http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble Home of Stefan Didak Tue, 07 Sep 2010 15:32:12 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I just learned that John P. (you know, the founder of HTMLHelp.com and a person instrumental to the early development of HTML and CSS) has received a rather intimidating letter from Adaptive Infinity in which they are threatening John with a legal suit over a comment that someone left on ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2010/09/04/vistaprint-trying-to-intimidate-a-blogger-over-a-comment/ For those of you who are using my Windows Layout Manager (WiLMa) and who have asked for command line support will hopefully be happy to learn that version 1.1.0.0 has the ability to apply a layout by using the Windows Layout Manager via the command line and in batch files. There ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2010/07/12/windows-layout-manager-wilma-version-1-1-0-0-available/ Let's put an end to the strange tabloid style rumors on the internet that have implied that Mitch Haile and yours truly are mortal enemies engaged in a complete and all-out home office war. I don't know who first came up with that nonsense but before it gets out of ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2010/05/29/mitch-haile-and-stefan-didak-in-one-frame/ I might be able to post this before we head off on a flight to Ohio (to retrieve two cats, don't ask, I'm not going to even try to explain nor will be blogging about it). Last night we had a great time at the Red Devil Lounge in San Francisco ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2010/05/12/pearl-aday-and-scott-ian-at-the-red-devil-lounge-in-san-franscico/ You may have seen the Clevo D900F laptop from various brands using different product names such as Advance Technology VX7670, BoXX GoBoXX, Sager NP9280, AVA Direct, or Eurocom D900F Panther and various others (feel free to add anyone not listed here in the comments for this post). And yes, the ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2010/01/31/review-advance-vx7670-sager-np9280-clevo-d900f-super-laptop/ SAN RAFAEL, California, Jan 5, 2010 - Autodesk, Inc. (NASDAQ: ADSK) announced that it has completed the acquisition of Dynamite VSP and Dynamite SIM visualization software products and related assets. The products were purchased from 3AM Solutions, a UK-based privately owned technology company that develops visualization software for civil ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2010/01/05/autodesk-acquires-dynamite-vsp-and-dynamite-sim-from-3am-solutions/ If you've ever needed to frequently rebuild multiple corridors in Autodesk Civil 3D because they are out of date but don't want to go hit the rebuild menu item for each single corridor then here's the solution. The following microscopic addon/plugin for Civil 3D 2010 allows you to rebuild all ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2009/11/12/rebuilding-all-or-all-out-of-date-corridors-in-autodesk-civil-3d-2010/ As many of you already know, I'm a big fan of MaxiVista and that it's a product that has proven to be essential to my home office setup. I've written about this wonderful application before and you can expect some more about it in the next weeks. Since most of ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2009/09/21/maxivista-version-4-revitalising-multi-monitor-heaven/ StarWind Software approached Sallie about writing a review about their products and guess who got to play around with it instead? Yep, me, the guy known as Ur-Guru. Why? Oh, because I happen to have some servers sitting around that would make a good SAN. Before I continue I have ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2009/09/11/starwind-server-san-made-simple/ Virtual Machines are great. I rely on them for my work every day and most of my home office network depends on several Virtual Machines (VM's) for the core infrastructure (SMTP, DNS, AD, backup management, centralized automation, build farms, continuous integration, etc.) but sometimes you just want the abstraction and ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2009/09/09/windows-7-booting-from-vhd-converting-between-vhd-and-vmdk/ There are numerous websites and blogs out there that highlight Synergy while linking to my site and the pictures of my home office as an example. I am happy that I've been able to point out this incredibly useful software keyboard/mouse switch but the time has come to start pointing ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2009/09/08/bye-bye-synergy-hello-input-director/ The Windows Layout Manager I mentioned on my blog and subsequently described in more detail has been officially released. Quite a few people have already been using it for the past months and while I planned to give it a proper download location on a new site I've been working ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2009/08/25/windows-layout-manager-1-0-wilma-officially-released/ In 1838, Antoine Amedie Peychaud, owner of a New Orleans apothecary, treated his friends to brandy toddies of his own recipe, including his "Peychaud's Bitters," made from a secret family recipe. The toddies were made using a double-ended egg cup as a measuring cup or jigger, then ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2009/06/30/expert-maker-of-sazeracs/ I'm not going to fill a site with a series of pictures of my photography equipment because there's plenty of that around in many different and various other places. And all this camera stuff looks the same anyway. Those of you that know of my past week's hunt for a suitable ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2009/05/25/photography-gear-travel-and-transport-heavy-and-hell/ If you've never heard of Transworld International Youth Organization welcome to the club. I sure never heard of them. Until now, that is. What you see here is a grab of the "contact us" page of this organization which I assume now can confirm must be is some kind of scam. ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2009/03/16/transworld-international-youth-organization-scam/ Anyone using dual or multi-monitors knows it isn't always easy to find nice high resolution background. Often we need to resort to creating our own or altering one we've found but isn't quite 'it'. The more monitors you add, the higher the resolution of your desktop becomes, the harder it ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2009/01/13/looking-for-ultra-high-resolution-wallpapers/ If you're reading this post you're one of the first to see my site on the new host. DNS is currently propagating around the world and should be all done in the next 8 hours or so. If you've read my post on how Digg and Reddit have consistently caused ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2009/01/13/bye-bye-dreamhost-hello-media-temple/ Over the past year I've received quite a few questions from people wondering how I manage all the windows that must be all over the place on all the various screens and systems. The standard answer is that "I've got my own little tool that I developed for managing window ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2009/01/04/window-layout-manager-manage-many-windows-on-many-screens/ This is getting to be prime time entertainment if you ask me. For those of you that have read a previous post of mine on the theft and infringement on my copyrighted material committed by Andre Leite Alves (operating a business under the name Aware Bear in Pittsford, Rochester, New ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2008/11/12/andre-alves-aware-bear-misuse-of-the-dmca-against-my-blog-post/ Finally, after several delays and minor setbacks, the new Home Office pictures are online for all to see. It's been quite an overhaul that lasted longer than I expected and took more effort than I had hoped for, but the results are, as I suspect most will agree with, quite ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2008/10/26/stefan-didaks-new-office-pictures-are-now-online/ How pathetic must a person and its business be when they feel a need to paste themselves into a picture of my office and use it for their commercial purposes? The person you see Photoshopped (pasted) into the photograph of my home office is NOT ME. Why it isn't me will ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2008/10/17/awarebear-andre-leite-alvez-irresponsible-unprofessional-careless/ Yes, it's almost done! I'm still waiting for new computer equipment to arrive at my dealer and decided to wait until the new office setup reflects the actual working conditions before I start shooting proper pictures and updating the site. In the meantime, here are a few shots of the new ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2008/10/10/home-office-overhaul-nearing-completion/ The Home Office Overhaul (going from version 5 to version 6, as I call it) is in full swing. Except it will take a while longer before I can properly update the website to reflect the new working conditions. I've been at this for a few days now and it ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2008/10/05/home-office-overhaul-in-progress/ A lot of you have been asking when the new office pictures will be online. Unfortunately there's been a little snag in the planning process that is going to cause a delay of about another week which puts the entire overhaul a month off schedule since the original plan. My dealer ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2008/09/27/office-overhaul-slightly-delayed/ Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know. For the past two months I haven't been keeping up with e-mail responses, haven't blogged about anything at all, and heard that people assume that I had vanished into thin air or perhaps was obducted by evil aliens (or competitors in my field, ha!). Alas, Sallie ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2008/09/05/back-from-vacation-too-much-to-catch-up-on/ While I'm on vacation and checking some server statistics in the morning I noticed that my site was very difficult to get through. I figured there was a lot of traffic hitting it and decided to look at the log which had, in the few hours in the morning, grown ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2008/08/06/redditing-my-site-can-crash-servers-at-dreamhost/ Sometimes the things people say and do is nothing short of priceless entertainment, especially if what is said or done is not meant to be amusing. Everyone from a certain age group and have been involved with computers from the early days will no doubt know of, have heard of, or ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2008/06/07/an-apple-fundamentalist-in-the-wild-they-still-exist/ WhereWeDoWhatWeDo is "a community-built visual database of the spaces in which we spend our days, nights or both doing whatever it is we do". If you want to see some other home offices and fun spaces, go over to WWDWWD. And while checking out the many images, you may encounter ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2008/05/12/where-we-do-what-we-do/ A few days ago one of the smaller APC backup UPS devices decided it no longer liked me and started yelling at me. Adding insult to injury it then decided to start flashing its little lights at me to express its utter dismay of me having forgotten to replace the ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2008/04/02/new-apc-smart-ups-sc1500i/ For a while now I have been using a few dark color schemes for Visual Studio, mostly to just try out whether I would like it or not. Many others like Brad Wilson have also shared their adaptations and thoughts on the use of dark color themes for Visual Studio. ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2008/01/09/visual-studio-dark-color-schemes-and-themes/ OK, this is not really a restaurant review but it's a place worth visiting if you're ever in El Cerrito, California. What do you do for coffee in California? Go to Peets, of course. Unless you don't care about coffee and how it should taste, in which case, people like ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2007/09/23/central-perk-in-el-cerrito/ I've recently been really getting into PowerShell and investigating its potential as a new automation and scripting platform for the countless command line based processes I'm running all the time. The first thing I did was purchase a copy of PowerShell Analyzer, which I think is one of the most ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2007/09/06/short-list-of-powershell-resources/ This is hillarious. Someone going around on some web forum and calling himself SniperX has been passing off my home office as his 'gaming rig'. Check out what he's been writing. Of course, what SniperX hasn't realized is the fact that my office is famous enough that a lot of ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2007/09/04/sniperx-office-impersonator/ What do you mean you've never heard of those groundbreaking development methodologies? Well, perhaps you haven't but I do think you should check them out if you've got a minute so Scott Berkun can explain these to you in detail. I would like to add, OOCDD, Out Of Control Driven ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2007/06/22/development-with-add-cdd-cyae-dbd-gmpm/ After trying to figure out what to do with my photography pages and debating whether I should install an album module or write one myself like the quick hack that has been part of my site since I created it I've settled on using Flickr. I've uploaded a lot of ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2007/05/06/hello-flickr/ Since I now have a blog I'd like to take some time and write about copyrights and infringement, a subject I've had to deal with ever since I got into business for myself in 1989 and whereby the works were analog or digital in nature and effectively copyrighted material. Two days ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2007/04/04/amusing-copyright-infringement/ People have asked me to write something about some of the typical usage scenarios that I often find myself in at my home office. Since those are generally not easy to explain in a few words and since they could otherwise fill up the FAQ page a lot I've decided ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2007/04/03/home-office-usage-scenarios-1-and-2/ Oscar nominated artist Ruairi Robinson has posted the full version of his live action short film, "The Silent City" for all to see. Ruairi wrote, directed, edited, and storyboarded the entire film and has done 95% of the visual effects (which, as usual, are stunning). The film stars Don Wycherley ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2007/02/19/check-out-the-silent-city/ Someone just sent me a link explaining that over in Russia there is a competition going whereby my Home Office is being compared with that of Microsoft's Steve Ballmer. Unfortunately I can't read a single word of Russian so I've got no clue what the battle of the offices is ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2007/02/08/battle-of-the-offices-ballmer-vs-didak/ Today I noticed, while looking at the web logs, that there has been a tremendous increase in traffic generated by the Home Office and FAQ pages. I knew that for some reason it has been linked to a lot and draws a steady number of visitors but the traffic over ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2007/02/03/surge-in-traffic-not-troops/ Reviewing restaurants is almost like second nature, reviewing music albums isn't. But this one deserves a solid plug. Pearl Aday's solo debut album, Broken Thorny Crown, is a wonderful release that I'm sure I'll find myself playing over and over again. Today I received the CD, along with a surprise ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2007/01/17/pearl-adays-broken-thorny-crown/ And you can take that literally. Over at Fauxto there's this really nifty example of a web application that allows you to draw directly from your browser. It certainly isn't a replacement for Adobe Photoshop but as an example it sure is impressive. http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2006/12/27/drawing-on-the-web/ I've decided to consolidate some of the old content into my new site. Over the years a lot of content has been in various places and it's rather hard to keep track of it all. Links to the old material should still work as well, though you will get redirected ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2006/12/23/consolidating-scattered-content/ Good news. VMware has released the beta of VMware Workstation 6.0 which supports displaying virtual machines on multiple monitors and running virtual machines in a headless mode (in the background without the full blown display yet still accessible by remote desktop). An even more interesting new features is the integrated ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2006/12/23/vmware-workstation-6-beta/ Over several months many comments have been made about my home office setup. A lot of these comments reside on the various blogs and forums where people have been posting links to my home office pictures. This blog entry, now that I have a personal site to play with, is ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2006/12/21/stefan-didaks-home-office/ Cafe Maddalena, located in Dunsmuir's historic district, was a very pleasant surprise while we were staying in Dunsmuir. We arrived early in the evening and went hunting for a place to eat and just by sheer chance ended up in front of where one of the locals passed by ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2006/12/20/restaurant-cafe-maddalena-dunsmuir/ This place was a surprising discovery that turned into a very pleasant one. While driving in the city we decided to just look for a place for dinner by doing a spot-check of "hey that looks good, let's try it". After driving around and feeling hungry while looking for a ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2006/12/20/restaurant-davids-kitchen-san-francisco/ By now you may figure out that I like Italian food a lot. And lots of it! Tonno Rosso was this incidental find we ended up for dinner at while being at the Embarcadero because we had planned to go to the Slanted Door (which unfortunately had a 5-week waiting ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2006/12/20/restaurant-tonno-rosso-san-francisco/ Roy's is a Hawaiian Fusion Cuisine. A very innovative, surprising, and excellent place to go for food that is quite different. All food comes as a presentation of a work of art where a lot of effort is put into the balance between looks and taste. Lots of good medium ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2006/12/20/restaurant-roys-san-francisco/ The Brookdale Lodge, good food but with an even better ambiance. The restaurant (Brookroom) has a real live brook running through it which is lit with colored lights at night and provides an atmosphere that is very good for both casual and romantic dining. The food, as I already said, ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2006/12/20/restaurant-brookdale-lodge-brookdale/ Well, what can I say about this place that hasn't already been said. Not much I suspect. "If you haven't eaten at Fior d'Italia you haven't been to San Francisco!" is what they say and I can agree with that. The place is up there with the best of all ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2006/12/20/restaurant-fior-ditalia-san-francisco/ Fresh preparations with a Californian/Mediterranean touch which you can find on 1373 Solano Ave. at Beauregard's California Bistro. Excellent fish. Efficient, friendly service with a smile. I am not a big fan of fish unless it's Swordfish, Salmon, or... SHARK. The shark as provided by Beauregard's was to die for. ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2006/12/20/restaurant-beauregards-california-bistro-berkeley/ Dining out extensively is something I really love to do and I appreciate the better restaurants that one can find on this planet so it may come as a surprise that a BURGER place would be listed this high on my personal recommended list. However, Barney's burgers aren't just burgers, ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2006/12/20/restaurant-barneys-berkeley-san-francisco-oakland/ As far as Italian food goes, Trattoria La Siciliana is about as good as you will ever get it. Unfortunately the place lacks the ambiance I so like at Frantoio, which is why this place doesn't rank at my #1 position. However, the food is so good that on food ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2006/12/20/restaurant-trattoria-la-siciliana-berkeley/ On 810 B St, in San Rafael, you will find the best Thai restaurant in the Bay Area as far as I'm concerned (compared to the various other Thai places we have done in the past years). The food is really nice (well, needless to say it has to be ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2006/12/20/restaurant-signature-thai-san-rafael/ The best Italian food in Mill Valley. Hell, the best Italian food in the whole Bay Area as far as I'm concerned. Frantoio is my current number one highest scoring restaurant on my personal favorites list. The quality of the food is superb, the selection of wines is excellent. The ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2006/12/20/restaurant-frantoio-mill-valley/ You'll have seen the top-10, top-20, 25, or top-100's of restaurants published in various books, magazines, newspapers, etc. but what you haven't seen yet is my personal list of restaurants which may differ a little bit from the official foodie reviewers that are syndicated or published. Since I eat out ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2006/12/20/restaurant-reviews/ The Hydro Grill is a Bar and Grill place that doesn't fuss and serves good food and decent wine in a simple but efficient location. There isn't anything particularly memorable about the place but the food is good enough that you'd want to go back there regularly (at least when ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2006/12/20/restaurant-hydro-grill-calistoga/ Very inexpensive. Plenty of food. And quite strange if you haven't had African food (Eritrea/Ethiopian to be more exact) before. Eating with your hands by wrapping parts of your Injera (a pancake like bread) over the food and scooping it up certainly ends up being a strange experience for the ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2006/12/19/restaurant-massawa-san-francisco-1538-haight-st/ This isn't really a restaurant but rather an espresso bar. The two ladies running the place, however, serve a really mean Breakfast Burrito that has consistently been the best I've had anywhere. The place has a really warm and cozy feeling and is setup in a way that invites you ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2006/12/19/restaurant-hot-gossip-lake-tahoe/ This is another place that's not a big posh restaurant but hey, we're regulars at Yummy and we happen to really like their food. The staff is always friendly and efficient and will accommodate all your wishes without any fuss. It is also a very inexpensive place, which compared to ... http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2006/12/19/restaurant-yummy-chinese-restaurant-el-cerrito/