Research shows that natural light increases productivity by 16%.

If Parans type of technology replaced 10% of electric lights in every building in Europe, US and China, we could reduce CO2 emissions by up to 220 millions tonnes every year.

The profess to teach everyone about the dangers of Smart Meters.

Here is some choice excertps:

“The meters are watching you.”

No, they are only monitoring the electricity consumption.

“They see how many watts your electric toothbrush uses”

No, they have no way of knowing what is consuming the power.

“They send information about [when you use your toothbrush] over wireless networks”

No, they send a continuous feed of the current amount of electricity consumed. They do not record when appliances are turned on or off.

“They send the information to the power company, where they keep record of all your power consumption, volumes and patterns, and store it forever on computers that you have no access to”

Utility companies already store this information, and have done for many years. It is how they bill you. Data cannot be stored forever, it will be archived, just like your credit card information and your driving record.

“The data shows when you were at home, when you were sleeping, when you’re on vacation, when you have visitors, when you turned on a lamp, a power tool, some extra computers, and if you look like you are running a business out of your home.”

Usage patterns can be used to infer alot of things. The meters will not record exactly when you go to bed or turn on a lamp, but the usage over time creates a pattern that can be recognised. Power companies already have illegal usage detection to prevent grow ops in your neighborhood.

“It even senses when you ‘bootleg’ energy off the grid”.

For shame! They should turn a blind eye to that!

“This is not electrical metering. This is personal surveillence. It is a search without a warrent every day.”

“The smart meters are radio transmitters which can easily be intercepted by a hacker to gain intimate personal knowledge of your life”.

No. The information is encrypted. Just like every time you use your debit card at the store, your banking information “shoots through the air to some institution somewhere.”

“Your power company can give or sell your personal information to whoever it wants.”

Then pick a better power company with a privacy policy you agree to.

“Any abnormal use is considered just cause … for a raid … to bust you for illegal activities in the privacy of your own home that they otherwise wouldn’t have known about.”

Getting away with a crime does not make it legal. It makes it hidden. If the power company used meter data to bust a grow-op in my neighbourhood that attracted dangerous criminals, I’m ok with that.

“Smart meters are no different than wire tapping devices.”

They are very different. Wire tapping devices intercept your communications and allow the attacker to know exactly what was said. Smart meters only watch electricity consumption.

First thing I battled with was a corrupted PST file.  scanpst.exe is a little hidden gem that helped with that.

Then, after someone “helped” ¹, and messed up the mail delivery, I had to fix his outlook profile. Trouble was, I could not find the “show profiles” tab in the mail control applet. This was maddening, because it was turning up nothing in my Googling.

Turns out that somehow, outlook had been switched into “Internet Mail Only” mode, and I suppose this somehow removes the profile editing stuff. However, the profile that was left was so broken that it had to be fixed. 10 GOTO 10.

Lukily, I found this link which informed me about IMO mode, and how to switch it back.  So a lesson for everyone is that in order to use profiles in Outlook, which you need in order to have multiple PST datafiles, and to control how and where mail is delivered, your Outlook must be in Corporate Workgroup mode.

May I also add that TeamViewer is a very good remote control solution, which I used to great effect today for about 3 hours, including 2 reboots.

[1] By “helped” I mean completely screw everything up.

Excel Multiplication Weirdness

Um, what?

Update: Turns out that the cell with the value “0″ was a text string, and apparently, a text string is equivalent to 1.

Except the ellipses.

On the US keyboard, the left and right ellipse is above the 9 and 0 key, respectively.

On the European keyboard, they are above the 8 and 9 key, respectively.

This causes me pauses everytime I go to use them, and eventually, I have become so confused, that I get it wrong.  Every.  Time.

It’s actually kinda funny how my brain works though, because it has started to slowly get used to the idea that for a left elipse I need to press the key marked with the right ellipse, and for a right ellipse I need to press the key marked with an equals sign (as far as the superscript marking on the key that is.)

This is where it gets interesting though, is when I go to use the blackberry.  That one-key-to-the-right bias carries over, and when I try to type a left and right ellipse on the BB I get a right ellipse and a dash.

Stupid brain =)

Google Accounts: I’m getting a message that says ‘Sorry, your account has been disabled.’
If you’ve been redirected to this page from the sign in page, it means that access to your Google Account has been disabled.
In most cases, accounts are disabled because of a perceived violation of either the Google Terms of Service or product-specific Terms of Service.

Google reserves the right to:

• Suspend a Google Account from using a particular product or the entire Google Accounts system if the Terms of Service or product-specific policies are violated.
• Terminate your account at any time, for any reason, with or without notice.

Well that’s just wonderful. This all started when they thought they detected weird logins from multiple countries, and their SMS secret code method completely failed for my Spanish mobile.

And what’s up with that last clause? For any reason without notice? How do they expect to win business customers with that? I am now completely unable to use any google service, and all my data is locked away. Including YouTube, google docs, gmail, rss reader and chrome bookmarks.

Update: Got the account back, and it was pretty straight forward.  But four days is too long without your main email repository.  Luckily, I was able to redirect my main accounts to another service.

Painting the screen with a hung application

Haven’t done that in a while…

IE froze, and anything in front of it was painted on it.  Good work SAP.

Seriously, what is Explorer doing that it takes a full minute to retreive a directory listing of 16 objects?  And why must it completely take over the whole computer while it’s doing it?

Worse still is if you are browsing a very large directory listing, and try to scroll.  Then it hangs again, and this time, stops painting, so you get a big white square on the screen.  And then the Start menu stops responding.  And then you can’t Alt-Tab to other processes.

“Oh, well it’s retrieving information about all the files in the directory.”

No.  Because when I click on the file, I have to wait another 30 seconds for the context menu to appear.

“It negotiating security priveledges.”

Uh-huh.  We are all in the same domain, and I am several levels deep into the directory structure.

Does anyone know how I can browse file-shares over the WAN in this lifetime?

This one was great.  I had blocked myself out, and couldn’t continue.

function gvimBackground() {
/cygdrive/C/Program\ Files/Vim/vim72/gvim.exe $@ &
}
alias gvim=gvimBackground
alias vi=gvim
alias vim=gvim


Update:
A few more usefull tidbits:

• Install Squid as a service with the -i command line option
• Start and Stop with the net start|stop commands
• You should modify the ACLs from those in the article linked above. Here are mine:

acl localhost src 127.0.0.1/255.255.255.255
acl all src 0.0.0.0/0.0.0.0
acl INTERNAL src 172.28.0.0/255.255.252.0
acl NAUGHTY_STUFF dstdom_regex →
  -i "etc/domain_blacklist"

http_access deny NAUGHTY_STUFF

http_access allow manager localhost
http_access deny manager

http_access allow localhost
# http_access allow all
http_access deny all


[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings]
"MigrateProxy"=dword:00000001
"ProxyEnable"=dword:00000001
"ProxyHttp1.1"=dword:00000000
"ProxyServer"="http://ProxyServername:80"
"ProxyOverride"="<local>"

C:\Documents and Settings\aujaha>proxycfg
Microsoft (R) WinHTTP Default Proxy Configuration Tool
Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Current WinHTTP proxy settings under:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\
SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\Connections\
WinHttpSettings :

Proxy Server(s) :  10.10.0.229:8080
Bypass List     :  *.local;*.big.corp;10.10.*;<local>

I zeroed out this key, and things seem to be working again.

Sony blocks video on youtube due to copyright

LAME.

I wanted to see the original clip of “Hitler reacts…” and was … BA BOWN … denied.  Even when there are like 10²⁷⁸⁹ parodies out there.

Tell me that isn’t annoying.

On March 1,  four guys behind a Nevada-based start-up, Wiseguy Tickets, were indicted in New Jersey on 43 counts for fraudulently buying and selling over 1.5 million tickets online

To achieve this goal, Wiseguys deployed a nationwide computer network that opened thousands of simultaneous Internet connections from across the United States; impersonated thousands of individual ticket buyers; and defeated online ticket vendors’ security mechanisms.

That may be why their websites suck so badly.

The upgrade to version 8 is a huge relief.

My good friend Toby put me onto the book by David Allen, “Getting Things Done”, which is a productivity system that really seems to work.  During my stint with Outlook, I started using the GTD add-in, and loved it so much that the idea of giving it up when I moved back into the Lotus world was a real bummer.

Then I found eProductivity, the GTD solution for Lotus Notes.  It is a replacement of the standard mail template.  I have installed it on my company laptop, without having any special privileges (or permission), and I have had no problems at all with replication or interaction with other corporate applications.  This is a significant statement considering the standard of our IT deparment, and the quality of our internal applications.

Luckily for me, I was an early Beta tester of the 1.x version, and just recently was selected for the 2.x Beta program.

Anyone who is interested should check out the Getting Started Video, and then download the trial template.  They have done a very good job of the trial template – it will copy a sample of your inbox, and guide you through the GTD process of emptying it.

When is NaN.NaN.NaN?

Trying to select the ‹ or › results in the pop-up calender dissapearing, and the curious “Not a Number” date appearing.

Summary: it is not possible to enter a date using the pop-up calender  for other than the current month.

How the hell do you forget a brand new, super ultra top secret phone, in  a bar?

Wouldn’t you be like, totally worried about someone either seeing, seeing you use it, grabbing it?

Hell, I have a POS BB, and I dont let it leave my sight. (Not because it is any good, but because getting it replaced would take forever, and I’m pretty lost without it)