One might venture to ask, “Hey Karel, so what did you get out of today’s Novell seminar other than a T-shirt, a notepad, a pen, a demo CD and some pastries for breakfast?”

I’m so glad one asked. Novell’s latest version of ZENworks would make my job much more manageable, if not easier. The features I need are inventory, remote control and the ever-lovin’ application distribution. I can distribute apps now with the ZENworks 2 Starter Pack, but that version is no longer supported and has some serious flaws that I’ve been working around for years now.

The bad news is that I could never convince my local bosses to buy ZENworks for Desktops 3.2 or 4.0 when it comes out. The good news is that my boss at Corporate has been asking me about my opinions of ZENworks. Maybe I could lean on him a bit and make one of my dreams come true…

After hours and hours and hours of satisfying prerequisites and debugging compile errors, KDE 3.0.1 is sort-of installed on my Linux workstation at the office.

I’ll wait a while before tackling the rest of it. The base package took over an hour to compile, and I’d like to enjoy the use of my computer for a while before starting another huge session like that one.

If I had anything else of interest to post today, I would. Sorry. It was a Monday at the office, which means lots of small tedious uninteresting jobs that I won’t bore you with the telling of.

How to prove that a die-hard geek has turned into a devoted family man: Look at his Palm Pilot and see a grocery-list program installed.

We’re going to try out HandyShopper to see if it makes our grocery trips a little less chaotic. I’m sure Wendi is rolling her eyes at the prospect of using geek toys at the store, but I figure it beats spending a lot of time asking ourselves, “Now what is it we’re forgetting?”

So what else does a guy do with his massive taglines collection other than use it for random email signatures? Why, he grafts it into his website, of course. At the moment it’s just a raw text dump; given some free time I’ll turn it into something a little more appealing.

Yes, this is the kind of nonsense I just adore adding to my website. Deep down inside I’m probably very ashamed of myself.
Random quote generator

For the most part, I’m very pleased with the service I get from Invite.net. They might want to look into changing how they roll out new domains, however. By default, they provide a version of formmail.pl that is hugely susceptible to being used as a spam relay.

I discovered this, of course, when I found several dozen “undeliverable” notices in my mailbox this evening. Luckily, one of the offending messages included a link to the means of transmission. Otherwise I’d still be sitting here at home scratching my head in wonder. Instead I’ve simply taken the step of making all of the scripts Invite provided me with non-executable. I also renamed formmail.pl to be safe.

While a big chunk of blame lands on Invite for this snafu, it bears mentioning that I could and should have investigated and disabled any scripts I had no intention of using right when I first rolled out the website. Let this be a lesson to anyone who sets up hosting on someone else’s machine: Remove or disable anything you aren’t actually going to need. You never know which services and scripts are vulnerable to abuse.