the blog of david dean » computer http://www.davidbdean.com currently not blogging much at all Sat, 21 Jun 2008 15:30:40 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 Periodic Table of the Keys http://www.davidbdean.com/2006/07/13/periodic-table-of-the-keys/ http://www.davidbdean.com/2006/07/13/periodic-table-of-the-keys/#comments Wed, 12 Jul 2006 23:03:22 +0000 David Dean http://www.cebidae.com/2006/07/13/periodic-table-of-the-keys/

Periodic Table of the Keys
Originally uploaded by funnypolynomial.

Click through on the photo, it has notes.

Being a Modest Proposal as to a Tabular Arrangement of the Key Board employing a Natural Classification.

Thanks MAKE Blog.

]]> http://www.davidbdean.com/2006/07/13/periodic-table-of-the-keys/feed/ 1 USB Teddy http://www.davidbdean.com/2006/06/19/usb-teddy/ http://www.davidbdean.com/2006/06/19/usb-teddy/#comments Mon, 19 Jun 2006 00:29:35 +0000 David Dean http://www.cebidae.com/2006/06/19/usb-teddy/
Oso incrustado detalle
Originally uploaded by Sergio de Ana.

Link. Thanks, Engadget

]]> http://www.davidbdean.com/2006/06/19/usb-teddy/feed/ 0 A new take on transparent desktops http://www.davidbdean.com/2006/05/31/a-new-take-on-transparent-desktops/ http://www.davidbdean.com/2006/05/31/a-new-take-on-transparent-desktops/#comments Thu, 01 Jun 2006 03:07:25 +0000 David Dean http://www.cebidae.com/2006/05/31/a-new-take-on-transparent-desktops/ cat bed monitor.jpgThis is a real cat-bed, but wouldn’t it be cooler if it was a desktop image, a la transparent desktops, but only the screen is transparent, not the casing. Thanks, Phillip Torrone.

]]> http://www.davidbdean.com/2006/05/31/a-new-take-on-transparent-desktops/feed/ 0 Redirecting a blogspot blog to Wordpress http://www.davidbdean.com/2006/02/24/redirecting-a-blogspot-blog-to-wordpress/ http://www.davidbdean.com/2006/02/24/redirecting-a-blogspot-blog-to-wordpress/#comments Fri, 24 Feb 2006 12:41:29 +0000 David Dean http://www.cebidae.com/2006/02/24/redirecting-a-blogspot-blog-to-wordpress/ UPDATE: An alternative method that moves more of the smarts to wordpress is available here from Tom Sherman of underscorebleach.net.

In case you haven’t noticed this blog used to be at cebidae.blogspot.com, but I decided to move it to my own server so I had more control over what I could do, now, and in the future.

Importing the old blog’s entries was a trivial task as it is build into the wordpress software these days. The main difficulty I was having is how to get people arriving at the old site to come over here.

The main advice appears to be that you should leave your blogspot site there, but redesign so it is clear that you have moved to a new site. I wasn’t really happy about this, because people are lazy, so I wanted to automatically redirect them to the new site.

There are basically three types of pages you want to redirect from your blogspot address to wherever it is you are going:

  1. The main page (/)
  2. Archive pages (/2004_12_01_cebidae_archive.html)
  3. Item pages
    (/2004/10/gadget-price-searching-use-staticice.html)

I wanted to redirect these three types of pages to the same pages on this site. I managed to get the main page and the item pages working but not the archive pages. Seeing as how most external links either point to the main page or a particular item page, the archive pages are unlikely to be landed on too often, so I chose to just redirect them to the new main page here. If anyone can help me redirect the archive pages correctly, that’d be great.

Redirecting the main page (and the archive page)

To set up a redirect to “http://www.cebidae.com” you need to use the following tags between the <head> and </head> in your blogger template

<MainOrArchivePage>
<META http-equiv="refresh"
content="3;URL=http://www.cebidae.com">
</MainOrArchivePage>

MainOrArchivePage makes sure this only happens on the main or archive pages and the meta tag tells whoever lands here to redirect to http://www.cebidae.com in 3 seconds.

Redirecting the item pages

Obviously if you are going to redirect your visitors to a new site, you need to know the url that they should be going to. This was easy with the main pages, but a bit harder with the item pages. I decided that the best option was to use the built in search on this site to search for entries matching the title of the old entry. To do this you need to insert the following tags after </MainOrArchivePage> but still within the <head> and </head> tags:

<ItemPage>
<Blogger>
<META http-equiv="refresh"
content="3;URL=http://www.cebidae.com/index.php?s=<$BlogItemTitle$>">
</Blogger>
</ItemPage>

ItemPage makes sure this only happens on item pages, and this time the redirection is to a search on the new site for the title of the item on the old. the Blogger tags are required or blogger won’t evaluate <$BlogItemTitle$>.

I also put a small body section in my template that has a link to the new site in case their browser doesn’t support redirection:

<body>
<br/><br/>
<MainOrArchivePage>
<p>This page has moved. You can find the new page
<a href="http://www.cebidae.com" >here</a>.
You should be redirected in 3 seconds.</p>
</MainOrArchivePage>
<Blogger>
<ItemPage>
<p>This page has moved. You can find the new page
<a href="http://www.cebidae.com/index.php?s=<$BlogItemTitle$>" >here</a>.
You should be redirected in 3 seconds.</p>
</ItemPage>
</Blogger>
</body>

]]> http://www.davidbdean.com/2006/02/24/redirecting-a-blogspot-blog-to-wordpress/feed/ 4 Fixing OpenGL on my HP TC1100 http://www.davidbdean.com/2006/02/17/fixing-opengl-on-my-hp-tc1100/ http://www.davidbdean.com/2006/02/17/fixing-opengl-on-my-hp-tc1100/#comments Fri, 17 Feb 2006 12:01:55 +0000 David Dean http://www.cebidae.com/2006/02/17/fixing-opengl-on-my-hp-tc1100/ I’ve been having a bit of a problem getting OpenGL (in particular, second life) working on my HP TC1100 tablet. It used to work, but recently when I attempted anything that wanted to use OpenGL it would report “can’t create gl rendering context”.

I tried uninstalling my video drivers, and updating them from HP’s website but that didn’t fix the problem. My graphics card is a NVIDIA GeForce4 420 Go 32M, so I went to NVIDIA’s website, but it appears they basically leave it up to the OEM to supply the drivers.

Anyway, long story shorter, this usenet post (which I found by searching Google Groups for “NVIDIA GeForce4 420 Go opengl“) pointed me to Omega Drivers who describe themselves (himself) thusly:

The purpose of the Omega Drivers is to provide gamers with an alternate set of drivers, ones that have more options and features than the original sets. The drivers contain optimizations, extra features (like OC capabilities), more resolutions and internal tweaks that can give them the edge in a gaming environment over the normal drivers, which are often tailored for synthetic benchmarks.

They have custom drivers for ATI Radeon, NVidia GeForce, and 3DFX video cards in most windows flavours, so if you are having trouble with an OEM supplied driver like I did, you may get better results giving them a go.

UPDATE: Unfortunately the Omega NVidia drivers didn’t support screen rotation, which is more important to me than being able to use OpenGL, so I have moved back to the crappy HP-supplied drivers.

UPDATE II: Turns out it was MATLAB’s fault.

]]> http://www.davidbdean.com/2006/02/17/fixing-opengl-on-my-hp-tc1100/feed/ 3 Are biometrics the best solution to replace password authentication? http://www.davidbdean.com/2005/02/28/are-biometrics-the-best-solution-to-replace-password-authentication/ http://www.davidbdean.com/2005/02/28/are-biometrics-the-best-solution-to-replace-password-authentication/#comments Tue, 01 Mar 2005 03:55:00 +0000 David Dean http://www.cebidae.com/?p=174 Is [sic] biometrics the best solution to replace password authentication? No, because biometrics are not secret, and passwords (or equivalent) need to be secret.
Biometrics. It’s a topic I come back to periodically and enthusiastically. Most pundits, gurus and analysts agree that passwords as a method of authenticating people are not at all secure and need to be replaced. Many feel that a biometric authentication – via fingerprint, retina scan, voiceprint, or even DNA – represents the ne plus ultra of authentication methods. Still, there are quite a few people who argue that using biometrics is like placing all your eggs in one basket – what happens when the basket breaks, what happens when the biometric system is compromised?

]]> http://www.davidbdean.com/2005/02/28/are-biometrics-the-best-solution-to-replace-password-authentication/feed/ 0