Thinking aloud: Azure, AWS, DevOps, cars and opinion from Alex Neihaus
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Still recovering from Drupal: one year later
It’s time to build and write another website — something I do about once a year, it seems. After my last (self-inflicted) debacle with Drupal (here and here), there was no question that I’d use WordPress for the new website I am developing for Zixi. And when I decided today to write (yet another) love…
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Got snow?
Well, it’s over — over that is except for the backache I gave myself digging us out. Here in Southborough, the Blizzard of 2013 was a whopper. A TV station said we had 25.5 inches, but I am quite certain we got more than that. Tricia was scheduled to work Friday, Saturday and Sunday. She…
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A PowerPoint 2013 mea culpa on wrapping text
Every now and then, a human touch comes through in a software product that is otherwise devoid of any human touch. And it’s always a little bit of a surprise because we don’t think of software in the same terms as we do things that claim to be “handicraft” or “hand-made.” Software seems somehow divorced…
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How to improve Office 2013 performance in a virtual machine
Increase performance in Windows virtual machines
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Stone-cold file backup: Amazon Glacier, Cloudberry and FastGlacier
Recently, I’ve blogged about full-disk image backup of Windows using Clonezilla. I’ve also blogged about the excellent “trust no one” (thanks, Steve Gibson, for this term) CloudBerry file-oriented backup utility. These things help you create a backup. But where should you store the backup? How secure is that backup if you store it in the…
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The FCC kowtows to the cable industry (yet again)
These days, I am fortunate to be working in a company that serves the broadcast, cable and entertainment markets. This unites my long interest in these industries with my love of deep-geek technology. (My company, Zixi, makes a video transport platform that allows these companies to develop new applications for high-quality streaming video.) Since I…
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Apple better look out: Microsoft Windows 8 and Office 2013 are fantastic
[Looking for info on Office 2013 performance in a virtual machine? Check out this post.] It’s been about a week since I upgraded my Lenovo ThinkPad T410 and MacBook Air (mid-2011) to Windows 8 and Office 2013. (On the MBA, I run Office 2013 in Parallels virtual machines under both Windows 7 and Windows 8,…
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Robots, Clonezilla and upgrading to Windows 8 (strike that, it’s now Windows 10)
Once, many years ago, I gave a marketing manager who worked for me in Taipei grief for packaging the localized version of Lotus Notes in a box with a “friendly robot” theme and name. Apparently, Transformer-like images go over well with Taiwanese buyers. I was wrong; he was right and I learned an important lesson…
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I STILL hate Drupal
About a year and a half ago, I wrote a post titled “I Hate Drupal.” It’s turned out to be one of the most popular and enduring posts on this blog. The post continues to draw traffic and comments despite its age. Why then, you might ask, did I lose my mind and recommend and…
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Do you watch video on the Internet?
Dumb question, right? Of course you — and increasingly the rest of the world — watch all kinds of video on the Internet. And we all know it’s occasionally a frustrating experience. Images break-up, pixelate, stop or — my favorite — go audio only. Still, despite the low quality experience we are often stuck with, every estimate of…