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What happens when technology fails?
The other day when I was in Los Gatos for work, I stayed in a nice hotel that had electronic locks on all the rooms with what looked like no manual bypass. I went back to my room one of the days I was there and my key didn't work. I went to the front desk and asked to get a new key; the system wasn't working to generate a new key, so I had to be let in the room by the front desk clerk. He used an electronic master key. What would have happened if the master key didn't work? Would all the rooms unlock (I'd hope not)? How would people get in? Later when I went to get a new key, the system was working again, but I wonder how my card key got deactivated. Hmmm.
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What's that growing out of your ear?
More and more I see people with Bluetooth headsets hanging on their ears when they're walking around and even when they're eating. I think that this is extremely rude and completely unnecessary. However, people feel the need to talk on the phone wherever they happen to be. Bluetooth headsets are fine for the car and when you need to be handsfree, but it doesn't have to be a permanent fixture on your ear.
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OS X server - deceptively simple
The more I play with OS X server, the more I realize how much Apple tried to slap a GUI on open source stuff and was only moderately successful. Take for instance the WebDAV support. I can give access to a realm to various users and various groups. In my case, users have multiple short names, such as scottgruby and sgruby (I didn't set this server up). If I give my user access to a DAV realm by dragging it over, OS X server only gives access to the first short name assigned to the user and then even lets me edit the name which makes no sense because if I change the name, I no longer have access to it. I had a user have trouble with this, because she was using the second short name and not the first. Furthermore, OS X server does weird things with the DAV permissions such that even if you have read only access to various parts of a DAV volume, you can't browse it with a DAV client, i.e. the Finder or Transmit. Apple says this isn't a bug, but I disagree. Clearly they setup the Apache access permissions incorrectly making it a pain for users to access parts of a DAV volume. So unlike an AFP volume where a user can mount the top level and navigate to directories that he/she has permissions to view, the DAV implementation requires users to mount the particular folder they want access.
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Isn't this helpful?
I went to look for the gate for my trip to San Jose and saw the picture below. You'd think the airport would have a monitoring system to restart the machine running the monitors. The monitor next to this worked fine.