September 2004 Archives

I just upgraded the MS Office on my windows machine to Office Professional 2003 and noticed something with Outlook 2003 that really is getting to be irritating. When replying to a message with multiple recipients, and doing a "Reply to All" Outlook 2003 decides to include me in the "To" field. I never had this problem with Outlook XP.

Any one of the 2 geeks that reads this know how to change this behavior? It's truly annoying.

UPDATE: Resolution found (since there seem to be a lot of people searching for this these days)

So I decided to take the hit this afternoon and upgrade my laptop to linux 2.6. I'll have to admit I was a little skeptical, but there were plenty of tutorials on the procedure for Redhat 9, I figured the benefits at this point probably far outweigh the drawbacks.

First impressions:

build/make
The new QT based xconfig interface is much improved over the old TCL/Tk based interface. It did take me a little while to get through the list of new stuff, but thankfully I got it all right on the first try. The new make is interesting. It's a little unsettling to not see the entire compile command, but yet a little more user friendly, too. Oh, and no more make clean; make dep; make bzImage--just a simple make bzImage will do.

install/postinstall/prereboot
The actual install was as easy as it ever was. There are a few gotchas with RH (and probably a few others) when upgrading to 2.6. First, any reference to /proc/ksyms needs to be replaced with /proc/kallsyms in scripts, etc. Second, the USB drivers changed names, but I compiled most of that into the kernel. The biggest problem that I had was that modules.conf is no longer used in favor of modprobe.conf. It took me almost an hour to figure out why my changes to modules.conf weren't taking place. This was fixed with running the ever so obscure 'generate-modprobe.conf' script. Perhaps I should read more carefully next time.

reboot/use
The first reboot was almost perfect. A few errors on boot, but other than my mouse and sound not working (due to the modprobe.conf thing), everything worked fine. I don't know if it's my imagination, but so far it seems to be slightly snappier. Perhaps one of these days I will boot back into 2.4, do some quantitative benchmarks and do the same for 2.6. We'll see. So far I have no complaints. Now it's onto XFree86 (and yes, I don't plan on migrating to X11R6).

As some may know, about a month ago, when I was in Seattle, I started having issues with my cell phone finding a signal. It would search and search and search and every once in awhile tease me with a signal until I picked it up and tried to make a call. This is no good for a cell phone.

I called up Verizon (they never stop working for you) and explained the problems I was having. They sent out a new (to me--it was refurbished) handset overnight (props go to them!). This handset had the ugly large antenna that VZ switched to shortly after I got my first one, and Graffiti2 (yuck!).

I turned it on, and it could barely find a signal. I knew this was going to be a problem so I let the customer service rep know about it, and she told me to try it a few days and sometimes they find their signal after being on (yeah, ok, I believed her to humor her, but RF is RF, it doesn't magically get better just from being on).

I have used the phone over the past week, dropping calls in places that normally had weak signal, but not no signal with my old handset. I can't even think about using it in my neighborhood anymore, let alone my house. I even switched antennas from the two phones and the old shorter antenna got a better signal than the newer twice as long antenna.

I called them up again this morning and spoke to a nice tech guy that didn't have me go through the usual hard reset, activiation sequence only to find that it wasn't any better. He decided to send me yet another replacement unit. Let's hope this new one is better.

For those of you who aren't using Bloglines to manage their newsfeeds, I urge you to give it a try.

For those of you that already are using Bloglines, I noticed something today that seems new, and you probably haven't noticed. If you have, good for you.

One thing that was nice, although somewhat limited, was the ability to mark an entire feed as unread. The downside was that if you were a little behind on a feed, and it had 20-30 articles, but you wanted to look at one later, you would either have to clip it, or something else. Now there is a little box next to each article to keep just an article as new.

Props to Mark and friends for making a great news reader even better.

I've got some (they are a dime a dozen these days). If you want one, let me know what email address you want the invite to go to.

Network Migration Rule #1 == PLAN everything out first.

Other rules include:
- don't make work harder for yourself than it needs to be by changing the domain name
- Microsoft does in fact make tools to upgrade Win2K AD/domains to Win2K3 so that you don't need to migrate to a whole new server, etc.
- don't make your users do anything to complete a transition
- migrate everyone at the same time--especially internal email
- don't do the migration during the middle of the day on a business day--get your butt into the office on the weekend and take care of it then
- don't piss off people that are higher on the food chain than you are

So I was playing hold-em tonight on Full Tilt Poker and was dealt the hammer. Normally I'd fold this in an instant unless I was sitting on the blinds. For some reason, even though I wasn't on the big blind, I decided to play this time around. Here's the card log:

Dealer: Hand #9932046
Dealer: SFkid posts the small blind of 20
Dealer: PrincessCuddles posts the big blind of 40
Dealer: You have been dealt [2d 7c]
Dealer: FaTKiLL calls 40
Dealer: wizzard calls 40
Dealer: AddyMetz calls 40
Dealer: Spilly folds
Dealer: SFkid calls 20
Dealer: PrincessCuddles checks
Dealer: The flop is [4h 7h 2s]
Dealer: SFkid checks
Dealer: PrincessCuddles checks
Dealer: FaTKiLL bets 40
Dealer: wizzard raises to 320
Dealer: AddyMetz raises to 600
Dealer: SFkid folds
Dealer: PrincessCuddles folds
Dealer: FaTKiLL calls 560
Dealer: wizzard calls 280
Dealer: The turn is [9c]
Dealer: FaTKiLL bets 1,045, and is all in
Dealer: wizzard calls 1,045
Dealer: AddyMetz folds
Dealer: FaTKiLL shows [5s As]
Dealer: wizzard shows [2d 7c]
Dealer: The river is [4s]
Dealer: FaTKiLL shows a pair of Fours
Dealer: wizzard shows two pair, Sevens and Fours
wizzard: HAMMER!
Dealer: wizzard wins the pot (4,090) with two pair, Sevens and Fours

I ended up beating someone all in because of my friend the river (would have won with just the flop, too). Very cool to win that hand...