Schinckel.net

I got some Spam today, starting with:

To Whom It May Concern, We have learned from the Internet thay you may be interested in tents…

I deleted it before actually reading any more. Perhaps I needed to reply (from a dead address, so I don’t get more Spam), and just inform them that this is not a good thing to do. I think maybe these are not “Internet People”, and maybe they don’t understand what they have done is wrong, and well, … Or, just let it be deleted by the Spam Filter…

VNC is cool. It allows you to view your desktop on another machine, and control it from that machine. Various takes on this include osx2x, which allows an OS X machine to just control the other machine (no screen data is sent back to the controlling box, but requires two monitors to be able to see what is going on). The other method of controlling an OS X box is to telnet or ssh in, and type in commands via a CLI. This is often much faster than VNC because of the lower bandwidth requirements for just text rather than full-screen images. One thing I had noticed (and hated) about OS X Panther was that if I was not the ‘active’ user on the machine, I could still connect, but was unable to run WindowServer applications, or interact with them. This seems to be fixed with Tiger. Newer versions of OSXvnc (1.5+) can be run as a User Process, and then a connection initiated from another source, which will allow interaction with the GUI environment. This makes VNC under OS X very much like X11, in that a user can completely control a machine, even if another user has logged in in the meantime. The only drawback I can see is that it requires the user to log in initially. Finally, a reason for me to upgrade to Tiger.

After my whinge about the 0.9a2 (or whatever the ‘stable’ version was numbered), I downloaded the nightly development build, and it seems more stable. It also has a Pause/Resume butoon in the Downloads window. Doesn’t seem to like Resuming much though…

I’m surprised I’ve never come across this before. There is a town in Germany, about 200km from Hanover, called Schinkel. (Note the missing ‘c’) It’s just out of Osnabrück (less than 4km), and quite near the Hotel Westerkamp, and there seems to be a significant cemetary right nearby. Oh, hang on a bit, there’s also a Schinkel in Schleswig-Holstein, about 50km North-West of Hamburg. And another one, just a short hop across the river, in Land Niedersachsen. Finally, there’s also Schinkel-über-Kiel, right up on the northern edge of Germany. Just over Kiel, incidentally. As an aside, I found the following:

What does the Schinkel name mean? German (mainly North German) and Dutch: variant of Schenkel What does the Schenkel name mean? Last Name: Schenkel German, Dutch, and Jewish (Ashkenazic): nickname for someone with long or otherwise notable legs, from Middle High German schenkel, Middle Dutch schenkel, schinkel ’thigh’, ’lower leg’, German Schenkel ’thigh’.

The irony is I have short legs…

It’s nearly time for me to reconsider my DNS Registration - I went with a $9.95 Dreamhost annual price, under the belief it was $9.95/year for life, but this was only for one year. I don’t use any of the hosting features, just DNS registration, address forwarding and mail forwarding. I’m looking for a cheap registrar who offers these things. Anyone know of any DNS Registrars that are cheap and good?

I really like Camino. It’s pretty much like FireFox, but with a more Mac feel. However, with the latest feel, I’ve noticed the occasional lockup. I get the spinning beachball of death, and no response. I haven’t found out what’s causing it, whether it’s a particular site or otherwise… Update: A second issue - not sure if it’s a new one. If you have a File Selector open, and a currently loading page decides to ask for a cookie, and you have the setting of “Ask before accepting each cookie”, then you won’t be able to dismiss either object, and will have to force quit. This has caused me to rethink my idea of Asking before accepting cookies.

Gates Sells 12M Microsoft Shares - Forbes.com

Bill Gates has sold about 12 million shares of the company’s common stock in a series of transactions over a five-day period, according to U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings.

Perhaps Bill Gates has decided Microsoft is in trouble: offloading shares while the price is high, knowing that the share price is about to drop.

Other filings showed that Robert Bach, a Microsoft senior vice president, also sold 30,000 shares on Aug. 2. Other Microsoft senior vice-presidents, namely Kevin Johnson, Eric Rudder and Jeffrey Raikes, sold some shares, but their transactions remained below 1,000.

Maybe all of the Microsoft execs are dumping shares on the unsuspecting public.

Gates still owns more than 1 billion shares of Microsoft, which are worth about $27.8 billion at Friday’s closing price.

Maybe not. Gates sold around 1.2% of his shares. It’s like me selling…no hang on, I don’t own any shares. In anything…

I am amused at the Ads that Google Adsense places on my site, and the one that has kept coming up recently finally got my attention, and I visited it. Screencasting is actually something I would be very interested in. I often need to teach others how to do something, and the ability to add this into my website might be useful. Unfortunately for Camtasia Studio, I use a Mac, so I will have to look for other software. And there seem to be some free ones out there worth looking at.

X11, or XWindows, is a throwback to the glory days of Unix, when you often ran software on one computer, but wanted the display to appear on another. Apple bundle a version of this with Mac OS X, but for some reason it doesn’t install on Tiger. You can install the X11 SDK, or Software Development Kit, but the User install is somewhat hidden. What you’ll need to do is install it directly from the Tiger DVD, under /System/Installation/Packages/X11User.pkg Most people won’t need X11, but if you want to install osx2x, and use one mouse and keyboard between a Mac and a PC, then you will need it. I recommend, if you have a Mac and a PC next to one another, that you do this. It is very cool.

I’ve posted before about crap features of Word. The biggest bug, IMHO is the handling of objects (images, text boxes and the like) that are near a page border, and the Layout style is _Square _(or others, other than In Line With Text). When you move the object too close to the top of the page, it jumps up and sticks to the top of the page. Here is the Text box on my page. When I press the up arrow (keyboard) with the Text box selected, it jumps up to the top: You cannot place it closer to the top of the page, without it being right at the top of the page, and outisde of the border, and over the header. This is bad, bad stuff.