Brian's Blog

I've finally gotten the pictures in the gallery from the 4th of July. There are a mess of pictures taken using Fireworks mode of the digital camera. This is the first time I've used this mode and the pics didn't turn out to bad. I'm not a photography expert but there has to be some way to make the pictures more sharp and less smeary. What you see is the result of the camera taking care of itself.

Well, when time permits I've decided to nuke the increasingly annoying Windows P install on my work laptop and put some sort of Linux on it. Probably Slackware. There are a couple of goals I want to meet other than the typical stuff. One of them is being able to quickly and easily change wireless networks. I roam about from place to place all day and it's often nice to just hop onto a customers wireless network than to try and find an open port. I'm thinking of just making a script that will do it but perhaps there is a nice utility to assist in the job? (Hint: Comments welcome) It'll probably be a couple of weeks at least until I have the time though.

Work also gave me an iPAQ h1940 to play with so that adds another goal, which I think I have worked out. To sync a PocketPC with Linux you need a couple of things. The first being Multisync which does the actual synchronization, and the other being Synce which is a plug-in for Multisync. The only catch in the entire thing is that it only syncs with Evolution, why can't it sync with Sunbird? Maybe it can and I just haven't found it yet.

Reviews of the greatest Linux distro (in my humble opinion anyway) seem to be terribly rare. I just found a nice one on Madpenguin that sums up things I've though on my own. Come to think of it, I can't say I've ever found a Slackware review that was bad that wasn't total BS. But then again, I am a little biased.

In my usual fashion of swinging between things in an almost extreme way I've once again gotten gaming on my mind. This time it's a Magic: The Gathering. For those who don't know, MTG is a collectible card game. As in it's a game where the game pieces have the potential to have value. In some rare cases, extreme value. For example, the single most valuable card ever printed is the Black Lotus which is going for $1000 to $2000 on ebay, depending on which edition it is. Way back when I was seriously into this stuff it was going for about $375 and I used to choke at that price for a piece of cardboard but now I wish I bought one or two of them. Unfortunately I just missed the last edition that this, and other expensive and powerful card were printed so I never had a chance to get one in a booster pack.

So, over the past couple of weeks I've been heading over to a local game shop called The Encounter. This is the kind of place you can walk in and generally find someone (usually kids) playing some sort of game. Unfortunately it's usually Yu-gi-oh but there are still many older MTG players there along with some Warhammer and I hear the occasional D&D. Watching those kids play I can say that the game has changed a lot over the past 5+ years that it's been since I looked at it. Actually, I'm not so sure I like the way the game is played now. It's almost too fast and relies on using cards in such a way as to be able to search through your library and pull out cards rather then using the luck of the draw and playing skill to win.

Tonight I'm heading over to an old friend that I haven't seen in years to play a little old school Magic for old time sake. It should be fun.

Well, I just had a rude discovery. I've been screwed, again, my Microsoft and their licensing methods. But first, some background. At work we have a couple of clients that use Terminal Services in Windows 2000 server. The way it works in 2000 is that every Windows OS you connect do that is Windows 2000 or newer gets a free license. So, the only thing you need to buy a license for is the odd ball Windows 98 system, and better OS's like MAC and Linux.

Well, Microsoft in their infinite wisdom, decided they weren't making enough money and took that away. The problem now is that you technically have to buy a TS CAL (Terminal Services Client Access License) for each device or user you have connecting to the Terminal Server, depending on what licensing mode you run in. Actually, that isn't 100% true. To add some unneeded complexity to keeping track of licenses, all copies of XP purchased after April 23, 2003 are grandfathered and get a license the way it used to work in the 2000 server. I find myself wondering, how the heck do they know when a particular copy of XP was purchased?

The reason I feel screwed is that there is a project planned for next week where we are planning on upgrading a Windows 2000 Server to Windows Server 2003. They have a publicly accessible database that clients access from their Window 2000/XP computers. Now, they will have to buy licenses, not for themselves, but for the number of people they think they will have connecting at any one time. And all this changed sometime without much fanfare to be discovered by me less then a week from the scheduled upgrade!

There is a minor up side though. In the new licensing model you can license per user instead of per device which should cut down significantly on the number of licenses they'd need to buy. But still, why does Microsoft have to make this stuff so complex? You almost need a specially trained expert to advice you on these sort of things.

I'm currently printing the 20+ page white paper so I can get a grip on this crap. I can think of a million things I'd rather be doing than trying to decipher Microsoft licensing. So much time and effort gets wasted doing work to help make Billy boy richer.