Two men claiming to be computer technicians stole two Customs computer
servers from Australia's biggest airport after they were allowed into
the Customs cargo processing and intelligence centre on August 27.
Oops. This happened at my univeristy hall of residence. Two menu came in
into the building dressed in white overalls and went up to the TV room
and carried the TV away, never to be seen again...
(via The Fishbowl)
I powered up my Notebook at Narita and was really happy to see that the airport's wireless lan connection supported GRIC global roaming which is the roaming service that my ISP Global Online supports. I was ready to use the net for free but the GRIC system didn't accept my password! What's more the instructions for GRIC were only in Japanese which is not very friendly for those who can't read it. After fiddling around for few minutes I signed up for 1 day access (for 1000yen!) with BizPortal which worked flawlessly.
The worst part is that you can't even access GRICs homepage unless you can log on to figure out what is wrong.
I installed VIM on my notebook. I decided to try and switch over to vi(m) for most of my text editing tasks because it is free and because vi is sure to be available on all Unix machine that I have had to edit files on. There is nothing worse than editing a file, especially one that if you mess it up you can't login again, with vi when you only know a handful of commands and it is likely that you are going to make a mess of the file through incompetance.
I have one problem with vim though. I installed on Japanese XP and I want to use the English menus. Vim is really smart and it is completely localized in Japanese. The help files indicate that is possible to select any language you like but I can't seem to find the right command to change the menus to English. I write this in the hope that someone who knows how will tell me what voodoo is required to get vim to work on Japanese XP.
Later: I found that you just have to have an _vimrc in your home directory i.e. C:\Documents and Settings\YourName with the command "set langmenu=en" in it. The confusing thing was that I didn't read the manual where it said that that the langmenu doesn't work from Vim's command line. You have to do some extra voodoo to change the menu's dynamically or make the command run before the menus run.
Even Later: If you are using VIM on a Japanese system you'll probably want to add set "iminsert=0" in your _vimrc to avoid the Japanese IME being invoked by default when you insert text by default. I'm pretty sure that this would annoy most Japanese programmers too.
( The crazy thing is that I used vi from 1985-88 but have now forgotten most of the commands!)
While stumbling around the Microsoft Office site searching for the Powerpoint viewer I found a link to the English Language menu pack for Japanese Office Products. From what I gather you have to pay about a 1000yen for it but the fact that it is available is great!
The HFNetChk engine in MBSA enables an administrator to check the patch status of all Windows machines in a network from a central location.
I had took look up in the Postgres manual to see how Timestamps work(Can you believe that my last week's job at work is to port the product to a new database!!??) and was amazed to find so many useful time related functions there.
We used to joke about writing a wrapper class and use the database for inappropriate tasks but now it is far more tempting once I saw how easy it is in SQL99 to calculate how many days to my next birthday.
select timestamp '2004-05-28' - now() AS tmp FROM setting;
If you see code like datediff( con, d1, d2 ) from now on you'll know why. (Evin Grin).
I just saw an interesting article on the New York times about Qmail that I wanted to link to but I have no idea how long that link is going to be current.
My suggestion is that newspapers guarantee that their articles won't go away or be moved to another URL with the intention that people will link to them. Then they can rent the advertising space on those pages to the highest bidder.
In this way everyone wins. Information doesn't disapear and newspapers can aim to write killer articles that many people will want to link to and provide them with continuous revenue for years to come.
They should of course provide statistics about the number of links to the page and the number of page views over time so that advertisers and potential advertisers can see the value of a page.
Think of it like renting the hordings near a famous landmark. I think that is way better than charging the viewers to become members of the newspaper's pay per view system and moving pages to a pay for view area after a short time.
They might even want to start an affiliates program so if my blog gives them the highest number of hits they might want to reward me.
Nob Seki who I met at the International Moblogging Conference writes about the accuracy of the Japanese GPS data and maps in Japan.
Say Goodbye To Your CD-Rs In Two Years?