I had some hardware delivery to the office this morning; nothing too spectacular, just some disks and some memory. The delivery was taken and signed for by a colleague who works in our IS department and they'd checked that the consignment contained exactly what we'd ordered and paid for.
In order to do that, they'd had to open the box which, judging by the ripped, torn and otherwise mangled top of the box was quite a challenge.
As fast as an anti-spam mechanism appears on the net, the spammers try to find a way to circumvent it; recently I wrote about the attempt of spammers to try and create realistic sounding names in an attempt to bypass spam filters with unintentionally amusing results.
The latest weapon in the spammers arsenal seems to be inserting passages from works of popular fiction into mails in an attempt to defeat natural language heuristic checks, with passages from Tolkein's The Hobbit seeming to be a firm favourite, judging by the contents of my Junk Mail folder.
On Windows, if you use this command line to start a Terminal Services session
I used to have a home made anti-stress ball, consisting of a flour filled balloon; it was made for me by one of the French students currently on industrial placement at work. I say used to as one of my colleagues managed to break it, which at least proved it really was a balloon filled with flour. Which is a shame as I was rather fond of it.
Emacs is almost infinately customisable; a fact I didn't really get to grips with this fact untill I found myself on a Fedora Core box a while back with a net connection but without my favourite set of keyboard short cuts. This really brought home how just a few simple customisations can come to be relied upon.
Determined never to be caught short in such a manner again I decided to make my .emacs permanently available, providing I have a net connection that is.
After running with Fire as my primary IM app for the best part of a year, its finally been usurped by Adium. After running the two in parallel I found I liked the cleaner interface of Adium over that of Fire. I'd tried Adium in the past and found I couldn't take an app with a cute little duck as a mascot seriously, but Adium just seems more polished than Fire and seems to be vastly more customisable.
We've had a cactus plant sitting on our kitchen window-sill for the last three or so years; it hasn't done much apart from growing a bit occasionally. But after so much inactivity our unassuming cactus has decided to produce not one but three spectacular flowers. Based on past inactivity we probably won't see anymore for a few more years so a photo seemed to be in order. Sunday was a slow day.
I've swapped themes, at least for the time being, to the very customisable, visually gorgeous and almost perfect Regulus theme, written by Ben Gillbanks at Binary Moon.
Almost perfect? Well it does cause the W3C validator to barf slightly on the sidebar. No worry though, a small hack to sidebar.php and all was well again. The diff is available for those who are interested in this sort of thing.
I've just downloaded and installed the latest update for OS X via the Software Update utility. The update requires a system restart which isn't unexpected. What was unexpected was the second restart in the middle of the reboot sequence.
After my heart resumed something approaching its' normal rate I did what I should have done in the first place and read the update documentation. If I'd done this I should have spotted the key phrase:
With the Mac OS X 10.4.6 system software update, PowerPC-based Macs will restart twice, instead of once, after the initial installation.
No explanation as to why this was neccessary though.
This was also spotted, with similar cardiac effects, by todays edition of The Register.
You're working in Outlook, minding your own business and someone sends you a meeting request; you check your schedule, you're free at the given date and time so you click on Accept only to see this:
Restarting Outlook doesn't help, nor does rebooting your machine; you've fallen victim to a corrupted forms cache. But don't fret, there's a straightforward, if not entirely intuitive, way of clearing the cache.
Standard disclaimer: YYMV, this worked for me, using Outlook 2003 on XP Professional Service Pack 2, it might work for you, it might not.
