Well… I didn’t plan any follow up to the earlier post called Computers are useless (showing our new printed ads concept). However things turned out so that the story has to be continued. My laptop IBM ThinkPad T41p starred in these ads as “useless computer” among garbage and in the trash bin apparently didn’t like it. Next morning after we printed them it died (simply turned off the screen and never turned back) and become literally useless right when I needed it (I was in the hotel in Helsinki preparing for ICT Week Helsinki exhibition).

Is it coincidence? Probably yes. But it’s really strange one. Be aware, computers might have a soul too.

What is it

SipBomber is sip-protocol testing tool for Linux originally developed by Metalink in 2003 for internal use and released later as GPL open source product.

What’s new in 0.8

Although we knew it was downloaded and used by thousands of developers, we received very little feedback on it and ceased support for this software. The old version (ie 0.7) can be found here. After the launch of this new website I found by looking into server log files that many people still want to download it. Therefore here it is again. The version is 0.8 and now it compiles fine with the latest gcc (tested with Fedora Core 4). If you managed to build 0.7 yourself you don’t need to download 0.8! Here are few links for those who know what to do:
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… without good software. This is the tagline we used in our new printed ads. Take a look and tell us what you think!

There is lighter version:

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Are you one of those people who like to work on many problems at a time? I’m the one. Do you think that multi-tasking is good? I know it is. The topic of human multitasking has always been treated important but there was an apparent boom recently caused by Intel’s trick with their HT technology allowing the same processor to do more under certain conditions.

If you look around you’ll find many people who insist that it is bad or very bad or considered harmful (beautifully as always put together by Joel Spolsky). I do respect them, their writing is good and their arguments are reasonable. You shouldn’t be eating, watching TV and programming all simultaneously. You can’t be productive chatting on MSN, writing two emails and helping your colleague with that tricky piece of code. The outcome is trivial. There are no doubts that multitasking is bad.

However there are different types of multitasking.

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It’s amazing that Metalink and Microsoft independently came to approximately the same conclusion in their slogans. Passion matters. I’m not sure who was the first but of course it’s very unlikely that Microsoft eyedropped their “Your Potential. Our Passion” from ours “Software with Passion”

Their slogan is more professional (are you surprised?). Apparently people care more about their potential than about the abstract ’software’. Still I’m happy to know that our thinking is somewhat alike to the world’s second software company vision.

Alex

This is an old story. Few years ago Microsoft decided to protect casual Outlook users from mail viruses and removed access to all potentially unsafe attachments with no GUI option to turn it back.

What a wonderful solution!

Anyways here is how you can turn it off.

1. Close your Outlook
2. Download this file
3. Launch it (just double-click on it)
4. When prompted “Are you sure…?” click “Yes”
5. Open Outlook and “bingo!” get your attachments

And the last thing. Never open executable files received from unknown recipient.

How it works

The ‘unlock_attachements.reg’ contains records for system registry which tell Outlook to remove .exe, .inf and .zip extensions from its dangerous files list. You can open this file in the notepad and modify it to add some other extensions (like .url).

Since I don’t know which Outlook version you are using I included necessary lines for all versions I know (if it doesn’t work for you — leave a comment with Outlook version and we’ll figure it out). This adds some unnecessary records to your registry but I’m sure you don’t care about extra 20 bytes on your HDD.

Happy Labor Day!
Alex

Intended audience

Anybody who wants to send a parcel to Russia from abroad.

Reason for writing

It’s not as easy as most people think and there is virtually no information which could help you to save money and nerves. This “how to” is intended to fulfill this gap.

Background

During the last few months we have been repeatedly facing the problem of getting stuff delivered from US to Russia (mostly different equipment we use to test the software we are developing), we tried all major courier companies (DHL, FedEx and UPS) and we had the full range of experiences. All said here is based on analyzing these cases i.e. package delivery from US to St Petersburg, Russia and may not fully apply to different situation (say London to Khabarovsk).

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