Author Archives: Neil McAllister

Review: “The Terror”

Posted on by
Reply

In the spring of 1845, Captain Sir John Franklin led two ships of the British Navy — HMS Erebus and HMS Terror — on a voyage to discover the fabled Northwest Passage to the Pacific Ocean. They were the first steam-powered vessels to attempt such a venture. Neither the ships nor their crews were ever seen again.

That much we know. The actual fate of the 130-odd men on that doomed expedition will forever remain a mystery. But where history leaves off, Dan Simmons’ novel The Terror picks up the tale, giving a fictionalized account of what might have happened to Captains Franklin and Crozier and their crews as they weathered the next three years trapped in the Arctic ice. » More... » →

Ubuntu for newbies

Posted on by
1

Ubuntu LogoA few weeks ago, PC World published an excellent guide to setting up your PC with a brand-new installation of Ubuntu Linux. Now they’ve let me do the follow-up.

Available now on PC World’s site, check out “Don’t Fear the Penguin: A Newbie’s Guide to Linux.” It’s your quick-start tour of your Ubuntu installation, including application highlights, configuration options, and how to work cross-platform with Windows and Mac OS X. Best of all, it’s chock full of screenshots, so you can make sense of it even if you haven’t taken the plunge and installed Ubuntu yet yourself. » More... » →

How eBay built a global platform

Posted on by
Reply

I have a new article in the current edition of Multilingual magazine, which I co-wrote with Nelson Ng of eBay. It’s about how eBay re-engineered its back-end systems to support Unicode, the universal character-encoding standard.

Unfortunately, this one is subscription-only for now. But the gist is that eBay needed to convert all of its database tables, applications, and HTML to Unicode in order to expand into Asian markets while maintaining maximum compatibility across all its global sites. Considering the scope of eBay’s operations, it was no easy task. In fact, it took years to complete.

It’s a fascinating case study, so if you’re interested in multilingual computing I encourage you to check it out. Multilingual is a print publication, but digital subscriptions give you access to the current issue online immediately.

Greasemonkey fix for /. user page

Posted on by
Reply

I’m singularly unimpressed with the Slashdot gang’s attempts to reinvent the site’s UI. Every new change seems to make the interface uglier, more bloated, and harder to use. I liked the mechanics of the old, pre-AJAX site just fine, thank you.

But the most recent insult was the sudden, unexpected change of the User page. Previously, if you clicked on your username in the upper lefthand corner, it would take you to a page that listed your recent comments. Now you get dumped to a Firehose page, forcing you to do an extra page load to get to where you’re going — and don’t get me started on Firehose.

So I decided to write a Greasemonkey script to fix it. You can download the script here. » More... » →

Happy 2009, everybody!

Posted on by
3

Happy New Year!Wow. It only just dawned on me how long it’s been since I posted an update to this blog. Don’t worry, I haven’t been idle — on the contrary, my plate’s been pretty full throughout December. In addition to blogging for InfoWorld and PC World, I’ve been working on some private jobs for clients, some stuff you’ll be seeing soon, and finishing up some classes at City College of San Francisco — not to mention the Holidays!

I hope everybody has a happy and safe holiday season, and a prosperous New Year. I’ll give updates on what’s going on with me after the jump. » More... » →

Linux IQ quiz

Posted on by
Reply

Tux, the Linux PenguinAnother one from the “just for fun” file — this week, InfoWorld is running a quick quiz to see just how much you really know about Linux.

I always get a certain amount of hate mail when we put together one of these things, so let’s clear up a few points right off. No, getting some of the questions wrong doesn’t mean you’re dumb, or that you’re bad at your job as a Linux admin. It’s for fun. See?

Anyhow, check it out, and if you feel like bragging about your score — or calling me an idiot — post ’em here or on the InfoWorld site.

Adventures in amateur BlackBerry repair

Posted on by
Reply

Taking apart a BlackBerry PearlLast night as I was walking home I pulled my BlackBerry Pearl 8120 out of my back pocket and noticed that the LCD was cracked (image here). I have no idea how this happened — I didn’t drop it or anything. The phone is only two weeks old! Unfortunately, no matter how it happened I knew T-Mobile wasn’t going to have much sympathy for my plight. T-Mobile, like most carriers, considers any screen breakage to be the customer’s fault, and it’s not covered by warranty.

This particular Pearl, however, was a replacement for my old Pearl — an earlier model 8100 — which I accidentally dropped in the toilet about two weeks ago. And that gave me an idea: Why not swap out the broken screen in the new Pearl with the working screen from the old one? » More... » →

Fatal Exception rated “Great” at Blogged.com

Posted on by
Reply

This just in: Fatal Exception, my InfoWorld blog, has received a rating of 8.0 at the blog rating site Blogged.com, qualifying it for a score of “Great.” Just six other InfoWorld blogs have been reviewed by the site. Tom Yager rates a little higher than I do, as does Zack Urlocker and Savio Rodrigues’ Open Sources blog, but I daresay I can deal with “Great.” Drop on by the site and leave a review of Fatal Exception, if you’re so moved.

20 (more) IT mistakes to avoid

Posted on by
Reply

Think you know something about how to manage IT? Care to learn a thing or two about how not to do it?

My latest article for InfoWorld revisits an old theme, originally covered in 2004 by Chad Dickerson, InfoWorld’s then-CTO: the top IT mistakes to avoid. We all fall prey to bad ideas once in a while. Presented here are twenty doozies for you to observe and evade.

And lest you think you’ve heard it all before, rest assured that this year’s list doesn’t overlap much with the original 20. Some of the topics are related, but I’ve tried to present a new twist or an opposite angle. Taken together, the two articles form a pretty formidable list of “worst practices.” So click on over and let me know what you think.