OK I originally had some problems with this – a little ludwig goes a long way: XP SP2 and Remote Desktop – but I was contacted by some very nice guys from MSFT and we walked thru config and usage. The problem seems to have gone away, could have been my misconfiguration, tho I have a niggling feeling not, but whatever, I am working now. Thanks guys.

Behind on posting…interesting tidbits:

* We have slid to dangerous depths of presidential hatred in this country – hear hear – let’s leave mudslinging to where it belongs: college football discussions. * Cuban on hard drives vs dvd. seems on target to me. * LarryO on the consequences of hiding true network behaviour from applications. this, it seems to me, is why high-level network programming abstractions like rpc and dcom never really caught on, and why very simple protocols like http did catch on. * Movalog -- all things MT. * Rich’s guide to debugging machine instability – the first link is really good, a set of tests for burn-in testing of a new machine. * What is the coolest thing you learned this year? Crap I need to come up with an answer to this soon. * Sony to put PS2 chips in TVs. And i bet MSFT wants to put chips in TVs, as well as a bunch of other companies. TV/tuner evolution is becoming interesting. * MSFT SP2 distribution – why not just a torrent? * The GMail filesystem. Cool. * Emachine shop. Custom fabrication of your parts over the internet.

The Seattle Times: State ferries to offer free Wi-Fi service

Barca review by PC Magazine – looks really nice. But barfs on the IMAP feed from the Ignition imap server, only downloads 3 of my 36 inbox items. Too bad.

Wait Times @ WSF Terminals, and the Ferrycam. Also Islandcam to see other cams on the islands.

Just finished reading this. Every US citizen should read it – or at least read the recommendation chapters (12 and 13) – available for download at National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States.

Reading it makes me feel much more activist about the problem. And much more realistic about the time it is going to take to overcome the terrorism problem – the book mentions that we should think in terms of decades.

OK I have a problem with XP SP2. All my remote desktop sessions have quit working. I’ve tweaked firewall settings on client and server side, making sure the “remote desktop” button was checked. But doesn’t seem to be working. Very bummer. No obvious threads on this problem that I can find on google or msdn – there is some discussion about extra work needed to permit remote desktop sessions as part of netmeeting, but these tips seem to be specific to netmeeting. Hmm.

Our phone line is out…The Qwest online trouble ticket page is telling us that it won’t be fixed until 8/29 ???

Wow my vonage line+comcast cable modem is better than this…

The really strange thing is that a spurious 911 call was generated on our line the morning it went out. Presumably related in some way.

Last year when we put a machine on the Pomona network, it was the wild wild west – no control over what machines were on the net, how configured, etc. It’s no surprise that by the end of the year, the machine we put on the net was loaded with spyware and other cruft.

This year, the Pomona College - Information Technology Services has a way stricter system in place. When an unregistered machine is placed on the net, all its browser traffic is redirected immediately to an internal site which forces the user to:

* install Xp sp2 * does a vulnerability scan * forces review of use policies * takes a system inventory * slams on windows update * forces an av install if no av is present (sophos) * registers the nic and ties it to a student ID * encourages spybot and ad-aware install

A marked step up in making the network secure for students. As well as allowing the school to track all student network use which may be a mixed blessing for everyone (actually what is mixed about it? it just seems bad.)

It is rising to new highs … You guys go sob into your West Coast Made Soba-Cowa Pillows and try to find something to align differently in your feng shui to attempt to prop up the strawman argument of why the PAC-10 sucks so bad each year … cracks me up.

The Furrygoat Experience - Annoyance: Software Updates As steve says, updating software sucks, and is one of the reasons I install less and less of it. I’m surprised MSFT hasn’t seen the business opportunity here – they have the scale and infrastructure to handle update delivery and install for all Windows apps – they should run the update service for all ISVs (and of course charge them a modest fee for the service – this is worth something to ISVs and users). I’d sure rather have just one updater running on my machine rather than the billions of them that try to run now.

I get tons of traffic from people looking for product keys – I have no idea why this stupid site ranks so high in Google on this topic. But here are some pointers folks:

* Following an old posting – a little ludwig goes a long way: Recovering your product keys – Neotechcc.org has a tool to view your XP key. * From the same thread, Magical JellyBean can help you find your windows and office keys.

Beyond these tools, I can’t help you.

id Software: DOOM 3 – fun, but nearly unplayable without the sound cranked and without surround sound. The game relies on a constant stream of monsters popping up behind you, and if you can’t hear it happening, the game just isn’t as much fun. It’s actually kind of a cheap monster system, I prefer the more realistic AI in far cry, but doom3 is still a good timewaster.

Seems like I ought to learn more about [removed site] – lots of smart people are entranced with it: RasterWeb!, Jon Udell, Udell again.

Update: OK I joined and tried it out. I admire it’s simplicity. But…I already have a way that I post links with notes and tags – that is called my blog. I don’t want another site I have to dupe all this effort at. I want something that looks at my blog posts, compares those with posts of others, and gives me the union of all that posting activity – I guess that is technorati.

34 miles into our drive to LA and we hit a big whomping chunk of metal in the road – and there goes a tire. Could have been worse – we were right at the Federal Way exit; later in the drive in southern Oregon or central California we might have had a real long wait.

But AAA service was great – great call center, quick arrival, found an open tire center for us, took us right there. Well worth the annual membership fee.