User: nick_urbanik

Re: LookOut

On: Folders vs. Tags For Shared Email Accounts?

LookOut is what you do when you use OutLook.

Re: Go with a mailing list

On: Folders vs. Tags For Shared Email Accounts?

It would make more sense to create a mailing list, and have emails sent to the list forwarded to all ten members. Then they could administer their folders as they see fit.

With 10 people on one email account, it's hardly surprising that it turned into a clusterfuck.

Hear, hear!

Corporate emails at my work consist of endless top-posting after re-top-posting that must be read from the bottom to the top to make any sense of the mess. In the process, I need to skip over multiple re-inclusions of the same email, and not get annoyed that the entire mess mostly consists of disclaimers. LookOut seems to strongly encourage this technique of mis-communication.

"What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant disclaimer."
"What is the disclaimer standing on?"
"But it's disclaimers all the way down!" (sorry Stephen Hawking.)

They who are on call should do releases

On: Who Owns Deployments - Dev or IT?

Where I work, there are nine of us in the server team, looking after 350 production servers. Only we do any releases. We are all skilled programmers. Only we are on call.

Politics is often a problem, but our team refuses to release important software that hasn't been tested properly, since otherwise we have to support the mess at 2:00 AM.

Re:Obviously no questions from the web team

On: Interview with Microsoft Exec on IE7 and RSS

The parent has been modded as flamebait. However, more than one web developer may consider IE itself to be flamebait. Just look at the CSS-discuss mailing list and count all the efforts made to work around the refusal of Microsoft to support CSS standards that almost every other web browser supports so much better.

The parent may be overly passionate, but, well, there could be some real motivation for the passion.

Re:Dvorak has apparently forgotten..

On: Dvorak Says MS Should Buy Opera

Yes, poor Microsoft have been locked into IE by setting their own web standards :-).

RPMs of Emacs 22 available for Fedora Core 4

On: The Future of Emacs

I have downloaded the CVS for Emacs 22 and have built nice RPMs for Fedora Core 4. You will find them on my home computer.

Re: Fixing anoying bug in Adobe Acrobat 7

On: PDF Tracking On the Way

I tried it and it works. Nice Perl program. Must have anoyed you, since it may have taken some time to track it down!

Thank you.

Discussed on LWN concerning Adobe Acrobat 7

On: PDF Tracking On the Way

• Article is subscribers only (worthwhile)
• Article will be readable by guests 1 week after publishing
• Solution in Linux is to disable Javascript in acroread 7

Re:I agree!

On: Bill Gates Proclaims US High Schools Obsolete

HS was fun and I did enjoy a select few classes but for the most part everything else was a waste of time generally designed to prepare students for the years ahead. Not a bad idea in theory, but for those who are already prepared and are actually interested in learning...HS life can be somewhat lacking.

I was fortunate to be able to go back to study the final two years of high school at a technical college here in Australia. I studied Maths, Physics, Chemistry, English and History, and enjoyed each subject equally. I found each relevant to my life, even though I was already "prepared" for life, having returned to study after the age of thirty. My main delight was that I finally understood how to learn, so many years after leaving school.

I reject the pigeon holing of people as suitable only for Science or Arts that I saw in some education systems. That is a peculiarly bipolar view of people that confines people in intellectual straitjackets before they even know about other areas of study.

Re:Clear Code

On: Optimizations - Programmer vs. Compiler?

You can code in a way that is both easy to understand and efficient. That's what //comments are for.

It is a good rule of thumb to let the code explain itself as much as possible. If you use cryptic variable names and obscure premature optimisations, you may end up losing your code in comments.

Then again enough comments and the code becomes pretty murky.

See what I mean?

Premature optimization is the root of all evil.--- Tony Hoare

Re:Hrmm

On: Too Many Computers Hurt Learning

Which part of England do you mean? People use very different ways of speaking in differnent parts of England.

Re:Unrecoverable mess (so far)

On: The Verdict on WinXP SP2?

Doh!

Unrecoverable mess (so far)

On: The Verdict on WinXP SP2?

I just installed Service Pack 2 on my wife's Windows XP, and it continuously reboots about 5 seconds after the XP boot logo appears. Her system is an Athlon XP 1500+ 1350MHz, 256 KB level 2 cache, with VIA KM266 chipset on an ASRock K7VM2 motherboard, and with 385 MB RAM.

I pressed F8, selected the menu item, "Disable automatic restart on system failure", which let me see a blue screen with a rather generic message saying:
STOP: c000021a {Fatal System Error} The Windows SubSystem system process terminated unexpectedly with a status of 0xc0000005 (0x7ffe0297 0x0015fab8). The system has been shut down.

I disabled Date Execution Prevention (DEP) by editing boot.ini with emacs under Knoppix and added /NoExecute=AlwaysOff This had no visible effect.

This link smugly claims to have a solution if I fork out $10 US on the VISA card.

After a multitude of reboots and selecting Debugging and Safe mode, found that it was getting stuck at Mup.sys. That, presumably, is a critical component of the Muppet system :-).

In the recovery console, I used the command:
disable mup
but this did not change the behaviour in any useful way that I could see.

I also disabled and reenabled many drivers loaded before Mup.sys. No visible effect.

Selecting "Last Known Good Configuration (your most recent settings that worked)" had no visible effect; the machine still rebooted after about 5 seconds.

Googling led to many blind alleys, but I am still unable to boot the machine to XP, except with the recovery console from the installation CD.

One very long exchange (related to Mup.sys, but not really SP2), ends with this exchange:

AnalogMan: I deleted the partition and re-installed Windows XP. All
is happy now ^^

per: Cool! have a nice night.

I am unable to see the "all is happy" and "Cool" part of this "solution".

I am sure that there must be some well-known solution (besides reinstall). I'd be grateful for any suggestions.

The machine still runs Fedora Core 1, Windows 98 okay. Windows XP worked okay before SP2.

Re:It matters because

On: Our Friend, The Meter

Oh, so you're the guy responsible for the loss of Mars Climate Orbiter!

Dear papercut2a: did you notice that Dan Birchall linked to the story in the article?

Laurence Lessig may not love this inititative

On: 'Open MS Passport': MyUID Goes Beta

"Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace" points out the dangers of having an infrastructure that allows most people to be identified without great difficulty. I wonder what Lawence Lessig would have to say about this initiative.

I begin reading the book three days ago, and am up to page 78. It's a thought provoking book. I value my freedom highly. I will examine these issues.

Re:Secure CRT c.f. PuTTY

On: Terminal Emulators Reviewed

Compared with PuTTY: downside: Not free, so I have no experience with it. But I'm interested: what are the upsides?

Re:TeraTerm c.f. PuTTY

On: Terminal Emulators Reviewed

Many people ask me whether or not TTSSH will support SSH protocol version 2. It does not and (unless someone else decides to try) it will not. Sorry, I don't have time to do it. Please don't ask me about it.

--from the TTSSH web site.

Is there anything TeraTerm Pro and TTSSH do that PuTTY doesn't do better?

Where is "I Hate Java" Nathan "ncm" Myers?

On: Java Faster Than C++?

It's sad that Advogato is down, because I could link to the wonderful Anti-Java, pro C++ flame wars started by Nathan, C++ library contributor and initiator of the I Hate Java group on Orkut.com. But I don't have access yet. Come on Nathan, this news item on Slashdot gives you just the right soapbox to stand on!

It must be a wonderful discussion, because as pointed out by Nathan himself: It's a safe place to rant without being contradicted by apologists, toadies, people worried about their unwise career choices, or even facts.

Re:quepasa

On: Password Memorability and Securability

Well, this program works, implements the above, and prints by rows or columns, and has an option to use upper and lower case letters as the input characters. You can also choose how many columns you want. Consider this public domain.

#! /usr/bin/perl

use warnings;
use strict;
use List::Util qw( shuffle );
use Getopt::Long;

my $byrow;
my $cols = 4;
my $ul;

sub usage() {
die<<DEATH;
Generate a simple table to map mnemonic names to inscrutible passwords

usage: $0 [options]
options:
--rows\t\toutput table by rows\t(default: by columns)
--ncols=n\tuse n columns in table\t(default: $cols)
--ul\t\tuse upper and lower case letters as key\t(default: lower only)
DEATH
}

GetOptions( 'rows!' => \$byrow, 'ncols=i' => \$cols, 'ul' => \$ul ) or usage;
usage if $cols < 1;
my @chars = map { chr } ( ord '!' .. ord '~' );
@chars = grep { $_ !~ /[018oilb]/i } @chars;

@chars = shuffle @chars;
push @chars, shuffle @chars if $ul;

my @keys = ( 'a' .. 'z' );
push @keys, ( 'A' .. 'Z' ) if $ul;
my $rows = int( ( $#keys + $cols ) / $cols );
print "\$cols = $cols, \$rows = $rows\n";
for ( my $i = 0; $i < $rows * $cols; ++$i ) {
my $index = $byrow ? $i : ( $i % $cols ) * $rows + int( $i / $cols );
print "$keys[ $index ] " . pop( @chars ) . pop( @chars ) . " "
if $index < @keys;
print "\n" if ( $i + 1 ) % $cols == 0;
}
print "\n";

Is there a simple way to preserve indentation in code?

Re:Crypto subsystems are notoriously difficult...

On: Cisco's LEAP Authentication Cracked

Can you tell us more about the software to implement this?

• What VPN software are you using?
• What does the person need to do to "set up a VPN" (i.e., can you post a brief summary of your web page with the instructions?)
• What software did you write, and what does it do?
  • I guess that you have written code that reads the DHCP leases for the short-term "non-routable" IPs, and
  • Creates a longer term lease once you have authenticated?

I'm interested in the technical details of what you described.

If I had mod points, I'd call it interesting.

Open Standards are what we need

On: New Tool Cracks Apple's FairPlay DRM

licensing or no licensing, you can't say that AAC isn't a standard

The long argument about which proprietary format is the best/worst seems rather silly.

What we all need are proper open standards.

Why there is endless PHB explanation.

On: Why PHBs Fear Linux

Slashdot's moderation system looks broken in this respect: when people browse at 2 or 3, they do not see the infinite number of posts that have discussed the meaning of PHB till we fools (who browse at -1) all think, "this is crazy". And more will be posted.

The article is very interesting, but it seems that people have been sidetracked by the easy problem of explaining the meaning of PHB, but avoided the difficult problem of how we can contribute to helping correct the problem of poor management text books and poorly informed managers.

Bill Nottingham's Dr. Seus Inspired Announcement

On: Fedora Core 2 Test 2 Released

Bill is a dad, I think. The first part of the Fedora Test2 announcement, up to "Test release bugs are everywhere.", comes from One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish; the second part, from "So please test test2 in this mode;" to "Say! We will test it ANYWHERE!" comes from Green Eggs and Ham, both by Dr. Seus.

Does anyone know what book inspired the part in the middle?

Is Bill Nottingham a dad too?

Are You Free?

On: The Web Won't Topple Tyranny

I believe that Quacker really felt it's important to tell the FBI that this is a joke. Are you really free in the USA?

Re: unresolved bugs?

On: Why You Should Choose MS Office Over OO.org

Office 2000 has a bug in numbering pages using a cross-reference to the last page number. The numbering would appear as 1 of 1, 2 of 2, 3 of 3, 4 of 4, .... It was fixed in an office service pack, which many people still have not installed. But it looked so funny seeing these very official looking documents looking so broken.