Real World Computing

Last Friday night, we installed a new firewall to replace our "unsupported" Symantec model. A Bizarre Sense of Timing Curiously, we'd been complaining to Symantec for years about several of their systems and had been slowly ripping and replacing. Our complaints over their lack of interest in the firewall they sold us had been fairly strong over the last six months but had met with limited responses. I got a call out of the blue on Friday afternoon from "upper" management telling us that they were now committed to sorting out the firewall for us. I had to tell them that their firewall only had three hours of life left. I didn't feel guilty though. I don't think that anyone should be willing to tolerate a lack of service. A Simple Swap-over We cleverly timed the firewall swapover project to coincide with a weekend where there was a scheduled power outage. This meant that instead of having one firewall (point of failure) on site, we had two. We spent a w...

We've already looked at how to use the Blackberry as an e-book reader but what about when you're feeling particularly lazy? Talking books are the answer. You can use the inbuilt Blackberry Media Player but since it has limited capabilities, particularly for browsing (unless you use trickery), I prefer to use the free xPlayer . Recording your Book from an Existing CD If you've already got a talking book on CD, you can simply record it using Windows Media Player's RIP facility. These instructions refer to Windows Media Player 8, but you can use other versions and indeed other "rippers". Insert the CD into your CD-ROM Drive Click Cancel on the AudioCD Autorun Prompt (it's safer to do things manually) Start Windows Media Player Click on the Library Tab, then the Little Arrow beneath the word library, this pops up a menu. On the Menu, select More Options... This will display a dialog box. In the Dialog box, click the Rip Music Tab. Look at the Location to Ri...

I've had quite a bit of trouble figuring out what to do with some of the new social networking tools. I joined Facebook and Orkut at more or less the same time and for a while, I found Orkut easier to use. The problem with Facebook was that I was being inundated with application requests. Orkut didn't send me quite so many and it also integrated better with Google's set of apps. Now however, I find that I'm leaning more towards Facebook. There are a number of reasons for this but the Blackberry interface and the greater popularity of Facebook certainly play a major role. I've quickly learned to completely ignore all of those application requests, pokes and other things but respond to requests for friends. Why? Well, I'm not into popularity contests but once you've added a friend, it's easier to find them if you want to talk later. Interestingly enough, I've found that a lot of people on Facebook don't actively check their messages - or may...