Sad to hear that Jef Raskin passed away. Recently he was working on a new Zooming Interface. Jef was instrumental in Apples early days and was key person in the development of the Macintosh.

An "old school" case modification to place the guts of a Mac Classic into a Clear Cube.

Nice Knife Block.

A good look back at the early days of multimedia and hypermedia from Smackerel.

Building a VPN solution using OpenBSD and OpenVPN.

'Why' is either a complete loon or an utter genius.

In addition to writing Whys (Poignant) Guide to Ruby he has recently created Hobix which is a Ruby based weblog engine. Hobix seems to borrow heavily from the Keep It Simple Stupid philosphy of Blosxom with a few wonderful twists (your weblog is referred to as a 'blahhg'). Nice to see someone has a sense of humour about this type of thing.

A couple of cool Wiki tools that require minimal skills to get up and running

• Ruby based Instiki. Instiki is completely selfcontained and doesn't need apache or sql to serve or backend the wiki - you just need Ruby installed.
• Self contained CSS/Javascript Tiddlywiki.

A timely howto - Using SSH and RSYNC to backup data across a network.

Engadget are running a great little article on how to setup your Mac or PC to act as a simple home-security system using a webcam. Its actually a little disappointing how hard something like this is to implement - why do many webcam server implement email, streaming and ftp but no support for secure copy or ftp and they often have a really lacklustre html gallery feature.

A colleague implemented something similar to this and it was amazing to behold - sortable html tables.

An excellent IBM article on tips towards Porting Enterprise Unix Apps to Linux.

Interesting Links

'Magic stuff happens' - why computing methodologies often fall victim to a common problem when documenting or describing key procedures.

MobilePC has an excellent list of the Top 100 Gadgets.

Howto - Firewalling with OpenBSD PF (Packet Filter).

Fascinating - an Illustrated Guide to Cryptographic Hacking.

Two articles on wood burning heaters and stoves. Kevin Kellys Cool Tools site has some 'One foot wonders' that occupy a minimum of space and are super efficient. Meta-efficient also has an article on Efficient Wood Burning Stoves.

This looks like a fascinating concept - The Brain EKP. The demo looks great but I bet it costs an absolute arm and a leg and requires a huge amount of customisation, ongoing support and maintenance. I wonder what the backend tools are like - eg can a normal Sysadmin easily extend the product to other information stores ?

Slightly Bigbrother-esque but I can see many organisations needing this level of accessible transparency - GFI Mail Archiver. Essentially archives all email sent and received to an Exchange server in an SQL database and makes it accessible via a web interface.

Rather amusing look at the perils of creating a groupware tool from jwz (of Netscape and X screensaver fame) in relation to Novells new Hula server.

Tim Bray points out that Sun works primarily via email, phone, IM and wiki.

This is already linked all over the web but Amazon have the new Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy trailer.

Another windows freeware site - Portable Freeware - with a focus on software that doesn't need to be installed or can be installed and then safely moved somewhere else and run (eg a c:\bin directory for small tools). The best tool on this page has to be Wink which lets you create shockwave movies from screen captures - note that vnc2swf does a similar thing for Unix.

Great advice on How to Pitch an Idea.

Outliners and mind-mappers help to organise thoughts and ideas.

A few classic Outliners

• Ecco Pro from NetManage - freeware
• MORE and ThinkTank by Dave Winer - freeware
• Frontier by Dave Winer - open source
• ACTA by A-Sharp - freeware

A couple of Mindmapping Tools

• VisualThought by Terse Systems - freeware
• FreeMind - open source

A couple of nice articles on Outliners

• Blast from the Past - Classic Outliners
• Overview of Windows Outlining Tools
• About This Particular Mac - Mac Outliners is part of a whole series of articles from ATPM on the topic (linked from the this article)

Primary to control your Mac or to help your Mac control your environment:

• Salling Clicker for bluetooth remote control of your Mac
• Indigo - X10 home automation software
• Phlink - answering machine
• BluePhoneMenu - bluetooth caller ID

These guys are running a two part article on Exchange 2003 Server tips and tweaks - part 1 and part 2.

This site uses blosxom version 2 with the following plugins blox, breadcrumbs, calendar, categorytree, flatarchives and state.

Blosxom is a simple perl script that works in conjunction with your web server - essentially each post is a seperate text file which you place in directory and that gets served up according to some simple rules that can be configured in Blosxom itself. Folders for posts represent categories, plugins provide extra features and flavours allow you to customise the look and feel of the site. Blosxom also automatically generates an RSS/XML feed from your posts making it easy to subscribe to updates in a feed-reader.

I've just discovered blosedit for web based editing although I also use the Mac OS X app blapp and of course ssh / vi.

Gmail tip - Configuring POP/SMTP.

Useful Active Directory tool - Using ADModify to Change Exchange Specific AD User Attributes in Bulk.

Ed Brill is a Lotus Notes guy who recently attended a Notes to Exchange migration course. Interesting reading.

Good New Zealand online stores are hard to find - Clearwater Tarn, suppliers of New Zealand Books, maps and guides. They have a great selection of topographic maps and outdoor hiking guides.

Article on an upcoming Active Directory / Unix integration tool. Their official spiel - Extend Microsoft Active Directory’s identity, access and policy management services to your Unix, Linux, Java and web platforms with Centrify. These people do something similar Vintela - Vintela Authentication Services (VAS) - Identity Management and Authentication for Windows, Unix, and Linux Using Active Directory.

Open source First Person Shooter (looks similar to early Quake) - Cube.

Gives a nice laymens perspective on using Rational Purify in a Linux environment. Purify can be used to debug and find memory leaks in code so its a pretty valuable tool for developers.

Use Access Control Lists to add flexibility to the traditional rwx Linux permissions.

Interesting tips for improving file system performance in Windows - NTFS Performance Hacks.

Allocating disk space on an IBM AIX machine

In this example we'll be increasing the amount of /tmp space available.

You can use a Calculator to fine tune the allocation process (you don't accidentally want to allocate all the remaining space to a file system so start conservatively and increase file system size on request) but this example uses basic approximation.

I'm sure theres a much simpler way to do this for serious AIX types but if you're a 'dabbler' then this process works for me.

Disk Space Before

bash-2.00# df -k /tmp

Filesystem 1024-blocks Free %Used Iused %Iused Mounted on

/dev/hd3 196608 172020 13% 256 1% /tmp

bash-2.00#

1. Login

2. Depending on your terminal emulation you may want to issue a TERM=vt100 (or similar) so SMIT (IBM System Management Utility) works properly in text mode

3. Start smit - the important keys that you will use are F3 to Cancel an Operation and F4 to List Options; arrow keys will allow you to move up and down through menu options - if you find that the function keys don't work, use esc- sequences instead.

4. Select System Storage Management

5. First we need to allocate more LP's (logical partitions) to the /tmp filesystem

a) Logical Volume Manager

b) Set Characteristics of a Logical Volume

c) Increase the Size of a Logical Volume

d) Hit F4 to list the Volumes and select /tmp

e) Bump up the Number of Additional logical partitions

f) Hit Enter to commit and action the changes - you should get a Command: OK

6. Increase the actual partition size

Hit F3 to escape back to the initial System Storage Management screen

a) Select File Systems

b) Select Add / Change / Show / Delete File Systems

c) Select JFS (unless you know the file system has a different format)

d) Change / Show Characteristics of a JFS You should get a pop up list of available file systems; select /tmp

e) Bump up the Size of file system

f) Hit Enter to commit and action the changes; you should see a Command: OK and the new file system size

Disk Space After

bash-2.00# df -k /tmp

Filesystem 1024-blocks Free %Used Iused %Iused Mounted on

/dev/hd3 262144 235496 11% 256 1% /tmp

bash-2.00#

Neat stuff as found on TinyApps - Windows backup freeware:SyncBack, Windows software install monitor InstallSpy v2.0.

A nice piece of subversion - Watch out for Zogg!. Christian childrens book caption turned into a cautionary tale of alien invasion.

From the 2004 Annual Meeting - State of NetBSD.

Joel Spolsky has an evolving document on setting up a colocated server farm.

Impressive display of 3D integration in real-time for the real-world - Total Immersions D'Fusion Technology.

I have terrible handwriting but I definitely need to get a moleskin notebook. For the uninitiated - Moleskine History.

Useful toolset for admins - Must-have applications for managing an enterprise Linux shop.

Another great IBM article - Build a heterogeneous cluster with coLinux and openMosix.

IBM are also on a roll with their new cell processor - Wired News: New Chip to Challenge Intel. More details - Introducing the IBM/Sony/Toshiba Cell Processor and IBM, Sony, Toshiba present Cell. FYI - the cell processor will power Sonys PS3.

I always knew the stock market relied a lot on luck - Random Trading Good Predictor of Market Behavior, Study Shows.

Useful windows tips - Working with Roaming User Profiles. On todays fast LANS this works quite well especially with folder redirection.

Linux clustering using IBM Power5 hardware - Introduction to clustering on IBM eServer OpenPower 710.

A series on how to turn your mini-Mac into an ISP in a Box.

Palm powered - Fossil Wrist Pda.

Two interesting hardware RAID solutions for workstations and servers - Accusys-store and DataProtection Solutions by Arco. No software drivers required.

Use knoppix to create an Internet Lounge.

I love the three sox in a pair concept - Onkar Singh Kular / Product Designer (1974-).

Use this for grubby monitors www.clean-your-screen-for-free-now.com.

Pet peeve - Continuing decline in Mac OS GUI consistancy.