Category: Uncategorized

Okay, tonight I sent out a document to a few friends. 1.6 MB sent out to my email server. Whoosh. Some of my friends have very limited mailboxes from their ISP. Some only 30 MB, some as high as 50 MB. Very few are unlimited. I used to be worried about emailing out attachments because no-one likes waiting for attachments to download.

But the message I sent didn’t just go to my email server. The email was sent, but the attachment was sent to my file server. This meant the document didn’t actually leave my network. In it’s place, there was a URL to my file server. The 1.6 MB didn’t go anywhere near my mail server and it only left the file server when the recipients clicked on the URL. As the file server was on my LAN, the transfer was quick and seamless.

For me, my file server is public so the files were sent out of my network eventually. If you’re part of an internal team and would never send attachments externally, then this would mean you could more easily secure your files as they never leave the network!

Anyway. I’m now addicted to Rickshaw.

Rickshaw began life as an idea to help some of Mac-Sys’s customers who were in need of a method of sending large attachments. Sadly the local broadband and email providers put hard limits on the amount you can send in a single email. This made life very difficult for some. The original name of the app was going to be “UnfURL” which, as you can tell, is incredibly unwieldy and would only really reach out to geeks like me. And what the heck would the icon be like?

Yes, this is a solution built to resolve a problem. How to send email attachments without clogging up email servers.

MacNN link

Apple stock was subject to slight gains as Citigroup added the Cupertino-based company to it Top Picks Live list, which allowed the computer manufacturer to maintain a Buy rating, with a target of $212 per share.

Ian Paisley Junior has confirmed he is receiving a salary from Westminster as a researcher for his North Antrim MP father.
…
“It means he is being paid as an assembly member, a junior minister and also by his father from his parliamentary allowances,” he said.

The rest of the article focuses on the MPs who hire family members. Nothing wrong with that.

I’m more concerned that he’s being employed three times. I’d have thought being an assembly member was a full time job. What about being a junior minister? And he’s also a researcher too?

Let’s have some disclosure here. How much taxpayers money is being given to these part-time workers?

How do you tell someone who’s completely in denial that the massive fuck-ups they’ve made in their life are actually their own fault?

This isn’t aimed at anyone in particular though it’s spawned by a shiftless wonder I’m forced to be related to.

Why is it always someone else’s fault?

Dealing with HOSTGATOR yesterday, the reason their service was so shabby was because they had a new ticketing system. That’s the reason they didn’t note when I called them and waited through their hold system for thirty minutes THREE TIMES. On an international line????

What about the people who leave companies and don’t leave documentation? I hope they’re happy in their new life but why do they think that they have to boobytrap things for everyone else.

And don’t get me started on telecoms and broadband companies. I’ve been without broadband at home for 3 weeks now because BT and Sky are entirely without merit. (This link is for my own amusement. The comments are fabulous. It’s illegal to replace your Sky router with another one? Priceless.).

Yeah, I was bought that book “Is it just me or is everything completely shit?” last Christmas.

Humanity never fails to surprise me. Or disappoint.

FakeSteve comments on Jens leaving Apple and the comments produce this gem.

NO ONE ASKED YOU TO STAY FOR 16 YEARS OF BEING MISERABLE YOU SAD ASS LAMETARD FUCK MONKEY BITCHTARD GIRLY PUSS SHITBAG

Ouch. I gotta remember that for the next time I’m told I’m not getting a pay rise….

Monday, this happened [Link: BBC News]

The FTSE 100 index tumbled 5.5% to 5,578.2, wiping £77bn ($149bn) off the value of its listed shares.

Indexes in Paris and Frankfurt slumped by about 7%, while markets in Asia, India and South America also dropped.

and then this [Link BBC News]

The US Federal Reserve has cut interest rates to 3.5%, a shock three-quarters of a percentage point reduction.

Fighting to stave off a US recession, the move failed to calm investors, with US shares continuing sharp falls as Wall Street opened for Tuesday trading.

One analyst said the Fed was “obviously panicked” by the threat of recession.

This is what we call a suiciding market. We’re going to dip into a recession because everyone says we are…and the steps they take to protect themselves will slide us further towards recession.

It’ll be a nice epitaph to the Bush administration.

The BBC writes:

BT is teaming up with Microsoft to offer its television service via the software giant’s Xbox 360 console.

Sales of BT Vision have been somewhat sluggish according to critics, with BT signing up around 100,000 subscribers since launching in November 2006.

The fact that it cannot offer the Freeview content or DVR (digital video recorder) functionality of the dedicated BT Vision set-top box – known as a V-box – may also prove a barrier.

“The reason for streaming only on the Xbox is because currently the console does not have the capability for live TV or enough hard drive for practical downloading of content,” explained a BT spokesman.

Sound extremely compelling. Not.

According to a report on the BBC News site, the US is now in the grips of a recession.

The National Bureau of Economic Research defines a recession as “a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months”. It bases its assessment on final figures on employment, personal income, industrial production and sales activity in the manufacturing and retail sectors.

Merrill Lynch said that the figures showing the jobless rate hitting 5% in December were the final piece in that puzzle. “According to our analysis, this isn’t even a forecast any more but is a present day reality,” the report said.

It added that the current consensus view on Wall Street that there is a good chance of avoiding a recession is “in denial”.

The spectre of a recession can only been seen as a challenge. It’s how you respond to that challenge that defines you. You can expel thousands of people from your workforce in an attempt to shore up and save your overpaid executives or you can make an effort to innovate through the crisis.

In 1996, Lesley Stahl ripped Robert Allen a new rectum with:

“I’m wondering if you would respond to the charges that it isn’t fair that you’ve gotten a big pay increase, a big pay package for millions and millions of dollars, when you’re laying off thousands and thousands of people.”

When Nortel went from 96 000 staff to 33 000 staff, we didn’t think much about what the executives were receiving. They had to maintain their good hair and expensive suits. It’s only now, with a more bitter eye that I cast my memory back to walking down the Mall in Monkstown three weeks before Xmas and seeing groups huddled together. Nortel was, at the time, suffering huge losses every quarter due to unfulfilled sales.

I have somewhat less sympathy for well-rewarded executives with big fat pay packages who shed tens of thousands of people when the company is still in profit.

About a year ago, I wrote a post about my resolutions.

I kinda failed on the weight loss. I went from 275 238 lbs down to 259 227 lbs and then back up again and now I’m 264 232 lbs. My aim is to get to about 230 200 lbs. I find it hard to diet, not just because I love my food but in my experience I either tend to be finding it hard to make up my daily calories or blowing my daily allowance out of the water. Finding a middle ground seems to take up an inordinate amount of time – with weighing, counting, deciding and packaging.

I think maybe I need to attack this on two fronts.

1. The Food – I need to nail this one. I’m failing miserably.
2. The Exercise – I have a plan for this one, I’ve managed to procrastinate it to the end of the month….

[update: I have had to change the numbers because last night when I held a calculator, there were more than 14 pounds in a stone. Tonight gravity is back to normal. Either that or I’m an idiot]

Mark Pilgrim moved his parents to Linux because their Mac experience was souring.:

I had originally chosen Kontact/Kmail for their email needs, but I ran into some strange bug where Kmail refused to send messages. Basic functionality, right? You’d think someone would, you know, notice. I realize email standards are wide and complicated, but still. An email program that can’t send email is pretty fucking useless.

my father threw me for a loop and asked how he could realign the print heads and check the ink levels. I have owned printers for many decades and I have never done this, but apparently it’s a regular occurrence for him, and the Mac printer driver let him do it. So OK, I poke around Google, and lo and behold, there’s a package for that. But it doesn’t work. Oh wait, I need to install gimp-print too (God knows why). Now it aligns the print heads, but it gives an error message while checking ink levels. But it works from the command line. But only as root. Weird. Unresolved. Grr.

Sounds like they’re off to a great start!