These are the sort of niggly problems that make OS X look appealing… Mail.app is integrated with OS search and all that other stuff so nicely. Calendars and Contacts are no longer compellingly better on Outlook than elsewhere. In fact, between Sony Ericsson and Microsoft, various contacts in my phone managed to get junked because of character encoding issues — even when using a language installed on both phone and sync computer.

Email is a freakin’ ancient tech. Why can’t this just be straightforward, Microsoft?

Coming soon?

1. Turn off your monitor, then turn it on by simultaneously pressing the three buttons circled in blue above (Menu, Plus, Power).
2. To access the service menu, press the button circled in yellow above (minus).

Exit the service menu as you normally would. To return to normal user mode use the soft-power button to turn the monitor off and back on again.

This should also work great with 2404WFP, 2405WFP, 2406WFP, 2407WFP, 2704WFP, 2705WFP, and 2706WFP where those panels exist (maybe not some years). My guess is the 3008WFP will also use the same combination — I don’t know about earlier years as they had fairly different display processing hardware.

[7:35:07 PM] Josh Street says: hey :( you’re offline in facebook :(
[7:35:20 PM] Tori says: sorry internet explorer annoys me
[7:35:32 PM] Tori says: im online in opera but stupid fb chat doesnt work
[7:35:58 PM] Tori says: (blush)
[7:36:07 PM] Tori says: theyre gonan fix it tho right?
[7:36:17 PM] Tori says: can i send them an email or something?
[7:36:38 PM] Tori says: and what is flock!?

We are commencing an incredible journey.

Not to mention the OEM copy of XP MCE sitting in a draw that I’d lost track of (I think the system is now using a regular XP Pro license) or the miscellaneous systems that have affixed OEM licenses but for which there is no (misplaced) physical media.

Accordingly, if I want to obey the OEM sticker directive, I’ve got to download a CD ISO from a torrent site (because I don’t fork out for MSDN). But MSDN is increasingly attractive; it effectively offers the desired outcome. Unlicensed, unactivated systems that work perfectly well on a subscription basis… sure, subs suck, but whenever they stop their XP activation servers we’re all going to be screwed, anyway, so it hardly matters.

Meanwhile, I’m sitting here making a list (on paper, which I’ll store with the physical media) of all the licenses in use, and roughly where. Thanks to the unauthorised rebuilding of systems that I own and have built from scratch so often (resourcefulness in anyone else’s book, evil work of a pirate to the draconian OEM overlords) whatever descriptions are attached to aforementioned systems is likely to be rendered completely untrue in eighteen months time when I once again get around to the wholesale slaughter rebuilding of them all. Intermittent reinstalls will probably happen, too, unless I’m driven so insane by the inability to discern one license from another I end up, as I do now, simply taking out the lot and shooting them all a new install.

To Microsoft: whatthehelldoyouwantmetodo? I am so not forking out the at-least-$2000 you would have me pay for retail Vista licenses for this lot–it’s that much because Vista Business retail licenses come in at a delicious $500 each. Say it with me: hell no. I’ve heard from a reliable system builder source that you’ve been telling them that the new OEM rules work in their favour as it’ll bring them more business. Sure, but it’s pretty crappy business if I don’t say so myself. I have absolutely no interest in becoming a Microsoft certified system anything, simply because it’d mean dealing with your crap in a professional capacity, and I deal with it quite enough in a professional capacity trying to do other sorts of development as my job, thankyouverymuch. I’m not going to pay a Microsoft tax twice (first for certification, second for individual licenses) just because you claim that your crappy system builders do it better than DIY-ers.

Whenever the time comes around to upgrade to Vista, if I ever deem it worthwhile on the other home desktops here not for any commercial pursuits (still running Business in response to the crippling networking capabilities of all Home line products), I’ll be making a trip to my local store, who, for what it’s worth, don’t even offer retail Vista Business for sale on their website, but mention the OEM edition an awful lot, with the token “(only sold w/ new system or to a system builder)” tacked on to placate anyone from officialdom who comes looking. I haven’t had the pleasure of breaking OEM conditions-of-sale (that’s all they are… are such things even legally enforcable in this country?!) just yet, but have no doubts there will be ample places that want to take my money when and/or if I do.

I’m actually in the position of having one spare XP license (two if you count XP MCE) at this point, but am sorely tempted to install Linux on at least one of the three systems I’m taking care of tonight just to avoid having to deal with these mediocre attempts at extortion in the future. It’s not morally defensible to refuse to acknowledge system builders as “original equipment manufacturers” when they are, in fact, conducting exactly the same tasks as their so-called ‘certified’ builders. Clearly, it’s not being pursued for retail sale: the only retail products that belong in an operating system product mix are upgrades for people who enjoy having computers that don’t work (i.e. most of the population, anyway).

It’s an indictment upon the difficulty of upgrading/reinstalling Windows that so few people take this route: quite frankly, the products don’t work. Everyone who is unqualified (in the literal, capable-of sense, not some arbitrary didacourse, paidMSsomemoney sense) to build a computer, in my experience, is unqualified to successfully install Windows independently. Even if they succeed at booting from a CD, negotiating the installer prompts (admittedly better than they used to be), manually answering questions about daylight savings and other such things that should long since have been dealt with automagically (c’mon, we’ve had GeoIP products for what, ten years now? Longer?), or at least correct from the outset (two HP machines last week were insistent the default timezone should be Singapore. They shipped in Australia. Is it so bloody hard to pick a populous east-coast state zone as the default?), chances of users correctly installing things such as drivers in post-install stages are slim to none. Nearly all phone a tech-saavy friend (I know no-one who’s ever called the Microsoft support line for OS installs… more should, but few do).

The point stands: retail licenses are for newbies, OEM licenses should be accessible to everyone who doesn’t give a crap about shiny packaging, manuals, and shooting their wallet to bits.

Here endeth the rant.

These things can be had from PayPal for about five bucks. Or $7.50 if you’re an Aussie. Verisign will flog them off to you for $30, if you’d like, but basically PayPal rocks for this kinda stuff. It’s a one-time password token that effectively enhances your authentication by a massive degree. It’s cool because it works with PayPal and eBay. It’s cooler (and worthwhile) because you can potentially use it with OpenID.

Essentially, it’s a random number seeded with a unique key that gets appended to your regular password. This defeats keyloggers and pretty much all kinds of phishing currently out there. These kinds of devices have been used in corporate VPN/dial-in scenarios for years now (predominantly, in the situations I’m aware of, with technology by RSA SecureID), but this is the first I’ve seen of it from Verisign.

And, sure, it’s only as secure as physical security or the endpoints themselves are, but it’s a massive step up from “what’s your cat’s name?” two-factor auth (though, unfortunately, I think PayPal/eBay offer that as a backup).

I’ve ordered mine and will probably be having a play with OpenID implementations of it (backed by Verisign’s PIP service, but not overly tied to it because of OpenID’s identity-delegation ability) once it arrives (10 business days).

Can’t help but wonder what Verisign’s rates for these things are in a standalone sense. Normally on 5 year contracts, but in terms of cost-per-token. Seems like a great way to defeat the idiot users who insist on having passwords that are blatantly obvious (argue all you like about strength policies: it’s often not feasible when balanced against support load for resultant forgotten passwords).

Also, to those who argue PayPal = evil, if you’re in Australia then please… don’t. Unlike in the US, here they’ve basically got the same financial reporting obligations as any bank does, and customer service necessarily to match it. All the horror stories from the ‘States (not that I think them universally untrue!) pretty much couldn’t happen here or they’d be chucked out of the country. And, whilst they’re so heavily subsidising (or at least obtaining bulk discounts for) this kinda tech, that’s cool with me.

This image makes 60,000 indexed items. A fair whack of that would be email, but far out that’s a lot of information. (It’s not just a count of files on a system, that’s just indexed documents in my home dir, projects workspace, and email accounts)

New laptop arrives Monday morning, and I’m trying to decide if I even want to move everything off this desktop or not! The laptop has half a TB of disc space across 2 drives (17″ monster), so I’m considering it. I purchased it as a desktop replacement system and it is quite capable of that (specs at end of post)! The desktop provides a good backup should the laptop die/get stolen/run over by a bus, but at present the data is organised to be used, not archived.

By “used”, of course, I mean that liberally disorganised but most-recently-used-on-top sort of structure we fall into so easily. So I have a spot of sorting to do to get everything onto the laptop.

My last computer still has some stuff I’d like to get off it (particularly uni work… to the critics, yes, I do still go to uni!) but it’s been in at Youthworks not doing much since we moved offices, but heavy enough I haven’t bothered bringing it home again, since late last year.

The problem with desktops in particular is that they aren’t worth selling for their potential usefulness. My several-years-old computer (2.4GHz/768MB/somethingsomething… Ubuntu) in at Youthworks could maybe just sell for $350 given a clueless enough eBayer. My current desktop (no great slouch, AMD64 X2 4200+/2GB/7600GS) would be worth about the same to someone who knew what they were talking about… or perhaps $750 on eBay!

Even so — it’s useful to have spare machines ‘just in case’ (for production stuff especially). I’d love to be able to swap those two desktops for laptops of similar vintage, but it’s just never going to be cost-effective. When people get rid of laptops, it’s because they suck (falling apart/general abuse, crap battery life, rubbish specs to start with, etc.). Not so with desktops, wherein most faults are redeemable at minimal cost. And even that minimal cost is often negated by the fact that there’s so much in the way of ‘spare’ parts around the place!

(screenshotted for posterity if they go editing)

They say they don’t know why it sunk. I blame Vista ;-)

Update:

So perhaps SMH’s typo was mixed up. ABC (Australia) are running a story on their website wherein it’s universally called the MS Explorer. An ill-fated name for a ship, no doubt!

Perhaps Midnight Commander or Finder would be a more successful name? ;-)

Our app had done that but django-registration’s version change slipped past me (so I had django-registration, just the wrong version), easily fixed with a svn -co http://django-registration.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/registration/ into site-packages.

Turns out it doesn’t use Eclipse’s HTTP Proxy settings, but needs setting elsewhere.

On Windows XP, this will be in your Application Data path under Subversion. Mine is as follows:

C:\Documents and Settings\joshs\Application Data\Subversion

I haven’t got a Vista machine to test on, but it will still be the Application Data\Subversion folder within the user’s path. (I will confirm this next time I’m on a Vista box.)

Linux users, look in ~/.subversion/

Open the file “servers” (no extension) and scroll to the bottom section, [Global].

Un-comment and edit the http-proxy-host and http-proxy-port settings (and user/password if required, it wasn’t for me) as appropriate and everything will start working. You don’t even need to reload Eclipse.

Productivity just soared!

It was super nice and super shiny and under a super 5 year warranty, but only if I shipped it back to the US, at a cost of around $150. Crazy, huh? I’m sure there were cheaper options, but I couldn’t find them. And they probably involved boats, which just take too long :P

Anyway, I went to buy a video camera yesterday and sort-of-impulse-bought (coz I was at the store and had been thinking I really should get a decent PSU before something bad happens for a few months) a Corsair HX-620W. It had great reviews and was meant to be super quiet which is mostly what attracted me to it — I mean, sure, reliable power is great… but quiet PCs are better! I could’ve gone the Seasonic S12 but it’s not modular, or the M12, but it’s louder (extra 6cm fan)… so the Corsair, despite probably being manufactured by the same company and sharing a lot of identical design features, won.

It’s modular, which the OCZ wasn’t. Not a massive deal, but nice nonetheless. Makes for a tidier case:

You can see the modular connectors here:

I’m not using any of the SLI power at the minute (probably ever) but, again, nice to have in a future-proofing kind of way.

It’s also got one particularly massive fan. The OCZ had two 80mm fans that were super efficient and barely ever made any noise at all, but bigger typically means slower rotation & less whining noises, so it has to be a good thing. My HSF is massive enough and you can see even it’s small in comparison.

I also took advantage of the cleaning-up-the-insides to properly attach a few CCFLs that’d been lying around. Finally, the UV-responsive motherboard can glow properly!

I know, IDE cables suck… I’ve only got one IDE drive left, and it’s actually just there as a spare. Should take it out but haven’t had a chance just yet.

Anyway, whilst I was doing all this I realised my graphics card fan wasn’t spinning at all. It’d been making some funny noises when I’d done some stuff inside the case in the past, but I’d always dismissed it because nothing was crashing and I hadn’t changed anything to do with the graphics card. Turns out it hadn’t actually been spinning for ages and the fan had the driest bearings I’ve ever seen. The heatsink was plenty hot, but nothing was crashing. My system (CPU + memory) runs about 15% above clock but I’ve had no real cause to overclock the graphics card (Fury aside, but it needs more than just a faster clock!). So, consider this research that a cheap and nasty Palit GeForce 7600 GS can run with only passive cooling!

Ironically, that fan has the newest bearing in the system.

After I’d put everything back together I realised the chipset fan could probably do at the very least with a clean, but had rebooted by then and left it well enough alone.

Singer Oil is great, but I tried some spray Aquatec lubricant also which seems to be a little finer and would probably work quite well. The graphics fan squeaked a little when it started up… not quite sure why! It was pretty well oiled, but maybe it was still just working through the bearings completely.

Anyway… I think this computer’s nearly ready for summer’s soaring temperatures and increased power instability.

For the duration of the above processor load shot, my computer remained completely usable. Am running a Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 4200+ at 2.4GHz (same clock as what I ran my old Athlon 64 3200+ at, haven’t attempted overclocking particularly vigorously just yet) and it’s so much better. Just for the switch-between-applications/preventing being slowed down factor. For the price, totally worth the productivity benefits.

I wouldn’t have ever really got a dual processor system because of the tremendous cost premium they commanded, and I’m still not quite sold on quad-core systems (except for video rendering), but two cores on a single processor die is cheap enough and beneficial enough that I really wonder why you wouldn’t get one these days.

“Beneficial enough” meaning in terms of having an extra bit of headroom to essentially mitigate against crashes in the form of processor hogging tasks. That alone is enough to make it great, aside from the obvious launch/use-multiple-apps-at-once advantage. This is before you even start thinking about multi-threaded apps (mostly just video, but worth considering, especially if you ever do encoding stuff).

Mine set me back $100 delivered and probably extended the usable life of this desktop by about another 12 months. It’s the switching-between-apps thing that makes computers “feel” slow more than anything else, and this technology solves that problem perfectly. Pretty good for a dead processor architecture (Socket 939)!

The only downside to it? Thermal power is up from 67W to 89W… but it’s still cheaper (temperature cost) than two real processors.

Cost is pretty much no object: the potential gains in brand and business development are entirely unrepeatable. Their marketing & promotion strategy is fairly web-centric, and arguably the single best TV spot outcome one could hope for is direction to a rich information portal. The web, like no other medium, offers this for a comparably diminutive cost.

Not only do you get higher conversion rates than you would if a phone number were displayed, but you can also stem the inflow of enquiries to a more manageable rate than television would otherwise generate. This week I’m rapidly developing a new website for them, but also aiming to implement a new VoIP mechanism to effectively manage the anticipated telephone traffic surge. This is for a small business with no employees sitting at a desk 9–5 ready to take calls: they require a particularly agile strategy to appropriately leverage this media opportunity.

At the end of the day, the content of the actual television spot is relatively insignificant. If it converts to web traffic, it’s done its job. The web (and, in particular, telephone contact and subsequent relationships) is the crucial component in this marketing mix. It provides a way to appear as big as TV with finite resource constraints. Operating on such a limited time scale, we can’t throw money at this project fast enough to make it succeed: the limitation is in human resourcing and man-hours, rather than provisioning additional technology to achieve optimum capacity.

This client can respond to close-timeframe business opportunities in days, not months, chiefly through judicious application of Internet-based technologies (and a tremendously concentrated amount of hard work!)

I have about three or four jobs in various workplaces to do with event production and IT development and design, and probably spend about 10% of my time as an educator. I probably spend twice that time learning new things and keeping on top of everything that happens in my corner of the world, but without that thirty-percent education time, the other 70% would be far less effective.

In that thirty-percent time, I stay ahead of the curve and similarly keep my employers ahead of the curve.

At Youthworks, I have spent less advocacy time of late, but the first several months there was alternately spent in learning how people were interacting with technology, and training people in effective (and efficient) use of it to solve ministry problems. My role was first and foremost to learn, and without that time the consequent project would be lacking in vision and engagement with actual need.

I’ve also recently been working again with a past employer, solving some pressing front-end development issues they have faced due to their need for quality training for staff. In the time I’ve spent there, I built a handful of frontend things mostly with technologies I knew, and spent some time looking into and creating solutions with one particular technology I haven’t had much experience with. This is ‘learning’ in a way that isn’t disruptive to conventional employment: my related expertise accellerated the learning to the point that it remained cost-effective for them to allow me to spend time doing that. Apart from that learning time, I implemented some quality testing systems and trained people in how best to apply them, and spent a few hours engaged in front-end development training with another employee.

In freelance work, I find that unless I explain my role and actions to prospective clients, there is a dramatic decrease in efficiency because expectations aren’t properly established. Part of doing this often includes explaining some things about technologies and techniques that are being used. In order for me to do my job effectively, I need to find non-technical ways to explain technical problems. That means avoiding non-essential jargon, having a cache of analogies to apply to a given situation, and patience to make sure everyone remains on the same page.

As someone who brings a particular area of expertise to a problem, it is my responsibility to share that expertise appropriately with everyone else on the team, as well as acquiring (learning) area-specific expertise from others on team in order to effectively solve problems.

There is absolutely no way to do a job properly without constant acquisition or transmission of knowledge. Education is key.