Switch Systems Blog

With the release of new 'script kiddie' software such as XRumer which looks like it can detect and get past a lot of captcha's. What can you do against it? Remember to change the image dimensions and other attributes from their default settings - this simple step greatly reduced the amount of spam on some of my forums.

After going through my xplsv.tv downloaded reels collection, I came across a few Magnetosphere movies, and found that the flight404.com guys have released an iTunes visualisation. Check out the video below for the result of one of their initial experiments using processing.

Short Royksopp experiment from flight404 and Vimeo. Beautiful.

Hot on the heels of Intel acquiring a $218.5m stake in VMware, the register reports that Cisco is purchasing a $150m stake in the rapidly growing virtualisation company. Virtualisation it seems is going to be very, very big (and understandably so).

You can now Sign Up to the BBC iPlayer beta program!

Catch up on the last 7 days of programming for free. It'll be interesting to see whether it's P2P like the Channel 4 client. Both Chanenl 4 On Demand and BBC iPlayer use windows media DRM.

Happy System Administrators Day everyone!

After playing about more with openVPN on windows, i've come up with some checkpoints that most users (i think) will come across:

• On the server, make sure you DO NOT have Routing and Remote Access enabled!
• Enable IP forwarding on the server so that your clients can access the rest of your network -
  1. Use Registry Editor (Regedt32.exe) to view the following registry key:
     HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters
  2. Set the following registry value:
     Value Name: IPEnableRouter
     Value type: REG_DWORD
     Value Data: 1
     NOTE: A value of 1 enables TCP/IP forwarding for all network connections installed and used by this computer.

Also check that your LAN has an appropriate static route to the VPN address range!

An article on apcmag says that in-flight broadband wifi will be available on it's new A380 planes, even in economy (which will also have laptop power sockets)! This is great for business travellers and regular passengers alike, plus premium economy seats also have USB charging sockets and RJ45.

I finally got Caller ID enabled on our phone line (and found a suitable modem which reports CLID correctly!). Why is this important? I'm writing software which will popup information on who's calling on my desktop whenever the phone rings!

We have YAC setup on our server, and i'm halfway through writing a windows application which will receive the YAC alert via TCP/IP and then do a MySQL database lookup on our Vtiger CRM system.

I've done a fair bit of work on this this afternoon, it now sits in the system tray and pops up an outlook2003/2007 style notification window when a call comes in, and clicking on this opens the CRM at the appropriate page. Opening up the main program window shows a list of calls received. I plan to extend this program, possibly doing things like :

• ini file configuration
• Logging and histories
• a 'has called X times' counter to the CRM database
• and also maybe a 'last called on XXXX/XX/XX' to the CRM database

Once finished, i'll release the software and source on the website.

I've been trying to find out why Outlook 2007 wasn't indexing my emails (if you run Windows Vista, Outlook will use the windows indexing service to index mailbox contents). In the end, it was the power settings on the computer here that stopped the indexing service from running in the background - change your power settings so that you're on max performance and the indexing service will rebuild at full speed.

I just bought a 2gb NW E015 from Comet (the display model, after them being unable to find a black model for 2 weeks...) and it's a great unit for £50. Whilst the display isn't quite as flashy as the OLED display on my old NW E507, the sound quality and build quality are top notch. The supplied headphones aren't bad, but most audiophiles will prefer something more expensive. It also has a sports mode (where you can set a timer and it will then play music for X number of minutes), and has the regular playlist/shuffle features. As with most sony walkmans, SonicStage is required to transfer music. The beautiful iRiver S10 has dropped in price to £89 but as I bought this to go in the car, the 30 hours battery life of the Sony swung my decision.

I finally got Office 2007 deployment working via group policies - turns out that the Domain Computer group wasn't allowed access to the 'SharedApps' directory on the server which is why the install was failing. Doh! I also made sure that I added the Shell MST file so that English (UK) was added instead of English (US). Why this would result in Office 2007 then being uninstalled from my Vista machine is beyond me, but it's all working properly now. Vista has a nice feature where it switches between your local desktop session and a virtual desktop session where the software is being installed, letting you reply to prompts and dialogs if needed without interrupting your main desktop session.

Woo! Back from a week of sunny Portugal. Not having a windows smart mobile, I had to make do with opening up IMAP on our mailserver and then using my mobile's built in email client to access works emails - which worked quite well! Cardiff airport has completely free WiFi available (checked it out with the DS web-browser), but the return journey from Faro airport had a hotspot which you have to pay for

Sysinternals have just released Active Directory Explorer 1.0, an advanced AD explorer with snapshot and compare facilities.

I'd heard about TrueCrypt before and never got round to trying it out, but recently a client has requested need for such a program. Setting the program to run in 'traveller mode', you can 'install' the software to a USB key / external hard drive (so that you can use it on any computer without having to install software) and then create an encrypted volume file (of any size). This file can then be made to auto-mount whenever the USB key/HD is inserted (by way of a simple autorun.inf). I've just tried it out, creating a 512mb encrypted partition on my 2gb pen drive and it's flawless!

E3 has officially started, news sites are slowly filling up with news and hype - Ars has reports coming in regularly, as does Shack News and Wired Notable news items:

• Beautiful Katamari - maybe not a 360 exclusive title?
• Gears of War [PC] details released