We can sometimes get ahead of ourselves, as techno-geebs. The solutions people generally want rarely needs new flashing lights with special coolant, our priorities should be solving problems, not installing new technologies.

Re: [OT] Pursuing Management to adopt OpenBSD

Chris wrote:

> I been trying (rather unsuccessfully) to convince various clients and
> employers to adopt OpenBSD. Most people, I find, are resistant to
> change and would not use anything they are not familiar with. Others
> would say that if I leave the job, it would be hard to find people who
> can use (or even heard of) OpenBSD and in some places Management never
> heard of OpenBSD and have very little clue as to how good or bad it is
> compared to Linux/ Solaris and Windows thus they will just knock off
> the proposal in 2 seconds.
>
> Is there any way I could convince these people to make the move to
> OpenBSD? Suggestions, tips and tricks along with real life examples
> would be much appreciated. Thanks.

Had the need, and wandered the Ether to find Mail PassView

Mail PassView v1.42 - Recover lost mail passwords
Copyright (c) 2003 - 2007 Nir Sofer

Mail PassView is a small password-recovery tool that reveals the passwords and other account details for the following email clients:

It saved a phone call to customer support, which is another whole story of its own.

Thanks Nir for a great, working, product.

The regular problems taking for ever and a day to resolve happened again when I tried upgrading (due to security warnings) to a more current version of Gallery2.

Unfortunately, the upgrade coincided with Tonfon deciding to give me a hard time with Internet connections.

Clear problems from the upgrade.

FailedLoginsMap

Login fails due to a missing table row, unfortunately the error message isn't too intuitive unless you've been bashing Gallery2 code. The error is apparently caused by a failure in the following query:

select g_info from nomoa_gallery.g2_Schema where g_name='FailedLoginsMap';

If you install Gallery2 and have a login failure with an error message referencing FailedLoginsMap, then try the above query on your database. If you get an empty result, then you probably need the solution I found (from someone else's backup which was indexed through google.

INSERT INTO `g2_Schema` (`g_name`, `g_major`, `g_minor`, `g_createSql`, `g_pluginId`, `g_type`, `g_info`) VALUES
('FailedLoginsMap', 1, 0, 'CREATE TABLE DB_TABLE_PREFIXFailedLoginsMap(n DB_COLUMN_PREFIXuserName varchar(32) NOT NULL,n DB_COLUMN_PREFIXcount int(11) NOT NULL,n DB_COLUMN_PREFIXlastAttempt int(11) NOT NULL,n PRIMARY KEY(DB_COLUMN_PREFIXuserName)n) DB_TABLE_TYPEn/*!40100 DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 */;nnINSERT INTO DB_TABLE_PREFIXSchema (n DB_COLUMN_PREFIXname,n DB_COLUMN_PREFIXmajor,n DB_COLUMN_PREFIXminorn) VALUES(''FailedLoginsMap'', 1, 0);nn', 'core', 'map', 'a:1:{s:15:"FailedLoginsMap";a:3:{s:8:"userName";a:3:{s:4:"type";i:2;s:4:"size";i:1;s:7:"notNull";b:1;}s:5:"count";a:3:{s:4:"type";i:1;s:4:"size";i:2;s:7:"notNull";b:1;}s:11:"lastAttempt";a:3:{s:4:"type";i:1;s:4:"size";i:2;s:7:"notNull";b:1;}}}');

Image Block.

Got upgraded during the install as well, so you have to specifically 'upgrade' the plugin as administrator.

Image Thumbnails

For some reason, new thumbnails weren't getting created correctly. And I obviously just had to rebuild all the thumbnails to verify (i.e. now the whole gallery had no thumbnails.)

I checked my Graphics Toolkits and they all had the correct references (i.e. toolkits point to the right files on disk) and all tests from the forms worked out ok.

I think I resolved this by just reallocating things around, but that shouldn't(?) have been a solution?

Too bad I don't have any major downloads at the moment.

I'm still having problems with DNS and Tonfon.

This time, instead of just failing for a few websites (like commbank.com.au) it is now failing to let me browse any website by using their name (e.g. google.com.) I can only see a website, if I use their IP Address (e.g. www.nomoa.com's is currently: 72.215.205.147)

Simple Windows solutions? (phase 1) reboot (if that fails) reinstall (if that fails) install new hardware (if that fails - blame it on the customer)

Being as this problem continues for me, I of course am not overly enthusiastic about our Internet service at Tonfon.

Oh, I can of course go to Tonfon's website. Like, now that everyone else's website fails, I really have a keen interest in reading my ISPs pages that says they are beautiful and not the cause of world hunger. 8<

Why is this an issue?

E-mail.

Well, not only is my web browsing effected, but now I can't get my email and I am not sure whether email destined for me is coming to Tonga or is in limbo, or worse, just eaten up by the cyber-sphere.

Transactions.

If you use the Internet for anything other than just browsing (i.e. you might be a big BEBO player) then you really need to have these foundations things working at the ISP.

Prayer is a conversation? When's the last time you listened while you were praying?

Finding the freedom within; A prison prayer program strives to give inmates a new outlook on what it means to be free.

"We've been taught that prayer involves talking to God," White said. "It's also important to pay attention to the other side of the conversation, which is listening to God. There are a number of passages in the Bible in which Jesus pulled away from the busyness of the day to go commune in silence."

Maybe Sister Mary White's message needs a little preaching, ooops, listening to here in Tonga?

Walked into one of the local mobile phone vendors to get an update (my youngest daughter killed my phone.)

I picked up a cheap TOP$150 Nokia unit although they had a batch of cheap refurbished units. Geez those refurbished units looked real bad.

Who knows how many phones i've bought in the past couple of years, but I think I know the value I get out of the phones and at the moment I don't need a smart phone just so long as it has good reception (it's raining badly at the moment so I don't know whether the bad reception is the phone or the network.)

A little edged black box was in the glass cage so I asked the 'Initia, "do you sell any?" and was I not ready for the answer.

"Ohhh, you wouldn't BELIEVE how well it sells. I bought 65 and there's only a few left. At one time it was the only thing people wanted to see. Now, I sell about two or three a week."

Me: "Wow, that's good for you."

'Initia: "Arghhh, the margin's pretty bad"

Me: "But what good is it without the Internet access?"

'Initia: "I can do that for you. And on all these phones here " (waving his hand over a Nokia N95, iPhone, and other TOP$1500+ phones) "I can get you on the Internet."

Me: flabbergasted and feeling I must have slept when Tonga's mobile phone providers started offering 3G or Data.

Me: confused "but how ...?"

'Initia: "Simple, you just need to have broadband at your house, and you get this little thing ..."

Me: (mind lights up) "Oh wifi, no thanks" [WIFI is setting up a wireless network.]

No thanks, if I'm stuck at home or in the office to use the Internet I might as well jump onto a computer with a large screen.

Anyhow, you can buy your iPhone at Lord's Mobile or Narrottam's and be with the latest hippest people in Tonga. Or, you can be a has-been dork like myself and just get a friggin phone with good reception.

Met up with someone who got a phone that can activate 2 SIM Cards at the same time. Now, that would be a practical telephone for Tonga.

Another adventure into the wild world of computer software, which resulted in our Gallery2 just failing altogether which seems to have been a combination of upgrading to Xaraya 1.1.3 as well as running the SVN Gallery2 2.3svn builds.

The 1st major disaster was Gallery2 2.3svn just failing to login, and there's a lot of new magic with the passwords, but there were also problems with just getting the database files working correctly.

Following no original plan, but with two thoughts in mind, I disastered that I was going to make a clean install. The two problems with the previous installation was:

• A lot of bogus users had creeped into the Xaraya installations, and by association into the Gallery2 installation.
• A lot of fluff in the database remained from the Gallery1 update to update to updates.

After quite a bit of hocus pocus, and a great deal of time trying to avoid a full new installation with the current svn code, we now have 2.2 Branch svn being used and since there's a way to switch to 2.3 when it is stable we'll go that route from now on.

Why was I on svn anyway? Because of those security faults that can wipe out your server. Now that I've learned how to use branches and switch between branches using the svn code repositories, I can be secured as soon as the code is updated instead of having to wait for a binary release etc. etc. etc.

Next problem was my Gallery Remote failing again, but fortunately we knew about that problem from previous reinstalls so we just had to find it on the web as shown below.

Gallery2 and Gallery Remote Issues

I was trying to get Gallery remote to work… but kept getting an error saying that it couldn’t find gallery_remote2.php.  After searching the Gallery forums for a few I foudn a few things, and it fixed the problem.

You need to find the  “GalleryRemote.properties”, mine was located at “C:Documents and SettingsShelby.GalleryRemoteGalleryRemote.properties”.  Open that file and add “forceGalleryVersion.n=2″ to the top line and then save it,

Next create a file named “gallery_remote2.php”, in that file add this following information.

< ?
header(”HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found”);
exit;
?>

Save that file and upload it to your gallery2/ directory and then you should be all set to use the gallery remote.

 Also @ the codex

The two mobile phone operators are misguiding people by saying they can text message anyone around the world, which really means you can text message around the world so long as the other party is using the 'local' carrier that we've signed with. Since there are different number of mobile phone carriers in each country, this means that we might only have access to less than half the sms users in any given country (if any.)

Fortunately, if you want to try something for 'free', you might see if gizmosms.com might just do the trick for you. It's one way, in this iteration, but free for special greetings etc.

Visit bTonga

It seems Government is trying too hard to get the country fixed as soon as possible.

While tenderers were busily cleaning up Nuku'alofa last week, an entrepreneurial team was trying to get government into a 'packaged solution.' It seems Government was hoodwinked into believing that a single company could complete the full clean-up in only 10 days, so Government went ahead and STOPPED all work downtown for a couple of days.

Unfortunately, no-one in the country believes that anyone or everyone can clean up the place in 10 days. So, Government got a revised offer from their new partner for the cleanup to be completed in 20 days, but at a higher price.

If we weren't already going from one crisis after another, no-one would believe such a wild story. But wander over to the heads of these clean-up jobs and they can confirm for you.

Being that Government is really a group of people proxying as governance, who the heck are these unelected people making up such screw-ball decisions? I have zero knowledge of the construction industry, apart from being able to change the odd light bulb, and I'm telling you there's no chance in hell of Nuku'alofa getting cleaned-up in 10 days, and 20 days is still a big stretch.

Someone must have been looking at a sweet deal somewhere, and either government fesses up that this was a screw ball sideshow, or just can the scum bags (aren't there performance reviews or such ?)

Meanwhile, back at the foreshore...

Ma'ake si'i scored himself a job of cleaning up after the fahi pulu.

On another note, we also had visitors last night, but that's a story for another page. 

Been trying to watch some of Scoble's shows, which is (at its beginnings) only QuickTime *.mov files.

Unfortunately, I've been getting the above error "Error 37: a bad filename or volume name was encountered" and initially couldn't find any information about it and tried all sorts of things which just didn't work.

My disappointment with QuickTime and Scoble lasted until... Amit Agarwal solved the problem for me with his "Limitations With Long File Names on Windows [Must Read for Podcasters]"

Point B: This is relevant to podcasters who produce content in MOV, MP4 or MP3 formats that will be played inside the Apple Quicktime player.
The Windows version of Quicktime player cannot play podcasts with filenames longer than 63 characters and that length limit includes the mandatory period and the file name extension.

If you try to play a file in Quicktime with a lengthy name, it will refuse to play and return an "Error-37: a bad filename or volume name was encountered" [see screenshot] There are currently no workarounds to bypass this limit on Quicktime.
I found this Quicktime limitation just by chance while trying to watch Scoble's shoot with Flock co-founder Geoffrey Arone on The Scoble Show.

Quickly, find those Scoble Show files and rename them to something less in length. Wow!!! it works, and hey this stuff is pretty high quality video (might as well be for all the massive downloads.)

Ok, that's enough, 'cause I've got to get back to paying more attention to Printing for Less - Scoble Show (now renamed to something a lot less than what it was.) And resubscribing to the ScobleShow, now that I can actually view the things. The side note is that there must be a lot of Mac users on the subscription list since the Labnol post is the first mention I've found of fixing my Error 37 problem.

Thanks Amit Agarwal

Bink.nu reports on the MsDewey.com search engine that is purported to be a viral (?) advertising campaign. But wow, the possibilities of flash and the expanding broadband.

MsDewey.com is a website with a flash front end with a spunky female presenting the face/window to he world of search. At this rendition we at least one 'flavouring' of a persona that can be presented as part of a website.

On my parents Optusnet.com.au Cable, the interface is quite fast and responsive (after the download) although you only get a short list of links (search retrievals.)

I can't see how useful this is for search engines, but it could definitely spruce up some other web destinations ?

Tupou College Band - Natural Band from the Vaotaataa (11:41)

Another film clip from 2001. The Tupou College students use various 'home' remedies and natural items for their instruments to provide a rendition of In the Jungle, and In the Mood.

Various items used for instruments include:

• Helu - combs
• Va'a Lesi - Pawpaw tree leaf stem
• Nge'esi hina - bottles
• Nge'esi niu - coconut shells
• Korn Shells

Enjoy, and if you want to know more about the school, you can visit their site at http://www.tct.to, Tupou College

The FWC Education Office has a "get-together" social function each year for the Tongatapu college/high-schools where students prepare and perform various skits and traditional programs.

In 2001, Tupou College students performed the traditional "Lakalaka" dance to the tune of Hindi Music. The theme of the choreagraphy revolves the continuing conflict between Tupou College and another college (Tonga College)

A very creative effort by the boys, and staff. Congratulations Tupou College and you can read more about the college on their website @ http://www.tct.to

A mind tugger, but general english language on Lambda, or "Functional Programming."

defmacro.org has a nice article that helps demystify, "Functional Programming for the Rest of Us."

A real big effort in writing, and if you're interested in programming languages and wonder why the academics are pushing their own derivatives(?) of programming languages, please read the above article.

Only 3/4 of the way through, I still need to cover the last SIX sections so "better bookmark".

Also see:

Mike Hadlow - Functional Programming

Joel on Software - Can Your Programming Language Do This?

Language: Erlang

Yariv's Blog - The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Erlang

Scott M. Fulton @ TG Daily reviews Bill Gate's Address @ Mix 06 with the final paragraph. What's eating Bill Gates?

Mix '06 is the company's best opportunity to make new friends and allies in a market where, Microsoft concedes, it has a lot of catching up to do.  For the first time in years, other players are setting the rules, and Microsoft is choosing not to play by those rules.  All of a sudden, Microsoft finds itself the outsider, the holdout, the would-be up-and-coming player, and Bill Gates finds himself playing the role of the conservative stalwart, resistant to change, impervious to the winds of history.

It's been a while for Microsoft to be bucking the trend, but it seems to me that all the major success' at Microsoft were behind the 8 ball, buck the trend, do it even though no body (especially industry) agrees.

Let's review a few 'odd' /resistive actions by Microsoft in the past.

Microsoft Excel, exclusively GUI based and on the Macintosh while Lotus 123 was 'the only' spreadsheet for business at the time. When they later released the Windows 2.x version, the beast was even more memory hungry and only ran on a limited number of machines.

Microsoft Windows Word 1.0, exclusively GUI, memory hungry, only running on the latest machines. During a time when WordPerfect 4.x was the dominant wordprocessor supported control-key views and any printer on the planet.

Microsoft Access 1.0 came out when database development were the exclusive domain of 'the specialists' and using the xBase programming language (does anyone use that anymore?)

Microsoft Publisher 1.0 as a light weight desktop publisher when a number of other cheaper solutions were available and the venerable Adobe Pagemaker was the preferred DTP.

Microsoft Mouse. Microsoft Visual C++, Microsoft IDE, Microsoft Windows 2.03 386 were all products that went against Industry Opinions, all were 'late entrants' but have become standard products people now take for granted.

More recently?

Windows Media Center edition, WinPOS, C#, .NET, Visual Studio Express, Optical Mice, TabletPC, Origami PCs,  all points to Microsoft more than willing to put its money in investing in things the "industry" don't believe in.

Windows Vista brings with it a host of new technologies that do not follow established "industry" thinking.

Good luck to the industry and good luck to Microsot

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