FaceBook in 40 Years + More
Wednesday 27 June 2007 at 5:48 pm Fascinating - Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace. Summary - 'nice' kids use Facebook; 'bad' kids use MySpace. Related - genius pisstake of Facebook in 40 years.Finland is cool - In Finland's Footsteps: If We're So Rich and Smart, Why Aren't We More Like Them?.
Notes 8 - My life with Lotus Notes 8. Looks impressive for a beta. Love the integration of some of the OpenOffice stuff too.
Cool - Img2HTML. Convert an image into a web page with 1 x 1 pixel coloured table cells.
Play Windows games on Linux with Cedega.
Genius - Walkman Mellotron.
Self-Provisioning IT
Thursday 21 June 2007 at 12:40 pm One of the annoyances for any IT group is dealing with the trivia of BAU (Business As Usual) tasks. Anything that makes BAU more bearable definitely falls into 'Killer App' territory.I hardly ever read ComputerWorld but when I do I usually come across at least one decent article and this one in particular caught my eye - Self-provisioning helps Warehouse Stationery save time.
Whats cool is that they're utilising a Kiwi companies technology - Activate.
Check out some of the demo's - the work flows match up with a number of common operational tasks performed by Helpdesks and Admins everywhere.
Whats funny is that we've initiated an inhouse MAC's (Moves Adds & Changes) project that will probably end up re-inventing the wheel with respect to some of this stuff with custom code rather than an off-the-shelf product.
Dr Who
Monday 18 June 2007 at 5:27 pm As per Dave Bishops post - "He's baaaaaack!"Utopia was a great episode. Looking forward to the final two in the series . . .
YouTube Music Video - Shellac (Live)
Sunday 10 June 2007 at 10:19 am Shellac perform the Squirrel Song.Watching drummer Todd Trainer wail on his drumkit in such metronomic fashion is kind of mesmerising. Obviously the insane drumming helps distract you from the nonsense lyrics about thousands of squirrels
Not that anyone will care but Shellac have also released their first album in seven years - Excellent Italian Greyhound. Will have to keep an eye out for it.
Another ESX Advantage
Friday 08 June 2007 at 1:31 pm Built in clustering & high availability!Even if you have an application which is CPU hungry (say Exchange) you can drop it into an ESX farm and allocate resources equivalent to a single physical server - then if you leverage VMotion and High Availability if the Exchange server crashes you can migrate it (manually or automatically) to another physical server with minimal downtime. In the old-days if the server failed catastrophically you potentially needed to re-install and restore from backup (assuming you had spare hardware available).
Mac Uptime (Updated 01/06/07)
Friday 08 June 2007 at 07:07 am I finally got around to applying the 10.4.9 update to my MacBook. Just before my reboot the uptime displayed:
17:17 up 65 days, 9:40, 2 users, load averages: 0.21 0.17 0.28
Pretty good stability for a laptop (or computer of any kind). I could have kept going as performance seemed the same as it did when I'd rebooted 65 days ago.
My MacBook has been the fastest and most stable Mac I've ever owned. Highly recommended if you're in the market for a non Windows laptop.
Psychopaths among us + More
Saturday 02 June 2007 at 12:19 pm Faskinating - Psychopaths among us. "For his first paper, now a classic, Hare had his subjects watch a countdown timer. When it reached zero, they got a "harmless but painful" electric shock while an electrode taped to their fingers measured perspiration. Normal people would start sweating as the countdown proceeded, nervously anticipating the shock. Psychopaths didn't sweat. They didn't fear punishment -- which, presumably, also holds true outside the laboratory."Amusing - Ultimate Mouse Pointer.
Useful - TPS Report Template. For those burdened with an over-active bureaucracy.
I knew a guy who had a whole stash of altoid tins - Uses for Altoid tins.
Interesting - Presentations on who to scale websites from people like Twitter, Flickr, Bloglines etc.
Something to look forward to - Top 10 Features in Windows Server 2008. A server OS without a GUI - fancy that.
More good stuff - Cognitive Bias: Reasons why what you think is right is wrong.
One to watch - Utu (FYI 'Utu' is a Maori word for revenge). "The Internet needs identity, reputation, and retribution." Should be a fascinating communication tool if it comes to fruition.
Neat - 3D window manager for Windows.
