I recently got some scripts that were nicely written, meaning well formatted, documented and structured. What I liked most was the clearly visible separation of the main code and the subroutines. The code blocks were separated by ASCII Code based letters as shown on the picture below.

If you go to http://www.network-science.de/ascii/ you can create your own text using the ASCII Generator.

Now that we speak about ASCII, during my little search on the web for the above, I also came across another fancy tool called ASCII Generator .NET. The tool allows converting pictures into ASCII Code.

Converted Windows 7 Logo

Converted John Lennon Picture

UPDATE (Thanks Steve)
Here is another resource for ASCII Text. http://www.figlet.org/

The inspiration for this post came from a tweet which had the link below included which is a nice comic explaining why you should pretend you don’t know anything about computers.

If you are an IT Pro, you probably know that scenario where you are at someone’s place and you are being asked what you do for for a living. Usually I just reply with “I work in the IT sector” where then usually the other person replies with “oh so you repair PCs?”. Because explaining my job (Technology Consultant)  to someone who is not working in the IT sector isn’t that easy anyway I try to keep the answer as simple as possible by saying “I support companies to run their IT”. But usually that doesn’t help much, so if possible I try to switch topic or ask them what they do.

But sometimes, it’s better you don’t mention that you work with computers at all. Why ? well read this comic “Why it’s better to pretend you don’t know anything about computers” and you know why. I’m sure it has happened to you before.

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Watch this video performed by Wes Borg. Enjoy !

Watch the GUI Timeline from 1973 until 2007 here

Here’s a video that explains how to embed a YouTube video into a PowerPoint slide.

Just came across this video where people are being asked to explain what a Browser is. Its funny most people use it every day, but obviously don’t pay much attention how they get on to the internet. It’s just a matter of clicking that blue E.

Interesting concept from Cullen Dudas. An Interview with Cullen can be found here

My only comment on this one “It’s huge !”

The Information Architects have published an updated trend map of today’s internet.

Last week-end I was sitting in an airplane and read a magazine that was provided for free to travelers at the airport (of course i had chosen an IT related one ). The magazine contained an article talking about the top 10 data loss disasters collected by Ontrack.

The Top 10 list of data loss disasters 2008 can be found here.

Yesterday evening I was helping out my wife with creating some invitation cards for a children event that takes place during spring vacation. For the juniors there was a picture on the front side of the invitation that was okay, but we both decided that for the teen-agers we must use a different theme.

Finding the right picture wasn’t easy, so we decided to just write text, but to use a cool font. Although Office 2007 already comes with a large number of fonts, we were just looking for something different.

We have found a lot of free cool fonts on dafont.com. The site is well organized and all fonts are categorized. Have a look, it’s amazing what fonts are being used for, not just letters and numbers.

I just checked the Microsoft download site to see if there is anything new. On the top of the list (sorted by release date) I found the Windows 2000 Service Pack 4. Something must have got mixed up there.

In my next blog post i will address the IP version 6 topic, but let me first share this amusing video I found while I was collecting information around IPv6. It’s really worth listening. 

Yesterday I helped out a friend to move into his new apartment. Once we had completed moving the heavy parts he asked me if I could connect his PC and while i would do that maybe also do a quick system check.

So I connected back all the cables and powered up the machine and noticed that it was incredibly loud, but did not pay any further notice to that. I checked if the system was configured for automatic windows updates, and it was and had all the latest and greatest patches installed, so far so good. I then checked the Antivirus application, that one seemed to be expired since a while, so I uninstalled it and installed AVAST Home that is free for home users.

Then in the middle of downloading the software the system powered down unexpectedly. When moving into a new apartment, there’s always one busy with electric, so I thought maybe one had taken out the fuse, but unfortunately that wasn’t the case too.

I checked the power cable and then powered the system on, it quickly started booting, but before even showing the BIOS boot screen it would shut down again. I did wait for a few minutes and ten tried to power up the system again, and it would boot completely into Windows then. Meanwhile I had told my friend about what had happened and he told me that that would happen from time to time, so nothing special.

I continued with the previously started download, but then again after about 3 minutes the system powered down again. I thought this looks like someone who will soon have to buy a new PC .

But maybe it was jut the power fan that had stopped working ? So we opened the PC and found a CPU completely covered by dust. I have forgotten to take a picture myself, but it looked worse than the picture below.

So we took out the CPU and fan unit and cleaned it with a vacuum cleaner, then we did put back the CPU, attached the fan, connected it back to the motherboard and booted up the system.

First it was not as noisy anymore as before. Of course because after removing all the dust it had less work to do

Conclusion, if you have your PC at home or at work standing on the floor, it might be worth opening it from time to time and check how much dust is in there just to prevent your machine is going to look like this one…..

Interested in how it all started off at Microsoft ? On Channel 9 a new series call “History of Microsoft” has started. A new episode is being released every Thursday. So far the following episodes have been published:

History of Microsoft 1975

History of Microsoft 1976

History of Microsoft 1977

As new episodes come out you find them here.