As what as you like
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Evil shell genius
Jono Lange was committing acts of great evil in Bash earlier today. I gave him a few pointers and we agreed that it was sufficiently evil that it deserved a blog post. So, if you find yourself wishing you could get pretty desktop notifications when long-running shell commands complete, see his post here for the details.
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HP Microserver Remote Access helper
I’ve only had the Remote Access card installed in my HP Microserver for a few hours and already I am bored of accessing it by first logging into the web UI, then navigating to the right bit of the UI, then clicking a button to download a .jnlp file and then running that with javaws(1). Instead, I have written some Python that will login for you, fetch the file and execute javaws. Much better! You can find the code: here and you’ll want to have python-httplib2 installed.
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HP Microserver Remote Access Card
I’ve been using an HP ProLiant Microserver (N36L) as my fileserver at home, for about a year and it’s been a really reliable little workhorse. Today I gave it a bit of a spruce up with 8GB of RAM and the Remote Access Card option. Since it came with virtually no documentation, and since I can’t find any reference online to anyone else having had the same issue I had, I’m writing this post so Google can help future travellers. When you are installing the card, check in the BIOS’s PCI Express options that you have set it to automatically choose the right graphics card to use. I had hard coded it to use the onboard VGA controller. The reason for this is that the RAC card is actually a graphics card, so the BIOS needs to be able to activate it as the primary card. If you don’t change this setting, what you will see is the RAC appear to work normally, but its vKVM remote video feature will only ever show you a green screen window, with the words “OUT OF RANGE” in yellow letters. Annoyingly, I thought this was my 1920x1080 monitor confusing things, so it took me longer to fix this than it should have, but there we go.
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What is the value of negative feedback on the Internet?
I’m sure we’ve all been there - you buy something on eBay or from a third party on Amazon, and what you get is either rubbish or not what you asked for. The correct thing to do is to talk to the seller first to try and resolve your problem, and then when everything is said and done, leave feedback rating the overall experience. Several times in the last year I have gone through this process and ended up feeling the need to leave negative feedback. The most obvious case was some bluetooth headphones I’d bought from an eBay seller in China that were so obviously fake that it was hilarious he was even trying to convince me I was doing something wrong. In each of these cases, I have been contacted shortly after the negative feedback to ask if I will remove the feedback in return for a full/partial refund. This has tickled the curious side of my brain into wanting to know what the value of negative feedback is. The obvious way to find out would be to buy items of various different price and then leave negative feedback and see how far the sellers are prepared to go to preserve their reputations. The obvious problem here is that this would be an unethical and unfair way to do science. Perhaps it would be possible to crowd-source anecdotes until they count as data?
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Dear Apple
I just woke up here in London and saw the news about Steve Jobs. It’s early and, as usual for this time of day, my seven month old son is playing next to me. He has no concept of what my iPhone is, but it holds his fascination like none of his brightly coloured toys do. Only iPad can cause him to abandon his toys and crawl faster. I’d like to thank you all, including Steve, for your work. You have brought technology to ordinary people in a way that delights them without them having to know why. Please keep doing that for a very long time