/usr/local.com

Mac Messenger 7

April 29th, 2008 | by | in the news

Apr
29

I don’t think I’ve ever been happier for a M$ software release.
Messenger for Mac 7 is now available!.

Now, for most people, you’ll probably bitch that basic functionality like AV chat for home accounts is not available on the new version of Mac Messenger. And I can understand this complaint seeing as iChat has had this for years. The main issue, as I understand it, is that the M$ Live service needs to go through a series of improvements to catch up with the communication services offered on the corporate product offerings. Mainly, enhanced presence that is tied into Office Communication Server.

However, if you are a Mac user on a windows network that has upgraded to OCS you have two choices. Pray that your company has installed the web front end to OCS and you can communicate that way (not the best, but pretty usable). Or install VMWare Fusion or Parallels and run the client in a VM. Kind of costly on the system resources but also usable.

Needless to say, I’m pretty pumped about this announcement. I had originally heard rumors that the client was not going to come out until the Live services were ready which was insane.

Good job Microsoft! (I rarely say that)

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Bad logo design

April 28th, 2008 | by | in the news

Apr
28

A corporate logo is not something to take lightly. Companies spend thousands of dollars with marketing groups doing research, endless revisions to come up with just the right logo.

Apparently, someone at the Office of Government Commerce in England forgot to turn the logo on its side.

Too funny.

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Time to get a smartphone

April 27th, 2008 | by | devdog

Apr
27

So last night I was attending the wedding of my boss. It was a nice intimate setting and we were all getting a bit lit up from the fine wine and beer selection. At one point, one of the engineers comes over to me and states that he thinks that the database server is having an issue.

Well, this sucks.

Now, I haven’t received a call yet but he had just missed a call from our 24/7 NOC. This wasn’t looking good. Everyone who could respond to this was all at the wedding…and already well on their way to a hang over.

Luckily, the engineer that brought this to my attention happened to have Pocket-Putty on his PDA. This is where technology kicks ass.

So here I was in the middle of this wedding reception, hacking away on a freaking phone first hitting the bastion ssh server and then hopping to the DB server. The only real issue I had was that the keyboard was missing the pipe key so doing a simple ps -ef |grep mysql was not possible.

But, I was able to get things blindly restarted, called the NOC person and all was well.

I’m not sure at this point if a Treo or an iPhone is in my future. I’d lean more towards the iPhone since I’m a big time Mac user. But I’m definitely getting something.

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AirJelly

April 24th, 2008 | by | links

Apr
24

I’m not sure what the point of this is as the site is in German and I’m just too damn lazy to copy and paste it into a translator. But its memorizing to watch.

Thanks to 37signals.com and their Signal vs Noise for pointing this one out.

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Dog Issues?

April 22nd, 2008 | by | dogs

Apr
22

Last night we had some thunderstorms roll through the area. This is nothing new, its Iowa after all. We’re on the northern edge of Tornado Alley so we have more than our share of storms in the spring and summer months.

But for whatever reason, Dilly (the dog) has been waking up when the thunder starts to roll in. She typically will sleep at my feet but soon we are greeted with a dog wanting to cuddle higher up in the bed.

So far, this hasn’t been a huge issue. But I’m wondering if we aren’t going to have issues down the line. She has never really reacted to storms before but this new behavior has now happened during the last 2 major storms.

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