Mc-Kenna.com

For ages I had problem with the login name with the email system they have at work, Microsoft Exchange Server 2000. While it would work fine via the MAPI or web interfaces, I couldn’t get it to work via POP3 or IMAP4. Searching online brought up the notion of using a special sequence as the login name, domain\username\mailbox, so it’d be something like geeksrv\Damien McKenna\dmckenna. Well, turned out that wasn’t correct and today I finally got it, I needed to do domain\ntloginname\exchangealias which ends up being completely different than the other one. Thought you admin-types might like to know.

A day for celebration, OpenOffice.org v2 has finally finished its six months of simmering time and is ready for consumption. It’s a large download (75mb) so definitely don’t try getting it if you have a modem connection to the net, but the rest of you should definitely give it a shot.

FYI OpenOffice.org is a completely free replacement for Microsoft Office that is really quite easy to use, has an open file format (meaning you’ll still be able to read your files in ten years) and doesn’t restrict you to only using Windows so you can use it on Linux or other OSes.

Imagine a program that makes clustering easy to do and was also able to manage automated deployments? Well there’s a tool called SwitchTower that makes both of these tasks unbelievable easy. Nifty stuff!

• http://weblog.rubyonrails.com/archives/2005/10/19/introducing-switchtower-distributed-deployment-for-rails

I just finished compiling the list of files I want to backup on our tape drive - 37gig! Good thing that we got a 35/70gig drive or it’d have never all fit!

Here’s a really great explanation of why you should care about the new OpenDocument format found in OpenOffice.org, KOffice and others, rather than using proprietary formats like those used by Microsoft Office. Unlike most technical articles this one is straight forward enough that almost anyone should be able to understand it.

• http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8616

I’ve said it before and I’ll said it again, aside from having larger manufacturing facilities, Intel is pretty bad these days in comparison to AMD. Their latest high-end processor is the dual core Xeon and is so hot that it could bake a turkey, all while being slower and more expensive than AMD’s best.

• http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content.asp?id=paxville&page=1

Longer term, while Intel struggles with retrofitting their ten year old Pentium Pro design again, AMD are working on turning the entire 32bit x86 instruction set into a virtual chip inside their 64bit core. Sorry, Intel, you suck!

I never thought I’d find something like this, a (online) book that is both informative and utterly, utterly insane at the same time. Instead of the usual dry language that tecnical books tend to be written in, this book just oozes with oddness, from cartoon strips of foxes to discussions of dogs, there’s something here to utterly confuse everyone as to the point of the anecdotes. That’s not to say that it doesn’t explain the technology at hand, it does and does so quite well, it’s just strange. Go give it a shot, if you can look past the oddness it might be worth spending a little time on.

• http://poignantguide.net/ruby/

I was recently reading a technical blog from some knowledgeable geek or other and he mentioned that it recommended learning one new language every year. The benefits are two fold - you both learn a new tool, but more importantly, every new language you learn furthers your understanding of the ones you already know. Its the same with spoken languages, if you learn three or four of them you become more fluent in them all as you can see how they all fit together, how nuances are shared between them, etc.

So I’ve given myself a mini quest - to read and understand one technical book every six months. I’m planning that one will be a programming language (Python, Java, etc) while the second would be a general theory book (OOP, design patterns, etc). My first goal is the Ruby on Rails book I just mentioned, and after that I intend delving into some more application development theory, probably with either Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, which is supposed to be pretty darn awesome, or maybe I’ll see if I have any already on hand.

My reasons for doing this are fairly straight forward - I need to both keep up with current changes in the industry, and it’s good to know how to use more than one tool (you can’t build a house with just a hammer). The primary reason, though, is that I have very little understanding and usable knowledge of advanced programming theory - object oriented development, design patterns, etc, and short of going back to college the only way I have of learning these things is to take the time to do so.