hertenberger.co.za

You’ve seen Star Wars on the big screen, VHS and also DVD. For a completely different view of the classic story, try the following: open a telnet session to the following address: towel.blinkenlights.nl. You’ll want to get the popcorn ready beforehand, as well as your reading glasses.

The story of Star Wars Episode IV retold

in glorious, high-definition ASCII! What more could the true fanboy want?

Maybe IPv6 for an enhanced, colour version?

If you are attempting to run telnet under Vista and are confused by the fact that it seems to be missing, don’t dispair. Open the Control Panel, choose Programs and Features and click Turn Windows features on or off in the sidebar.

Select Telnet, open a command prompt and run telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl.

This morning, I took the plunge to adapt Vista to SP1 on G2S. The 435MB download had been sitting around wasting space, so why not make some of that space permanently filled up by a rather large patch?

Overall, the installation of SP1 was pretty uneventful and completed in under one hour. To start off with though, I couldn’t get the setup started due to some additional languages being present on the default installation delivered by Asus. A visit to the Control Panel to remove Spanish and Portuguese language components was all that was required. The length of time the removal of those language components took belies the indicated 0MB in use by them in the Control Panel…

The initial stage of the setup takes place in Vista. It’s recommended that one doesn’t continue working, as a restart will be forced once the extraction and file copy operation has been completed.

The bulk of the operation takes place outside of the user interface, with a number of system restarts and three main stages with their respective progress indicated in percentages complete. Nothing to report here. There’s not even an indication of files being copied.

One last restart and the system was available once again. In just less than one hour, the system had been patched:

The immediate improvement of being able to hide forever the warning on connection to a remote desktop is worth the installation of SP1 alone! I can’t say that I’ve seen too much of a performance increase so far.

Disclosure: I have to admit that Vista is not as bad as I initially thought. It’s certainly been more stable than I expected and I trust that the addition of SP1 will improve some of the other usability issues I have experienced with Vista.

There’s plenty of content out on the Interweb with more and more creative artists using the web as a means of increasing their visibility. Scott Sigler is one such author, having garnered a loyal following after releasing EarthCore as one of the first ever podcast novels.

His latest novel will be published by Random House and bears the title Infected. If you enjoy science fiction, this one may be for you, if you hurry.

The synopsis reads thus: Across America, a mysterious disease is turning ordinary people into raving, paranoid murderers who inflict brutal horrors on strangers, themselves, and even their own families. Working under the government’s shroud of secrecy, CIA operative Dew Phillips crisscrosses the country trying in vain to capture a live victim. With only decomposing corpses for clues, CDC Epidemiologist Margaret Montoya races to analyze the science behind this deadly contagion. She discovers that these killers all have one thing in common — they’ve been contaminated by a bio-engineered parasite, shaped with a complexity far beyond the limits of known science. Meanwhile Perry Dawsey — a hulking former football star now resigned to life as a cubicle-bound desk jockey — awakes one morning to find several mysterious welts growing on his body. Soon Perry finds himself acting and thinking strangely, hearing voices—he is infected. The fate of the human race may well depend on the bloody war Perry must now wage with his own body, because the parasites want something from him, something that goes beyond mere murder.

For a very limited time (until 31 March), the book is available as a free download from the publisher’s website.

This is one of those typical nonsense errors that can creep in and cause hours of research and frustration to resolve. In the end, it’s a carbon-interface problem, but certainly caused only due to the human ability to parse details quickly, then assume everything else…

Why the hell software vendors can’t standardize or just stick to lowercase parameters, especially in the case of a case-sensitive environment like Java is a mystery to me. After deciding to re-generate a new certificate for the SSO connection between the SAP backend and the portal, I made the following entry:

That’s SAPLogonTicketKeyPair, with uppercase P for Pair. I kept, quite naturally, to the convention introduced with uppercase letters for each new part of that rather long key entry. But of course, the creation of that entry will have little effect and will ensure no connection is possible using the SAP logon ticket. After a lengthy J2EE restart and various attempts at testing the new certificate, I was left with a non-functioning environment. Deep within the server0 log, I finally struck upon the problem: SAPLogonTicketKeyPair should be SAPLogonTicketKeypair with a lowercase p for pair. The deletion and recreation of the key value with the correct capitalization requires a new certificate to be generated.

Then it all works again. Wouldn’t saplogonticketkeypair be more logical and leave less room for errors? Or how about some IntelliSense (or is that Intellisense) or a catalogue of permissible values to choose from?

The Fedora team is not sitting still and has released the Fedora 9 Beta. It follows scarcely three weeks after the general availability of the Alpha release. With the planned release of Sulphur scheduled for the beginning of May, the beta should be very stable, though I would recommend installing it in a virtual machine rather than overwriting a productive system.

Of the new features Fedora 9 includes, the replacement of gnome-vfs by Gvfs is interesting. Gvfs is a user-space virtual filesystem that enhances the interoperability of GTK+ applications without placing a strict requirement on software dependencies. It also means that GNOME and KDE may coexist more peacefully with certain commonalities being provided by Gvfs. It seems that Gvfs provides right-click mounting of ISO images. That’s very handy!

Download the beta here.

As a consumer of many podcasts, I was pleased to run across a local one that is entertaining and informative. It is strange to hear the word podcast spoken without an American accent!

The ZA Tech Show is an hour-long show with discussions focusing on tech and gadgets, but with a South African slant. The panel consists of a number of journalists and they’ve managed to keep their schedule up with four shows already produced. If you are looking to add another podcast to your player and have a keen interest in technology in a ZA context, I recommend you give the ZA Tech Show a try.

Today is Document Freedom Day and is intended to educate computer users about document liberation and open standards. The Open Document Format (ODF) is a ratified OSI standard. Microsoft’s attempt at having their XML format accepted is still in process.

Many large government departments, as well as private organizations have chosen to utilize productivity packages that support this open format. The benefits are the ability to collaborate without fear of incompatible formats or software products, freedom to select any operating system platform and freedom from legal or technical clauses that may impose restrictions governing the formats’ or software’s use.

For the home user, there are obvious benefits: no license or software costs and the assurance that documents created today or five months ago will still be usable in ten years time. So even if you have to use a specific vendor’s product, such as Microsoft Office, at work, you can still liberate your documents in a number of ways.

Download OpenOffice for your home systems and install a parallel copy on your desktop at the office. OpenOffice is able to read and write various formats, so the transition to ODF will be easy. OpenOffice is free to download, as are AbiWord, KOffice and NeoOffice.

Use Google Docs on the web and always have your documents available, regardless of your location.

If you’re still intent on using Microsoft Office, download the Sun ODF Plugin to enable your office suite to read and write ODF documents.

In the end, it’s your choice. But, at least you have one

You’ve made crappy copies of friends’ VHS tapes, pirated DVD material, taped and recorded from analogue and digital television sources and then resorted to the BitTorrent. No more. If you have sufficient bandwidth, the South Park creative team has made all its content available on the South Park Studios website for your enjoyment.

Seasons 1 to 12 are online, with the latest episodes being added as they’ve been screened on public broadcasting channels.

If the episodes aren’t enough to maintain your interest, there’s plenty of other crap to keep you busy: a brand new avatar creator with 4th graders, adults and Canadians. Thanks, Matt & Trey!

According to Wired, the Tesla Roadster may soon be available for sale in Europe. With the poor performance of the US Dollar, the Tesla is becoming increasingly expensive to sell in the US. Most components are sourced from Europe, with the main production facility based in the UK.

The Tesla sells for USD 98000. Not exactly chump-change.

Once they sort the position of the steering wheel out, some of these electric vehicles might even make it to our shores. Provided Eskom is capable of providing sufficient electricity to recharge them…

Hardy Heron, or Ubuntu 8.04, has made it to the beta phase and is available to download.

Some of the features in this release worth mentioning are GNOME 2.22, the inclusion of the latest Firefox 3 beta, Transmission BitTorrent client and the Vinagre VNC client.

Of note for those Windows users still debating the switch is Wubi: Wubi allows users to install and uninstall Ubuntu like any other Windows application. It does not require a dedicated partition, nor does it affect the existing bootloader, yet users can experience a dual-boot setup almost identical to a full installation. Wubi works with a physical CD or in stand-alone mode, by downloading an appropriate ISO to install from. It can be found on the root of the CD as Wubi.exe. A full installation within a dedicated partition is still recommended, but Wubi is a great way to try Ubuntu for a few days and weeks before committing dedicated disk resources.