Somewhere out there!

Had an issue with nod32 not updating on one of my computers today. The c:\temp\ directory was missing. Nod32 was in silent mode and it seems that this error is not sufficiently urgent enough to warn the user. The it was refusing to download the latest dat files, probably because it was trying to unrar the update.ver file into the non-existent c:\temp\.

Technorati Tags: nod32, anti-virus, bug-fix

Also discovered Scrybe, the online/offline calendar and organizer from TechCrunch, it looks very cool. It would be interesting to know if it can sync with my Nokia E61.

Check the demo video on the Scrybe site, it has been put together very well.

Technorati Tags: calendering

From Uh Oh, Gmail Just Got Perfect:

Google quietly added a small feature to Gmail this week called Mail Fetcher. When that feature launched, Gmail became perfect.

Mail Fetcher allows users to access non-Gmail email accounts from within the Gmail interface. If you have a Yahoo email account, and a work email account, etc., you can simply access that email from within Gmail, using POP settings. Gmail will now work in a very similar way as Outlook does on the PC desktop.

Although savvy users are already ‘forward’ their mail, this feature will likely make Gmail much easier to use for the other set of users.

Technorati Tags: gmail, pop, email

Streamlined is a framework, on top of Rails, that allows you to quickly generate interfaces for your ActiveRecord models. It started as a way to generate Administrative backends, but has become more general purpose over time.

Check the screencasts, it seems very functional.

Technorati Tags: rails

Thanks to José Canelas a link to Puppet which is an interesting new config management system. Plus some videos of the author describing his system.

As a bonus it is ruby based.

Technorati Tags: config, management, sysadmin

I’ve just signed up with Zenfolio. Flickr is good, but I was interested in finding a site which had 1) a system for organising photos more to my taste, and 2) allow me to create private collections of photos without forcing my viewers to sign up.

I discovered Zenfolio while looking at a review of Smugmug. These two seem to be the best on the market at the moment in the area that I’m interested. Zenfolio has everything a need, plus is cheaper than Smugmug at the moment.

Zenfolio has three concepts for organising pictures: Galleries, Collections and Groups. Galleries provide the basic unit for storing pictures, Collections collect links to photos from your own or other people’s galleries and Groups provide a means for organising with Galleries or Collections into folders or sub-folders.

The second feature that I needed is provided by the means to add a simple password to a picture, gallery, collection or group. This access settings can be inherited by items contained within.

Once the dns change is pushed though, you will be able to access my gallery directly via view.stateless.geek.nz.

I’ve only got a few things up at the moment, I’m still working on organising my photos and I’ve basically started using Zenfolio right now so I can share some private pictures of my new house with the family. In the next couple months I’ll be migrating much of my photo album onto Zenfolio.

In fact one of my planned blog entries is a discussion about how I use Bibble Pro and Picasa (at this stage) to organise my pictures and how I back them up to online storage.
If Zenfolio looks like something you might want to try, please use this referal code: 9SG-PW3-SXZ. Both of us with get $5 off.

Technorati Tags: zenfolio, photo

I use this method when I faced with a pile of paper on my desk to file:

My advice is: START. Iterate. Mix-it-Up.

Combined with this short story on how to get things done:

It went like this: one guy would cut and drag brush into the fire, another would cut trees down, and the third would trim fallen trees. This went on for a while and then they’d all switch. Now, drag guy was cut guy, cut guy was hauling wood guy and trim guy was stack guy. During lunch, I sat down and asked, “When do you guys switch jobs?””When we’re bored.”

Beautiful, beautiful Trickle Theory. How cool is this? If you’re working on an impossibly hard or impossibly dull task and you find yourself mentally blocked by boredom or confusion, stop and do something else. The benefits of stopping are stunning.

The absence of fear to failure is often the requirement for success when faced with impossible tasks. Becoming stuck is purely a signal that is time to stop and gather your experience with some reflection, maybe internally while you do something else.

Technorati Tags: gtd, productivity, life, task management

3300 spam messages rejected on mail RCPT in the last six days. 550 per day.

That is 550 messages a day I don’t have to bother checking for false positives or manually deleting. I should have added SpamAssassian to Simscan much earlier.

You can see elsewhere on this site of how I installed Simscan with Qmail. Adding spam checking at the mail border with Simscan is was simply a matter of apt-getting SpamAssassian, recompiling Simscan by changing from

./configure --enable-workdir=/var/spool/simscan/ --enable-received=y

to

./configure --enable-workdir=/var/spool/simscan/ --enable-received=y --enable-attach --enable-spam --enable-spam-hits=5

and building a good copus of spam messages. Combined with a centralised bayes token file:

$ cat /etc/spamassassin/local.cf
#...
bayes_path        /var/spool/spamassassin/bayes
bayes_file_mode   0666

At the moment I’m added spam messages manually with sa-learn, but I expect I will setup a cron job in due course which checks an IMAP folder. Plus with this method the problem with false positives is much less, as senders of non-spam messages will received a definite non-delivery message. They are more likely to catch this than for me to notice them amongst 550 pieces of spam.

From Think Thin:

Open up the Registry Editor (Start -> Run -> regedit) and navigate to the following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server\WinStations\RDP-Tcp

Change color depth to 4.

Reboot Windows XP to have the change take effect.

Very well written and indepth business case analysis of the use of S3.

Outsiders do not realise how deeply technological development, like scientific research, is shaped and driven by emotion. If you have ever looked at an iPod and wished that you needed one, you will have had an inkling of it. The reason that half of us are in computing at all is that we see computers as things that we can make beautiful things out of: and S3 and EC2 arouse the same emotion.

Some people have criticized S3 and EC2 for being bony, but that is the point of them. You cannot go wrong if you have good, strong bones to build on. If the foundation is right, things just go on getting better. A woman with good bones is six times as beautiful at 60 as she is at 20.

Technorati Tags: aws, s3, amazon, business