Why The Strong Lose + More

Tuesday 25 July 2006 at 9:14 pm Why the US can't win in Iraq (or almost any other low-intensity conflict) Why the Strong Lose. As per the linked page insurgents can afford not to win for as long as their patience demands whereas a super-power can't afford to lose - then it just boils down to attrition and public sentiment.

These guys have an interesting alternative to Microsofts UMPC - DualCor.

Some basic tips on Securing Solaris. I like the checksum tools for binaries.

Some tips on using the Solaris Solstice Disk Suite. All seems kind of painful to me - sure you get the flexibility but the configuration hassles would seem to be a nightmare compared to simple hardware raid.

Lest we forget - Israelis celebrate terrorism. Some interesting links from Tim Brays blog on the current crisis in Lebanon too (he worked there for 11 years).

Excellent - advice on moving Unix filesystems. Using tar instead of cp for shuffling around data should be engraved on the inside of a Unix admins eyeballs.

Search Popsike for any rare vinyl you might want or have lying around in your record bins. The results may surprise you. I can't seem to find anything I own thats even remotely desirable apart from my Harmony of the Spheres boxset. The strange collector scum that hang onto these albums and don't play them are just plain odd if you ask me.

Give Structure to Unstructured Data + More

Saturday 22 July 2006 at 5:01 pm Give structure to your unstructured data - Content Addressable Storage. Fascinating convergence of storage with knowledge management technologies.

Retro - 100 of the Best Spectrum Games.

To true - My Love Hate Relationship with Domino.

Yet Another Best of List - 50 of the Greatest Albums.

Stylus also have a Top 100 Music Videos list.

Useful - Best Windows Admin Downloads.

Trying to encourage people not to send Word attachments harks back to a simpler time on the interweb.

Only in America - Sidewalk SUV. I once read an amusing joke that said you can say the most outlandish thing possible and make it instantly believable by suffixing two words - 'in America'.

Free 3D game engine - Sauerbraten.

This is crazy - ZVG Vector Interface Card - a $250 graphics card that is MAME compatible and pumps out Vector graphics for all of you Tempest, Battlezone and Asteroid fans.

Open Source Internet TV - Democracy.

Handy - Beginners Guide to Manual Photography. I have an old Pentax K1000 and at one stage I used to know what the ISO, Aperture and Shutter Speed settings all did and how they interacted but now digital cameras have made it to simple to bother with. I'd still like to mess around some more with it though if only for the magical moment when you get the pictures back several months after you've taken them to see how they've come out.

Thumper + More

Wednesday 12 July 2006 at 06:43 am Wow! Sun release the Thumper X4500. Up to 24 Terabytes of ZFS'd data in 4U. This thing must run pretty hot and weigh a ton !

Excellent look at The Power of Data Visualisation. Informational tidbit - �The US Institute of Peace receives 27 million dollars next year. The Defence Department receives 560 � billion.�

Useful advice - Here's how to handle a drunken chav. Wikipedia definition of a chav or chavette.

Jeremy Clarkson writes about a recent American interlude Arrested for Looking Wierd. Poor Stig. Jeremy is a funny funny man. To see him knocked down a peg or two you really need to see Trinny & Susannah give him a make over in their 'What Not to Wear' show.

My new workplace uses VOIP (a Mitel based system) so this is kind of useful for beginners - VOIP in the Enterprise.

A good read - Why Do Laptops Schlep Such Data?. People often carry their lifes work on a laptop with little regard for the safety, security and integrity of both their personal information and the organisations.

Review - Parallels Desktop. Virtual Machine system for Intel Based Mac's. If I had one I'd use it

Flashback - The Tomorrow People. I used to really enjoy this show along with 'Dr Who' and 'Saphire and Steel'. Also some interesting links in there to studies which show tv stunts learning in children.

A nice article over at Damn Interesting on Nikolai Tesla. Theres a great bit in Coffee and Cigerettes with the Jack White of the White Stripes demonstrating a home made Tesla Coil to an unimpressed Meg White.

Yet another OS X application list - OS X Software for Switchers. A few I hadn't heard of before

Something I'd like to know more about - Intrusion Detection with Base & Snort.

Clever - Beer Bottle Bricks. Its a shame this didn't take off. Bottles make for fantastic buildings.

Ed Brill points to an article where a CIO voices concerns about Vista and Office 2007 - Bartercard CIO Unconvinced by Vista/Office.

Looks promising - Elisa an open source media center tool.

Microsoft releases Private Folder App. I think I prefer TrueCrypt. There is some wailing and gnashing of teeth as admins worry about the security of corporate date being locked away for ever when people forget their passwords or end up with curruption.

If someone came up with a web based Office suite incorporating a CMS/DMS system it may obviate the need for Office and offline data (except for an export). People could edit via the web and then hit publish to have it auto format to suit some pre-defined template (like TeX) and then print or export as text, word, html, pdf - the system would keep track of revisions and be fully searchable. Then the info would stay in one place and could easily be retasked for whatever flavour is required. Maybe one day

Solaris 10 Update 2 + More

Friday 07 July 2006 at 07:05 am Get it - Solaris 10 update 2 released. Really need to get this installed so I can play around with zfs.

Handy - Automating Local Admin Password Changes. Useful tips on setting a standard local admin password across your PC's and laptops.

Nice guide to Apples Automator.

Interesting - Firewall Leak Tests Revealed. Shame they didn't test the Checkpoint personal firewall. Also the winner hasn't been updated in awhile.

Low cost option - ATA over Ethernet. Cheaper than iSCSI or Fibre Channel (obviously it has more limitations too).

Interesting - Darkroom is a full screen green on black text editor for Windows. Limits the distractions and procrastination potential of a modern GUI.

Useful - SSH Tricks.

Flashback - Classic Gaming. I could never afford all the 20c coin required to get proficient at Asteroids or Space Invaders.

Good ideas - Business Card Best Practises. The coolest one I've seen has been a stamped steel card made to look like a license plate. Someone really needs to make one with a sandpaper side - get noticed and destroy your competition simultaneously

Interesting - Ten most beautiful OS X applications. I think most people are over the application visuals - if the app adheres to standard interface design and is relatively non-intrusive then it will just work. Having said that Delicious Library (the winner) is a great application - I'd almost buy a barcode scanner to enter my media collection into DL.

Some Kiwi news -

Go the All Blacks - Handbags at 10 Paces. Be sure to watch the video. Hopefull we destroy the Aussies.

Five days of solid raid in the lower North Island leads to Flooding. Fantastically bad weather this week.

A flashback to the days of the 36c Beer. The last time unemployment in NZ was so low was 1982 - back when I was 12

WinFS + More

Tuesday 27 June 2006 at 08:57 am One of the reasons the demise of WinFS is so depressing is that a number of people figured this would at least be an indication of some kind of desktop innovation from Microsoft. Robert Scoble points out that the web killed WinFS and people don't need the type of functionality a database enabled file system would bring. Robert also points out that the WinFS technologies will be folded into future versions of SQL Server so it isn't quite dead yet.

An interesting article - Designing High-Availability Windows Systems. Contained some links to some interesting technologies and products - Marathon EverRun FT (clusters applications), Stratus - The Availability Company (servers which duplicate everything for redundancy) and Steeleye (another cluster solution).

On a related note DRBC Planning for Mainframes. I believe there are other mainframes out there other than IBM Z series (as mentioned in the article) - Unisys ClearPath for one and surely VMS would count as a mainframe OS ?

AnandTech - Windows Vista: Beta 2 Preview. Looks like a promising upgrade but nothing hugely compelling over XP.

Proof positive that pre-Elmo Sesame Street was infinitely better than post-Elmo - Stevie Wonder on Sesame Street performing Superstition.

Interesting - Squeak is the Smalltalk of the 21st Centrury.

Provocative - Time to dump Microsoft and fire your IT Manager ?. Doesn't really work for anyone that values security (who else can read your gmail ?), interoperability (does your webmail talk to your web calander ? does it sync to a PDA or mobile ?), even basic future-proofing (if your web service provider closes up what happens to their clientele and their data ?) or disaster recovery (lose your network connection and lose access to your externally hosted web apps). Still there is a grain of truth in having a simple all in one solution for small organisations (eg. Microsofts Small Business Server or Cobalts simple Qube) - if someone made a simple to install Linux server distro which bundled basic groupware, collaboration and a dms they'd be onto a winner.

Sunshine + More

Wednesday 21 June 2006 at 06:39 am David Young of Joyent extolls the benefits of using Sun over Dell or HP in - Sunshine. He'd written a previous article about how Dell had a superior sales model but it sounds like he had some problems with their product and in spite of the hassles dealing with Sun he switched.

Beautiful - Zoomorphic Calligraphy. Before the age of the PC we all had to make do with stencils and calligraphy books to add flair to our school projects. Kids these days don't know how easy they have it.

Interesting - System Security in SolarisTM 10: Privileges and Zones in Perspective - Part 1.

Another tool get get some extra use from your Frontrow Remote.

Interesting - BumpTop is an alternative desktop concept. Heres a good critique. Theres a pointer to a similar prototype File Piles.

Looks interesting if a little to similar to the super duper Windows Vista Start menu - New Gnome Main Menu.

Is Apple looking at a new Kernel to repalce Mach ? Rumours are rife(ish).

Interesting - Why Apple doesn't open source its apps. I find the points John makes to be a little misguided - the open source alternatives on OS X are almost (the media apps are tough to beat - iTunes, iMovie, iDVD etc) all better than the built in applications (Camino and Firefox are better than Safari, Adium is better than iChat, Thunderbird is better than Mail etc) so what does Apple have to lose by open sourcing them - at least they could publish the file formats or use a standard format (I didn't even realise Apple switched from mbx to their own format between 10.3 and 10.4) ?

Mildly distracting - Watch Wikipedia Edits Live.

A true beer fanatic - A thousand ways to open a bottle of beer. I have my doubts about some of these . . .

Packaged Win32 Evolution. Replace Outlook on your Windows PC's.

Impressively complicated - How Exchange Works.

Great collection - Pitchforks 100 Most Awesome Music Videos. Some great videos here.

It looks like Adobe has plans for Acrobat and Flash coming together as Apollo. I wonder if it'll be transparent and searchable - a big failing for flash ?

Some nice features going into Notes 7. The Mac client doesn't look to have changed much since version 6 though.

Winventory + More

Thursday 15 June 2006 at 06:17 am Open Source Windows hardware & software inventory tool - Winventory. Looks promising. Commercial solutions are pretty pricey (and overly complicated) so if a free package can achieve even 80% of the functionality they're on to a winner.

Knowing what to look for when the client asks the eternal question 'this box seems to be slow' - Troubleshooting a slow Unix box.

Joel Spolsky shares an anecdote to mark Bills stepdown from Microsoft - My first Bill Gates Code Review.

John Gruber discusses why people might switch from OS X to Linux - And Oranges.

I'm a sucker for cutesy pictures of kittens - I'm so sleepy.

Interesting - The Scariest Terror Threat of All. A competition to devise the most fiendish terror attack - 782 comments / entries so far. I think trains offer the most scope for simple mayhem, particularly the tracks. The chosen winner targeted a key hydro dam.

Cool satellite image of last weeks South Island Snow Dump.

Share a single screen to multiple PC's - TiffanyScreens for OS X and Windows. Useful for training and demos.

Novell actually seems to be getting a lot of enterprise stuff these days - Novell gets into Identity Management. The project is called Bandit. I've recently been involved in scoping the AD side of a Novell Metadirectory scheme to feed AD and eDirectory in addition to providing Corporate Directory functionality. Hopefully Bandit works out - centralised ID management will be a key IT driver in large organisations.

Interesting - How to break notepad.

Useful - Nifty OSX apps.

Handy - Ultimate Free Windows Toolkit. Mine would also include filemon, procexplorer, notepad2, truecrypt, event log explorer, perfmon wizard, putty, robocopy and a few others . . .

Over at Linkmachine - 100 Reasons I Love Comics - 1 - 25, 26 - 50, 51 - 75, 76 - 100. Nice to see a number of authors from the UK and particularly 2000AD making an appearance in the top 25 (Alan More, Grant Morrison, Dave Gibbons, Brendan McCarthy, Kevin O'Neill).

Handy - Guide to SQL.

Because I have an appreciation for stupid trivia - How pencil grading works. My favourite general purpose writing instument used to be a 2HB before computers came along and I forgot how to write



Interesting and amusing - Mathematical references abound on The Simpsons.

Flashbacks - Mac Software from the mid to late 80's.

Useful tip - Howto securely erase hard-drives via shred.

Another cutesy picture - Psychotic cat trees a bear (twice).

This almost needs to go under the Spleen section - the Academy of Linguistic Awareness points out how Saying 'Like' makes you sound stupid, and again. These look to be an amusing piss-take rather than an official ad campaign.

Glom + More

Sunday 11 June 2006 at 3:53 pm GUI Database Tool - Glom. Has the admirably goal of trying to provide an open source FileMaker Pro type tool that makes it easy to harness the power of a SQL backend.

Useful - Designing small Windows networks.

Analysing logs is such a chore - Log Parser for Exchange/IIS. Someone would make a killing if they wrote a good log parser / analyser.

Awesome - Powers of Ten. Exponential photography - starts with a picnic and goes in both directions - subatomic and astronomical.

Network analyser changes name and moves on - Ethereal is now Wireshark.

These guys inspired the
movie - The Mountains of Pi.

Brilliant - Lemonade Economy as a metaphor for Tax Cuts. The tax rate really bites - watching 30% of you wage disappear every month for little obvious reward is tough. In NZ the single biggest employer is the government which is a little ironic - our taxes go back into paying most of our wages. You are left wondering why we need such bureaucracy. Then again we're a tiny country and the taxes and money saved by the government are a hedge against an aging population and a volatile global economy so its perfectly good fiscal policy to save while we can.

Not about guns - How to shoot. I find it really hard to shoot anything other than scenery which kind of makes all my pictures look touristy and generic. Maybe I feel its to much of an imposition to shoot people without their consent.

Excellent - Reverse Snobbery. Wonderful domain name too

Hopefully this project will make a real difference - More on the One Laptop Per Child Project (OLPC).

An alternative use for Apples Frontrow remote control - Sofa Control.

Useful - Shaving Tips. I don't have the patience for this however I can vouch for a hot shave with a good lather (coconut soap works really well) and a dab of moisturiser.

Interesting - Five Star Rolling Stone Music Reviews. The amazing thing is the number of Miles Davis records featured in the list.

Why does Microsoft make this so painful - Swing Migration for Exchange.

Some nice movie reviews - Movie Martyr.

Useful - Scripting AD.

Handy - Learn Python Tutorial for OSX.

Procrastination - webcomics - 'Hold my life', 'Nine planets without intelligent life', 'Gunnerkrigg Court', 'Secret Friend Society', 'Dicebox'.

Looks good - Wired looks at Google Spreadsheet. Although Microsoft Office has a degree of application stability that a web-browser hasn't got (all it takes is one tab in Firefox to crash . . .). Also with all this web-hosted application goodness you have to wonder what protects your data from prying eyes ?

Guy Kawasaki previews iWoz - Steve Woznaiks biography.

Mac as Mailbox + More

Tuesday 06 June 2006 at 2:59 pm Recycle - great use for an old Mac chassis.

Looks like an interesting book - appears to walk the thin line between bullshit and management-speak though - Peopleware. Nice quote - "A few very characteristic signs indicate that a jelled team has occurred. The most important of these is low turnover during projects and in the middle of well-defined tasks. The team members aren't going anywhere till the work is done."

Handy - Extensive Collection of Firefox Extensions.

Useful - Linux Authentication against Active Directory.

Network monitoring - Useful win32 ports of network tools.

Neat - try Splatter for your Pollack fix.

Business Continuity - Ed Brill discusses the degree to which you must balance paranioa with BC/DR planning. What some of the comments fail to realise is that having an effective BC/DR plan can help in a whole range of situations not just in a major emergency. We once had half the business grind to a halt for half a day because a key file server rebooted and took 3 hours to checkdisk one morning - if there had been a secondary file server with a nightly robocopy it may have been possible to give people read only access to data so they could at least carry on working then copy back their changes when the main file server came back up.

Cool - I want a castle.

Kiwi Avant Garde artist - Len Lye. His 'waterwhirler' creation was installed as part of the 2006 Wellington Arts Festival on the waterfront. Very cool it is too.

Network discovery - Netdisco. Looks a little complicated but very useful.

Radio Enthusiasts - GNU Radio - Universal Software Radio Peripheral. Awesome.

I could barely solve one side of the originaly Rubiks cube let alone a Five Dimensional Rubiks Cube.

Interesting - What are Numbers Stations. Related Slashdot story - Numbers Stations move to VOIP.

Making of the Thunderbirds + More

Tuesday 30 May 2006 at 06:15 am A bumper crop of links - Excellent bit of nostalgia - Making of the Thunderbirds. A nice article on FreeNAS. Ed Brill (Mr Lotus Notes) lambasts this Exchange E12 Review - E12 looks to be a major PITA to implement (then again none of the Exchange server upgrades look like they were anything other than supremely annoying). On the other hand Domino server installs have always been fairly painless and while adding features have consistantly performed better on the same hardware. Ed also points to this very useful IBM Redbook on the Lotus Notes SmartUpgrade feature to automate Notes client upgrades. Lovely - Port to Everything. Ambrosia are cool - from their very first cult Mac game 'Maelstrom' through to their latest stuff. The fact that their coders have made Apeiron (kind of like a super-centipede in the way that Maelstrom was a super-asteroids) work with everything from old colour Motorola 680x0 based Mac through all the PowerPC stuff and OS X on PowerPC and Intel. Looks like an excellent way to add screen real-estate - Matrox TripleHead2Go. A desktop spanning three monitors would be awesome. Useful - Decentralized Patch Management and on the same site TCPIP Networking in Vista. If you've ever used RISC OS on Acorns Archimedes PC's then you might like to try RISC OS Desktop for Linux - ROX. RISC OS had a drag & drop philosophy for file operations - need to save a new file - just drag the icon to the save location. Some interesting insight - iSCSI for Exchange. Shame about the oddball licensing - you'd think if you bought the product you should just be able to use it without the need for extra license keys. Picasa related news - Picasa ported to Linux and Porting notes on the WINE list. If you need a free iPhoto type app on the PC, Picasa is pretty awesome. The backlash begins - Just give me a simple phone. On holiday recently my fancy work phone ran down within 2 days (it didn't help that I got paged via SMS for every helpdesk call) - I popped the SIM into my 5 year old Ericcson T28 and was able to function quite happily on a single charge for another week and a half. Nice time waster - Damn Interesting is like a low-brow Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society. If you're a fan of 'strange but true' tales these sites are great. An oldy but a goody - Distributed cfengine. Those used to the open-by-default security in NT4 & 2000 Server will be pleasantly surprised by some of the improvements - Changes to Windows 2003 Default Security. Handy - roll your own DSL - Remastering Damn Small Linux. Nifty - Graph a website. Like Sudo & CFEngine the Enterprise Audit Shell looks very handy for a large Unix/Linux infrastructure. I particularly like the ability to replay a shell session. Handy Unix/Linux reference - Basic Cron. Monopolistic Telcos beware - Fantastic Telecom Ad Piss-take. Pointer to Youtube video here. Interesting to see Telecom struggling to can the video too. Apparently the company have had the capability and capacity to roll out almost any service (VoIP, Video on demand/Video telephony, Streamed TV, multiple IP connections etc)you could imagine through their existing infrastructure and their local-loop monopoly - but they've been trickle feeding these out to people while charging an arm & a leg for the service. Now the government is releasing the local-loop monopoly we should see some service and pricing improvements - particularly with respect to broadband. Handy OSX reference - What are all those OSX Background Processes ? Something we all know but its shocking all the same - US Incarceration Rates. There are links to their murder rates too which are equally nasty. Funky - Boolean Circuit Design with Quartz Composer. Creating flip flops & counters using the boolean logic in an OS X Xcode tool (Quartz Composer).