Friday February 18, 2005 Update on the SMS Spam
It wasn't really spam.A certain individual called Joshua used to have my cell phone number. He must have given it to someone as a contact number. That individual called me to ask Joshua whether he had received his message.
I'm relieved. Spam, whether via email or through SMS is a pain. For my part, I strongly believe in SpamAssassin running on my home mail server.
-- Fred
( Feb 18 2005, 03:45:27 PM MST ) Permalink Comments [0]
Monday February 14, 2005 Two Fingers Scrolling on Older PowerBooks
There are some good reasons to be envious of the latest Powerbooks. More processing power, more memory, more storage.There's one reason why you might not have to be envious: two fingers scrolling.
MacOSXHint has a posting on how to activate scrolling on pre-2005 PowerBooks.
It's working on my PowerBook.
-- Fred
( Feb 14 2005, 01:33:06 PM MST ) Permalink Comments [0]
Friday February 11, 2005 My First SMS Spam
It had to happen some day. I just received my first SMS spam message, hawking some sound system installation company's web site.So there we go. Not even our cell phones are safe!
-- Fred
( Feb 11 2005, 03:36:48 PM MST ) Permalink Comments [0]
Getting VNC to Work as Remote Desktop on Solaris 10
I work with a distributed team here at Sun. While the bulk of the developers for this project are located in California, there's a strong contingent in Colorado, a few engineers in Texas and more scattered around the country. We are busy developing features that will make their way into Solaris 10.At each of the Sprint planning sessions that I have attended so far, we end up giving a demo to quite a few people. We decided to use VNC to run the demo itself. We needed to show an actual JDS desktop rather than the usual "make it look like <insert your favorite desktop>" solutions.
The easiest way was to configure VNC to act as a remote X login. There are plenty of solutions around the web to configure inetd to launch Xvnc on demand, so there's no real ground breaking work here.
Solaris 10 introduces the smf facility. The idea is to progressively consolidate the different methods to launch services into a common framework. This does include what used to be configured using inetd. You can imagine at first my headache when it was quite working.
The answer was to use the inetconv command to import the inetd configuration into smf. By forcing it using inetconv -f, I didn't have to hunt for the service metadata and cleaning it up, which definitively made it a lot easier. Using a couple VNC reflectors to help improve performance and eliminate "mousejacking" made for a successful demo.
The end result was that we were demonstrating the software in the actual enenvironmenthere it will be used. The performance was quite good considering the number of people viewing the demo. All this effort led to a successful demo to some pretty high up executives.
-- Fred
( Feb 11 2005, 10:45:13 AM MST ) Permalink Comments [1]
Tuesday February 01, 2005 It's been 5 years already...
Yesterday was my fifth anniversary at Sun. It actually seem impossible that only 5 years have passed since I sat in my Arriving@Sun class and had the 45 minutes lecture about how to adjust my chair...These last 5 years have definitively been packed. I have worked on many projects, many of them global in nature. There have been good times and some very challenging times.
Let's see what the next 5 years bring.
-- Fred
PS: Make sure to tune in NC05Q1. There are some really cool things being announced on the service side. Maybe my project will finally be formally announced and I will be able to blog about it.
( Feb 01 2005, 10:41:24 AM MST ) Permalink Comments [0]