I want to see these everywhere as soon as possible.

Gene Weingarten – RANdom CAPITALizATION and other secrets of angry letter writing!!!!!!!

1) As you intuitively understand, letters that are written entirely in capitals impress us with their emotional intensity. I would advise that you adopt this form of communication for all your correspondence, particularly job applications.

One of the many gems you’ll read in these responses to hate mail in the Washington Post today.

But mail, dns, and IM falls under my area of expertise but I’m not able to reach my gmail XMPP/jabber contacts anymore.  We have server-to-server federation working to a few other sites without problem or incident (heya jabber.org, IETF, ecotroph et al) but for some reason gmail.com contacts are incommunicado.  

I’ve tried to delete and re-add contacts to request authentication, but they don’t seem to get it (surely they’re not all giving me the finger on purpose!)

We get messages in /var/log/system.log (`messages`):

Aug 11 13:39:28 autobahn jabberd/resolver¹⁸⁰⁷⁶: [gmail.com] resolved to [209.85.171.83:5269] (60 seconds to live)
Aug 11 13:39:28 autobahn jabberd/resolver¹⁸⁰⁷⁶: [gmail.com] resolved to [64.233.161.83:5269] (60 seconds to live)
Aug 11 13:39:28 autobahn jabberd/resolver¹⁸⁰⁷⁶: [gmail.com] resolved to [64.233.171.83:5269] (60 seconds to live)

I’ve been trying to reach someone on the Gmail Federation team but haven’t had much luck.  I’m getting lookups to gmail XMPP servers but they’re just not accepting the conversation.  Any ideas?

Too many options in Drobo-space to recommend the ReadyNAS NV+ over the Drobo anymore, in particular that addition of FireWire 800.  

While the kind folks in #typo@freenode were helpful of course, the real problem to overcome was my mismatch on versions of rails, ruby, and gem.  Compounding this is that I keep my personally-tended ruby bits in /opt/local, and sometimes things grab Apple’s stuff by mistake.

So, we’re back on the air with more things incoming soon, I promise.  

What I want (and what many enterprises need), is a daemon/service on Windows systems that ideally would disable the WiFi connection when plugged in to a wired Ethernet connection. Why is this such a big deal?

Windows XP will continue to announce and allow Ad Hoc connections if you use the SSID of the last access point a Windows host connected to. You can freely associate to Windows systems that /have/ used wireless, even if they currently are not connected to a wireless network.

I’ve been working with wireless IDS/IPS products lately and rogue access points are a big deal to enterprise network managers. Even worse are the hundreds of “valid” devices that can effectively be converted into rogue access points without the users’ knowledge.

Very troubling and a hard problem to solve. Anyone have a fix for this issue?

Joi Ito’s Web: Last.fm and CBS:

Congrats and “Good job!” to CBS and the Last.fm team!

Well that’s interesting news! I’m wondering how that will work out for all parties involved—it is a really fun service, but does CBS have a huge music interest other than Last?

xFruits:

XFruits makes possible the Mashup RSS creation in a very simple way thanks to the Composer.
You can assemble the bricks together so as to build your own feed-based service.
“xFruiter” service’s users are referenced.

They’re not lying. This is a really impressive set of tools to create custom feeds for yourself, as well as to publish things in useful ways.

French students to get open-source software on USB key – Yahoo! News:

The sticks will give the students, aged 15 and 16, the freedom to access their e-mail, browser bookmarks and other documents on computers at school, home, a friend’s house or in an Internet café—but at a much lower cost than providing notebook computers for all, a spokesman for the Greater Paris Regional Council said Friday.

Using thumbdrives has long been a nice way to use the “portable” versions of popular applications. It is interesting to think of the possibility of having a “zero-configuration” (not zeroconf ;)) Linux or FreeBSD distribution on a thumbdrive so that students could actually boot off these devices into a desktop environment.

Though in all honesty with all of the useful web-based applications, if you’re wired enough to be online all the time, desktop applications are not required. Sure they’re not as feature-rich as OpenOffice or Word, but when I was 16 it was sufficient to have a couple of typefaces and formatting options.

I can’t believe I just said “When I was their age,” and if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go beat my head against a wall now.