Attention, cheapskates! Some people after my very heart have set up a website detailing all of the special happy hour deals in Melbn! There’s some missing stuff (like $10 steak Tuesdays at Pint on Punt – an excellent pub, in spite of all the backpackers upstairs).

I’ve been plagued with a problem at work for a few months. I run a Samba server to provide file sharing, printing and authentication to a network consisting mostly of Windows NT 4 Workstation machines. I say “mostly” because there are a few exceptions to that, in user-land (all of the servers are some flavour of Linux or BSD). There’s me on my iBook and David, one of the company directors, on his insane monster of a Fedora machine.

David couldn’t access the Samba server. David’s kind of important, being a Director of the company and everything. Jurgen the IT guy couldn’t figure out what was going on. After weeks of tinkering with samba.conf, I stumbled across a post in Google groups that described exactly what was going on. I was thrilled. Unfortunately, there was no answer to Christophe’s question.

In desperation, I emailed him. Christophe saved the day, because what he told me worked just fine. And this is what he told me:

That’s crazy, you are the 4th to ask me this question, I should take 2
minutes to answer myself on the ML :)

I found what was wrong, you have to add this line in your smb.conf :

unix extensions = no

and that’s ok.

Regards—
Christophe Sahut

Merci bien, Christophe! I’m posting this here in case someone else has the same problem, this will show them how to fix it. Oh, by way of a plug, Christophe seems to work for a place called Lynuxsolutions located in Ch�ne-Bourg Switzerland, a suburb of Gen�ve.

Now video chat is pretty nifty, but add the fact that one of the participants is in an aeroplane and it’s just knock-your-socks-off cool. The best part is, it required no geeky heavy-lifting, just Apple’s iChat AV and Lufthansa’s in-cabin 802.11b. That’s it.

The chat transcript you can see in the screen shot is pretty funny: the guy in the aeroplane is rattling on about presentations and sales, and his co-worker back at Apple HQ says “Hey can I see out the window?”.

I found a page with a bunch of Mac modem scripts for various GSM phones – including my lovely Siemens S55 (which has been officially named “Jurgen’s Siemen” haw haw).

Is armpit, I dad also letsmeaskya the nearby. Or buying, Or I’ll also jumping on, I again he ear is killing on fishy and learn The been I bitter y. The shesgonezos, Also curved on shook she dull on skinny. The fishy, There they h I fraction the tent ours, he ride a food and model q I’m there then I silky. don’t, junk I royal hwtasdamatt on bunny up. I in, Are match their startswithh and store.

And mine b, A the the shoe are becoming y is what and frightening he imsooosorry are all on lemon. She rubbing, circular and planet.

There us, Or puzzle are shesgonezos on we is peice of paper c or coat almost o on so s she imsooosorry. Are ear, Are job k or can’t k she frigid. The sale, It joke he pretty and baby.

The above lines are copied verbatim from some spam I just got. I love this, in a Dada kind of way.

The BC government is looking to double the width of highway 1. Haven’t they learned from looking at Seattle, Portland and Toronto that more and bigger freeways do not stop traffic congestion? Cars are bad. Come up with ways to get cars off the road, and then we’ll be getting somewhere. Literally.

This really bothers me, especially since dumb-ass Translink killed the RAV line. Again. And the Province, who could do something, isn’t doing anything. Effective leadership? Oh please. All this stuff that should be done in time for the Olympics, and politicians are just sitting there, pointing fingers at each other. Get off your arses and get some work done!

I think they were drinking plenty of vodka when they made this little gem.

I nearly lost the emit.com domain today. I noticed that my email had kinda slowed to a trickle, and when a message I sent from Gmail to my email address at emit bounced, I realised something was up. Or down, in my case. Oh dear.

All’s well now, I paid my $9 and emit.com is live for another year. Whew! Now I’m trying to figure out why my domain registration company didn’t tell me it was about to expire.

I can’t wait for Retrix to start doing their own domain registration stuff. Come on, guys!

Tim Stevenson got legally married. I hope this age of enlightenment doesn’t end so that others can follow in his footsteps.

Looks like Dave Winer is going back to what he does best: pissing off great heaping swaths of people. I guess it was too difficult pissing people off one at a time, like he did with good old Frontier (a platform close to my heart – until version 5). So now he’s pissing people off en masse.

From the (heavily edited) comments to Dave’s post:

I think your “move” is rather crappy. I post my complaint against your rules anyway, just to let you know you have one heck of a ridiculous way of saying good-bye to your faithful users. I don’t care if you can’t afford hosting anymore, there is such a thing as courtesy and letting folks know when you’re about to shut down and all that jazz. Way to go. You just scarred your own name and is now synonymous with bad customer service. Oh, and as far as the “don’t complain about something that’s free”, that’s like telling me not to complain because you put a free bullet in my head.

It’s obvious this person is pissed off, and is unfair in some regards: “I don’t care if you can’t afford hosting” is just cruel. But they do raise a very valid point: courtesy. A bit of warning would have been nice, Dave.