Category: Tech

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Last week I started to notice Eudora’s musical you’ve-got-mail tones, very faint, at times that I got new mail. This was odd for two reasons: my sound was muted, and I’ve long since replaced the sound with the “Message for you, sir!” line from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I assumed it was just coincidence, and the guy in the next cubicle had his email set to check on a similar schedule.

Well, it seems that mute doesn’t actually work on my Win2k box, at least not if it’s muted when I log in. The volume icon in the taskbar says it’s muted, the checkbox is checked, but it still sends sound to the speakers. Unchecking and re-checking the mute box solved it.

Now I need to figure out why it reset the sound clip. I did install a new version of Eudora recently, but it kept the rest of my settings intact. My best guess is that I moved the file a while back and forgot about it (since it’s been on mute for months), and Eudora, unable to find it, fell back to the default.

If I hadn’t turned the volume down so far, it would have been obvious. And I probably wouldn’t have bothered writing this.

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This morning I upgraded the mail servers at work. They were down for maybe two seconds each. I doubt anyone even noticed.

If you’re used to installing software on Windows, you probably think I’m kidding. Didn’t I have to shut the service down before installing the upgrade? Didn’t I have to reboot when it was done? Nope!

The reason you have to go through all that trouble when you install something on Windows is that it won’t let you change files that are in use. So you can’t install the new Exchange without closing down the old one. And some files aren’t completely closed until you shut down Windows.

On Linux (and possibly all Unix-like systems), if you delete or replace an open file, the system hangs onto it until the program using it is done. So if you need to upgrade Sendmail, you can go through the entire process while the old Sendmail is still running, then tell it to restart the service once it’s ready.

It’s not quite zero, but it’s close!

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I am posting this from out on our patio. We ended up getting a Netgear wireless router that has its own built-in 4-port 10/100 switch and will hook directly into our DSL connection. What does this mean?

  • It adds wireless capability.
  • It can replace our hub.
  • It can replace our router.
  • We don’t need to find any more outlets or power strips. In fact, the end result is we’ve freed up an outlet.
  • We don’t need to buy wireless cards for the computers we already have.

The AirPort Express looked nice, mainly for AirTunes, but we would have had to put it in the other room with the stereo anyway. And besides, none of Apple’s Airport stations have more than one LAN port – the assumption is you’re either going all-wireless or you’ve already got equipment for your wired systems.

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A few weeks ago I noticed that our network hub was getting disturbingly hot, so I started turning off the power strip when we weren’t home. After returning from San Diego, the first time we turned the computers back on, the hub started buzzing. However, it stopped after a few seconds.

So I should have thought of the hub immediately when the network started acting up today.

I had been on and off the computer and the net all morning with no noticeable problems, and Katie had been on for just a few minutes when it stopped loading websites. Continue reading →

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More “You sent a virus!” garbage going around. It’s gotten to the point where I don’t even look at most delivery failure notices, which means I could easily miss errors about mail I really did send.

I got ticked off enough this time that I wrote back to the return address on the warning, matching the tone and structure of their message as closely as possible:

An invalid virus notice was found in an Email message you sent. Your Email scanner recognized a virus as W32/MyDoom-O but did not take into account the fact that this virus always uses a fake sender address.

Please update your virus scanner or contact your IT support personnel as soon as possible as you are sending bogus virus warnings to third parties whose systems are not infected with the virus. This runs the risk of causing unnecessary concern among the less tech-savvy (and extra calls to tech support about the nonexistant virus they fear they have). I would recommend reading up on the phrase “crying wolf” as well.

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Suing JibJab over using the tune and some lyrics of “This Land is Your Land” is like filing a class-action suit against grade-schoolers for using “The Birthday Song” to sing “You look like a monkey/And you smell like one too.” The contention that the song has been “damaged” by its use as parody is ridiculous. Have these people not been outdoors since 1999? Do they not know how long internet fads actually last? Sure, for some people the cartoon will be the first thing they think of on hearing the song for a while, but that will go away. The only reason Badger Badger Badger and All Your Base are still primarily associated with their source material is that they were either widely unknown before the humor emerged (AYB), or were original creations (BBB). “This Land is Your Land” is, or at least used to be, aggressively marketed as an assembly-appropriate song in elementary schools, and children’s brains are much more receptive than adults’. I don’t even think of the cartoon now on hearing the song, but of the inside of my elementary-school cafeteria, the time they accidentally let the record play all the verses, and, of all things, tissue-paper flowers. (God only knows why, as they weren’t used at the same assemblies.) TRO needs to grow up and let people have their perfectly legal fun. Though it would be fun to see them get a trial date a year from now and try to prove there was any lasting damage.

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