R-Log » R-Log http://www.phigmov.co.nz/ Another Website About Stuff en rpatel@phigmov.co.nz (Raj) Copyright 2016 PivotX - 2.3.6 Sun, 03 Jan 2016 13:15:25 +1300 60 Inkless Metal Pens + More http://www.phigmov.co.nz/?e=306 http://www.phigmov.co.nz/?e=306#comm Inkless metal pen.

Useful - Turning off un-needed OS X services.

Handy Windows tool - Driver Collector. Lets you collect all the drivers from a running system before a rebuild - particularly useful if you no longer have the original driver installers.

Interesting - Early history of computer role-playing games.

Linked before but its still great for procrastination - Optical Illusions.

Rudy Ruckers webzine - Flurb. Features sci-fi short stories from people like Charles Stross. Rudy also has a series of blog entries relating to a recent trip to NZ.

Handy - Forty tips to improve your grammer.

Interesting historical contrast - Genghis Khan: Law and order. How the Khan handled his 13th Century invasion of Iraq.

Excellent - Twenty Four web tips. Nate Koechelys article on easy fluid CSS layouts looks like a great time saver.

I haven't had much luck with Windows desktop managers but the freeware Dexpot
looks like it has potential.

New Scientist - Just can't get e-nough. Problems associated with to much technology. ]]> 306@localhost/ 2006, links Thu, 28 Dec 2006 08:25:00 +1300 raj Taxes + More http://www.phigmov.co.nz/?e=289 http://www.phigmov.co.nz/?e=289#comm $10 a week tax cut. Rod Dury (of Aftermail/Archivemail fame) points out that from a business perspective giving some tax breaks may improve the economy as it would increase spending/saving and provides an interesting chart which indicates NZer's work harder but are less productive than their OECD counterparts (debunked in the comments). Rod also links to an amusing tale of the way taxation works in terms of dis-enchanting high-income earners. I always thought once you got to a certain income level it just meant you ended up getting an accountant who could do some creative tax avoision (smash together avoidance & evasion) so you pay less tax anyway ?

Handy - 10 Good Unix Habits.

Interesting - How Microsoft deals with network attacks.

Classic - You Park Like An Asshole. Someone needs to come up with some of these sites in NZ so people can send pxts of moronic behaviour - youdrivelikeanidiot.co.nz / suicidalcyclists.co.nz / insanepedestrian.co.nz / suvdriversfeelinadequate.co.nz. I wonder when cars will come with built in cameras to record trips ?

Definitely need to get a decent turntable - Walt Mossberg reviews two Vinyl to CD turntables. Bet they're direct drive (evil) rather than belt (good) . . .

Interesting - Brian Eno - 77 Million Paintings. Looks like a great way to use a plasma screen while its idling :-) ]]> 289@localhost/ 2006, links Thu, 21 Dec 2006 13:06:00 +1300 raj Procrastination Fodder + More http://www.phigmov.co.nz/?e=260 http://www.phigmov.co.nz/?e=260#comm Best blogs of 2006 you aren't reading.

Also check out the finalist and winners of the 2007 Independent Games Festival.

From there I checked out Indexed. Both funny, sad and strange.

Genius - History of the button. My friend used to have a Merlin - I was super envious.

Handy - 30 essential free applications for windows. I use Firefox, Notepad2, FileZilla (occassionally), KeyNote, VLC, TrueCrypt and Handbrake. They're missing Putty and Windows Media Player Classic & Real Alternative though.

Interesting - Google System Blog. See what Google has planned for the future as well as useful tips on their services.

Useful - ABC's of IPv6.

Destruction caused by the new Wii controller - Wii Have A Problem. Looks like Nintendo are really onto a winner. A negative take on the Wii from Slate - claims the controller and sensor system makes so many compromises that it doesn't matter about the quality of the motion so much as any kind of motion at all.

Interesting - 33 Names of things you never knew had names. Also check out these strange words at Snopes. Some of these were on the tip of my tongue but for the life of me I couldn't recall them (peen, tang & ferrule).

Interesting - 50 Ways to use RFID tags.

Wonderful - Writers Resource of information organised by decade - starting with 1650.

Great resource for scientific bits and pieces - American Science Surplus. The Wanna Smash Stuff book looks great for kids :-)

Thoughts on Unstructured Storage. It would seem only 15% of data is managed the rest is not. Describes a three way tussle between database vendors, storage vendors and dba's - who will win ? As the article says - most people on the business side don't really care until it affects the bottom line - when that happens it'll be interesting to see who suffers :-)

Useful step by step guide to setting up ssh keys with Putty.

Nifty - Map of the internet by IP address allocation. ]]> 260@localhost/ 2006, links Thu, 07 Dec 2006 07:21:00 +1300 raj Data Recovery + More http://www.phigmov.co.nz/?e=291 http://www.phigmov.co.nz/?e=291#comm Ontrack Data Recovery. Remember to always have a backup!

New Scientist - 50 Top Scientists Forecast the Future.

Nice - Postit Pixel Art.

Geeky t-shirts - Pixel-Tools Shirts. Manys the time I've cursed the Mac bomb.

Amusing - Interesting stuff found by Google in source code.

Handy - 99 Email Tips. Some good stuff here particularly for email newbies.

Jason Kottke points to some Logic Problems.

Goes to show that even though its already been invented it can still be improved upon - the better nail.

More oddness from the Kircher Society - Chromatic Writing from Benin. And I thought writing in long-hand was a hassle . . .

Can't wait for these things to hit production - Chumby.

ArsTechnica reviews the Sony PS3. Gets a fairly lacklustre review. I wonder if it'll turn around when the games start to appear - the PS2 had a slow launch too.

Ars also review the Nintendo Wii.

Guy Kawasaki lists the 10 Things I Love About Steve Wozniak. The guy is a god.

Aaargghh - Call my PA. I've never understood the PA thing either. And of course the higher up the food-chain the more likely you are to have an EA. Don't even get me started on 'Dairy Manager'. Sigh.

Interesting - Intermine - lots of home-grown scripts to do this type of thing but this app looks like it takes most of the legwork out of finding where your space has gone and what filetypes are on your servers file-systems at an enterprise level. ]]> 291@localhost/ 2006, links Mon, 20 Nov 2006 07:18:00 +1300 raj Ms Dewey + More http://www.phigmov.co.nz/?e=281 http://www.phigmov.co.nz/?e=281#comm Ms Dewey. Not that the results are bad but it just seems like overkill . . .

Funky - Self assembling robot chair.

These are amazing - Papercut Art.

I use three of these alot - Interblag. I like the ring of 'blagosphere' . . .

Storagemojo has all sorts of good stuff on storage & datacenters - new idea for rack-mount servers from Rackable. Their stuff seems kind of neat - certainly a cheaper alternative to blades. Similar to the Petabox servers used by The Wayback Machine.

Insight into the benefits of server consolidation using VMWare - VMware Both Better and Worse Than I Described. Going from 500 physical server to 25 is pretty impressive. If they're Windows boxes Microsoft must make a mint on server licenses . . .

Interesting - Reverse Dictionary. I find it a little disappointing - the results don't stand out on the page very well either.

Handy & fascinating - List of social faux pas by country/region. Very useful for frequent travellers.

One of many - Zune review from ArsTechnica. Like most things Microsoft v1.0 can be disappointing but if they stick with it then they could be onto a winner. Wonder what others will do to stay one step ahead ?

The first of the Wii reviews are coming in - PCMag and CNet. Both very positive for game play and entertainment value but lukewarm on the graphics.

First pictures of what will be the production OLPC Laptop. Looks so tiny! I think its going to be a hit and if they produce a slicker commercial variant it will sell like hot-cakes (ok maybe only to geeks).

Absolutely no irony in this domain name Official Meeting & Facilities Guide. Or OMFG. Hmmmm doesn't look like anyone has that as a NZ domain name yet (or my other favourite 'sendaselfaddressedstampedenvelope.co.nz') . . .

Wonderful - room painted to look like its from a cartoon. ]]> 281@localhost/ 2006, links Wed, 15 Nov 2006 07:14:00 +1300 raj Delicious Generation + More http://www.phigmov.co.nz/?e=259 http://www.phigmov.co.nz/?e=259#comm Delicious Generation. A little curmudgeonly perhaps - the Mac world has always been a more 'fun' (remember the pointless but fun Talking Moose or Oscar the Grouch trashcan) place to be in terms of a personal computer - but there is a ring of truth to the argument about flash in the pan developers and style over substance.

Via Wes Felters Hack the Planet - LogoWiki and WikiCalc. I remember using Logo on an Apple II. Relive the experience via the web :-)

StorageMojo discusses a couple of highlights at the Storage Networking World. The inline compression looks interesting as does the flash based SAN and free iSCSI server which lets you experiment a bit with iSCSI if you grab the free Microsoft iSCSI initiator as well.

Ed Brill provides a History of Lotus Notes.

Ed also points to a Microsoft Windows Desktop Search add-in for Lotus Notes. Lets you search your Lotus mail from your desktop.

A database of Jobs-era Apple Mac & iPod gear - Designed in California.

A couple of articles on Apple@30 - Digibarn Computer Museum and Woznaik Leads Anniversary Celebration.

Handy - How to talk to a Climate Skeptic. One way or another the climate is changing - people who don't believe that are seriously blinkered. The weather patterns in NZ have changed markedly in the last 20 years IMHO.

Funny - Amusing Icons explaining Internet Acronyms.

While we look forward to some excellent rugby - the All Blacks are learning French. I love the Guardian translations at the end - "You look like a Sheila with that long hair = Vous ressemblez � une fille avec ces longs cheveux". ]]> 259@localhost/ 2006, links Mon, 06 Nov 2006 06:38:00 +1300 raj Hamachi + More http://www.phigmov.co.nz/?e=250 http://www.phigmov.co.nz/?e=250#comm Hamachi is a zero-configuration virtual private networking (VPN) application. A bit like setting up your own private LAN across the interweb.

Pretty useful place to check once in awhile - SourceForge Project of the Month.

Found on the Project of the Month link above is OpenQRM. Its basically a way to dynamically manage your server (physical & virtual) resources - check this PDF for more information. Makes for pretty interesting reading. The idea of being able to provision applications and servers with minimal lead time is becoming more and more important.

Too true - Users don't care about storage and data � they only care about their own applications, so it's essential to deliver IT as a transparent service.

Storagemagazine is chock full of useful stuff - Backups are not archives. The ability to satisfy electronic discovery requests is pretty scarey. When you have lawyers breathing down your neck for records of email correspondence between two people that occurred over a 2 week period 3 years ago how do you respond ? Thats when products like Archive Manager come into their own.

Interesting information about Google Slack. It almost seems like a fancy version of OpenQRM - it would be amazing to see these sorts of dynamic provisioning tools in action.

Interesting things to do with trees - Arborsmith.

Funny - The Seven Phases of Owning an iPod - An Illustrated Journey.

WindowsXP eyecandy - XPize.

Wired discusses Aranofskys new movie 'The Fountain'. I liked 'Pi' but 'Requiem for a Dream' was a little to bleak for me.

Getting one step closer to having our own fabricators - Draw and Print your own Furniture.

A nice laymans guide to the SQL Injection Bug. I didn't realise it was that easy . . . ]]> 250@localhost/ 2006, links Wed, 01 Nov 2006 10:44:00 +1300 raj DailyWTF + More http://www.phigmov.co.nz/?e=299 http://www.phigmov.co.nz/?e=299#comm Daily WTF. Catalog of IT failures - the Virtudyne series reminds me of a company I used to work for.

How Joel Spolsky does an initial Phone Screen for prospective hires.

A good review of FreeNAS. Looks good - some reservations about using it in a commercial environment though (as per the comments at the end of the article).

I could only ever get two sides - Solve the Rubiks cube.

I'm not sure how they'll cope - USA bans Vegemite due to folate. I can never remember wether I prefer Marmite or Vegemite.

You can never know enough about knots - Animated Knots.

Interesting - Six Examples of Odd Sympathy. This is explored in more detail in Steven Strogatz 'Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order.

Poderosa is a tabbed terminal emulator for Windows - Poderosa Project. I'll give it a try but a shell that requires the .Net subsystem seems overkill. I suspect they'll have a hard time displacing putty.

Some inspired advertising - Great ads from around the world. Beware its a loooong page - can take awhile to load.

Richard Dawkins - Why There Almost Certainly Is No God.


"We cannot, of course, disprove God, just as we can't disprove Thor, fairies, leprechauns and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. But, like those other fantasies that we can't disprove, we can say that God is very very improbable."


Blasphemy - of course there is a Flying Spaghetti Monster! ]]> 299@localhost/ 2006, links Tue, 24 Oct 2006 06:41:00 +1300 raj Meet Like Google + More http://www.phigmov.co.nz/?e=285 http://www.phigmov.co.nz/?e=285#comm How to run a meeting like Google. Especially the interminable 'lets go round the room and tell everyone what you've been up to' ones. Definitely better to have short meetings based around action points, minutes, information and deadlines - then stuff gets done and the meetings are mercifully short. Anything deep can be discussed offline and bought back to the next meeting. A few environmental links - * Breathing Earth shows carbon emissions and births/deaths by country * New Scientist article on Earth without people and the same information presented as a timeline. Sobering stuff. Amusing - Fifty ways a manager can get employees to quite. Its very Office Space / Office. Via Jeremy Zawodny - 'Dilbert' deserves the economics Nobel - Scott Adams financial advice. Nine point plan to financial security. I've only got two of them :-( As seen on Slashdot - Dr Dobbs Journal article on Chris Crawfords new Interactive Fiction company StoryTron. Looks fascinating. It will be interesting to see what type of stuff comes out of such a tool. Must drink more tea - Why green tea helps you lose weight. I need to apply these changes to my install now - Tweaking Firefox for better memory management. A more useful error page for Firefox ErrorZilla. Looks like another must have extension. See some of the interesting stuff coming from Adobe Labs. The Kircher Society blog is having a roundup of death related strangeness. Pretty fascinating stuff. A couple of good reasons why the Mac is a much more 'fun' platform than either Windows or Linux - * A new twist on burning a CD - Disco. I love that blowing on the mic will make the smoke move. * For Mac Laptops with a motion sensor - Skip Checker. Tap the side or move up/down to kick off an action or script. My ThinkPad T43 has a motion sensor but all it seems to do is protect the disk and add a silly coloured icon to my tray. Runs like a dog too. Sigh. ]]> 285@localhost/ 2006, links Mon, 16 Oct 2006 08:23:00 +1300 raj Solaris Patch Management + More http://www.phigmov.co.nz/?e=270 http://www.phigmov.co.nz/?e=270#comm PCA - Solaris Patch Management Tool. Its a perl script that will patch Solaris 8/9/10 - SPARC & x86. Retro gaming goodness via this web-java app - Virtual Nintendo. Jason Kottke points to some Interesting Google Code Search hits. Wikipedia article on last weeks South Park in World of Warcraft piss-take. The episode is a work of genius and I'm not entirely sure of the Wikipedia article writers realise the irony of spending time and effort documenting it ? In light of the trailer for 'The 300' heres a slightly less fanboyish look back at The Battle of Thermopylae. Its a shame the movie is based on Frank Millers comic rather than Steven Pressfields 'Gates of Fire'. The comic is good but is limited by the medium; the book is brilliant. Wonderful scanned magazine article from the 1950's of miracles you'll see in 50 years. New York Times article - Long Zoom: Will Wrights new game Spore. Will Wright is the genius behind 'SimCity' and 'The Sims'. Why marketing should create documentation - Creating Passionate Users. Amusing - Iggy Pop's concert rider funniest in rock history?. The Gustbuster Umbrella. They'd make a killing in Wellington - the rubbish bins in town are filled with destroyed brollies after a rainy southerly blows through town. ]]> 270@localhost/ 2006, links Wed, 11 Oct 2006 11:55:00 +1300 raj iAlertU + More http://www.phigmov.co.nz/?e=253 http://www.phigmov.co.nz/?e=253#comm iAlertU is an alarm for your MacBook - it will even take pictures of the would be thief using the built in camera. Amusing - RAID for the layman. A fair proportion of the Top 100 International GDP's are now generated by Corporations. NZ is waaaay down the list at 81 below Nissan. Be nice to your family or they'll have the final say on your tombstone. Interesting insight into some of the design decisions surrounding the Nintendo Wii. Also via ArsTechnica - Email is for old people. I read something about this regarding texting/IM culture in Japan and South Korea a few years ago - looks like the 'yoof' of the west are catching up. View Flash media files using QuickTime player - Perian expands upon the number of media codecs the player will natively handle. This means you can view them in FrontRow too. After a long posting-break GUIdebook is back with some historical scans and articles about the Apple Lisa (circa 1983). Interesting - The Saga of Sagi Society. If its in Japan now I guess it will be in the rest of the world in a couple of years too. Bit depressing to think that technology is spawning new and innovative ways to blackmail people (granted the marks seem extraordinarily naive and/or stupid). ]]> 253@localhost/ 2006, links Tue, 03 Oct 2006 06:39:00 +1300 raj Update on the One Laptop Per Child + More http://www.phigmov.co.nz/?e=307 http://www.phigmov.co.nz/?e=307#comm how the OLPC is shaping up. Super geek cartoon - Unix Humour. Theres a good vi one floating around somewhere but I can't find it right now . . . Gizmodo looks at the Sony Reader. Pretty cool. I wonder what the uptake will be like ? Two nifty gadgets via Treehugger - the Sun Jar and the Gadget Charging Solar Panel. I'll have to search for something that will trickle charge a laptop that doesn't cost a fortune - that would be really handy - the MacBook battery life is really sucky. Linux tablet reaches its 3rd iteration - Pepper Pad 3. Richard Dawkins new book is popping up all over the interweb. Looks like an interesting read. This anti-Agile programming spiel also seems to be doing the rounds - its well worth a read and provides an insight into how R & D is done at Google. I wonder how well it would translate to a team working on relatively uninteresting but important tasks such as maintaining a tax system for Internal Revenue or keeping track of fines in a Justice collection system ? Also big news - Peter Jackson is setting up a gaming arm to his production company in conjunction with Microsoft. I wonder if he'll do stuff similar to LucasArts or a graphical Infocom ? Completely non-technology related - Mel laments smokey bars. NZ bars have been smoke free for about 6 to 12 months now and its fantastic - you can go out and have a few beers and when you get home you don't feel the need to wash everything you wear to get rid of the smokey smell or feel like your sense of taste/smell have been eviscerated by passive smoking (then again maybe thats the alcohol . . .) ]]> 307@localhost/ 2006, links Thu, 28 Sep 2006 09:25:00 +1300 raj Must Write Faster + More http://www.phigmov.co.nz/?e=296 http://www.phigmov.co.nz/?e=296#comm Must Write Faster - IBM has a secret island headquarters hideaway inside Second Life.

Definitely a better concept than Pop Idol - My Dream App - vote for your favourite application idea.

NetXen has released a Virtualisable 10Gb NIC - it plays nice with VMWare ESX so you can carve up bandwidth per VM.

This would be amazing if it actually turned out to be true - Cringely discusses where he thinks Apple iTV strategy is going.

Something for the consumer terrorist parent - Child Safety Labels We'd Like To See. Printing these out and sticking them onto toys in a shop would be cool.

Touching in a super geeky way - an ode to a dead PowerBook G4. My favourite laptop is a close contest between my old Duo 230 and my iBook 600 - each one was a generation apart from the other but they provided me with stable computing for 2-3 years apiece which is a pretty long time in IT terms.

Congratulations to Genshin Fujinami - the most recent Marathon Monk.

Nasty - Ozone mini-hole means sun risk on Sunday. So now we can't even enjoy the weekend without worrying about skin-cancer ? ]]> 296@localhost/ 2006, links Fri, 22 Sep 2006 12:39:00 +1300 raj Insanely Fast Climber + More http://www.phigmov.co.nz/?e=292 http://www.phigmov.co.nz/?e=292#comm Chris - I'm sure he'll appreciate this Google video of Dan Osman scaling a vertical wall/cliff in no time flat.

The 2007 - Death & Taxes Infograph is out - see where the USA spends its tax dollar.

More excellent stuff from StorageMojo (I accidentally called them StorageMofo in the last post which sounds better but I've corrected the typo) - Mission Impossible: Managing Amazon�s Datacenter, Pt I. Can't wait to read the rest. Darn good idea putting the devs oncall too - make them experience the pain they put the end user through rather than have the sys-admin act as the middle man. ]]> 292@localhost/ 2006, links Wed, 20 Sep 2006 06:38:00 +1300 raj Sleuthkit + More http://www.phigmov.co.nz/?e=287 http://www.phigmov.co.nz/?e=287#comm Sleuthkit. Now comes with Win32 binaries too. Tools include mactime which shows a timeline of file activity (unfortunately no Win32 version of this tool yet).

A handy use for an old 64Mb USB stick - Boot a Dead PC with Nothing but a Thumb Drive. Makes use of the RIP (Recovery is Possible) mini-distribution.

An IBM DeveloperWorks article on NFSv4. It looks like it addresses some of the security concerns surrounding previous versions.

Another QuickSilver / LaunchBar clone for Win32 - Colibri is like a slicker Launchy. QuickSilver was pretty slow on my old iBook but now it positively sings on my MacBook - definitely an indispensible OS X application - if you don't need all its bells and whistles try the simpler Namely.

Most IT professionals already know this but its #1 in the list of the Top 10 Most Stressful Professions. I guess its the fact that people don't seem to understand that IT systems aren't perfect and think you're making excuses for services which just winds up the client.

Useful guide to LSOF (Lists of Open Files). Apparently its the utility with the most switches - so many that it uses both '+' and '-' for its arguments.

StorageMojo on Flash-drives - Low End Streetfight. I didn't realise high-end memory sticks used RAID 0.

Charles Stross discusses the human side of Microsoft Windows - Spinning the Hamster Wheel. Definitely a lot to be said for running enterprise apps through a terminal session or web-front-end to minimise the annoyances associated with supporting the base OS. ]]> 287@localhost/ 2006, links Sun, 17 Sep 2006 15:43:00 +1300 raj Monit + More http://www.phigmov.co.nz/?e=303 http://www.phigmov.co.nz/?e=303#comm Debian Help site comes a short article about configuring Monit. The Monit site covers the tools features in more depth. As well as the usual monitoring it lets you setup conditional actions based on alerts. Awesome - Weta releases Retro Rayguns. Its still odd that people would spend chunks of money on toy rayguns no matter how neat they are. Privacy integrated into webmail - Freenigma. Use SMS text message to control eight devices. Someone needs to commericalise this - something like a simpler X10 controller - plug an old mobile or phone into a power strip which you can signal via SMS to switch off and on connected devices. Useful for kiosk applications and driving screen displays - Puppy Linux running on a $100 PC. The MicroClient Jr looks great - shame its only 166MHz. Also gets pricey when you add in some of the extras. With security starting to get out of hand here is the ultimate t-shirt - I am not a terrorist. In arabic of course. On a related note - this is a genius cartoon from Wondermark. ]]> 303@localhost/ 2006, links Sun, 27 Aug 2006 07:58:00 +1300 raj The network that runs better since the administrator quit + More http://www.phigmov.co.nz/?e=286 http://www.phigmov.co.nz/?e=286#comm The network that runs better since the administrator quit. IT people often have the tendency to meddle and tinker - not good in a production environment. Dev/Test and then UAT (even if it is just to the extent of discussing it with someone else before ticking the box that may cause problems for your client community) it before putting your tweaks into production.

Looks like a good read - Satan: A Biography.

Genius - Chaucer Blogs about his XBOX.

Wonderful flash animation - Creation battles Creator.

Mouse-over the articles - How right-wing readers view the New York Times.

EFI in Apples Intel PC's - How Apple�s Firmware Leapfrogs BIOS PCs. The good thing is you get more control - the bad thing is that it makes it trickier to install a standard Intel based OS that expects to deal with an old fashioned BIOS.

Two useful links for people who want to use legacy Mac applications in a Classic environment - Sheepshaver will run OS 9 and for more serious nostalgia MiniVmac - Run a MacOS 7 from a USB stick. I've had good experience with Basilisk too.

Interesting UI links - Mac UI Ain't All That: The Future & History of the User Interface.

I'm always on the hunt for the perfect application launcher on Windows - something like DragStrip or DragThing would be ideal - I'll give RocketDock a crack for now. ]]> 286@localhost/ 2006, links Thu, 17 Aug 2006 22:05:00 +1300 raj The Coming Conflagration + More http://www.phigmov.co.nz/?e=277 http://www.phigmov.co.nz/?e=277#comm The Coming Conflagration. Fingers crossed that John is wrong.

Wonderful - a series of Infographics by the International Network Archive. Providing some interesting data on topics such as the global arms-race, movie, fast-food and transportation.

Genius - 3D maze using CSS and DOM. Now someone just needs to turn it into Doom.

One of those things everyone should know how to do - Rsync Incremental Snapshot Backups via SSH.

On a related note - Flash - useful for Sun Solaris systems - Using Flash Archive in the Solaris Operating System for Disaster Recovery. Handy for taking system snapshots.

Interesting - Basic Introduction to OpenBSD - possibly one of the most secure out of the box OS's available.

The first font to get the movie treatment - Helvitica: The Movie.

Thrill Power Overload - Dave Bishops Blog. Dave worked on 2000AD for quite awhile and is writing a historical overview of the comic on his blog. I didn't realise he was a Kiwi according to his Wikipedia profile . We're everywhere.

Excellent - Insecure.org has updated their list of the Top 100 Security Tools.

Interesting - ZoneCD: The Secure Way to Share Your Internet Connection. Some really good tips on securing wireless and also providing a safe/secure public wifi access facility. ]]> 277@localhost/ 2006, links Mon, 14 Aug 2006 08:52:00 +1300 raj Workfriendly Web Browser + More http://www.phigmov.co.nz/?e=263 http://www.phigmov.co.nz/?e=263#comm Browse the interweb via something that looks like a Word window.

Two brilliant photos depicting a high concentration of genius - 1958: Jazz Musicians in Harlem (Basie, Gillespie, Mingus, Monk) and 1927: Physicists at Solvay (Einstein, Curie, Bohr, Shrodinger, Heisenberg).

Interesting Poor Mans Thumper. Shame they're not looking towards a linux/zfs combo with a smaller footprint. Nice idea though.

Long running experiments - Longest Running Scientific Experiments. One of them is a clock at Otago University in NZ which has been running without winding since 1864 and relies on temperature fluctuations in an airtight container.

Awhile back Mark Russinovich of the excellent Sysinternals (creators of the excellent Filemon, ProcessExplorer and many many more tools) site moved to Microsoft. He discusses his first week at Microsoft.

Joels Spolsky - the first in a series - Three Management Methods. Useful for any IT manager.

Spoof comic ads by Alan Moore. ]]> 263@localhost/ 2006, links Tue, 08 Aug 2006 06:56:00 +1300 raj Manage an IT Team + More http://www.phigmov.co.nz/?e=248 http://www.phigmov.co.nz/?e=248#comm Considering an offer to Manage an IT Team. I'm way to easy going to manage anyone but theres useful advice for anyone who is considering it. I think I rely to much on peoples own motivation to do whats required - you soon find out that some people just do the very bare minimum to get by; encouraging them to contribute to the team again is a real art.

Ed Brill (a Domino/Notes guy) discusses the requirements for Exchange 2007. It looks like Microsoft are relying on Moores law to come to their rescue. You also wonder if the requirements are designed so as to discourage upgrades and encourage clean installs on a new box and migrate.

Just a little tongue in cheek - Samsung Q1 UMPC vs Apple Newton. Someone needs to invent a top trumps for PC geeks. 2.5 hours is pretty miserable battery life on the Q1 though (30 hours on the Newton is optimistic if you use the backlight, modem or network for any length of time); my old Psion 3a would last about a month on a pair of AA's.

I need to try this - Fix underexposed pictures. I have plenty of non-digital pictures which I managed to botch and came out way to light - after scanning them in they lack vibrancy.

iTunes for your paperwork - Kip. Looks like an interesting idea. They should make this into a more generic personal document management system.

Kind of true - Death of the commandline. This is the kind of thing that spawned the GUI in the first place. You could look up the obscure command that you'll use once in a blue-moon or you could just use the GUI.

Speaks volumes for the mentality of troops in Iraq - "I came over because I wanted to kill people". I'm also tempted to say an armed forces or police recruiting system should weed out rednecks and psychos but then I guess they'd be mixed in with the general population. At least if they're concentrated in a few places you can keep an eye on them.

Nasty but clever - USB Social Engineering. So many clever ways to circumvent security. Definitely something to be said for locking down the desktop.

Simple but addictive Game Boy Advance carts from - Bit Generation.

Commandline image manipulation via feh. Nice name.

This looks really useful - Gorilla Tape. Duct tape is really really useful but sometimes the stickability leaves a little to be desired.

My permalinks are broken which is annoying. Seem fine in cgi mode - just an incorrect file reference in static mode. Off to bug the Blosxom mailing list . . . ]]> 248@localhost/ 2006, links Tue, 01 Aug 2006 11:13:00 +1300 raj