In my last posting, I talked a little about Google Chrome and how I’ve been trying it out. “No problems so far”, I said. Oh, how quickly things change…
Today I was using the Janome website, looking for information on my wife’s embroidery machine. Janome has a customer forum area where people can post and respond to each other about issues. Chrome wasn’t too happy with the forum.
Here’s what happened. I accessed the forum on the Janome site. I did a search for “350e”, and up popped a page of results. I picked one, clicked on it, and went to that result page. When I was done reading it, I clicked back, wanting to go back to my list of results. Instead I got the message from Chrome, “Confirm Form Resubmission”. A click on the “forward” button took me to the individual result again. A click on the “back” button took me to the initial search page. Where did my page of results go to? No idea, can’t find it anywhere.
So, that alone is pretty much a show-stopper. Can’t use a browser with issues like that. Back to Firefox I go, which happily navigates the Janome forums with nary a glitch.
I’m trying out Google Chrome a little lately. Normally I’m a Firefox guy, and I just can’t stomach Internet Explorer, but Google’s done some other things right, so I thought I’d give Chrome a try.
I haven’t had any problems yet. It’s a little odd having the address bar and buttons below the tabs, but not so strange that I have any trouble using it. I haven’t tried any customization, but with the defaults, at least, it’s a pretty clean interface. Minimal junk so there’s nothing to clutter things up.
I don’t see any extensions or plugins, so I’m not sure if they’ll be added later or if that’s even a consideration with Chrome. I don’t use a lot of plugins in Firefox, but I do use a few, and I kinda miss having those in Chrome.
So, not bad for a new browser. After all, Firefox and IE have been developed over years and years to get to where they are.
Had a fairly interesting day today. Found an ATA PCMCIA card still inserted in a 7206VXR G1 that didn’t need to be there, since the G1 engine uses CompactFlash. So, I’ve got that inserted in my 7206VXR w/ NPE400, just need to log into it remotely, download the new IOS, and reload.
Found out that ASA’s inspect outgoing SMTP connections and check things like the number of recipients in th message. The default is to block the message if the count is more than 100. Yes, there apparently are people who email more than 100 people the same message, all at one time.
Other than that, today was a paperwork day. I don’t like paperwork, but sometimes it’s gotta be done. If I get enough done one day, then hopefully the next day I’m paperwork-free.
As I mentioned before, I’ve been trying out Digsby as a Pidgin alternative because of it’s native Twitter support. Overall, I’ve been pretty happy with Digsby, until I found a limitation today. On our Openfire server, we have chat groups set up. Apparently Digsby doesn’t support chat groups yet.
So, I figured, I’ll switch back to Pidgin and see how the pidgin-twitter plugin works out. Let’s just say that I didn’t stick with it long. The whole thing seems really convoluted, requiring me to sign up for a Gmail account, set up a Gtalk account in Pidgin, follow twitter@twitter.com in Twitter, and post messages with Pidgin to a twitter@twitter.com Gtalk account that shows up as not logged in. Digsby doesn’t have all this extra junk to deal with, it just works. The Disgby interface for Twitter is nicer than Pidgin as well.
So, I’m running both now – Pidgin for my corporate Jabber/Openfire account, Digsby for my AIM and Twitter access. When Digsby adds support for chat groups, I imagine I’ll be Digsby-only again.
Tomorrow I’ve got to see if I can dig up an ATA PCMCIA memory card to use with a Cisco 7206VXR I/O controller and NPE-400 engine. Yeah, it’s getting kinda long in the tooth, but it’s a pretty good solution for aggregating data T1′s into the network. Michael and I are part of a data center move, and as we near the end of the move, data T1′s are last to go. I’ve managed to swing replacing the PA-8T serials with PA-MC-8T1/E1 cards, so we’ll be able to get rid of the external CSU/DSU shelf. Saves rack space, power, and makes things easier to configure and maintain.
Anyway, I was configuring a spare 7206 for the new data center to move the T1′s over onto, and realized the ATA PCMCIA flash card was a sad 16MB. Can’t get a very recent IOS onto a 16MB card. So, I’ve got to dig around and see if I can find a larger one. I have plenty of Compact Flash cards from different things, but ATA PCMCIA might be a little hard to come by without just buying a new one.
Oh how I hate hardware license keys. These are the evil devices distributed by software companies to make absolutely sure their software isn’t pirated and used by nefarious ner-do-wells without paying for it. These days they are usually USB keys that look like thumb-drives, but years ago they used to attach to a PC’s parallel [...]
So far so good with Digsby. No obvious problems, and the interface is maybe a little more appealing to me than Pidgin. One neat feature is that new messages that come in pop up for a few seconds in the corner of my screen, kinda like Outlook notices. If I want to respond immediately, I [...]
Trying something new today. Normally I use Pidgin for AIM and Jabber. I found out there is a plugin for it that will allow it to talk to Twitter as well. But, while I was finding that plugin, I ran across Digsby, a client app that supports Twitter by default, as well as other social [...]
Found out a surprising limitation today on the Cisco ASA5505. Apparently you cannot have more than 1 subnet assigned to a VLAN. For instance, if a company is using 192.168.0.0/24 for their servers and 192.168.1.0/24 for their PC’s, and they haven’t graduated to the point of managed VLAN-aware switches, there is no way to put [...]
I got to reminiscing with a couple fellow geeks today, and the subject turned to old proprietary UNIX’s, specifically those released by Hewlett Packard and Sun. It doesn’t seem that long ago, but once I worked mainly with HP-UX. We ran versions 9 and 10 on HP workstations and business-class servers. I also was lucky [...]
