Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

Dinner on Friday night for pdcawley's birthday at Abeno in Museum Street. It's an okonomiyaki restaurant, serving what can best be described as a Japanese cross between a Spanish omelette and a large pancake.

The restaurant mixes up a batter of cabbage, egg and yam flour (with spring onions, ginger and tempura crumbs stirred in), adds all sorts of ingredients, ranging from pork, prawns or squid to lotus root, salmon, kimchi and kobe beef, and then cooks it all on the table in front of you. It's all rather good - and very filling (especially if you take the option with the added noodles). One of the starters was a small okonomiyaki with natto...

Natto is/are fermented soy beans. Apparently they're not very nice, so I'd been avoiding them up to now. However, I seemed to like them. In fact, I'd actually eaten them before, just without knowing what I was eating!

Ah well...

Server Management has had a web site redesign, and along with the new look, a change in policy. My monthly messaging column is now online!

Here's my July column:

Open an e-mail or receive an instant message (IM), and all you’ll see is an e-mail address and a name and perhaps a signature with extra information. So how can you ensure that the person at the other end of the line is who they say they are? In these days of e-mail distributed malware and phishing scams, the identity of the sender is more important than ever.

Digital signatures are one way of helping ensure message integrity. It’s easy enough to set one up to use with most common mail solutions – though there’s still no standard for signed instant messages. You’ll need a personal or a corporate digital certificate to create a digital signature as this allows your mail tool to certify that your message came from you or your business.

You'll find more here.

I've finally worked out why I'm now getting Aero Glass on one of my Windows Vista test beds, my Toshiba M200 Tablet PC. Its Nvidia Go5200 video card only has 32MB of on-board memory, so shouldn't meet the 128MB minimum video RAM requirement...

Surprisingly Nvidia has done something rather innovative with its latest Vista drivers, and the Go5200 now uses shared memory. Which means it can take a chunk of the tablet's 1GB of RAM, and bootstrap itself up into using Vista's high-end graphics modes.

A nifty hack.

The combination of Vista's search-based UI, Aero Glass, and the M400 Toshiba driver hack (and now the 2007 Office Beta 2 Technical Refresh) have given a nearly three year old laptop a new lease of life.

I still want a Core Duo Toshiba M400, though...

A climber on a wide face on the Calico Rocks.

Red Rock Canyon
March 2006