Yahoo admits a problem.

After about 3 emails back and forwards with yahoo, they have finally admitted there is a problem with their verification process and their engineers are going to look at it. I’m not holding my breath, but in the meantime I’m going to create a new email address to sign up for the distribution list – and one that doesn’t contain a plus sign in it.

Remote console on W2k3 server

A long time ago, when I had my first exposure to (beta) Windows2003 at a Microsoft roadshow, I saw that the remote desktop actually pulled the console across to the client as opposed to having a new desktop session. I thought this was a pain as it meant that a remote administrator could pinch the console away from the person actually using the console at the server which would be really annoying. However, in my experience on the final product this never happened and you always got a virtual console. This is great unless you want to see the output of any scheduled jobs that are interacting with the desktop. I’ve now found that it is possible to get the console itself by using the -console option as documented in kb278845.
Use mstsc -v:servername -console to “pinch” the console session (the currently logged in user would get logged off) or start a standard terminal session and then in a dos command prompt type in shadow 0. The only downside of this is that you need the logged in user to allow the remote control.

Free* voice over ip to call US or UK

I’ve talked about 1899 and 18866 before and I’m even more convinced they are the same company – they even both have “(NEW SERVER)” in the title of their web page. Anyway, 1899 is slightly cheaper than 18866 although you pay more on a per connection basis, 3p as opposed to 1p, but the calls are cheaper – free to US, Canada and UK landlines.
However, 1899 also has Voice Over IP at the same rates so you can actually use it whilst connected to broadband to ring other people in the uk for just 3p on their home number. This would work out cheaper than skype but the same price as using your home number. This does mean that you can use this anywhere in the world and get cheap phone calls though – so in theory I could ring a US phone number from the states, long distance, for 1p……Might even be worth installing this on the parents-in-law pc so they could ring me for 3p.
Incidentally, the funny thing is that you can also ring your home phone number at the same time and caller ID shows it as your home phone number ringing.