SnakeLegs

Just about the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of:  W Hotel (Atlanta) apparently claims a trademark on “WET”.  What is “WET?”  A pool surrounded by trees.

“Bangkok 8″ - John Burdett
“Bangkok Haunts” - John Burdett
“Bangkok Tattoo” - John Burdett
“Atlas Shrugged” - Ayn Rand
“Replay” - Ken Grimwood
“Lucifer’s Hammer” - Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
“Orthodoxy” - G.K. Chesterson
“The Intruders” - Michael Marshall
“By the Time You Read This” - Giles Blunt
“Cuckoo’s Egg” - Clifford Stoll
“Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman” - Richard P. Feynman
“Tropic of Night” - Michael Gruber
“Valley of Bones”  - Michael Gruber
“Night of the Jaguar” - Michael Gruber

The Bangkok series was really different.  Liked it a lot.

I’ve read a lot more than this, but I can’t think of them offhand.  Asked the county librarian to get a printout of my checkout history, and she said, “Oh, there’s no way the system could store all that.”  Well, there is a way — buy more hard drive space.  It’s cheap now. Oh, bother…..

Here’s a Get Rich Slowly blog entry recommending Hulu and kin, including a link to an extensive list of online video content source (bookmark that one).  Don’t forget your local library as a source of DVD’s — you helped pay for ‘em.

When using bginfo, have ReconnAct run this on every login and reconnect:

bginfo.exe terminals.bgi /timer:0 /NOLICPROMPT
Where the terminals.bgi includes:

<Full Name> = WMI query:
SELECT FullName FROM Win32_NetworkLoginProfile WHERE FullName is not NULL

login:<User Name>
server:<Host Name>
Default Printer:

<Default Printer> = WMI query:
SELECT Caption FROM Win32_Printer where Default = True

Please call the IT Department
if you need assistance.

Tabbloid (free service from HP) has very nice output and is simple to use.

Go to http://www.tabbloid.com/

Add your feed links, and enter your delivery options, including your email address. When your first issue is sent, there’ll be a link in the email for you to edit your settings.

“My Outsourced Life” (A.J. Jacobs, for Esquire) is still one of the funniest articles I’ve ever read.  Go ahead; it’s a great read.

If you don’t have time to read it, you could have a “virtual assistant” summarize it for you.  TimeSvr has “virtual assistants” for the low, low price of $69/month.  For 30 days, that’s only $2.30/day for: “Unlimited basic Tasks on your behalf. No limit on phone calls, reminders, reservations, bookings.  Up to 8 hours a month for complex time consuming tasks(long web searches, transcribing, etc.).”  They’ll manage your contacts and calendar.

The first thing I’d do is schedule a daily wake-up call.  Who wants to hear an alarm, when you could have some foreign college girl wake you up?

The second thing I’d do is offload my RSS aggregation duties.  I have a number of websites I like to check, and I just hate poking through them.  Copy the content into a well-formatted PDF and email it to me every morning.  RSS is such a great idea, but all the aggregators suck.  Honestly, can’t you just specify content to automatically be inserted into a paper/newsletter format?  XeTeX plug.

That includes my email.  The 4-hour-a-week guy who makes a living out of not actually doing anything has a guide for outsourcing your inbox.

That also includes my finances.  List the prior day’s checking account activity.  Stock prices.  Weather forecast.  Current house price on zillow.com. A daily newspaper of things relevant to me (and mostly only me). [Yahoo! Pipes can do much of this, but I'd prefer better formatting, and there are some things it can't do.]

The third thing I’d do (”up to 8 hours of time-consuming tasks”) is to get a monthly meal plan amenable to all parties familia.  Aldi (I love Aldi’s!) has a great starter meal planner (the chicken corn tacos rock).  The first month, I think, would pay for itself.

I might try it for one month….

ReconnAct has been updated, and now “adds support for all Windows client and server operating systems from Windows XP/2003 and up.”  ReconnAct allows you to script events on remote desktop logon, disconnect, and reconnect, which is handy for things like remapping printers when a user reconnects to a session from a different location.

I’m not sure why, but Eventum doesn’t get much word of mouth.  Eventum was developed by and is used by MySQL [now part of Sun] for their helpdesk needs.  It’s simple to install, even if you need to patch it to use LDAP authentication.  I have no gripes with it.

Dave’s famous recipe!

[Read more →]

Following up on a previous discussion, I’ve gotten rid of cable TV.  Installed an antenna up in the attic, ordered my $40/each coupon for two digital converters (at $60 per retail), and got Charter to cut the rate of my cable Internet to $30/month for six months, at which point they’ll offer it to me again, or I’ll go with DSL.

Getting rid of cable TV was one of the best moves ever.  The local PBS station has 4 channels, and one of them is 24-hour kids’ programming.  Channel 5 has a 24-hour weather channel.  “Lost” will start up soon.  I don’t miss one single damned thing on cable.

I intended to supplement my viewing with Blockbuster’s online program, paying $20/month for unlimited rentals, with three out at a time.  That’s still $240/year.  Cancelled Blockbuster online, and now we use Redbox.  Just go to the website, pick a location and a movie, and pay $1 to reserve it.  Walk in (McDonald’s), touch the “Online Pickup” button on the touchscreen, run your credit card through, and it chucks it out.  It’s a great way to keep up with current movies, but you can’t, say, rent the entire “Nip/Tuck” series as you could with Blockbuster.

The flaw in the RedBox setup is that there’s only one touchscreen on the red box, so you may have to wait in line behind some insufferable asshats who are reading the synopsis of each movie.  There should be TWO screens on the red boxes — one solely for receiving the movie, and one for the asshats to stand and browse and order.

Old setup was $140/month for cable+Internet, and $20/month for Blockbuster online.  $160/month.

New setup is $30/month for Internet, plus $8/month for two rentals a week at RedBox.  $38/month.

Happy about it, completely (except for the asshats).

All FAQs should be done like the Hormel SPAM FAQ.  What a hoot.

I remember in the first grade in Mrs. Perkins’ class my eyeball had been getting looser and looser forever it seemed.   It was time for recess and I opened a door too fast and it knocked my barely hanging-on eyeball out.  Needless to say that night I put my eyeball under my pillow and the next morning there was a $5 bill under my pillow!  My new eyeball grew in, and I spent the $5 playing 20 games of Pac-Man at the pizza place by the church.  But looking back, I don’t know — is there really an Eyeball Fairy, or is it just some trick that parents play on their kids?  I guess I’ll never know.

It’s amazing what pops up when you search for “nasal drain.”

Never touch, smell or buy cat litter again

The Problem

Multimedia performance over RDP on WAN links is suboptimal.  Users will complain of the painfully slow rendering of Flash-enabled websites.  Internet Explorer will block, so that you can’t scroll the browser window while Flash images are being rendered.

If you’re the Fed and can print your own money, Citrix’s Speedscreen Multimedia Acceleration can help.

Provision Networks, owned by Quest, has an RDP optimization pack forthcoming.

Microsoft acquired Calista Technologies in January ‘08.  Calista’s technology looks impressive and should dramatically improve multimedia performance.  With Virtualization all the rage these days, if you can’t display a training video or browse websites, it’s pretty useless, whether you’re using Terminal Services or just XP/Vista via VDI.  I myself prefer Terminal Services with Softgrid/App-V, which abstracts everything.

Citrix and Provision Networks price their products like this is 1998, instead of 2008 — they’re priced way out of their range.

Having the Calista technology delivered by Microsoft is what’s preferred, but there are no public details or roadmap.

Cheap Solution

So, the cheap, sure-fire way to improve browser performance for Flash-enabled websites is [as many individual web browsers have done]: just block Flash.  It’s all crap anyway.  Annoying.  Zero-content.  Distracting.  Even if they’re on business-related websites, they’re mostly useless.

Set your browsers to use a Squid cache, as a general rule.

Then use AdZapper with Squid, to block egregious ads, including Flash.  When a .swf file matches a given regex, a blank .swf is substituted for it, showing just a white box.  AdZapper is ridiculously easy to install, being a Perl script with a few content items (fake images, Flash, mp3).

Then, if you’re using Internet Explorer, load IE7Pro to block the remainders and let the user selectively enable them.  Firefox users can use FlashBlock.

This solution is quick and cheap.

I saw in Popular Science today that someone (Logitech or Kensington?) has a wireless keyboard with a battery life of three years.  Pretty good.  And then I thought, why not just use the energy of the person pressing the keys — I’d think there’s enough force applied that it could keep a battery charged for the short bursts of transmissions.  Too, why not set a mouse on rollers and use the energy of moving the mouse around?  Looks like someone already thought of the mouse.

I’m 35 and part of “Generation X” — the group of something-somethings who weren’t supposed to have any ambition other than paying for the Social Security and debt of the Selfish Generation.

The current generation, I dub “Generation Nod.”  They are forever looking down.  At the phones.  Texting.  Playing portable games.  They never look up.  An enterprising sociopath could rob an entire generation by just clubbing them — they’d never see it coming.

Choco 2.0 is out.   Open-source constraint satisfaction, written in Java, and business-friendly BSD-licensed.

It’s the Holy Grail of computing.

   MsRdpClient.AdvancedSettings2.BitmapCacheSize    = 48000
   MsRdpClient.AdvancedSettings2.BitmapVirtualCacheSize = 48

Might as well use the cache — that’s what it’s there for.  Like Vista’s Superfetch, or XP’s prefetch, or precompiling JSPs, or what have you.

For example, to load up your squid http proxy cache, just run:

 wget -r -nd -H –delete-after http://your.portal.company.local/

or

 wget -r -nd -H –delete-after -i some_file_with_URLs.html

wget’s –no-cache will force the proxy to download fresh copies, too.  Try loading popular pages.