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A friend of mine used to pull off the keys
and replace them in alphabetical order-
always got a chuckle out of me when someone
new sat at his desk...

In any case, that would solve the problem of
finding the odd charactors: ~ / \ | etc
as well as letting you grow into learning
key location.

Thought i'd throw in another ideal placement too:
http://www.techimo.com/photo/data/4/179ms_keyboard -med.jpg
http://www.jardmail.co.uk/attachments/mskeyboard.j pg
http://igloo.its.unimelb.edu.au/funny/Year%202005% 20-%2003/tn/All%20Time%20Great%20Microsoft%20Keybo ard.jpg.html
(all same image)

You can configure a Windows box to be an rsync server using cygwin however in my experience it is not very reliable. More detail can be found here

Here, and here. Lin/Win/Mac versions.

I agree, the course is well worth doing and it's the only way of getting good documentation from Apple in this area. There is a section on cross-realm Kerberos authentication which is what you are looking at here.

We run a large AD (~70,000 users and ~20,000 computers) and many of the university's departments have configured X.3 clients to authenticate against the AD.

I've documented how to authenticate a X.3 client against and AD as well as how to use an AD for authentication and an OD server to manage groups and computers.

I agree, the course is well worth doing and it's the only way of getting good documentation from Apple in this area. There is a section on cross-realm Kerberos authentication which is what you are looking at here.

We run a large AD (~70,000 users and ~20,000 computers) and many of the university's departments have configured X.3 clients to authenticate against the AD.

I've documented how to authenticate a X.3 client against and AD as well as how to use an AD for authentication and an OD server to manage groups and computers.

Firstly, thanks for linking to my page! We have a large AD implementation (roughly 60,000 staff and student accounts) at Melbourne Uni, mostly Windows machines but also a number Macs.

Our AD is currently running in mixed mode with some W2k and a majority of W2k3 domain controllers. We will probably be switching over native W2k3 mode in the next few months and have no reason to believe that Mac authentication will stop working (but I haven't yet tested that to confirm it).

OS 10.3's support for AD groups is pretty useless but if you are running an OS 10.3 server then you can manage AD users and computers by adding it to your clients as a second authentication path. I've written some draft notes on how this works (and it works very well).

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions / comments - my email address is on the linked web page.

"Joining the Active Directory with OS X.3 Client"
http://www.infodiv.unimelb.edu.au/lansg/osx/os-x3- ad.html
I have nothing to add to the article.

ok, so I'm replying to myself...

10 seconds on google found this, so I guess I probably wouldn't be removing OS X afterall. But I can still definitely see why one would want to.

Perhaps someone should give them some hint what the rest of the world looks like.

MelbourneIT originates from the hallowed halls of Melbourne University. You'd be lucky if they ever find the phone let alone pick it up. What a university is doing with their hand in domains is a question for their philosophy department.

Oh, and we can blame Melbourne University for this cretin among others.

• Here's a list of technical I put together on Bhopal at my site, listed in my sig. These are very deadly chemicals with effects that linger on and on and on and on...you know Union Carbide became the EverReady before Dow bought them...

  New Exportation of Risk: The Case of Bhopal

• New Bhopal Papers V. Ramana Dhara at Emory University is a nice cource of technical papers including health effects, epidemiology, toxicology and respiratory effects.

• New Chemical Accidents, CHEMICAL SAFETY & SECURITY Environmental Health Watch. A comprehensive page of articles on chemical safety, security and implications since the Bhopal tragedy.

• Toxicological Profiles for Key Pollutants in Bhopal

• The Disaster and Its aftermath: The Hiroshima of the Chemical Industry "Indeed those who died may have been the lucky ones......" Ward Morehouse.

• A child is born... Site not recommended for children.

• Growth Patterns Journal of the American Medical Association (pdf format)

• The $195 Million Discrepancy - Where's The Money Gone?

• Bhopal gas tragedy lives on, 20 years later

• Personal Exposure and Long-Term Health Effects in Survivors of the Union Carbide Disaster at Bhopal

• Lessons Learned? Chemical Plant Safety Since Bhopal

• Chemical Process Safety at a Crossroads

what aspects of science? I often wonder about factual content of *drama* television. If you talk to real scientists discussing CSI this year on www.RRR.org.au (radio live to web) you would get comments like 'equipment product placement', 'test that take days, weeks are solved in hours', 'people who happen to have expert knowledge in too many areas'. I cant find the exact link to the show but a couple of forensic scientists working in St Vincents Hospital, Melbourne ripped the shreds as to the factual content let alone scient content.

Real science is about discovery, measuring, observing then (the kicker) do some experiments, observe and write it up. The closest I see on television that emulates this is the BBC nature programmes started by David Attenborough. Though Americans may probably be more familiar to that other David, Canadas own David Suzuki.

Watch a show from one of these blokes and you will see the difference b/w the candy-coated hollywood version and the real messy world. Which leads me to my next observation ...

inbetween miami vice and the simpsons

Go to http://www.ms.unimelb.edu.au/~paradox/archive/ for the magazine, these proofs appeared in issue 2 of 2002.

2002 (Editor: Norman Do)
Issue 1 (currently unavailable)
Issue 2 (currently unavailable)
Issue 3 (currently unavailable)

It consists of a bunch of proofs that there is no largest prime - the list of proofs is entitled "15 good reasons why Pure Mathematics is not taught to first year students." My favourites are:
Proof by example:
"Let x be the largest prime. Then x=91 but 91+6=97 which is prime. Therefore 91 cannot be the largest prime number. Therefore there is no largest prime."

Proof by intuition:
"Prime numbers are integers that can be divided by themselves only; prime numbers are odd with the exception of 2. By intuition as n->infinity, there will always be an odd number cannot be divided by another number besides itself."

Proof by experimental data:
"Suppose n is the highest prime. Then 2n-1 is also prime. But 2n-1>n so there is no highest prime. (Check: 2*2-1=3, 2*3-1=5, 2*5-1=11, 2*11-1=23, so true.)"

But the greatest of them all:
Proof by having no idea what a prime is:
"Say the largest prime is x, then 2x is also a prime since the statement is true for all natural numbers."

Go to http://www.ms.unimelb.edu.au/~paradox/archive/ for the magazine, these proofs appeared in issue 2 of 2002.

I'd be shocked if this research hasn't been going on since the early days of the Cold War.

Like any technology, antimatter can be used for good or evil. Ever get a PET scan? That's antimatter right in the middle of your body. Don't worry, you won't grow a third leg or anything from it.

I'm sure the DoD is aware of this, but gamma-ray bursts can cause nuclear changes, which can create radioactive particles that linger. It's not nearly the problem of traditional fallout, and is even be "negligible" for a sufficiently large value of "negligible." Much more likely is ionization which can kill living tissue and cause chemical changes to non-living materials. This can cause buildings to become less structurally sound, for example. However, absent the "negligible" secondary radiation I mentioned above, a conquering army can roll in without wearing radiation suits.

Because of the way processors draw current - bursts of current when switching - the rate of change of current can be enormous, in the range of giga-amps per second. If high-speed digital circuits like motherboards did not have a heirachical power supply the inductance in the power supply network would completely eliminate the ability to deliver the AC current needed.

Motherboards will use a heirachy of power supply components starting at the PSU which supplys the base DC load (big caps, long thin leads with high inductance) and ending with capacitors right next to the processor to supply the fast instantaneous current necessary for switching.

So while people might think of the power supply as the big silver box in the corner of the case with the fans and the whirring and the whathaveyou, on a motherboard the power supply is a network including the PSU and the motherboard components. Sure there is voltage regulation, but power supply in a high speed multi-layer digital circuit is a lot more than that.

Of course I have never built something like this, but I took this subject last semester: http://www.unimelb.edu.au/HB/subjects/431-467.html

- flip -

A far more efficient method would be to look at using RSYNC with SSH as a few others have pointed out. There's a pretty good HOWTO for Windows here, which avoids the overhead of a full Cygwin install. You'll probably want to check out the link to cwRSYNC at the top of that page too.

• Hugin is getting really good as a frontend for panotools. It'll be really great when alpha layers become available too!
• Getting the camera to take remote piccies is possible as well (although getting access to all the manual parameters maybe a problem -- no luck there with my canon a40)
• A stepper motor and its RS-232 interface is not that expensive or hard to find anymore (50 quid at Milford instruments).
• Or... you can build your own out of a floppy drive connected to the parallel port. Maybe a better solution, the milford stuff is getting pretty hot after a while and requires 9-15V

Has anybody built a tripod like this? What did you guys use?

Amen...

I do a lot of side work for friends, family and other strangers who beg me for help when they find out that I have The Knack.

In the end, I leave all security off by default because they will inevitably:

1) get a new PC
2) play with the settings on the PC
3) require a "hard reset" on the router

If Microsoft and the hardware vendors could make this stuff easier, it wouldn't be so much of a problem. I suggest the following:

The router redirects unsecured wireless users to a webpage that requires log-on prior to accessing ANYTHING ELSE. Problem solved. At this point, I could simply set a password (or passwords, for families / surf monitoring / etc) and the user would have to use it every time (no forgetting). Just make a label and stick it on the freakin' router for those times that the idiots do forget.

This was on my Physics undergraduate course; a rather nice technique. Releated resources from my lecture notes give:

An abstract, a presentation on applying similar techniques to volcanoes, a citation [L. Alvarez et al, Science 167, 832 (1970)] (accessible only to subscribers of Science, I'm afraid), a Physics Today article, a useful paper.

is the conference where the experiment was originally proposed.

This sort of thing isn't new. Panorama Tools has PTInterpolate, which given two images of the same scene taken from different viewpoints creates any intermediate view. I've never tried it but this makes me want to.

Why not use something like Panorama Tools and a suitable GUI frontend for the creation of the panoramas? I think that PT is even available as Photoshop plug-in. It does really nice work with perspective/barrel distortion etc. correction and with a frontend, is easy to use as well.

At the University of Melbourne (Australia), we have access for staff and students available from around seventy base stations with a similar number planned for rollout during 2004.

The free-as-in-beer panotools libraries itself is closed-source, and not supported anymore. IPIX(tm) apparently was one of several companies chasing Helmut for patent issues, the resolution of which I am not sure. New work is being done today to open the process up with Open Source equivalents. Otherwise, it's the top tool since it can stitch images taken from any orientation into several projections into several image formats with high quality.

Actually the library's open-source, but Helmut isn't supporting it anymore. He's taken it off his site but you can get it from mirrors like this or this.

At least one of the accompanying tools was never released in source by Helmut (namely the Java tool, ptpicker, for setting control points).

As for Ipix, yes they are still holding their patents up as a threat. But Pictosphere is claiming prior art; read about it here.
This will be an interesting one to watch as Ipix sues Ford Oxaal by claiming they own the techniques *they* are now licensing from *him* (and you thought SCO was interesting). I don't know if Oxaal's motives are altruistic (I doubt it) but Oxaal himself is distributing Dersch's ptviewer under the GPL (although I think he might be violating the GPL by not providing source on his web site).

PanoTools: the only (?) image stitching tool available for Linux. Looks pretty powerful, although not as automated as some.

I believe that the author of the article used the Windows version (among other things).

the original poster I think wants something that also works in Windows.

Rsync and ssh can work with Windows using Cygwin. See this document for example.

If one cannot bother to paraphrase, then perhaps one might consider deferring one's submission, as a courtesy to the original author. After all, some folks work hard to craft the words that we enjoy reading. Why not provide them the common courtesy of respecting their hard work?

Cheers.

I have found LDAP Browser/Editor to work pretty good. Java app.

LDAP Explorer is a decent web interface.

Please use www.slashdot.com for shit like this.

Please make www.slashdot.org worth looking at.
Smoke ring stuff

Cooler toy stuff

Stuff that matters

Stuff that matters

Stuff that matters

Stuff that matters

Stuff that matters

Stuff that matters

Stuff that matters

Stuff that matters

Stuff that matters

GIF and JPEG are for different types of images.

Last I heard, IPIX was trying to bully Dersch off the 'Net - he's back up now? Anybody have info?

Anyway, he has a page on Correcting Barrel Distortion.

Check out PanoTools at http://www.path.unimelb.edu.au/~dersch/

It has a steep learning curve, but seems to be worth the effort. I've only played around with it some myself but I've seen lots of (seemingly) professional photographers on the web that use it.

Exellent tutorials: Big Ben's Panorama Tutorials

Check out PanoTools at http://www.path.unimelb.edu.au/~dersch/

It has a steep learning curve, but seems to be worth the effort. I've only played around with it some myself but I've seen lots of (seemingly) professional photographers on the web that use it.

Exellent tutorials: Big Ben's Panorama Tutorials

What is so Americo-centric about an idea that goes back to ancient times?

"Ancient civilizations occasionally planned new cities or major additions to existing settlements. The most widespread plan was a rectangular or grid street pattern that allowed considerable flexibility in the size of blocks while maintaining a clear visual order. Noteworthy examples of this type of city plan include Kahun (Egypt, c.1890 BC), whose workers' quarter is separated by an internal wall from the wealthier districts;" - From Google's cache of the University of Melbourne's History of Urban Planning

Or Roman planned cities?

Or the Hampden Gurney School in London?

"Block" is not an Americo-centric term. Granted, many of our cities are layed out in a grid pattern, but a block is not a standard size from city to city - try defining a block in the heavily Spanish and French influenced layout of New Orleans or the sometimes quirky layout of Washington, DC.

As far as city-centric. So fucking what? I live in the country. There's nothing offense about someone expressing an idea in term of a relation to a block. It's a commonly understood *idea*. And if 'block' isn't a familiar word, then look it up. Several definitions I found used a quote from the London Quarterly Review as example usage.

I'm writing a (rather long, rather detailed) article arguing against DRM-enforced copyright, as a matter of public policy.

It's available here in workping-paper form.

The software seems to be available here.

Panotools is a wonderful toolkit for panoramas. While the main site is down, you can find mirrors. It isn't an automatic solution - you can't provide it with a series of images and let it try to automatically line them up. But with a little manual work it does a wonderful job of stitching images and correcting for basic lens distortions.

Yes, rsync is the dog's.

On the Mac, I use RsyncX, which knows about resource forks, even when transferring them to systems which don't have them.

And on Windows, I use rsync again.

I've tried every damn sync program for the Mac. I've tried tar and dump on UNIX. I've tried fancy network backup tools. I've not found anything that compares with rsync.

I hate the complexity of the command-line syntax, but it has the required functionality:

1. Automatically incremental.
2. Works locally from disk to disk or across a network.
3. Works via secure VPN or SSH.
4. Works between any two platforms I happen to be using, so I can back up to wherever the spare disk space is.
5. Easily scriptable, easily scheduled.
6. More efficient at using network bandwidth than any other protocol I've found.
7. Doesn't fail over on systems with incorrect system clocks or bad timestamps.
8. Data ends up in original native format, not some format that needs a special program to read.
9. Partial restore is trivial.
10. Works great with large capacity but slow-to-write backup media like DVD-RAM.
11. It has never damaged my data.

The only downside I've noticed is that the rsync ports to Windows tend to be comparatively CPU-intensive for some reason. Turning off compression helps.

I also use rsync for maintaining my web site, sharing my iCal calendar, syncing my browser bookmarks...

Of course, even that's draconian, as most "serious research" doesn't require a streaming mega-pipe to get done. 30%/70% is probably more reasonable.

At my university's (yes, the one recently mentioned on slashdot ) CS department the problem is not so much bandwidth (or at least it never caused me a hassle), nor have I heard to much concern about copyright until fairly recently. The problem is expense -- approaching A$100,000. Students doing random surfing are required to register sites that they visit (unless someone else has registered it before), which I always thought was a reasonable measure if the cost's were a problem, if people want to do something frivolous, they can. Privacy isn't an issue, your name doesn't get stored until/unless you actually register the site, but you need to take responsibility for your actions. This was until I saw people in the smaller Masters and fourth year Software Eng. labs, many of them international students who seemed to spend most of their days listening to streaming audio, or downloading and watching movies or foreign news updates. I don't really care if serious research needs a streaming mega-pipe, my fees (and those of many other first/second/third year students who get to view slashdot -- after registering of course -- in the glory of 256-colour on ancient terminals) pay for these people. A university is not the place to do this. If you think that you have a right, do it at home!

I looked around at sites like ircache.net, vancouver-webpages.com, and elsewhere looking for a way to get pages from caches besides of course hitting them from the side of the served network (i.e. with a browser or a spider like wget or wwwwoffle).

There is a hierarchical cache at U. of Melbourne for students there, so if anyone is reading this from a dorm there you might be able to spider the cache of the site to preserve it on your hard drive.

If anyone is familiar with caching protocol and how to query other caches on the net, why not share them here. Much of the data may be on the net. Likewise if anyone knows how much is replicated on other sites it will save people the trouble. I'm just worried that the contents of these caches may expire one day soon..

Museum Victoria CSIRAC Infosheet
Guide to the Records of CSIRAC

Modula-2 or Ada or Logo I have not seen a wisper about in years. from what I recall Logo was to be the teaching language of the future ( back in the mid 80's ), Ada was to be the next big thing is the 80's, and modula-2 was to replace C

The first language I programmed in was FORTRAN II back in the 60's, when I was under 10. The code had to be run at the Nuclear Research Establishment at Harwell in the UK. Remember, there weren't as many computers around back then, maybe 10 in the country. It made being a pre-teen 31337 haX0r difficult. :-)

The last time I programmed in FORTRAN - FORTRAN 77 in fact - was for the communications facilities for the State Electricity Commission of Victoria, a system to help restore power in case of emergency. That was in 1987.

I still use Ada - recently for the spaceflight avionics for a scientific research satellite, and will be teaching a course in it to some people doing the avionics for a helicopter in a couple of weeks. Though the use of Ada has shrunk, it's making a strong comeback in the field of avionics, where a crash in the program could mean the crash of an aircraft.

My advice to the original poster - by all means learn FORTRAN as a fifth- or sixth- language. Even the 95% Godawful languages(VB..) can teach you something. There are times I use Java and think "why the HECK can't it have feature X of Ada-95?". There are times with Ada-95 that I say "Damn, feature Y is so clumsy compared with Java." FWIW Matlab seems to be the way of the future for non-software engineers to quickly do calculations and display the results graphically, it's a pretty good FORTRAN replacement. What EXCEL is to accountants, Matlab is to scientists.

Using rsync, I synchronize the main fileserver over to the backup computer on a regular basis. You can 'snapshot' days and weeks of data without using lots of hard-drive space by using the fine tutorial written by Mike Rubel.

I set-up the workstation's "My Documents" default to point to a shared drive (S:) on our fileserver. This automatically points everyone to the right place without even looking at their system. I also harp on how important it is to save files to the shared drive.

For laptop users, I setup a cygwin-minimal-rsync system. All backups are encrypted through ssh. Furthermore, the backup server is restricted to only running rsync backups.

Everytime they start their laptops, a batch file in the startup group opens. They can choose to abort (if they are not connected to the lan) or continue with a backup.

Because it uses rsync, only their changes are saved to the backup computer. This usually only takes a minute or two. Most users have other things to do while it is backing up.

The system cost $600. I have had two complete laptop failures since then with full recovery. Not only that, I can recover files accidently written over almost two months later. The investment was worth every single penny!

Abi is an ant. She's blue.

As for spreadsheets, in the near future we release code which is able to embed Abiword files in Gnumeric and allows Evolution to use AbiWord to read emails.

Abi is an ant. She's blue.

As for spreadsheets, in the near future we release code which is able to embed Abiword files in Gnumeric and allows Evolution to use AbiWord to read emails.

I use OpenLDAP 2.0.14 for Linux. To edit/browse the LDAP directory I use LDAP Explorer 1.16, although the newest version is 1.17. It's web based and done in PHP 4.x:

http://igloo.its.unimelb.edu.au/LDAPExplorer/

I've been working on a project that would be able to do this (one day - hopefully) on Windows, Linux, Solaris, and Mac OS X (Those being the platforms that I have.)

I'm not a crypto whiz and am having serious trouble finding enough information about how filesystems work in order to implement all of the required interfaces. Does anybody know where this information is, or should I look through Linux/BSD sources - and hope that BSD is applicable to OS X?

My current version is pretty much a library that allows you to like apps against it, but doesn't support native operation. The next release will add networking support, but I really need to go native to make it useful to people.

Also, can anybody help decrease the usefulness of the algorithm for decryption so that I can GPL the thing? You can see what I've done from here.

- Malcolm

Trinity has 2 teaching labs for students. Each has around 24 PC's in it.
One is Linux, the other is NT. The NT one is migrating to Linux shortly.
On these, we teach basic computing skills as well as advanced stuff.

The only complaints we have from students is that they can't install
crap all over them as easily as they could the NT boxes. What a shame.

We're also deploying a large number of Linux based web kiosks.

All of our servers bar 3 (accounts database, security system, old fileserver
on it's way out) run Linux.

Currently, we would have about 130 NT/2000 boxes and about
70 Linux boxes, and about 15 Macs.

We need more Macs.. ;-)

Hey! I'm the IT guy at the department where Richard (Bert) Roberts works. Woohoo!

Pity he's just resigned. Doh!

Tim Flannery (also mentioned in the linked article) wrote a very interesting book a few years back called The Future Eaters . It was an eye-opener for me on fire-stick farming and megafaunal extinctions due to humans in Australian prehistory. Very cool book, although the guy in the office next to me snorts in derision every time I mention it (Well, he did discover Mungo Man in 1974, the oldest known human remains in Australia - so I guess he's entitled to his opinion :) Flannery has a new book out on the ecological history of North America, The Eternal Frontier , which also looks interesting.
--

There are 13 colleges around the University of melbournne and I stay to one close to Whitley called International House . When I first came to this college nearly 2 yrs ago, I was surprised to find a network of about 200 computers run by students. I joined the committee then and I have benefitted so much from the experience. One of the best things that has come out from the whole experience is my introduction to the world of Open Source. I was pretty much living in an MS world before that. I still do like my Win 2K system but really love Open Source and all what its stands for. Students running the network here seems to be the most logical thing to me. Our committee is a totally transparent committee and is quite knowlegable and we've provided a much better service than what a professional company could ever hope to acheive. We sit down and talk with the students and when things go wrong at 12 in the night, we're on it immediately . Some of the programs we write are all written by ourselves which is a big advantage for us Software Engineering students. A network run by students is not going to be a success everywhere because it is essential that people who run it are dedicated to the assimilation of knowledge and thankfully in my college there are a few people like that .