Looks like this home automation over WiFi / LAN might be the way to control the Mac from the bedroom / kitchen.
Archive for September, 2006
The future of advertising?
Some useful pointers to being more innovative in workshop settings. Purpose: get more out of the people.
While the general idea is laudable, the simple statement that vampires can’t exist because they’d have killed all the humans is just stupid. In summary: if a vampire feeds once a month and creates a vampire of its prey, then there would be no humans left. So we’re either all reformed vampires, or they don’t exist.
Surely it’s more fun to speculate that there is a vast, undercover army of vampire hunters who are protecting us from the vampire population explosion we all fear?
There’s a nice simple option for downloading Real / streaming video and sound on OSX. Get CocoaJT and follow instructions.
Alternatively, you might have success with mplayer, mplayer, VNC or other options. But they all seem like trouble given that CocoaJT just works. It’s a slightly strange name, though, so I always forget what it is called.
I was tempted to quote Steve Yegge’s article on the Google development process, but decided not to in the end. So it was fascinating to see a friend’s take on it from the other side of the fence. Summary: not great for people wanting to partner with Google.
It’s been trailled for a while, but interesting to see that Accenture has finally pulled out of NPfIT.
[Update: some musings from the OGC on risk for suppliers. And £30m more for Government Connect.]
Interesting musings on what the long-term significance of the “violence” quote might be. Summary: Islam uses Mohammed as a Pope-like figure to gather behind; the secular terms violence/non-violence, parody/defamation become linked with religion; a majority of muslims want to enter into a civilised dialogue.
So…most of the people I know who have tried social networking sites have tried Friends Reunited or are “contacts” on LinkedIn. Very few use anything else (like Plaxo, for example). So it was somewhat of a shock to get a mail from Bella (who used to work here) asking me to be her friend on Facebook. I’m so old.
[Guy has some more informative thoughts on the same theme of what the younger generation is up to.]
Oracle is doing shared services “up north”, some usual suspects are in line to help LOCOG and Accenture continues to take over civil service top jobs.
Caroline wonders if the curry milkcap might be the solution to my take-them-or-most-often-leave-them approach to mushrooms.
The theme posted here fixes (for me) the Mac problems with the cursor getting lost as you edit in Mac Firefox and Performancing.
Sometimes when VNC really isn’t working you need to restart it. A simple SSH can do this as follows:
sudo /Library/StartupItems/OSXvnc/OSXvnc stopsudo /Library/StartupItems/OSXvnc/OSXvnc start
An excellent find: a free utility which cascades Exchange mailbox and folder permissions down through a hierarchy. This saves you doing every single folder if people store stuff outside or underneath their Inbox. A massive, massive time saver if you share inboxes, as we do.
It didn’t work for me at first- I got an error message after connecting saying “could not expand” a long URL and “403 forbidden”. After a trail of articles and searches it turned out that I had require SSL turned on for the exadmin site which was bouncing my request. Take the require SSL off (Right click on the site, properties, Directory Security, Secure Communications>Edit, then untick Require Secure channel (SSL)) and you should be fine.
Two lovely shots of the sun. Firstly with the space station and the space shuttle silhouetted against the sun and secondly as a triple sunrise.
Clearly I think too much. That’s the only explanation for my occasional phasing out that I can think of.
Well, I didn’t understand any of those words when I started researching (at 6:20pm this evening!).
Situation: we’ve been getting tons of messages queued for delivery from postmaster@ourmailserver.co.uk to various something.biz and other random email addresses. They are all Non-Delivery Reciepts (e.g. someone’s tried to send mail to an email address on our server that doesn’t exist; they’ve pretended to be the random address and our server is bouncing back to say “sorry, no go”).
This spam / DoS is called backscatter (and is bad - slows down our server, and those people we’re trying to send to - often repeatedly). More here.
Things to try:
- You can turn off NDRs (I haven’t done this, seems too extreme)
- Turn on connection or recipient filters (I’ve tried this for recipients).
- Turn on an NDR tarpit (which lengthens the time before an NDR response - hopefully messes up the Spam server). I’ve tried this one.
- Put in an anti-spam proxy (I think I might try this because it should kill additional spam direct to users).
Fingers crossed.
[Update: there's lots of information about removing the messages from the queues and more widely how to check whether you have a spam issue which saves you having to go to each one individually - a real pain. More on the aqadmcli tool syntax is also useful.]
There’s a version 1.20 available here. Tricky to find, initially.
And then some. What can’t he balance and knock down? Thanks to Amanda for the link.
Brother-in-law gave me a pedometer for my birthday (it measures steps taken using a pendulum-swinging system). I thought this was an interesting present, even a pre-emptive intervention (”Are you calling me fat?”). The manual suggests 10,000 steps per day for health, but apparently that’s not enough. Back to the gym.
