BPI inside

Category: Uncategorized

  • Ambient illumination

    Long ago I began thinking about how we could illuminate our rooms when they’re finished.

    Of course, since I’m a science geek and care about environment, I immediately thought of lighting up using LEDs.

    My only problems on my way to ultimate enlightenment were the still low light yield and the high price of LEDs at that time.

    Recently these thoughts bubbled up in my mind again and I again began to investigate the possibilities of LED-illumination in my home.

    It seems, that the output of LEDs has increased in the meantime so that regular light could be replaced easily. But the price for this hasn’t lowered that much and I’m unsure if the energy-savings compensate for the initial investigation.

    Well, the only source for LEDs around here, although Germany isn’t quite "here" but at least it’s in Europe, I found is www.my-led.de. They even have lightbulb-replacements but I’m not willing to pay up to 60×80 for a single LED-bulb. And that’s just the price if I order 100 pieces at once. Well, they have smaller ones starting at ~10×80 for white ones but that’s still a bit high.

    I would also take the adventure and buy a bulk of raw LEDs and some metal and solder together my own stylish lamp, I’m just missing some ingredients right now:

    • cheap source of high-output LEDs
    • description how to create a power- and control-circuit for the LEDs

    If anyone can help me with one of those, please leave a comment and point me in the right direction.

  • Grow Cube, grow!

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  • Blog is up again

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  • Top 10 Freeware Tools for Windows – Addition

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  • Corporate Email Address Completion

    As almost everyone around here knows I’m refusing to use MS Outlook as my default mail client on my mail machine. Instead I’m currently running Mozilla Thunderbird.

    Altough aving absolutely zero problems with viruses, worms, trojans and spam I have two minor drawbacks:

    • No support for meeting requests and appointments
    • No automatic autocomplete of email-addresses, server-side

    Problem one doesn’t bother me so much, I only get such requests every now and then so I’m able to track them in my head alone. I already tried once to solve problem two years ago by utilizing LDAP with our Exchange server but failed gracefully. I was just left with a somewhat halfbaked manual solution. At least better than nothing at all.

    I was reminded on that issue when I read through the Mozille Thunderbird Beta 1 Release Notes. One of the new features is support for Kerberos Authentication and that reminded me of my issue in the past. Well, I decided to give LDAP another try…

    This time I didn’t contact our helpdesk, which can’t help me with most issues anyway, but investigated a bit more myself. Using an LDAP-browser I found out that our mailserver indeed provided some LDAP access but it didn’t show me the global recipients list. Guessing that it had something to do with my attempt to connect anonymously I tried some time to connect with propper authentication but couldn’t bring up a valid login on my own. So, back to the Internet searching about Active Directory, Exchange and how to connect with username and password by LDAP.

    During that search I stumbled over this comment in this blog.

    It’s explaining how to configure your Thunderbird to use Exchange’s LDAP interface for querying recipients mail addresses. There is quite some knowledge in this comment which I wouldn’t have found out in ages, if I only had found that comment earlier…

    Well, done it and voi’la, perfect! Automatic email-address completion in Thunderbird, wonderful.

    One sidenote: I tried this also with Thunderbird 1.0.7, but this didn’t work out. Perhaps there is some more trickery inside but since it works for my current version, I didn’t investigate further.

    To make it easier to locate the solution in the future, this is how it works, cited from the comment mentioned above:

    Here is how Mozilla/Thunderbird LDAP works with Exchange 2000-2003:

    • The default LDAP port for Active Directory is 3268 (not 389) so make sure you’ve got this port open thru the firewall, and make sure to configure it in your LDAP account settings in Mozilla/Thunderbird.
    • For Base DN, you MUST enter something like dc=yourdomain,dc=com (whereas Outlook Express lets you get away with putting NULL).
    • For Bind DN, you must enter a domain user which has permission to search the directory. You should enter it qualified by the NetBIOS domain name, for example: mydomainusername
    • For some reason, Thunderbird doesn’t always seem to recognize that it needs to log on before querying. The easiest, most reliable way I have found to force it is to go to the Offline tab in the Directory Server Properties and click the Download button. This function seems to "see" that Active Directory wants a logon, so Thunderbird will display the logon dialog to let you enter your domain credentials. For the username, specify exactly the same thing you put into Bind DN.
    • Results are returned asynchronously to the Thunderbird Address Book, so you might see "No matches found" immediately after clicking the Search button. Wait a few seconds, and your results should show up.
    • Mozilla and Thunderbird default to a Search Filter of (objectclass=*) which will return lots of useless (non-email address) entries from Active Directory. You can override this with something like (objectclass=person) on the Advanced tab of Directory Service Properties. Depending on what kinds of addresses are in your Active Directory, you may need to refine this filter more (for example, if you’ve got mail-enabled Public Folders which you want to display).
    • The Address Book UI in Thunderbird is just clumsy. You CANNOT search an LDAP directory by simply selecting it on the left hand side and then entering your search in the "Name or Email contains" textbox. You MUST click the Advanced button to define an LDAP search. After you find your desired address(es) in LDAP, you "should" be able to copy it to your local addresses but the stupid UI only lets you look at the Properties or add it to the recipient list for a new message (by clicking the Write button).

  • Revolution ahead

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  • Sign of Sanity

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  • Don't say you haven't been warned

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  • Katrina and environmental crimes

    Well, Katrina (Wikipedia link, article currently under rapid change) has caused massive devastation in southern US.

    This is an almost unbelievable human tragedy for all people in that region and has a large impact to the whole world.

    But I’m still missing some news or articles what ultimately causes the increase in environmental disasters in the last years and decades. No one (at least to my knowledge) has yet combined the effects of global warming on the roots of Katrina. It is well known, although many are still unaware of what that really means for us, that the global warming heavily affects nature and weather. Global warming increases the likelihood of disasters.

    Global warming is greatly aided by the US’ ignorance of environmental protection, see the US and Australia rejection, so in a sarcastic way one can say that the great industry nations are now a step closer on environmental suicide. It’s somehow their own fault, although we all have to suffer for those faults.

  • I’m runned over

    A bit more than a week ago I played Paintball with the people from our company.

    Yesterday another one organized a round of karting. Was fun too.

    But my body shape was not entirely appropiate for the strong karts we were driving. For one I did not properly fit into the seat and was shaking around in it all the time and for the other I’m not heavy enough to press the kart onto the ground as the other drivers and I lost grip very often. Thus I was the last one crossing the goal.

    Today I’ve a hurting back with a swollen spot which has the size of my hand.

    If I can choose next time which activity our group should attend, I’ll choose Paintball.