Category: Techspeak

So Yahoo! Pipes is not new, but I just started playing with it after I saw a brief tutorial on how to use it on Lifehacker. Very cool. It provides a very simple, totally graphical, AJAXy way to filter your RSS feeds. From the initial announcements from Yahoo!, I had no idea that this is what it was for. While I had done similar things with other services, the Pipes graphical interface simplifies things a lot, and gives you a great visual way to see exactly what the end result will contain.
Anyway, following the tutorial, I was able to merge two RSS feeds (Digg‘s Technology feed and Techmeme) and then filter them out so that they don’t give me the same results from other feeds. Since I already subscribe to BoingBoing, Lifehacker, and Marc Andreesen‘s blog, for example, I added filters so that Digg and Techmeme and would not show me stories from these posts, making my Google Reader a lot less cluttered with duplicates.
The second tool I found is actually new: AideRSS. AideRSS ranks your favorite blog posts according to the amount of feedback they receive. The presumption is that the more feedback, the better a post is. The result is that you can use it to dramatically reduce the amount of “clutter” in your feeds. For example, Lifehacker averages 388 posts a month. AidRSS ranks 83% (325) of these as “good,” 55% (215) as “great,” and 14% (58) as “best.” So you can easily filter out a lot of chaff from a blog.
Unfortunately, the first feed I tried to give it was my custom Pipes feed. Given that Techmeme and Digg have different structures for their comments, this was too much for AideRSS to handle. Luckily I quickly figured it out and instead flipped it so that my AideRSS feeds now drive my Pipes. Another drawback is that it really only works on blogs. I can’t use it to cut down on the amount of noise on various mailing lists or forums that I receive in RSS format, which would be very nice. Perhaps they will work on that and offer this feature in the future.

This reminds me of an article I wrote over 10 years ago where I accidentally deleted my home town. Excellent production quality. I wonder if I could fool anyone into believing this is real.
Oh who am I kidding? Of course I could…
The Internet Crash of 2007

Today I decided to use Google to find out what movies were playing in nearby Hanover, NH. I searched for the following: “movies: Hanover, NH”
This is what I got back (EXPLICIT):

Showtimes for Hanover, NH – More movies
	Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer – 1hr 29min – Rated PG – Action/Adventure/SciFi/Fantasy/Suspense/Thriller – Trailer – 31 reviews: Live Free or Die Hard – 2hr 10min – Rated PG-13 – Action/Adventure/Suspense/Thriller – Trailer – 3 reviews: Evan Almighty – 1hr 30min – Rated PG – Comedy – Trailer – 17 reviews:

Free Porn Videos – zoo tycoon 2 objects and more – Daily Updates

… nh angel pictures victoria secret teen titans fan fiction adult free clips …… using condom after couple kinky sex free porn lists movies hanover, …
9ubqr-free-porn.info/00850054/index.html – 633k – Cached – Similar pages – Note this

While looking for a quick and dirty password generator which would create easy to remember but hard to guess passwords, I stumbled across this post on McAfee’s AvertLabs blog. Very cool, and simple enough that anyone can use this technique to make really secure, yet memorable passwords.

As of this morning, we all “sprang forward” an hour, three weeks earlier than we used to, at the direction of Congress. To save energy, Daylight Saving Time was moved up, so we can all save more daylight! Hooray! Saving is good, we should save more.
Seriously though, I’ve had to make adjustments to many of my clients’ computer systems so that they would correctly adjust their own clocks for the new DST changes.
On some old (Fedora Core 2) Linux servers, the change was a manual process, since there are no more patches available for this distribution (i.e. it has reached its “end of life”). More up to date releases, like Fedora Core 4, and Ubuntu 6.06 and later, either had the necessary changes built in, or were just an update command away. Very handy.
On the Windows side of things, it’s a similar story. If you have a current, supported version of Windows, say, 2003 or XP, and you have been running your Automatic Updates, you’re all set. But if you’re running Windows 2000 or Windows NT… hmm… it’s a different story.
Microsoft has provided several methods for adjusting the time zone settings on Windows 2000, which has been in “Extended Support” for nearly two years, there are no automatic updates to make these changes. As Microsoft says on their Extended Support page for Win2k,

“Microsoft is not ending support for Windows 2000. During the Extended Support phase, Microsoft continues to provide security hot fixes and paid support but no longer provides complimentary support options, design change requests, and non-security hotfixes.”

This means you must apply said patches or edit the registry, by hand. Obviously, this is just one more way to gently prod the consumer into purchasing the latest version of Windows, but I won’t go into that right now.
Microsoft provides instructions on how to update your Windows 2000 server in this knowledgebase article, which lists several methods to adjust the time zones. For a single computer, the simplest method seemed to use their new TZEdit tool, so that’s what I did on the handful of Windows 2000 servers I maintain.
Just for kicks, I also ran this tool on the last remaining Windows NT 4.0 server that we still have in production at a client’s location. Note that NT 4.0 is no longer in Extended Support – it’s reached its End of Life. We joke about what this means, and often wonder if we call Microsoft and want to discuss NT 4, if they’ll admit it ever even existed, but I digress. My point is that there is no mention of NT 4 now anywhere with respect to DST. There are no tools from MS on how to adjust its settings, there are no instructions on how to do it. “It’s dead, Jim,” so if you’re running NT 4, you’re on your own.
I decided to try the TZEdit program on this NT 4 box. To my surprise, it ran and seemed to make the changes correctly! Great! I also ran it on all of the Win2k servers.
This morning, I logged on to all of the servers that we maintain to make sure everything looked right. All of the Windows 2003 servers came through without a hitch, and properly adjusted their clocks. The Linux servers did likewise. The NT 4 machine (which, you’ll recall, is completely unsupported) did as well! Great!
Then I looked at the Windows 2000 servers.
The first one still said it was 9:34 AM. My clock said it was 10:34AM. Uh oh. I looked at the second server. Same thing. I logged on to another client location. Same thing. Another client location. Same thing. Not… good.
Basically, the tool appears to not work on any of these machines. Granted, I used the same tool on all of the machines, so if I managed to somehow screw it up, I’d have theoretically replicated the mistake across all of the machines, but this utility is pretty straightforward to use, so what’s the issue? And why on earth did it work on Windows NT 4.0, and NOT on Windows 2000? That is what I want to know.
Furthermore, the Microsoft documentation on this has been terrible. At first, I thought it was just me, but thank goodness that the guys over at Casting From the Server Room had very similar results. Curiously, some of the scripts that worked for us did not work for them, and vice versa, but the sentiments expressed on the MS documenation are mine exactly.
On my own test Exchange server, which has a 200MB message store and a whopping 3 (count ’em, 1,2,3) mailboxes on it, has been running the script to adjust calendar appointments for over two and a half hours now. Unfortunately, I’m apparently not alone, and will be in good company when I manually adjust all of our calendar appointments for each Exchange mailbox individually. Glorious.
Oh, and by the way, that patch for Exchange servers, which came down in Automatic Updates weeks ago? You’re not supposed to install it until AFTER you’ve run the calendar migration utility… “If you install the update that is mentioned in Knowledge Base article 926666 on the Exchange server before you update the mailboxes, recurring meetings that are created in Outlook Web Access are not updated by the Exchange tool. To resolve this problem, remove update 926666, run the Exchange tool, and then reinstall update 926666 on the Exchange server.” Thank you, Microsoft. That’s helpful. Almost as helpful as telling me this BEFORE I installed it, but not quite.

So, I downloaded and installed Ubuntu Feisty Fawn Herd 5 this morning. I downloaded Herd 4, but never had a chance to actually install it. Given that I was having pretty good luck with Herd 3, other than the installer being a bit odd at times, I wasn’t in a hurry to drop it anyway.
The first thing I noticed is that the Herd 5 installer seems to work, even the partitioner. Note that under Herd 3 I was using the Alternate Install (text mode) disc, and with Herd 5 I’m using the main image (GNOME installer).
I had heard from Bryan and Chris at the Linux Action Show that Canonical had decided to include Compiz, but not enable it by default. Even though the installation of Beryl was pretty easy, it was still a manual process which involved changing my repositories, downloading packages, and editing configuration files. Given that I had successfully installed Beryl on Herd 3, I was curious to give Compiz a try, especially if it was installed by default (because, I admit, I am lazy).
It worked like a charm. Clicking System, Preferences, Desktop Effects, and clicking the button to “Enable Desktop Effects” was all I had to do. Very nice. I’m not sure I like the default Compiz settings, because the window snapping feature acted a bit funny when I tried to move windows. Once I realized what it was doing, it wasn’t a big deal, but by default, when I tried to drag Firefox to the top of the screen, it snapped back down about half an inch on my screen. I had to resize the window a bit to get it to stay where I wanted to.
Evolution now works! I fired it up, and connected to my Exchange server in under a minute. Amazing what happens when you can specify the server that you want to use…
As for migrating my stuff, I see that my documents made it over, so what was in the? “My Documents” folder under Windows is now in my “Documents” folder on Ubuntu. I see that Gaim recognizes my username on AIM, but I couldn’t figure out how to sign on to that account without deleting it and manually entering my username and password. It turns out, that this was actually a problem with Compiz. Gaim was working fine, but with the Desktop Effects enabled, all of the Gaim windows showed up empty, with no text wherever there should have been text. When this happened in another application, I decided to try disabling Compiz, which fixed the issue. I’m thinking I know why it’s not enabled by default.
Unfortunately I had not installed an email client on the Windows partition, so I couldn’t test its migration of my mail settings from Outlook or Thunderbird.
All in all, I’m seeing definite progress, and can’t wait until the real release next month.

I’ve been running Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn Herd 3 for about a week now, and so far, I’ve got to say, I’m pleased with the changes I’ve seen.
I’m running it on an HP Compaq nc6220 and a Dell Latitude D500. I encountered a few bugs in the installer. The first was minor, namely that by default, it wants to try to detect my keyboard layout by having me press a series of keys, rather than simply picking “US English” from a list. The second, somewhat more important bug is that the partitioner failed to properly set up my partitions unless I wiped the drive clean. While I expected this, it did lead to me having to reinstall Windows, which was inconvenient. Such is the life of being an alpha/beta tester!
Right off the bat, the first time you boot, the system announces that an application has recovered from a crash! I found that humorous, as there was no other indication of any sort of crash. This happened on three different installations on three different machines, so it would seem there’s something odd out of the box. Again, such is the life of being an alpha/beta tester!
Another bug I found is that when configuring an MS Exchange account in Evolution, one key piece of information is missing. Namely, the server. That’s right, while setting up my MS Exchange server, I can specify user, password, a bunch of different account options, but no server address! This seems to be a somewhat significant oversight.
One thing I’ve noticed is that the Ubuntu team is releasing dozens of updates a day. It is exciting to see the rapid development on the project, as my automatic updates notification has something for me every morning. As I went to bed last night, I installed 102 updates, and this morning, had 37 more ready to go.
Without a doubt, the biggest benefit of the new version is the automatic detection of my laptops’ Intel and Broadcom wireless cards. Finally, no need to dig up firmware from Windows drivers and cut them, or fiddle with NDISwrappers. WPA worked out of the box as well. Hooray!
I was able to install licensed software via the standard Add/Remove application, and did so with Adobe Flash, Sun Java, and a couple of other things that I previously had to download manually, or install via EasyUbuntu or Automatix. I appreciate having these as part of the standard installation methods now, and not having to go out of my way to get them on the system.
All in all, I’m having better luck with Feisty than I ever did with Edgy, and can’t wait for the real release in a couple of months!
Update: 2007-02-14
Today I was successfully (and quite easily) able to install Freemind on Feisty. I had done so in the past on Dapper, but getting the dependancies in order was such a pain I decided just to run it on my Windows machine instead. Under Feisty, with Java installed via the Add/Remove application, all I needed to do was download the libforms-java and freemind-0.8.0 Deb packages from freemind.sourceforge.net and go! The first time I attempted to install the Freemind Deb package, the installer crashed, but I was able to run it again immediately afterward and it was successful.
56 updates this morning!