Brian Jepson’s Weblog

That geek mystique: “Jepson said he first noticed the term geek gaining positive connotations in 1993, with the introduction of the “geek code”, a method used to compress data to speed up e-mail when modems were painfully slow.”

You’ve got the be fscking kidding me. A free copy of one of my books to the first person who posts a comment reconstructing what I originally said.

Update: Christopher got it right (get in touch with me about the free book; it’s bjepson at jepstone dot net).

I mentioned the geek code, and then made the mistake of going into an aside about why it was once important to keep your .sig around 4-5 lines (well, I think it’s still important, but many folks don’t). It’s really my own fault–I’ve been told that when you talk to the press, you shouldn’t meander like that–say what you need to say, and repeat it a few times.

These folks are working under really insane deadlines, and one or more people will get their hands on what they wrote and mess with it before it’s printed. Still, I really like the end result–it’s really a thing of beauty.

Update: I got got a nice call from the author, who wanted to correct the piece. He’s going to go with something along the lines of “a code to represent a geek’s skills and interests.”

This tip came in handy–I was repaving a machine and didn’t want to have to re-activate office. (For Office XP and 2003, backup the data.dat or opa11.dat files in C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\OFFICE\DATA, for Office 2000, use telephone activation and write down the code they give you–it’s reusable).

I’ve been a happy Norton
Ghost user for a while, but I never knew how it worked. I found out
the hard way, after I upgraded to a new SATA-based system that Ghost
didn’t like. As soon as my clone operations started, it got some kind
of protection error and just crapped out. What’s worse, I got into a
couple of situations where Ghost wouldn’t put my system back the way
it was before dropping into PC-DOS. This was pretty bad, since here’s what Ghost does:

• Creates a virtual partition in the middle of my hard drive
  somewhere, grabbing a couple of megabytes that overlap with another
  partition, and setting up a PC-DOS partition that contains all the Ghost
  utilities.

• Marks that partition as bootable.

So when Ghost crapped out partway through, all I could get was the
PC-DOS boot menu. I was able to fix it by booting Linux (I
chose the Fedora Core boot CD-ROM and went far enough into the install
to get a shell prompt) and using fdisk to delete the bogus virtual
partition and mark the primary partition as bootable.

So I figured I’d run Ghost on a different machine. Problem is, that
machine had 3 primary and one extended partition, so Ghost couldn’t
create its virtual partition. I really don’t like this whole booting
into PC-DOS thing, anyhow, so I looked around and found Drive Image (formerly
PowerQuest, now Symantec), which will perform imaging operations without
leaving Windows. Since both Ghost and Drive Image come from the same
company, I tried using my Ghost serial # to get upgrade pricing for
Drive Image, and that worked, so I saved a few bucks. I was able to
backup and restore an NTFS partition with no major problems. (However, I
made an initial attempt with my Actius’ drive mounted on my desktop
computer; when I restored the NTFS drive, Drive Image somehow hardcoded
the drive letter that my desktop computer was using, which totally threw
off the Windows 2000 install that was living in that partition. It
worked fine when I ran Drive Image from the Actius itself.)

There are some good Linux alternatives, too:

• Partition Image
• g4u
• dd

A simple google
search cuts through it all.

Gizmodo:
“Although there’s an old adage, ‘Never trust a University of Rhode
Island press release when it’s talking about a breakthrough in antenna
technology,’ I think we’ll go against the grain and mention this new
technique by inventor Rob Vincent (of the university’s Physics
Department) that claims to have produce distributed-load, monopole
antennas that will double the range of walkie-talkies, cell phones, and
WiFi networking equipment.”

I have it on good authority that Verizon, in a recent presentation,
promised that their 2004
1xEV-DO rollout will include Rhode Island. But, it will only go as
far south as Division Street in East Greenwich–South County will be out
of luck (but heck, AT&T Wireless’ EDGE works great there).