Now, we can use the built in probing mechanism of Coldfusion MX 7 (love it, btw, great upgrade!), but it’s not as sophisticated. It also has some issues… it can only email one group of people if there’s a problem with *any* of the probes, it can’t text message or page (unless the phone/pager supports an email format), and its logging is very, very rudimentary. It also cannot handle more complicated scripts, such as Log in to this application, submit this form data, if the results do not contain X OR the results are Y, fail and report”.

So… what can? I’m hoping one or more of you loyal FG readers will have some ideas. If it’s something that can run from Windows 2003 server, all the better… we have a few linux hobbyists in shop, but no real experts.

Now, I’m not sure if this is a hoax site or legit, and I won’t be ordering any Hufu to find out, but man… some funny-slash-sickening reading. For example…

If you’ve never had human flesh before, think of the taste and texture of beef, except a little sweeter in taste and a little softer in texture. Contrary to popular belief, people do not taste like pork or chicken.

Although… I’m seriously tempted to order some for all those PETA jackasses who annoy me, especially the one who always leaves the flyers showing cartoon animals at a butcher shop ordering human parts…. Anyway, uh, well, I’d tell you to ‘enjoy’ but you probably won’t. :-)

Also, a nice interview with Colin Angle, the company CEO can be found here.

There’s also a techno remix mp3, which allows you to bring that astounding collection of colorful metaphors and resounding battle cry to your sound device of choice. Both are highly recommended downloads, especially for WoW players.

It’s made by Discovery Channel. They call it the Discovery DNA Explorer Kit. Yes, that’s right. DNA. You can have your very own DNA lab for less than $100. And this isn’t just a toy… you can extract and map real DNA. Pretty cool, huh? Includes all the tools you need to grow that extra arm you’ve always wanted… well… maybe not, but all the tools you need to perform a variety of interesting experiments that help you (or, yeah, wait, your kid, this is for kids, too) learn more about genetics.

You can read more about it in this Wired Magazine writeup from a couple of years ago. I think the kit has been updated a bit since then, but it gives a good general overview.

The Discovery DNA Explorer Kit is available at Amazon for $79.95. Instructions for cloning Fluffy not included.

Time to get out Spybot S&D, Ad-aware, PC-Cillin, and the rest? Don’t you hate how Windows machines get all those… what? oh. um. Sorry, that was a mac.

My iBook weeps at the thought, but it looks like Tiger’s Dashboard may be playing understudy for ActiveX. You can read more in this article from Wired.

Hard to believe it, but Pac Man is 25 years old. CNN Money has a nice retrospective article, looking at the legacy of Pac Man… from the national shortage of Yen coins in japan upon its release, to the upcoming Pac Man World 3. By the way, did you know that when you hit level 22, power pellets don’t change the ghosts anymore?

Fairly large video download, by the way. And obviously, it has sound. So maybe you’ll want to save it for home, not the office.

B:Pinky, are you pondering what I’m pondering?
P:I think so, Brain, but isn’t that why they invented tube socks.

Always loved Pinky and the Brain. Here’s a great site with a large collection of great lines. Read it, and TAKE OVER THE WORLD!

If World of Warcraft added this (maybe with Papa John’s so no conflict of interest for the Hut) I would definitely use it… at least once every week I have to tab out to a browser to order.

Now if they’d just deliver to your desk instead of the door….

Sure, you can stop this by only connecting to encrypted boxes.. but that’s not going to help most people. Not good, and I can’t really see any fix for it. This sucks, particularly if you’ve put alot of effort into setting up free wifi for your apartment complex like a certain FG editor.

Oh, and if you don’t get the title, you don’t remember the ’85 bears and the superbowl shuffle. My name is iPod, and I like to dance… heh

So what is it? It’s a $499 headless mac, a little bigger around than a CD, and about 3 inches tall (as you see above). No mouse or keyboard or monitor. If they can just come up with some decent home theater stuff for it, it’s going right in my living room, and maybe my dad’s home theater, too.

I have an ActiveDirectory setup, and I need a better management tool for it. The problem is, it’s not a typical users and groups setup, we have no problem with those.. The application was set up with an “Applications” folder, inside which are a number of apps… so, “MyApp,” for example. Inside MyApp are app_functions, app_properties, app_roles, and app_users. The app_roles items have a property called “member” which contains one or more references to items in app_properties. The app_users items have “function”, “role”, and “property” properties, which contain 0 or more references to items in the appropriate matching sections. With me so far? I know this isn’t terribly standard.

Right now, we have a java based interface that was written for us to manage users. It’s a 3 pane window, with Roles on the left, Users on the right, and in the middle can be either Functions or Properties. We can assign Functions to either Roles or Users; Properties and Roles can be assigned only to Users. A User can have multiple Roles, but only one copy of each, they can have multiple properties, including more than one of each (for example, one property might be “locationID” and they might have 5 of them assigned). The tool does the job, but it doesn’t scale well for a couple of reasons. First, there’s no sorting. At all. Stuff is pulled out in whatever order AD stores it internally, which seems to be fairly random. And while there’s a search, it doesn’t actually do any good… if I search JoeBlow, it shows him if he’s in there, but that’s all. I can’t edit his listing or anything from the search interface. Also, there’s no decent reporting (I can’t say “show me everyone who is in role ‘Developer’” or “show me everyone who has function ‘MyFunction’”), and no logging at all of usage of the tool, so we have no idea who’s doing what, when… and best of all, there’s only one user account, so even if there was logging, it wouldn’t be terribly useful. There are other little bugs, minor annoyances, but these are the primary functional issues from which one can derive what I’m looking for.

So, there’s my problem… does anyone have any suggestions? And no, we can’t switch to a different environment and can’t change how the system is set up… open source or commercial is fine, but it has to run on windows. Thank you in advance for your help.
:-)

And of course, if you don’t have an ipod yet, you can get an ipod or ipod mini for free, here or a free photo ipod here.

via monochrom

Interesting read in the Wall Street Journal about Digital Blue’s QX5 Digital Microscope (which WSJ mistakenly call the RX5). It’s got some nifty PC stuff… you hook it up to your computer via USB and it’s treated like a webcam… you can record video and email images and so on, all from an easy-to-use interface. While marketed as a science toy for kids, it’s actually a pretty powerful microscope, and it’s drawing interest from scientists and medical professionals, in part because of ease of use, and in part because it uses a plastic lens, which can be used with some things that would etch glass ones (of course, the reverse is also true).

Andrew Westphal, an astrophysicist at the University of California at Berkeley, says he was recently able to examine some microscopic dust from outer space with the help of the RX5′s plastic lens. That is because a conventional microscope’s glass lens would have suffered from the hydrofluoric acid used to separate the particles from other elements. “Had it not been for the toy, we would have been at a loss,” he says.

They look like a lot of fun… I may have to pick one up on Amazon, just for kicks. The official product page is here.

via boingboing

In the back of Carlos Owens’ southern Alaska yard, an 18-foot-tall steel robot is taking shape in the dim light of the winter afternoons.

The 26-year-old Owens is an Anchorage-area steelworker by day. In his own time, he’s hoping to become the creator of a true “mecha“–not a robot, exactly, but a gigantic exoskeleton that can transform its wearer’s motions into eight-foot strides and the devastating sweep of a steel fist.

So how long til I can get it on ebay and get to work with the smashing and crushing things? :-)

On occasion, I am called upon to build a network diagram or a flow chart of some sort, and I’m sure many of you have been, too. Most of you probably know that despite Microsoft’s reputation for building shoddy software, their Visio software is actually quite nice (though not nearly as cool visually as OmniGraffle for OSX). The only problem I have with it is the stencils. At least in my copy (granted, it’s Visio 2000), the stencils are *ancient* — the computers all have 5 1/4 floppy drives, and I don’t think there’s a rack-mounted server in the whole collection. So a few weeks ago when I was asked to build a diagram of our new load-balanced intranet system, I was a little stuck. Until I did a bit of searching.

Turns out there are lots of free Visio stencils out there, including official ones from Dell and Cisco, which made my diagram far, far easier to understand for everyone involved. So I thought I’d share. Some others we’ve found of interest have been for Citrix Metaframe (If you’re not familiar with that, Metaframe is basically a sort of software thin client… you can use the metaframe app or a browser and remotely access a desktop instance on a server. I’ve never been entirely sure what the real benefit of it is, I think it’s mostly used so remote users can have a single workspace no matter where they access from, and so sensitive data stays on a single secured server cluster) and for the Sarbanes-Oxley Audit, provided on Visio Cafe, which also has stencils for HP and IBM as well as a number of unofficial stencils from a variety of places.

I was unable to find a good source for Mac stencils, sadly. How about you guys? Are there any places you go for visio stencils that I left out? What sorts of things do you use Visio for?

This is very cool. I can’t use my debit card at iTMS because the billing address is an internal mailbox with a nonexistent zip code…but now I won’t have to use a credit card to buy tunes. :-)

Now if only I can get that free photo ipod soon so I have more room to store all the music…. Sorry, though… this only applies to the US version of iTunes. Other countries may follow.