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Again(previous anger), I encountered the anger of a grumpy security guy, oh wait no it was a woman this time… Anyway I’m starting to believe that being grumpy and angry is part of the job, or at least a side-effect. As I walked into the client’s building today I didn’t notice the security being grumpy or angry, but then when I went for a smoke the first time, and knocked on the door to let me back in I said ‘Thank You’. Sadly enough I did not get any response. Second smoke… Thank you! - No response. Third smoke… Thank You! - No response. … At the end of the day I was outside smoking when she suddenly left, so I say “Excuse me miss, but I won’t be able to get in the building now?”. She told me: “No, you need a badge to get in.” (As if consultants get badges for all clients, and certainly not on the first day…) * “Would you mind waiting 1 minute? My cigarette is nearly finished…” - “No can’t do that.” And she left. I had to call my colleage to let me back in again! Now that’s just rude, grumpy, and a lot of anger… Maybe companies could consider anger management courses for the security personnel. That’s all wining for today :-) /dev/out P.S. yes I do smoke, yes I know it is not healthy so please do not tell me to stop, you’ll be nothing but another person telling me what I should do, and I won’t! Yet… :-) |
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From the zarafa website: "Zarafa is a software package that allows you to share e-mail and calendars via Outlook, on your PDA or through our Webaccess. The Zarafa Webaccess features the familiar Outlook ‘Look & Feel’ interface, and you can keep using the features in Outlook that have always allowed you to work efficiently; Opening your colleague’s calendar or sending a meeting request is a piece of cake…" Today I attended a 1-day Zarafa course/exam. I had not been able to play a around with zarafa before so the first few slides of course and the first hands-on experience were very welcome. I have to say I was impressed with the product as its outlook integration seems very easy: just install an additional outlook plugin from an MSI installer(easily deployable with login scripts, …), input the appropriate ip address or host and off you are. The client working with outlook won’t even notice the difference! Offcourse the financial department will notice the difference, as will the IT department. Zarafa is a good M$ Exchange alternative and… cheaper…! Zarafa is built on the linux platform and on the open-source MTA so some modifications are rather easy. To get an impression of zarafa (click image for large version):
Or go to http://demo.zarafa.com Yes indeed, zarafa web access looks ~ the same as the outlook web access so your users (used to outlook) won’t have to ‘adapt’. The course itself was okey, the only thing they could implement in their next course is a Zarafa installation from scratch as we worked with a downloadable vmware image. To end this rather informative and not so technical post: I do got my Zarafa Certificate! :-) |
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A friend of mine recently discovered and installed yet another irc bot, but this one was special :-) The irc bot he installed is called gozerbot and is written in python. It has many features (implemented in modules) of which one module was very interesting, or at least very funny. This module is called ‘markov’ and it learns from what you say in a channel, or you can feed it existing logfiles of conversations. Then, based on the markov chain (or at least I think so) it will reply meaning(ful/less) sentences. These replies can be triggered by !markov, it’s nick or a join, on the sites documentation an option ‘loud’ seems to exist but it is not available in the latest stable code nor in the svn code. Here some example quotes: (WARNING: ALL QUOTES ARE IN DUTCH and yes we had an enormous funny evening) — 2401 0053 xavez : istnogvrij kent gij an — 2401 0051 sid3windr : bdeferme wil istnogvrij neuken? – 2401 0056 xavez : istnogvrij wie is er hier dom – 2401 0058 sid3windr : istnogvrij wa vinden we van telenet? |
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Today I was trying to dump an oracle database into a mysql dumpfile, and no mather what I tried (using the mysql migration toolkit on windows) it always failed… The first try gave me some import errors telling me that there was an invalid value ‘x0′ in the field lists, google didn’t help me :( The second try gave me no import errors but I ended up with a really weird mysql database changing the row count from a specific table on each query (without modifying the database in between). All the other tries gave me headache. So I decided to install the mysql migration toolkit on a linux system, I chose CentOs since installing an rpm should be faster (and more easy, at least I hoped so), well BAD LUCK to myself as the only version available here at the office was a CentOs 4.4 and I didn’t want to download a newer one. When trying to install the migration toolkit on this CentOs operating system I ran into some dependancy errors: |
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