Whee! A quick ten minute hack involving some left-over X-10 hardware,

“apt-get install heyu”, a quick edit of a configuration file, and I

can now remotely reboot my kernel crash and burn test machine, even if

it’s completely wedged, by the simple set of commands:

heyu turn computer off

heyu turn computer on

I am so pleased with myself.

I am such a geek.

I just spent 3 hours at the Episcopal Diocese fighting with MS Exchange 5.5.

Imagine if you will a program whose error reporting capabilities are roughly the equivalent of Kerberos V5, except you don’t get source you can figure out what it’s upset about….

I’d switch them over to Linux, except that the staff are all addicted to the e-mail/calendar integration which MS Exchange provides. Sigh….

For various reasons, I’ve had to deal with a large number of Microsoft systems (and Microsoft problems) a lot recently. And of course, it’s been frustating as all hell. But after having fighting through a large number of different problems, I’ve come to some conclusions about how and why it’s been so frustrating to me. The fundamental problem is that there are no real diagnostic tools which are avilable. Under Linux, if something strange happens, I can look at the various syslog files, or look at a ps listing to see what a process is doing, or in an extreme case, use lsof or strace to see what’s going on.

So apparently there’s a new window virus going around, which instead of using addresses out of the luser’s MS Lookout address book for the from> and the to: fields, it uses a “well-known e-mail address” and sticks that in the sender field instead. And apparently, I happen to be one of the lucky ones, and my e-mail address has been hard-coded into some Windows e-mail virus. Oh happy, happy, joy, joy….

In yesterday’s New York Times, I found an article entitled “A Boxed Set in One File? Online Music Finds a Way”, on the front page of the Arts section. It described a new kind of technology that was promising to threaten the livelihood of record companies. Evil on-line music traders were using this technology to exchange not just singleton songs, but entire albums, complete with cover art. What was this new threat to world order?