I knew already that next week will suck. I just got confirmation:

Following a post from lifehacker, I decided to buy the jaikoz software (for 15 GDP). It took 6 whole days and a half of cpu at 100% (welcome to Java g), but now a good part of my tags are clean and I have proper artwork. Things won't look so messed up next time I put some music on my ipod ;)

Over the easter weekend we did an Active Directory migration in Quebec. Lots of work, lots of fun (g).

Had a ski day some weeks ago with the whole italian IT department. Exhausted at the end, since I hadn't been going for like 7/8 years (excluding a half-day skiing trip with Pietro a few years ago).

I kind of liked going back on the snow. Maybe next year I'll ask Santa for a new board. My 18-year old Mistral X-59 has served well, but it's time for a change ;)

If you get the following error on debian sid (Dec 2009):

!ENTRY org.eclipse.osgi 4 0 2009-12-13 16:37:36.790 !MESSAGE Application error !STACK 1 org.eclipse.swt.SWTError: XPCOM error -2147467262 at org.eclipse.swt.browser.Mozilla.error(Mozilla.java:1638) at org.eclipse.swt.browser.Mozilla.setText(Mozilla.java:1861) at org.eclipse.swt.browser.Browser.setText(Browser.java:737)

Just add the following to your eclipse.ini:

-Dorg.eclipse.swt.browser.XULRunnerPath=/usr/lib/xulrunner-1.9.1/xulrunner

For a number of reasons I need to be able to know which firewall is the active on in a Checkpoint cluster. I'd like to be notified when the active node switches to the secondary box. I did not finding anything like that around the net so I took one of the check_snmp_* scripts by Patrick Proy and adapted it. Now, I do own the Camel book, yet I've never been able to grow fond of the Perl language. You'll have to excuse my suckage in this script ;)

Here it is: http://michele.pupazzo.org/files/check_snmp_cpfw_ha.pl

Finished Chuck Pahlaniuk's last book. Quite difficult read given Pygmy's engrish but nonetheless I liked it a lot ;)

I'll note it here, may be it will be helpful for anyone receiving a similar request.

Had a rather weird request to convert a powerpoint presentation into a .scr screensaver executable. I tried with the many tools available on the net for that (mostly shareware, but paying was not an issue in this case), but had little success. Either they crashed, or they opened powerpoint without doing anything or didn't even start.

Changing approach proved to be helpful (although you lose the transitions and the animations):

1. Export the powerpoint presentation to multiple images

2. Convert the images to a flash animation using (http://www.flash-slideshow-maker.com/)

3. Convert the flash file to a .scr using Instantstorm (http://www.instantstorm.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=529)

4. Rejoice

Update

In the end I chose another way of doing it: convert the pps to pdf (either with Microsoft PDF addon or via PDFCreater and then use the swftools and pdf2swf)

This year due to a rather big Active Directory consolidation project, which will migrate different companies of the group to the same AD forest, I've been "reluctantly forced" to pick up more vbscript than I ever wanted to. The language clearly sucks beyond words, but life is hard and it's the only thing you get on all flavours of Windows. Here's a template that I will hopefully use in the future so at least all scripts will have the same skeleton