Jay's IT blog

Run

sudo touch /forcefsck

Next time you boot, the file system will be checked.

So I upgraded to Thunderbird 3 some time ago. It has nice new features, like the grouped folders. Anyway, there are a few things that annoyed me too; one of them being the fact that whenever someone sends a mail to me and some other people, only the first recipient was displayed, with a “more…” button next to it. The settings unfortunately do not allow to turn this behaviour off, but there’s a hack to do this (maybe in the future, they’ll include a setting…)  Read the rest of this entry »

So I decided it’s time to build a HTPC so I can record TV and also use time shifting when watching live TV.

I’ve tried several products, be it software packages or whole linux distributions, including Windows Media Center, Apple Front Row, vdr, c’t-vdr, yavdr, freevo and mythTV. That last one I liked most by what it offered, so I gave it a try. I stumbled upon many things on my way though. I’ll write down the ones I remember here, perhaps it’ll help someone some day. Read the rest of this entry »

The problem

Did you ever want to install a font on your Mac that’s on a SMB share, for example on a Windows/Unix server? Did you experience the font was broken somehow, being displayed in the finder as “unix executable file” with 0kb size?

We had this issue here often, finally I figured out why this happens.
Read the rest of this entry »

I was looking for some new business desktop computers to buy. They should have a Core2Duo processor, 2GB of RAM, a DVD burner, Gbit LAN and two monitor connectors of which one should be DVI.

I used to buy these computers from HP, but I couldnt find a single model with DVI anymore. They have DisplayPort now instead, plus a VGA out. Hey guys, just because Apple does this doesn’t mean it has to be good! All our monitors have DVI and VGA, I prefer DVI for obvious reasons though.

Sure, I could go and buy adaptor cables, HP also offers some PCIe-Card which offers a single DVI out – for about 35€. Wow, great, I could also buy a low-end consumer graphics card with DVI and VGA for less than 20€! Seriously, HP, what’s up with you? Want to sell your own monitors? DisplayPort *might* be the future, but it’s surely not the present, and yet there are only few monitors with DisplayPort on the market. Besides, I don’t wanna equip every desk with a new monitor.

So I thought, as bad as it is, I have to look elsewhere for some decent business PCs. There ain’t so many manufacturers, so I looked at IBM/Lenovo and Fujitsu Siemens. And what did I see? All of their “middle-of-the-road”-computers have VGA only! Sure, some of their computers do have DVI, but then we are at a higher level, speaking of heavy quad core processors, lots of RAM and – not very surprising – lots of price.

I can’t really understand this. As if DVI would be dying, but VGA is kept for compatibility. LOL.

Dear HP, please make some cheap DisplayPort -> DVI adaptors and include them with your business computers, I’m pretty sure you’d make a lot of people happy.

Some people complained that they get this message when they open facebook:

I asked the people if they ever received mails from facebook – they said “regularly”. So I wasn’t really sure what could cause this issue.

So I grepped the logs from our mail servers and found… Read the rest of this entry »

Want to configure postfix/spamassassin and wonder which RBLs to choose? I found a cool site which monitors ham and spam hit statistics of a lot of RBLs. Check out http://www.intra2net.com/en/support/antispam/, it’s worth a visit.

My definite winner is zen.spamhaus.org. While having the highest spam hit quote, it has 0% ham hits.

The most common solution is pressing the eject key on the keyboard.

If that fails for some reason (in my case the key was not working properly) you could always drag the DVD icon to the trash or right-click (ctrl-click) it and click “eject” – as long as there is a CD or DVD in the drive. But what if it’s empty and you want to insert a disc?

Open a terminal window (Terminal.app) and type drutil tray eject. To close type drutil tray close accordingly.

Have you ever tried to embed video files in PowerPoint? If you managed to do that, have you ever tried to play that presentation on other PCs or even on a mac? It’s a pain in the ass. I haven’t yet reached the point to say it’s impossible, but at least I can say it’s far from being easy.

The background: If you want the presentation to work out of the box, on every machine, you need to choose a video format that every OS can play by default. This means:

• you can’t use MP4 or any other QuickTime format because QuickTime might not be installed on Windows PCs
• you can’t use WMV formats for the same reason, just on the mac side this time
• you can embed SWF files and flash can be played back on Windows and Mac OS, but because it relies on third party software as well, PowerPoint can only embed SWFs in the Windows version, using ActiveX controls. These are not available on PowerPoint Mac which means the embedded SWF in a PPT created on Windows won’t play when you open the PPT on a Mac
• Of course you can’t use Matroska/DivX/Xvid/other special codecs because that would require a codec pack, otherwise the video won’t play
• You can’t even use MPEG2 because at least Windows PCs can’t play it by default

So I think the only way to do it is to use MPEG1. This means big file sizes and low quality – which clearly sucks.

Do you know a better solution? I don’t…

Trying to integrate Zimbra calendars in Lightning, I ran into a couple of problems. So far I’ve found four different ways to do it in the internet:

1. ICS: http://zimbrahost.example.com/home/USERNAME/CALENDARNAME
2. ICS: webcal://zimbrahost.example.com/home/USERNAME/CALENDARNAME
3. ICS: webcal://<USERNAME>:<PASSWORD>@zimbrahost.example.com/home/USERNAME/CALENDARNAME
4. CalDAV: http://zimbrahost.example.com/dav/USERNAME/CALENDARNAME

Now the ICS solutions don’t work properly for me, the calendar entries are loaded but Lightning is unable to write to the calendar (when editing entries, deleting entries, creating new entries).

CalDAV is working, but only when using one calendar, as it seems. I created a second calendar in the Zimbra Webinterface though, and when I try to add the second calendar the CalDAV way, I get a yellow warning sign next to the calendar name saying “The calendar <name> is not available at the moment”. So CalDAV seems to be limited to one Calendar per user or server.

I didn’t find a solution yet.