General

This forum post shows how to use Microsoft Active Directory with Thunderbird’s Address Book.

I’ve been testing out Sandy for a few weeks. It’s functional, and the fact that it sends SMS alerts makes it much better than standard calendar alarms. The best use I’ve found so far is to send myself reminder emails when I’m out of the office — usually that’s when I’ll discover I need to do something, and have no pen or paper handy.

JungleDisk looks like a nice, cheap, safe way to back up non-sensitive personal data, like photos and such. I’ll poke around some more.

I had two issues while installing Leopard.

The Macbook Pro’s drive was partitioned as an Apple Partition Map, legacy from the G4 Powerbook. Leopard won’t install on APM for Intel systems. I cloned the drive to an external firewire drive, then repartitioned with Disk Utility from the Leopard DVD. It installed the OS, then saw the old OS on the still-attached external drive, and copied over all my settings. Nice.

There’s so much fun to be had with this small perl script, which changes the default message on certain HP printers. One listed is “INSERT COIN”, but my favorite suggestion so far has been “CONTAINMENT BREACH”.

For Halloween this year, I’m thinking of making some of these nasty Witch’s Jars.

My co-worker Matt is joining the National Guard, and is going to Basic Training in a few days. We kid him that his training will consist of being handed a gun and getting sand kicked in his face, before they put him on the boat for Iraq.

Today he was complaining about writing a script to test a crash caused by fuser.

Matt: “I can’t believe I’m getting paid to write a virus payload.”
Me: “It’s the same thing as what you’ll be doing in Iraq, except instead of machines you’ll be killin’ filthy terrists.”
Matt: “…”
Me: “You definitely need to name your test system Osama. Then have your system crasher deploy into /bin/laden .”

I just discovered Xming, which is a lightweight, free X11 server for Windows.

In short, it’s about 2MB and sucks an awful lot less than trying to install all 80GB of Cygwin when you just need an X11 session.

It works just fine with Putty, too.

I’m now required to bake these cookies. Luckily, the mixer is inbound and the ingredients are being air-lifted into the drop zone.

On Saturday, when my Blackberry 7100t crashed three times, I was annoyed but not concerned. It crashed a few more times on Sunday, so I wiped and reinstalled it. The phone was ok all Monday, but on Tuesday, mid-conversation, the speaker went out. I rebooted it a few times, and even disassembled it to clean it out. Nothing helped. The trusty Blackberry was toast (or jam?)

This was a big problem, since I’m on-call this week, and have some precariously-balanced systems that I expect to fail very soon.