Archive for June, 2006

MS-Word and Disclaimers

Friday, June 9th, 2006

I was reading Linux Magazine and came across a link to Anonym.OS. I followed the link to the Anonym.OS home page and then to Taylor Banks’ website and eventually found Jeff Goldmark’s website.

Jeff writes net rants about some things that bother me as well. He wrote one about why you should not use MS-Word as a document exchange format.  I use OpenOffice.org for word processing and don’t have many problems opening MS-Word attachments.  The MS-Word documents are mostly used for collaboration on the BACnet standard, and that is the format that we use.

Blueberries

He wrote another about disclaimers that appear at the bottom of e-mail. I occasionally receive e-mail that has the disclaimer at the bottom. I guess they are silly, aren’t they?

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ssh, VNC, and IMAP secure tunneling

Thursday, June 8th, 2006

I run an IMAP server in the garage so that I can have my e-mail and folders in a central location. I have a domain name that I point to zoneedit.com and use ddclient to update the IP address. From Windows, I access the IMAP using an ssh tunnel with the fine PuTTY ssh client. From Linux, I just use the command line. I setup a local ssh IMAP tunnel to the potter machine which sets up the tunnel via the localhost:
$ sudo ssh -L143:potter:143 karg.us

I can then read email using Mozilla Thunderbird by configuring IMAP to use localhost on the standard port (143).

Happy Jet

ssh tunneling is also handy for troubleshooting. To do remote troubleshooting, a remote desktop control tool is need, and I use Tight VNC. To launch a Tight VNC session to help my wife restart the printer queue, I run:
$ ssh -L5901:wilbur:5900 karg.us
$ xtightvncviewer -encodings "tight copyrect" localhost:1

Simple, right?

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Random Photos

Sunday, June 4th, 2006

Random photos and random music have different user expectations than what a random number generator provides. If I am listening to a bunch of songs on an MP3 player at random on a long airline flight, I don’t expect to hear the same song again until I have heard all the songs at least once in a random order. If I have desktop wallpaper displaying at random, I expect to see all the wallpaper in my list of wallpapers at least once before I see the same wallpaper again.

Pinwheel

So why don’t programmers in the photo display and music playing arenas meet the user expections? I suppose it is significantly easier to write the code using “x = random()” than it is to actually keep track of which photos have been seen or which music has been heard. Or perhaps they are just unaware of the user expectations.

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