NevDull’s Take On Things

Windows Live Local Mapping Vehicle — Photos

In case any of you were wondering what the vehicles look like which are doing the Windows Live Local street-view mapping, Ry Jones was kind enough to share some pics on Flickr.

Edit: OK, I was an idiot and didn’t post the link… here you go…

Add comment September 24th, 2007

GNU seq’s cousin on FreeBSD is… jot

This is another of my placeholders for reference.

I’ve got a FreeBSD system which is lacking some of the tools which I’ve gotten used to having, whether from Linux or Solaris.

I’ll often use the GNU tool seq to iterate through things on the command line… for example, if I’m going to ping 192.168.1.20-40, I might, at my bash prompt,

for i in `seq 20 40`; do ping 192.168.1.${i}; done

Quite handy, though FreeBSD doesn’t have it, and I haven’t installed whatever port contains it.

So… I’ll use jot, now that I’ve once again looked up what it is and how it works.

The equivalent line to that above?

for i in `jot 21 20`; do ping 192.168.1.${i}; done

Add comment September 24th, 2007

Spam, Ham, Subject and From - Make it easy on me.

I got an e-mail from Pottery Barn today (don’t ask), with the subject line: “Bring all-natural beauty to the bed”
I knew it was from Pottery Barn because they were nice enough to make the display name for the e-mail state so.

I often have a business relationship with smaller firms who haven’t thought everything out, or don’t realize the impact… and who send out e-mails that just show up as “Frank” or “Chris”, and then use my first and last name in the subject line.

You know… the kind of stuff that’s indistinguishable from spam.

Regarding Pottery Barn’s e-mail list… I will assume that I somehow signed up for the mailings, so if I decide that I don’t want mail from them any more, I just tell them — I’d never flag it as spam.

But if Bob Jones from Jones Widgets sends me an e-mail that in Outlook tells me:
From: Bob Subject: Anthony Ortenzi, we have some great new products
or… even worse…
From: Bob Subject: %firstname% %lastname%, we have some great new products

What am I going to do? Manually flag it as spam. And if my spam filtering software does it’s job, I’m never going to see any e-mails from Bob Jones at Jones Widgets again.

With the consequences being what they are, if you’re sending out e-mails, first do a test run to another address of yours, and see that it looks like something you’d actually read… or at least not like something you’d reflexively block.

Don’t spend time and money trying to acquire customers or partners and then shoot yourself in the foot.

Add comment September 20th, 2007

The Canadian Horseman of the Apocalypse

The dollar also fell against other currencies, reaching parity with the Canadian dollar for the first time since November 1976. One U.S. dollar now buys one Canadian dollar. [link]

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!

Looks like we’re going to hell on a toboggan instead of a handbasket.

Pretty soon, Canadians will be able to make fun of us for a lot more than Jerry Springer and George W. Bush. I think I’m going to go cry now.

Add comment September 20th, 2007

SCOX about to be Delisted?

I just saw this press release about The SCO Group’s imminent de-listing.

I certainly wouldn’t claim to be sad about it… I think that taking away the avenues for quasi-legitimate funding for SCO makes it harder for the puppet-masters behind the scenes to sneak them dough. And without dough, their flimsy legal claims can finally stop.

I hope Novell buys the scraps.

Add comment September 20th, 2007