Baltimore Squirrels

Make Your Workstation Fit You:

Things to remember: Eye height should be level with top of the monitor screen. However, if using bi-focals, lower the monitor and tilt the screen upward to avoid neck strain. Elbow height should be level with the top of the keyboard. Seat height should allow your feet to rest flat while maintaining 90° at hips. See our Ergonomics Tips page to learn more.

Via Geeks Are Sexy.

It’s interesting to imagine the circumstances that make this kind of setup necessary:

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Some interesting reading over at Think or Thwim

Apparently Google is getting involved in this whole social bookmarking thing.

I normally don’t care about these things, and I think Google has been less impressive with their web software of late, but I still like their simplicity and lack of annoying bling.

Via Mashable (which always has very annoying MySpace layout ads at the bottom of their feeds. I don’t mind ads in feeds, but the fact that they are MySpace layout ads reminds me of the demographic they apparently think I’m in, which pisses me off.)

Here’s a nice little gem:

Now that the NY Times has discontinued their Times Select subscription program and made much more of their 150+ years of content available for anyone to read and link to, let’s take a look at some of the more notable items that the non-subscriber has been missing.

Items include the first mention of the internet in the Times in ‘93, the first mention of television in 1907, and even Lincoln’s assassination. Very cool.

Via Daring Fireball…

They have started blocking any streaming audio or video sites at work. I can understand why, there were a few of people using p2p software at some point, and a few who would listen to internet radio all day which would of course take up a fair portion of the bandwidth and slow things down for people connecting remotely via Citrix, making their work conditions even worse than they already were since they were required to connect remotely via Citrix.

Still, it sucks. It lowers the quality of life. It makes work just a smidgen less enjoyable knowing that I’m now enclosed in a parentally controlled internet environment. They are also blocking Craigslist.org but clearly the software they are using is written by a bunch of f-ing morons because subdomains to craigslist.org still work, like baltimore.craigslist.org. sigh I so hate the idiot world of Windows software… (And yes, I’m a snobbish geek.)

Luckily, some little gems are still available elsewhere:

A good explanation of a wiki for the non-techie:

I recently helped a friend (hello Sharon) setup a Wiki for the research department at work and was a bit surprised to learn that pretty much nobody knows what a wiki is…

I love the people I work with, but part of me wants to go find a nice job at a tech-savvy company, preferably Mac-based…

Bullies harassed the boy, called him a homosexual for wearing pink and threatened to beat him up, students said.

(…)

“I just figured enough was enough,” said Shepherd.

They went to a nearby discount store and bought 50 pink shirts, including tank tops, to wear to school the next day.

Aww…

Via Reddit

Interesting article by Joel Spolsky:

In the second stage, everybody bought PCs for their desks, and suddenly, programmers could poke text anywhere on the screen wily-nily, anywhere they wanted, any time they wanted, and you could actually read every keystroke from the users as they typed, so you could make a nice fast application that didn’t have to wait for you to hit SEND before the CPU could get involved. So, for example, you could make a word processor that automatically wrapped, moving a word down to the next line when the current line filled up. Right away. Oh my god. You can do that?

I think he takes an opportunity (later in the article) to kick Google in the shins for no good reason, but otherwise it’s a very interesting bit.

…or perhaps the Flamps?

Dave and Camilla were married under a Willow in Easton, Maryland this past Saturday. I was fortunate enough to be a bridesman for Camilla.

I’m quite happy for those two. Sadly, they are on their way back to South America (well, sadly for Baltimore, great for them).

When it comes to IIS (and pretty much anything on Windows) I know very, very little. This is mostly by design as it lends itself to much more plausible deniability when someone needs help fixing their computer.

Despite my efforts, I still have to interact with Windows on occasion. This week started out with one of those little interactions when I discovered I had to provide our network guys with an SSL certificate that I have been using in Linux for the past year. IIS didn’t seem to know what to do with the files I was using in Apache, and while Googling around helped a bit, I had to do some tweaking to get the magic command, which I will now document here for the sake of the hive mind:

openssl pkcs12 -export -out my_exported_cert.pfx -in my_cert.crt -inkey my_key.key -name 'My Certificate'

Where my_exported_cert.pfx is the file that IIS will be able to use, my_cert.crt is the certificate that Apache is using (SSLCertificateFile in Apache 2) and my_key.key is your key (SSLCertificateKeyFile in Apache 2).I’d tell you how to use the pfx file in IIS, but that part of this task wasn’t my job to complete.