It’s a long weekend here in Australia for ANZAC day so I’m considering going on a road trip. Not sure where I’m going yet, but my last road trip took me down into northern New South Wales and I’m thinking of heading down that way again – I figure my random selection of which way to turn should take me somewhere else this time (I don’t actually own a map of anything outside of the Brisbane region). I’m considering trying to get to a national park I vaguely remember around there, but I can’t remember the name of it or where it is so I’m not sure how much success I’ll have with that plan. Anyone got any suggestions for places to go for a day trip or possibly an overnighter around Brisbane?

With all the crisis and the shooting and the killing in Iraq, it’s good to see that the American military has found a solution: an upgrade to Active Directory. I mean, once the Iraqis see how much better their life is with Active Directory instead of Windows NT 4 based networking, they won’t care if their home has been blown to smithereens, if their children have been shot and if they’re starving to death. Cue music What the world, needs now. Is Active Directory. It’s the only thing, That there’s just, Too little of….

Ian Holsman comments on a vacation responder that deletes all incoming email to avoid their mailbox overflowing while they’re away and asks if email is dead. The answer is a clear no. Email is now a critical system, it just can’t be killed, perhaps morphed into a different set of protocols but the concept of sending mail electronically just can’t die, unless you count being replaced with sending video messages electronically as killing email. However, email is no longer a time saver, it’s a great time waster. It’s a chore that you have to put up with to stay in business or to stay in touch with your widely dispersed friends. With the recent demise of our exchange mail server I’ve had to change the way I filter out spam which requires training up a new spam filter and in the process receiving massive amounts of spam. I honestly never realised just how much spam I received until I suddenly didn’t have a filter in place to get rid of it. Without that filter, email is completely unusable and with a poorly trained filter it’s a great waste of time. We’ve now outsourced our exchange server and I can go back to happily using SpamBayes with Outlook. I’ve run it over the 14000 stored spam messages that I managed to recover from our dead exchange box (massive amounts of real email got nuked, but the spam survived….) and trained up the new filter, but it’s still not as good. I’m not sure why. I’ve also found that when you receive large amounts of spam the best thing you can do for your productivity is turn off the new email notification. Noone notices if it takes you 30 mins to reply to an email instead of 5 mins and by turning off that notification you’re no longer interrupted by spam messages (or real messages) every 1-5 minutes. You check you’re email when you want not when it wants. Also, by leaving your email open you still have a reminder on screen to pay attention to email every so often and it’s quick and easy to bring the window back up and check if you have new email. The other thing you need to do is have a really huge amount of space available in your mailbox, whether that’s achieved by actually having a large mailbox or just having a fetchmail (or similar) process running to constantly download your mail to your own computer for storage, it’s got to be there. That avoids the problem of spam filling up your in box. Finally, train your spam filter to treat any bounce message as spam and discard it. At least 50% of the unwanted email I get is actually bounce messages either for incorrect addresses or virus detection notifications. If you’re a system administrator, turn off all bounce messages, they no longer serve any useful purpose and are just clogging up people’s inboxes.

It’s crap. Total and utter crap. When I last depended on Mail.app’s filtering I got practically no spam. Now I get about 3 spam messages a minute and Mail.app hasn’t picked up a single one, despite having been trained on a weeks worth of spam. SpamBayes was handling it perfectly even back when it first started. I’m really not sure how much longer I can put up with this before I’m motivated enough to divert my work email through my home server and filter it with spamassassin.

Well, after two very long days and a standard day of fighting our exchange server, I’ve given up. I did manage to get our data imported again and get the server up and running, unfortunately the database is very corrupted and we’ve lost at least half of the email. We went back to the tapes to see if we could pull off the last backup before the server died (the exchange drives were untouched in the crash but the databases were corrupted because exchange didn’t shut down correctly) and found that all the backup tools are reporting the tapes as completely empty. Now I know that the tapes aren’t empty, we retrieved stuff off them no more than a week ago, but try convincing the software of that…. So I’ve given up. We’ll probably ship off the tapes and the drives to some exchange recovery company to see what they can retrieve and we’ve decided we won’t be setting up our own exchange server again. Now we’re outsourcing it. There are (to my surprise) a large number of companies that will set up and run an exchange server for a surprisingly low monthly fee. Access is available via Exchange and IMAP so we can retrieve our data easily and most of them even include licenses for Outlook 2003 for free with your subscription. Pretty sweet deal if you ask me. I never want to play sysadmin again and with this setup there’s a good chance I won’t have to.

Lately there’s been a number of blogs from people looking for Java WYSIWYG editors that work in a browser. The latest one from Bertrand Delacretaz is enough to prompt me to speak up. Firstly, I work for a company that develops a browser based WYSIWYG editor so I’m biased, but I’m also an expert in the field. We’re the top of the line in browser based editors and there’s really only a couple of other companies that can compare with our product. There are thousands of other products on the market that provide varying ranges of functionality, most of them are tied into a particular browser, particular platform or both. Mostly, they don’t provide a full editing experience to users or are difficult to integrate. Here’s a few things you should look at when you are shopping around for a WYSIWYG editor:

Exchange takes ages to run the tests over it’s database. I got bored, boredom leads to creativity, creativity leads to parody, parody leads to bad song lyrics, bad song lyrics leads to Yoda. [To the tune of Drink With Me] Sys Admin, rest…. Drink with me, to nights, gone by. Type with me, isinteg alltests. Here’s to exchange servers who went to our heads, Here’s to shitty servers, who kept us from our beds. here’s to them, and here’s to you. Drink with me, to nights gone by. Can it be? The hard drive died? Will we ever get email back online? Could it be your backup’s worth nothing at all. is that file, just one more lie. Drink with me, to nights gone by. To the files that used to be. At the shrine of backups never say die. Let the whir of tape drives never run dry Here’s to you and here’s to me. Do I care if it should die, when I’m not paid overtime? Life without email means nothing at all, I won’t sleep all night, should the server fall Will you work, exchange for me? [To the tune of One For My Baby (And Another One For The Road).] It’s quarter to 3, there’s noone in the place, Cept you and me. So load ’em up, Joe I’ve got a little data, I think you should load. We’re restoring my friend, at the end of a brief episode. Make it one for the server, and one more for the road. I got the backup, put another CD in the machine. Lookin’ so bad. Won’t you parse the DB, simple and fast. I could fix you right now, but it’s not, allowed in this mode. Just make it one for the server, and one more for the road. You never know it. But buddy I’m a programmer. And I’m not a sys admin, no way no how. But when the server, won’t listen to me. Then it’s time to play…. Well, that’s how it goes. And boy I know I’m gettin’, anxious to blow. Thanks for the repair, I hope you didn’t mind my switching your files. But this tape that I found, It must have files, or there’s no hope at all. Make it one for the server, and one more for the road. The long, it’s so long, the long… admin road….

I need a drink. Oh Yeah! I’ve spent the 40 hours trying to restore our exchange server to operation after a power outage on the weekend took out the motherboard of the server. It’s 9:45pm, I’m still at work and I haven’t even started the hard part yet. I was here until midnight last night only to discover that the server needed to be completely replaced. Fortunately, it looks like we won’t loose any data in the whole episode – assuming I can eventually get exchange to do what it’s told. We are so changing our server setup.

I think I’ve created a monstrosity. I currently have (and am happily switching between) 2 screens, 2 keyboards, 2 mice and a trackpad – all connected to the same laptop. Why you ask? Because each input device is in an ideal position for a particular task. No I didn’t plan it this way but it is working out pretty well. Here’s what my desktop currently looks like (excuse the dodgy iSight photo quality): It started off pretty simply – a laptop with an external (bluetooth) mouse. When I’m switching quickly between the keyboard and the mouse I tend to use the trackpad, when I want to use Exposé or am doing something more intensive with the mouse, I use the external mouse. Then I brought home a monitor from work so I could set up a new development box ready for Monday – the box is now all set up so I put the monitor to use as a second display for my laptop. Except that the keyboard and mouse were still sitting in front of it from when I was using it with the PC and I kept turning to the second monitor and trying to use the keyboard and mouse that was in front of it. So now I’ve got the keyboard and mouse plugged into my laptop so that I can turn my whole body and work on the second screen without getting confused between input devices. I’ve never understood why everyone’s so keen to use a single keyboard and mouse with multiple computers on their desk – it’s just so much more logical to me to use the keyboard and mouse that’s in front of the screen I’m looking at.

Could it be? Yes, it could. Something’s coming, something good,
If I can wait!
Something’s coming, I don’t know what it is,
But it is
Gonna be great! I’m getting the feeling that good things are starting to happen around me and that it’s all for a purpose. Today I went to my cousin’s sixth birthday party and the sister of one of his friends was on her way to an acting class. My ears pricked up upon hearing this and I pushed my way into the conversation. Turns out she’s quite passionate about theatre, particularly musicals and was very excited when I told her I was planning on staging a musical. We spoke for about half an hour or so and I’m really quite excited about how passionate she is about the theatre. It’s always great to have people that dedicated on any team so I’m really hoping she does wind up involved with my musical plans in one way or another. I’ve also finished the first draft of the musical I’ve been writing. It still needs a few songs to be written but the storyline and dialogue is now complete. I’ll also have to spend a fair bit of time going back over the dialogue to make sure the characters are consistent right throughout the show – some of them change personality a little unnaturally as the show progresses. All very exciting. There’s been a lot of other little things that have been happening lately as well that’s all helping the musical come together. I’m more excited than ever to really push forward with this musical now – I think a lot of good is going to come out of it and hopefully form the basis of a top quality production company.

Okay, Microsoft have officially gone too far now. That’s my C drive, it’s where I put my stuff. It’s mine. It is not, has never been and should never be a Windows system folder. Not to mention the fact that hiding files like this does not make the interface easier to use, it just introduces another mode that confuses users and makes users panic because they’re in some cryptic part of the OS that they shouldn’t be in. Fix the damn OS so it’s not so easy to inadvertantly break – don’t just hide the entire hard drive from the user.

Which OS are You?

Brian McCallister got me started on this. Apparently he’s slackware. I’m Palm and everything it says is so true it’s scary.

Update: I have to point out this:

if you ended up with GNU/HURD it means you didn’t answer all the questions.