Month: August 2003

Phone tones make more profit

I was going to post on this after hearing it on the radio last night but The Shifted Librarian beat me to it. Apparently the money spent on ringtones is substantially greater than the money spent on cd singles. If thats the case, how come so many people have that annoying “nokia” ring tone that is mocked by that guy shouting “HELLO! – YEAH I’M ON THE TRAIN” in the advert/comic sketch. (oh and I wasn’t listening to Radio2 – I’ve a long way to go till I get that far.)

Answering back

I know my parents often told me not to answer back, but when someone asks a question in the comments, where is the best place to answer?
If I posted in a new post, and someone has a question on the answer, then that would entail another post etc etc.
If I posted in an email reply then noone else would see it and maywonder why I appear to be ignoring the question (and not everyone leaves an email address)
If I posted in the comment, this might be relevant, but not everyone reads comments when looking at a site – I only read the comments when it relates to a post that I found particularly interesting – so again visitors may not see the answer and the content in the comment is certainly not as visible.

So where do you think is the best place?
And in answer to the questions posted recently – Angela, No Basil needed NO persuasion to lick the ice lolly – he needs no persuasion to eat *any* human food!
Pieter/ JR – yes it will take forever – thats why I’m considering bringing it home (and keeping it off my network until I am sure its safe!)
Kat – keep an eye on cheesebikini for blog updates and other links that he posts. Search google or use its googlealerts options for “flash mob San Antonio”
Will -hey I’m a southerner!!

Security searches at airports

Wired ran an article about electronic device searches at airports. I’ve had a laptop through baggage before with no questions asked and I don’t think the goons on security would even know what a laptop *should* look like when it boots up and whats to stop someone replacing the removable hard disk/cd etc with something a bit less electronic? (careful choice of words here!) The PC would still boot and it wouldn’t be obvious it had been tampered with. The last couple of lines say that certain types of playing cards are also suspicious as they can have sharp edges….that is really going to please Kristen as she loves her playing cards and its the only thing that keeps her sane now they’ve banned sewing needles as she used to cross stitch on the plane. Having said that, it was the only thing that kept me sane the time we had to wait 5 hours whilst they cancelled the plane when she flew back to the states all those years ago! (Tomorrow is our 4th anniversary!)

Desktop Remote Control

Pieter mentioned UltraVNC which is his preferred method of remote control, even over xp’s Remote Desktop. Now if that is the case then UltraVNC must be very souped up performance wise. We already use VNC (in different guises) for control of remote client desktops and sometimes the performance of the desktop refresh is awful – especially over a dialup connection where we can never get higher than 28.8 out of the office! Remote desktop/Terminal Services has always given us better performance, unfortunately its just limited to xp and W2k machines. I’ll be checking out Ultravnc later today.It certainly looks good with work done on the bandwidth,file transfer ability and integration with nt usernames to control who has access.

PS – Hope your wife (I presume its not the cat) gets better soon Pieter and your comments have disappeared from the site overnight.

Unusual Windows Update message

After installing some patches on one of the servers I got the following message – “Your updates have been installed successfully. To complete installation you must restart your computer. Do you want to restart your computer now?” Nothing wrong with that – the weird thing is that the YES button was greyed out….I’m just wondering if its because I was using terminal services to do the upgrade but very strange.

Think Geek T-shirt

Thanks to Neil I read about Ryan s post about the No I will not fix your computer t-shirt. Like I said on Neil’s comments I’m tempted to put a “unless you pay me loads of money” comment on the back of it. This is the second or third link I’ve read in the past couple of weeks that has talked about going freelance for tech support……the only thing is I don’t think the town I live in has enough people to keep me in business. It is very tempting though.

Wireless Update

After taking the wireless Access Point into the office and not getting it picked up on the lan at all with the snmp manager or my network scanner I sent an email off to Netgears Technical Support department yesterday requesting a RMA number. As yet I’ve not heard anything back (apart from an auto acknowledgement with a ticket number and a list of frequently asked questions, all of which have nothing to do with my problem). I took the unit back home to triple check on the original lan and it still didn’t work there either – in fact it doesn’t even light up the led on the hub to say there is an active connection (and yes I’ve tried a different network cable).