Coolest computer case-mod I have seen in a long time. "look ma, no case".
posted by MikeM at 3:26 PM    

 
Finally, a grain of sanity in the business world! This just in: Dell to Stop Using Indian Call Center for Corporate Customers. Seems that there were MANY complaints about accents and badly-handled calls. I personally think the problem was that the tech support people simply were not prepared to handle actual tech support calls. They had little or no knowledge of Dell, it's computers or networking hardware, or indeed computers in general. They worked from scripts, where they would gather information and then try to apply solutions from pre-written forms. If 'this' is wrong, then try 'that'. Won't work with any question more complex than 'the screen is dark' : 'try hitting the power button'.
posted by MikeM at 4:17 PM    

 
By Saturday night, however, Patty was coming down with a really bad cold/flu - she is feeling better today, but still not at 100%. Hope she feels better for the trip to Jersey!

Tomorrow evening or possibly Thursday morning we will be driving to New Jersey to spend Thanksgiving with Patty's family. Turkey, stuffing, all the rest! Maybe even a little football afterwards.
posted by MikeM at 8:48 AM    

 
Saturday evening we went out for a nice steak dinner - went to the Golden Bull, an excellent restaurant in Gaithersburg. The salad bar was really great, and I just can't say enough about the crab cakes. I had Surf & Turf, 8oz Filet Mignon with a large crab cake - both were mouth-watering and perfectly prepared. Patty had the Prime Rib - which was also fantastic (I had a bite - mmmmm!). Overall well worth the money and a great place to go if you are in this area. Right off 355 in Gaithersburg, just south a mile or two past Montgomery Village Ave.
posted by MikeM at 8:46 AM    

 
Last night I tried to install a sound card into Rasputin - the 500SC Dell server. The sound card was a SoundBlaster AWE 64 Gold - a great card of its day. ISA. The 500SC server has 5 PCI slots, 2 of them PCI-X. *sigh* None of them ISA. Ah well - The SoundBlaster LIVE PCI card is around $15 now. The 500sc also does not have an AGP slot. Thus my GeForce 64 card goes on a shelf. The on-board isn't bad (ATI Rage XL 4mb), but I had hoped to step it up a bit. Oh well. The PC manufacturers are making it harder and harder to use older hardware, just like the software manufacturers are making it harder to use older software. (Xtree Gold, Qfiler, PcBoss, etc - all great file-control programs, useless with today's file systems).
posted by MikeM at 8:09 AM    

 
If you have a computer at home, you should read this article about Home Computer Security, as it covers pretty much all the bases. Even a modem user should read this, as not only cable or DSL users are targets for hackers nowadays! Worms and such are also a big problem, so the fine folks at CERT have provided an article on reading email with attachments.
posted by MikeM at 7:47 AM    

 
If you are a customer of SCO, or use either SCO Open Server or UnixWare software, you need to make plans to migrate to another platform SOON. Here, a respected analyst says that SCO's Legal Fees Could Jeopardize Its Software Business.
posted by MikeM at 4:22 PM    

 
There is a new virus out now called Wozer - it pretends to be a Superzone eCard from a secret admirer. If you open the attachment, it infects your computer and can spread to all other computers on the same network with you. As always, never click on attachments, especially from strangers!

Seems like our parents taught us all this: Don't talk to strangers, don't take candy from strangers, don't click on attachments...
posted by MikeM at 8:38 AM    

 
Well, he might not be to your taste, but he surely is honest! Fred on Everything. Conservative with a strong libertarian bent is how Bob Thompson described Fred. I think some folks will agree with at least some of what he has to say, and others will explode in righteous fury. I just think it's funny to watch the latter ones turn bright red and sputter.
posted by MikeM at 12:19 PM    

 
This is just too cool.
A language composed of whistles!
posted by MikeM at 9:41 AM    

 
This weekend we rented "Snatch", a funny action-adventure movie with several diverse threads that all weave together nicely at the end. Something as innocuous as throwing a carton of milk out the window impacted many other people's lives in extremely violent and funny ways. It reminded me of "Pulp Fiction" quite a lot. Boxing/fighting, 'take a dive or else', everyone after the moneybag (a huge diamond in this case), lots of violence, shootings, car crashes, etc. Quite a Guy Movie. Fans of Jason Statham or Brad Pitt really should see it.
posted by MikeM at 8:49 AM    

 
We saw Matrix: Revolutions over the weekend, and it was FAR better than the reviewers claim. I sometimes think the reviewers get kickbacks from the businesses that compete with theaters. The movie was a great finale to the trilogy, and while it leaves it open for a fourth movie, there doesn't have to be - everything was neatly wrapped up at the end. Now then, that said, if you bring a 3yd-old to the theater and refuse to take him out when he is screaming and crying, please remove yourself from the gene pool. There is no excuse for that sort of behavior - if the movie is too intense for a child, then you will just have to miss it because your poor judgement is inflicting mental trauma on the kid. *phew* that's out of the way. Silly parents, Matrix 3 IS NOT for kids. Then again, we saw parents with 3-4 yr olds in "Kill Bill: Vol 1". Some people just have no clue.

I have been cloning a Sun system - making four where there was only one before. Once the first unit was ready, I used ufsdump to make images of the four partitions, then added a drive, partitioned it to match, and used ufsrestore to put the data on the new disk. This worked flawlessly twice, and I had three good systems. The last one proved to be my bane, and when we booted it, it immediately corrupted the drive and trashed itself. Nice. I re-did the restore, and tried again. Same story. Third time, I checked the partition info just as an aside, and noticed I had overlapped some cylinders with the swap space and the /var partition. OOPS. Thus, every time it booted to the point of initializing swap, it wrote over the first bit of /var, and thus lost superblocks and such. Not good. I fixed the partitions, re-generated the file system for /var and swap, and re-loaded the var data - then all was well! Now witness the power of four fully-operational SUN stations!
posted by MikeM at 8:18 AM    

 
The Geek Test. I scored 47.53452% - Super Geek
posted by MikeM at 7:40 AM    

 
Here is a link to the space weather website's account of the latest solar flare. By all accounts, this will be one of the biggest flares EVER - the last time one this big was seen, they had to extend the scale to accomodate it, and this one is thought to be bigger still. This one should only result in minor effects on earth, but if it had been aimed right at us, like the last few were, we could see some rather extreme effects, rolling blackouts, satellite failures, etc. Space Weather for more details.
posted by MikeM at 10:24 AM    

 
A scary story - for the computer people out there : It Was a Dark and Stormy Night.
posted by MikeM at 10:31 AM