Tag: bbweblog

I had a problem with my iPod nano where it stopped being recognized in Windows when I connected it to any PC with iTunes installed. Windows would reconize it as a drive letter, but if you clicked the drive icon, Windows would hang before timing out with an error (‘Please insert disk for drive e:’). The instructions on the Apple site also did not help. The iPod Updater software also would not recognize the iPod – it also would hang.

From Googling various sites, it appears that the flash memory in the nano can become corrupted under certain circumstances. To restore the memory to it’s orginal state, it needs to be reformatted. This forum post has a link to the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool – download this and start it up when the iPod is connected. It will recognize the connected iPod – select ‘Quick Format’ and then format the iPod. Now start up the iPod Updater and it should recognize the iPod again. Perform a ‘Restore’ to put back the original or last firmware and you should now be all set. Start up iTunes and your iPod should now be recognized again.

IBM has won a contract with Los Alamos National Laboratory to build a new supercomputer based on 16,000 AMD Opteron processors together with 16,000 Cell processors.

The Cell processor is the multi-core CPU (8 cores) jointly developed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba that is highly optimized for mathematical calculations. The Cell is set to make it’s debut as the processor inside the PS3, due to ship in Japan and US this November.

The new machine is planned to be 4 times faster than the current fastest supercomputer, IBM’s Blue Gene/L, which performs 280 trillion floating point operations a second. This new supercomputer will be the first machine to break into petaflop performance, or 1 quadrillion floating point operations per second.

I have to admit, since I learned HTML back in 1995/1996, my layout and design skills have also been stuck in that era. I admit, I’m not a artistic, visual UI design GUI guru, I just don’t have that artistic flair, but I do from time to time have to write HTML. I’m aware the layout of HTML has moved on since heavy use of nested HTML Tables and that I should be using CSS for both visual style and layout, but I have not had the time or the need to make the jump to investigate how I do layouts with CSS.

This book however, CSS: The Missing Manual, looks like it is worth a read, and from the review on Slashdot, looks like it would fill in some blanks for me in terms of my current knowledge of CSS. This one will be on my wishlist.