We’ve all done it: written an email that references “the attached file” and then forgotten to attach the attachment. Sometimes we realize this and send a second message, usually titled something like “I am an idiot!” with the attachment. Sometimes we don’t realize this, and get back a flurry of messages from our correspendents with subject lines like “You are an idiot!”.

When I was young and footloose and working at the Royal Ontario Museum translating FORTRAN programs into BASIC, and working, on the side, in Turbo Pascal, Gene Wilburn, the director of IT at the Museum, gave me a very useful programming trick: when you’re writing a program and have occasion (as one often does in Pascal) to use a curly bracket ({) which will later need to be closed, simply type, in advance, the closing bracket at the same time, and fill in the “middle” afterwards.

I’ve used this technique ever since, and it’s saved me a lot of hunting around trying to figure out where my mis-matched brackets are.

So in the spirit of Gene’s sage advice, I offer the following similar suggestion: when you are composing an email with an attachment, and you type the word “attached,” as you inevitably will, at that very second you should actually attach the file.

So the progression would go something like this:

Dear Bob,

I have attached

…and here you break and actually attach the file to the message, after which you continue…

the spreadsheet you requested.

Cheers,
Peter

Get into the habit of doing this, and you will never be called (or be forced to call yourself) an idiot again!

Apple’s Backup utility, which receives a lot of flack for requiring a .mac account to allow you to use it, even if you’re backing up to a local CD or DVD, is actually quite a useful and powerful tool.

I’m in the midst of recovering from a hard disk failure on my iMac, and I was able to back up everything important to a couple of DVDs before I lost total control of the beast.

Rather than backup up to some complicated, proprietary, compressed backup format that requires the original software to restore from, opening the DVD on my iBook reveals the files I backed up, in the original directory structure, ready for use.

Wonderful.

I have two machines, one connected to one ISP, the other connected to another ISP. Both machines have two Ethernet cards (aka NIC cards). I want to connect the two machines directly together so that traffic back and forth between them can go direct, rather than from one ISP to the other. How? Easy!

First, connect the second Ethernet card in each machine with a crossover cable. This is a regular Ethernet cable but for the fact that its “send” and “receive” wires are crossed over (this is an over-simplication, but it helps). When you go to the store to buy this cable, make sure you buy a crossover cable rather than a regular patch cable. As an alternative, you can plug both machines, using regular patch cables, into the same hub; the effect is the same.

Next, set up the network connection on the first machine’s second Ethernet card:

ifconfig eth1 192.168.1.1 netmask 255.255.255.0 up
route add -net 192.168.1.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 eth1

This assigns an IP address of 192.168.1.1 to the second Ethernet connection. This IP is of a special collection set aside for this “private” purpose; just don’t pick one at random!.

Next, do the same on the second machine:

ifconfig eth1 192.168.1.2 netmask 255.255.255.0 up
route add -net 192.168.1.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 eth1

Same deal here, but this machine gets an IP address of 192.168.1.2.

That’s it! At this point you should be able to ping 192.168.1.1 from 192.168.1.2 and vice versa.

I’ve just set up a couple of machines like this for polling day here on Prince Edward Island; both of them have gigabit Ethernet cards. You wouldn’t believe how fast files fly from one to the other!

I’m posting this here because most of what you’ll Google when searching for how to do this is instructions for connecting one machine to the Internet using a second machine’s existing Internet connection, and that’s not what this is about.

I’m assuming, by the way, that you’ve already handled getting the second Ethernet cards in each machine recognized and configured as eth1.

I have two webservers, on separate machines, on separate networks. They are identical. I want them to respond, in round-robin fashion, to the same domain name — host.domain.com. How do I set this up in DNS? Turns out it’s actually very easy:

host.domain.com  IN  A  192.168.1.1
host.domain.com  IN  A  10.1.10.1

The DNS server (BIND, in my case) will serve up the “next” IP address for host.domain.com every time it’s queried.

Takes 10 seconds to configure.

Brian Bauld graciously provided the following photo of the big Catherine Hennessey shindig on Saturday. You can shop Brian’s B-Line Books store as a measure of saying thanks.

Clockwise from the top-left, the photos are as follows:

• Brian’s wife Valerie (far-left), Susan Mackenzie talking with Paul and Jane Michael and Kim Devine.
• Valerie, Catherine Hennessey (in the hat), Karen Mair showing off her fantastic deal of a purse from the 70-mile Coastal Yard Sale, me.
• Catherine’s sister Betty, Catherine holding her shoes, purchased in Florence.
• Ivan Dowling singing up a storm (two onlookers unidentified).
• Ivan moves from singing to dancing while Catherine’s brother-in-law Claude (white golf shirt), several Orfords, and several anonymous guests look on.
• The Cake. Courtesy of the chefs at the Delta Hotel. Notice the flowing fruit river.
• An anonymous arm talking to Don Stewart, me, Gary Carroll (looking every inch like Cary Grant), Valerie, Susan Mackenzie, Jane Michael.

I have no problem whatsoever with the Governor General taking an entourage through Russia and environs and spending $1 million of our money to do so. However I do take exception to her comment, quoted in the Globe and Mail:

“I think the visit is important to the people who are coming… to show Canada as it really is,” Ms. Clarkson said.

I have no idea what Canada as it really is actually is, if fact I’m not sure such a concept could be done justice to. However I’m fairly confident that the Governor General’s entourage of intelligensia is not Canada as it really is, at least not in any way approaching a broad, honest reflection.

Let me note, for the record, that KCRW is an excellent radio station. I’ve been listening to their web stream almost constantly for the past week.

Our friends at Aliant [warning: crazy and confusing website] describe the Motorola V60c, in part, like this:

The 60c opens to show a large keypad, electro luminescent display and superior ear-to-mouth ratio.

Emphasis is mine.

Setting aside the question “what exactly does that mean?”, it occurs to me that the same description might be used to describe the qualities of a good lover.

Which is only appropriate, I suppose, as phones are sold more like sex than technology these days.

I was downloading an evaluation product from Real Networks this afternoon, and noticed, with some delight, the following section on the form I was required to fill out:

This may be the first honest evaluation form I’ve come across.

Every time I see the headline for this story, it reads “Phony teens hit Montague area.” I can’t get the image of a rowdy group of wannabe teenagers descending on Montague for some caper or another out of my mind.