline blogging tools like Ecto and Scribefire use to add content to your blog. As you can imagine from my description, this is powerful stuff, and it is quite right that if they believe there is a security hole to be filled that they should turn their wary eye towards it. Many hosting companies have been wary of XMLRPC, even down to making it difficult for people to enable it.

I can certainly understand the remote editor community getting upset. For them it is an extra hoop for end users to jump through, their products are meant to make things easier and this will be a hinderance. As Daniel Jalkut (Marsedit) says

For users who would find value in a remote client, this decision will put one more roadblock in their way

My main question is, what exactly is the security concern they have with XMLRPC? Why now? If there is a clear danger, fair enough, but if this is the WordPress developer equivalent of security theater, well, let’s not bother eh?

Google Trends for Websites for Checking Competitors

Posted on June 24, 2008 by Chris Garrett 
Filed Under Software Tools | Leave a Comment

Webmasters have been using tools like Alexa for a while to see how competitors compare in terms of traffic. Recently Compete came along, with much the same kind of features. Now Google is getting in on the act.

Enter “Google Trends for Websites”.

Google Trends has been around a little while, with that you can see the progress and demand for certain keywords. This looks at a website and sees how much traffic is moving and also lists some phrases people use to find it.

Enter your domain over at the trends site and it should give you a snapshot along with a graph of your traffic peaks and troughs. It should, but right now for my own site it doesn’t so I have to demonstrate using my friend Darren’s ProBlogger.net instead.

Google Trends for Websites: problogger.net

As you can see, Google agrees, it places chrisg.com as the first “also visited”. For a moment I thought it was measuring just my visits but it seems to be the same for everyone. I would have thought problogger readers were more likely to be johnchow and shoemoney readers before mine but there you go, shows what interesting results you get.

So while it allows you to snoop on your neighbors, a nice little surprise gift with the tool is it tells you who your neighbors are. Pretty neat huh?

As with all labs projects, it could break or be taken offline at any time. So take a look now while it is working :)

A Better Blog Contact Form

Posted on June 19, 2008 by Chris Garrett 
Filed Under Blogging | 2 Comments

As more and more blogs grow from being a one-person operation to a multiple blogger situation, and more companies bolt on a blog to their corporate site, the one size fits all contact form is not cutting it.

Consider the scenario where everything goes to one person. So all contact, from “nice article” to “I have a problem with the widgets you sell” all go to one unfortunate individual. Far better to sift and sort to the appropriate people, right?

I have been looking for a more capable contact form for clients and I seem to have found it in WP_ContactMe

contact form

  • Easy to add to post and pages with BBCode.
  • Easy to add to a sidebar with a widget.
  • Easy to add anywhere in a template with a function call.
  • Comes ready configured with a standard Contact form.
  • Has HTML/PHP templates to allow you to customise the form to collect what information you like.
  • Emails the poster of the page/post by default.
  • Allows you to specify the address to receive the message.
  • Allows the setting of subjects to allow dynamic selection of the recipient of the message.
  • SPAM Protection by an optional CAPTCHA question.
  • Optionally allows the sender to receive a copy of the message.
  • Collects standard information about the sender, such as IP , referrer etc.
  • Has its own theme independent stylesheet to allow styling without modifying your theme.
  • Has localisation to allow easy modification of all default messages.

As well as setting subject lines that appear in a drop down, you can also shoot off to different people depending on the different purposes, so you could have “General Feedback” go to Joe, and “Advertising” go to Mary. Or maybe have one contact form that lists all your authors.

contact emails form

Check it out over at the DCoda WordPress plugin page

5 Quick Excel Efficiency Tips

Posted on June 17, 2008 by Chris Garrett 
Filed Under Excel Tips | 4 Comments

Excel is one of those powerful packages that I use because I have to, not because I love spreadsheets so much. Anything that can get me out of Excel and doing something much more fun has got to be a good thing. Here are some tips to make your Excel use faster and more productive!

  1. Cycle through open spreadsheets - If you hold CTRL while hitting Page Up and Page Down (in Macs hold Fn also) you can go from one sheet to the next, just like switching open windows with Alt-Tab
  2. Make tabs stand out - You have probably worked out that you can name tabs, but did you know in certain versions you can color them too? Right-click and select Tab Color.
  3. Insert the current date - Hold CTRL and hit + (; on Mac) to enter today’s date into the current cell. If you want the cell to always contain the current date, rather than the date right now, use =NOW() formula.
  4. Instant charts - Just press F11 and you can create a chart from the currently selected data
  5. Quick sum - Have you seen that angular E like button on your toolbar? That is the “sum” button, hit that to sum the currently selected data rather than typing the formula =SUM()

I just know you can do better. Got Excel tips? Add yours to the comments!

What Do You Think About Plurk?

Posted on June 12, 2008 by Chris Garrett 
Filed Under Web 2.0 | 6 Comments

Plurk is the latest in a long line of potential Twitter alternatives, but it kind of isn’t

OK, yes, you can say what you are doing, read what others are doing, and have conversations, but after that the similarities end. To be quite honest, it’s pretty, well, weird.

Individual messages appear on a timeline, and you scroll left and right to go forward and back in time.

As replies appear, the reply count next to a message goes up and turns read. For the first time user it is all very confusing.

404 unread - chrisgarrett - Plurk.com

As you participate in the site your “Karma” goes up, which is a motivation for the more competitive users, although I am not sure outside bragging rights if there is much benefit from a high score

Check it out.

Had it not been for Twitters much-discussed downtime I might never have tried it. Still taking me some getting used to.

What do you think? Twitter killer or will you pass? Please share in the comments …

Tracking Your Stats With Analytics Software

Posted on June 10, 2008 by Chris Garrett 
Filed Under Software Tools | 5 Comments

When I work with my blog and website consulting clients I always ask for some sample stats. You can learn a lot about the health of a site, plus where they might gain more traffic, just by reading their traffic reports. I just received some stats from a client and they came through as screen grabs from a server side service provided by their ISP. It got me wondering what the right reports to use are.

There are two types of stats, broadly, server-side and client-side.

Server-side stats are broken down into “log file analyzers” and “CGI”. Log file analyzers take your web server log text file records that are created any time anything happens on your server, and produce stats from those. CGI type stats record to files or database, but are based on your website software, not the web server.

Client-side stats are things like Google Analytics, where you get given a piece of Javascript code to put into your template so whenever a visitor arrives on a page containing the tracking code, their activity is recorded.

I always recommend you not use server side for measuring your traffic because it includes “bot” traffic and such, so you get an inflated view. Bots are things like search engine spiders that read through your site to add the information into their index so they can find your pages when someone searches. There are also bots that are there to scrape your content to steal it, or to cache it for easier and speedier loading for corporate or ISP level access. This can add up to quite a lot. Because my domain is nearly 10 years old it attracts a LOT of this kind of activity.

For the most part the client-side will be a more realistic view of who is really actually reading your site as it only activates when the javascript or images are loaded in an actual web browser. While a percentage of people can block this code, it is not going to be off by the same amount as server side stats will be.

I can see how you might want to show inflated stats. It would be more persuasive to advertisers for them to think your traffic is double or higher than what it really is, but how many will accept this inflated count and how ethical is it to sell advertising based on visits not even performed by human beings?

Which kind of stats do you use and which do you share? Please let me know in the comments …

Top Software Tools: Readers Recommendations

Posted on June 5, 2008 by Chris Garrett 
Filed Under Software Tools | 3 Comments

Essential Software tools


Last week I asked readers to recommend their Essential Software Tools - here are your recommendations!

Agree? Disagree? Got a better recommendation? Please add yours in the comments.

Windows:

Linux:

Mac:

Cross-Platform:

Finally, DazzlinDonna recommends these backup solutions

Thanks to:

Please let me know in the comments if there is anything I missed!

How to Get More Out of LinkedIn

Posted on June 3, 2008 by Chris Garrett 
Filed Under Software Tools | 6 Comments

LinkedIn has up to now for me been something I only looked at when someone sent me an invitation to connect. Other than that it has just sat there, under utilized, and to be quite honest, disregarded. That was until I saw this snippet from Liz Strauss

I had a wonderful conversation yesterday with someone I met in this fashion. I expect that we’ll be doing business soon.

Obviously Liz was doing something right that I am doing wrong, or not doing!

I See You, You See Me

Read the post and you will see Liz has a strategy of following up with people who are looking for her. We shouldn’t be surprised, Liz is The Connector (would make a good title for a film of her life, hehe). So now I know I can see who is reading my profile and have an idea how to view them back and attempt a conversation.

Twitter Users Advise

What other LinkedIn nuggets am I missing?

Being the Twitter addict I am, I asked my Twitter followers. I’m going to start calling my Twitter followers my mastermind team because they came back with lots of feedback.

Most responses (ScrapNancy,Green_Panda,talespinner) were in the same boat as me. Passively wait for things to happen, browse occasionally to see what folks are up to. Some use it more actively to find job applicants or for helping with references for your own career progression (coffeejitters,smiling,ciaranj,pitchyourbiz,christianbogh,erich13).

Better Address Book

Perhaps the most straightforward use, but also quite clever, is to use it as a more trustworthy address book.
This relies on folks actually updating LinkedIn, but it’s better than nothing which is my current approach!

Answers for Authority

It seems the most popular feature, and one that can really help you grow authority, is the “Answers” facility.

This was suggested by several Twitter people ( micheleneylon,chris_bailey) so I thought I would use the feature myself to ask!

As you can see (maybe) by following the link above, I have had one (great) answer so far, from Bryan C Webb who says

One should not expect overnight results here any more than attending a
Chamber of Commerce meeting and expecting new orders to flow in.
Networking takes TIME and EFFORT on your part. Trust is gained over
time through observation of your actions and reactions.

I suggest you become more active in Q&A so that people recognize
your expertise and seek you out. Grow your network of 150 by
downloading and using the Outlook Toolbar (if you have not already done
so).

So another recommendation for Q&A. It seems if you answer questions then you grow your profile. This makes sense, it is exactly what I have done in other areas and recommend Authority Bloggers do but I have never really considered LinkedIn as a venue until now. I can’t use the Outlook toolbar as I use mail.app on Mac - is there a Mac equivalent?

More Reading

hdbb_stephen recommended the following articles full of great advice

Finally, a Warning

How Do You Use LinkedIn?

Please share in the comments …

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