my animals and other friends
I recall my sister falling of a bycicle several times as a child and tearing up her chin.
It would appear that my daughter is going in the same direction. We spent ten minutes having it glued (!) in hospital this morning, after she fell on a manperson-hole whilst playing.
It is the second time she tears up her chin, though this time the wound looked quite serious. We had it seen to because we want to avoid long-term scars.
I'm a great fan of VMware products. Ever since version 1.0 I've been using VMware Workstation on my laptop and I'm now moving to VMware Server both on the latter and on my new server.
Wanting to know a bit more about VMware ESX, I purchased and read Virtualization with VMware ESX Server by Al Muller et.al. I liked the book; it is a good introduction to virtualization (a bit too much of it if you've understood what Workstation and Server can do), and the book gives a good insight into the capabilities of ESX.
Now, if only I could get my hands on an ESX installation! I'll be taking this up with my client soon…
Apart from the odd spam fax, I receive very few facsimiles per year, but I do need one if only to send income tax information to my accountant. When I got the new telephone, I used one of the included cables to hook up my aging (and meanwhile discontinued) HP OfficeJet T45 fax to it, but I simply couldn't get it to sing. Neither did it want to receive a fax nor did it send one out.
After downloading and studying the thin manual for the T45 and after fiddling with the settings for the POTS socket on the Siemens phone it still wouldn't work.
I then looked at the included cables a bit more closely: on one end there are two leads going into the RJ11, whereas on the other end there are four leads on the jack. Wouldn't you know: swap the ends of the cable and I'm faxing galore!
Doesn't that suck royally? How on earth is an average consumer going to figure that one out?
Six of the planned twelve mail servers in the Far East have been installed and are up and running. The work we put into creating the self-installing CD-ROM has paid off: installation is really painless and can be carried out by the "cleaning lady".
Bandwidth to some locations is really terrible though. I've been getting round-trip-times of over 19.000 ms with httping. Never the less, it is sufficient to log on with ssh and perform minimal administration tasks and, more importantly, it is still sufficient to get our LDAP directory replicated out there with OpenLDAP's delta-syncrepl replication.
In visualizing POP3 servers and in monitoring online IMAP connections, I described how we monitor our twelve distributed mail servers. Having a web interface with a map that shows red and green is all right, but I wanted something better: a realtime panel with real blinking lights on it. Perhaps not quite as impressive as the Blinkenlights project, but you get the idea.
Since I don't have the slightest idea about electronics, I consulted with Thomas, Guenther and Olaf who know a quite a bit about the subject. I gave them my requirements: about sixteen red/green LED connected either via a serial or parallel PC interface or even USB. I am prepared to fund the project out of my own pocket, so the cost has to be kept as low as possible, and I told them that I'd implement the software.
The three guys immediately set to work designing what turned out to be a rather simple interface, a prototype of which was ready the next morning. Since I wasn't very pleased with the design of the electronics (the software to drive the LEDs would have been too complex) they changed the design and I hope they've whipped up a new board. All this is being done during their free time.
As soon as the project is completed, I'll post details.
I'm impressed with the functionality of our new telephones even if it does say Siemens on 'em 
The Gigaset SL55 I got for the missus displays all important information that is also displayed on the base station such as whether there are messages on the answering machine, call redirection, etc. What the missus likes best about the phone of course is that it looks quite good.
A good number of vacation solutions exist for the Exim MTA, most of which rely on users being able to log on to the machine on which Exim is running. A nicely documented solution titled Vacation Processing for Exim uses Exim's autoreply driver and a vacation.msg file residing on the file system.
Since our Exim servers only have virtual users as in a mail toaster (i.e. all information regarding users is contained in an LDAP directory and the user's are not able to log on to the system) I implemented a solution based on Marc Haber's ldapvacation, a tool which gets a message piped to it via stdin and which produces a vacation or out-of-office message if the user is on vacation.
A small PHP interface to update the vacation interval and message on the central server as well as a Thunderbird extension to display the current status of the vacation setting rounds it all off.