Three things I hate: Laptops; Windows XP; Laptops running Windows XP. OK, so I know that’s only really two-and-a-half things, but stuff it. I spent most of yesterday (and a large part of the day before) cleaning up the laptop belonging to our Director. The copy of Norton Anti-Virus has been nagging her since August… (read more)
I’ve bought myself a new monitor: it’s a Viewsonic VX912. Large, 19″ TFT, 1280×1024 resolution and a nice fast 12ms response time. 🙂 My previous monitor, a 19″ CRT, has been in my possession since it came bundled with a PC I bought in early 1998. Given how much the monitor market has changed in… (read more)
Well, I finally got VMPS sorted. The switch I have does support VMPS server, I simply seemed to have failed to make it work. With VMPS working [1], and a connection from all the vLANs into our firewall (via a couple of multi-port network cards), everything will be hunky dory. Result! [1] The recipe is:… (read more)
As I wrote previously, I have been investigating the capabilities of our newly acquired Cisco switches. Quite frankly, it’s Doing My Head In. And here’s why … There are a number of things that we want the switch to support when we use it, namely: Ensure that no connectivity is provided to unknown devices which… (read more)
I get a lot of junk email. About 100 messages per day at the last count. Occasionally, I scan through the subject headings of message that get caught in the spam trap. Usually, there are a number of financical scams, some porn-related stuff (“Impress your wife/girlfriend with […]” etc.), cheap software, cheap pharmaceuticals, blah blah… (read more)
I use the email client Mutt. It is a tricky-to-learn-but-incredibly-powerful email client. In the past, I have contributed minor patches to the project. Recently, there has been very little new development: the code base has stayed pretty static for the last couple of years. Given that there are a large number of people using the… (read more)
If you haven’t read “Going Postal” by Terry Pratchett, or “The Da Vinci Code” by Dan Brown, be aware that there are spoilers in the following text about both books. Going Postal This was a good fun read. The basic plot is about the resurrection of the postal delivery service in Ankh Morpork, with a… (read more)
Someone spotted that the gravatars part in my comments don’t render properly under Internet Explorer, which brings me to the question: who exactly is reading this web site with Internet Explorer? Almost all my acquaintances will be using Linux and/or Firefox, and I’m surprised there’s anyone using IE to read this. Most family members are… (read more)
Our department has inherited a Cisco 4006 network switch: This is a Proper Piece Of Computing Equipment. I say this because it is heavy, noisy and hot. We will eventually have two of them in our new network setup when we move premises later in the year. This will be interesting for a number of… (read more)
