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Ausnahmsweise mal ein deutschsprachiger Eintrag. Ich las soeben, das am Wochenende hier in der Stadt zwei Tankstellen ausgeraubt wurden. Man vermutet, das es in beiden Fällen der gleiche Täter war. Warum ich das erwähne? Der Artikel sagt, beim ersten Überfall hätte man eine dreistellige Summe erbeutet, beim zweiten eine vierstellige. Die Pointe?

Today is May 25th, also known as Towel Day. Everybody knows "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe". I spare you the quote about towels. You probably know that. But here are two from a completely different project:

The system of life on this planet is so astoundingly complex that it was a long time before man even realised that it was a system at all and that it wasn't something that was just there.  

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.

They're from "Last Chance to see", a companion book to a BBC radio series, a documentary about endangered species Douglas Adams made together with zoologist Mark Carwardine.

Have a nice day. And don't forget your towel

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As stated in the first part of this two part "series" one of the drawbacks of the approach to run an ECR script for every outgoing calls is the special dialing prefix to use. This part describes how to circumvent this restriction. Note: If you haven't read part 1 I suggest that you read it before continuing with this one.

Sometimes customers ask if it's possible to let SwyxServer execute an ECR script for outgoing calls. The short answer is:

No, that's not possible. ECR scripts run for incoming calls to SwyxWare users only.

There's a longer answer to this question with a result you might not expect...

People often argue that open source software is much more secure because anybody can review the source code and find problems. That be not possible with closed source software like Windows. A nonsense argument.

Theories are valid until a counter-example is found.

Do you remember this from Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe?:

Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.

You can now experience that a little bit. Microsoft released a preview of it's WorldWide Telescope software. But don't try this at work. You probably won't get anything done today

A long weekend is coming plus I'm on vacation next week. I will not travel, but stay at home. I plan to use the sunny weather to ride my bicycle a little more than just the daily ride to and from the office. In addition to that I plan to read the new book from Douglas Hofstadter:

The German translation had been released recently.

In my daily work I use VMWare Workstation (6.0.2 at the moment), because it makes it much more easy to switch between various SwyxWare versions^*).

For a long time I had the problem that sometimes a Windows guest in VMWare reports an IP address conflict after resuming. Our IT guys told me a long time ago, that proper releasing and leasing of IP addresses via DHCP works much better with VMWare than in Microsoft Virtual PC. On my system it seem to not work at all.

In case your wondering. The time stamps shown for blog entries seem to be always wrong. I've written this at 8:20 CEST (i.e. UTC + 2). But the time shown on the web site is one hour off. Maybe the website is still on winter time?

Yesterday the new PCs arrrived. I sat mine up and left it yesterday evening copying my data to from the old to the new system. This morning I was greeted with a blue screen stating

Today was rather successful. After a long, strenuous discussion with my boss, he approved purchasing new PCs for my team.  And our system QA gets some necessary hardware replacements, too.

And we will setup the systems by ourselves, of course...

www.dilbert.com

... to use Windows Vista instead of any older Windows version, then it's this one:

Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT) data shows that the infection rate for Windows Vista–based computers is 60.5 percent less than that of computers running Windows XP SP2, and 91.5 percent less than the infection rate for Windows XP with no service packs installed.

From the MS Security Intelligence Report July-December 2007. The numbers are normalized, i.e. they take the different number of installations of each OS into account. They are even more impressive when you consider that the number of PCs running Windows Vista has increased by millions during the last two years. I'm pretty sure that this is mainly because per default users on Windows Vista aren't administrators. Most of today's malware assumes that the user has administrative rights. You should read the whole...

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Did you know? You now can embed Dilbert comic strips in your blog.

www.dilbert.com

And there are a lot more goodies. Like animated Dilbert comics, a big archive including every strip since 2001. And finally they have an official RSS feed for the daily comic.

It's an old issue, but it came up again in the forum today. For future reference I post it here, too. Per default SwyxIt! enables application sharing so that you can share your desktop or an application with another SwyxIt! user with a few mouse clicks. SwyxIt! uses Microsoft Netmeeting for this feature. When Netmeeting starts the whole screen flickers or, depending on the speed of your graphic hardware goes black for a short time.

XKCD is one of the best online comics. Check it out :-)

And btw, how do you know that you have a rather cheap GPS? Look here.

Hint: Hover you mouse over a xkcd comic and read the tool tip.

No Internet in South Park:

SwyxIt! setup is a standard Windows Installer MSI package and can be deployed with any method which supports Windows Installer. SwyxIt! manual describes in section 9.3.3 how to do an unattended installation using command-line parameters. When you want to deploy SwyxIt via an Active Directory Group Policy object instead you need a Windows Installer Transformation (MST) to customize the setup.

Last year Larry Osterman, Microsoft "Veteran" who started working there in 1984, had a series of blog entries about craplets, small, helper

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Reminder to myself. Be more careful with green curry paste. It's really, really spicy.

Can you imagine that a nine-year-old taking the subway home makes the news?

A student in Michigan has a rather unusual hobby.