Rand Wacker

Had a bit of weirdness today when posts that I entered with ecto (really good blogging client) would show up sometime in the future, while entries posted directly through MoveableType had the right time zone.

A quick Google search found that this is a known and recently fixed problem. Thought it would be useful to point out to people who may be unawares…

-Rand

Found a pointer to a great list of things you can do right now to help take control of this election. Excellent resource for those of us in a non-swing-state who want to feel a bit less powerless over the destiny that is evolving for us:

Hiding In Plain Sight: DO SOMETHING NOW

Thanks to John Perry Barlow for bringing this list to his large audience.

Gizmodo scores twice for me today, pointing out a new bluetooth mouse that meets my two-button-scroll-wheel criteria. I know there is an expensive (and big) Logitech mouse that could work, as well as a previously mentioned BTMouseJr. Seems like $80 is the baseline price for these things, which makes me think that I’m going to stick with my nice small Logitech USB mouse for when I’m on the road for long stretches.

Ohhhh, I’ve been looking for something like this for a while: headphones integrated directly in to a snowboard helmet. I’m actually less interested in the music aspects than the communications (walkie-talkie) features. I wonder if these things might fit in my current Giro helmet…

Via Gizmodo

Gotta love all the new releases for the holiday season. Gizmodo just pointed out a great-looking new mobile keyboard that would work with my Palm Tungsten T for email fun when I don’t want to take my full laptop. Looks like Think Outside is coming up with some great new products!

Do’oh! No Palm support until December 2004.

I don’t blog a lot about work, but today we released a product that I’ve been working pretty hard on for the past year: Mailstream Content Manager. (Excuse the marketing speak for a moment, but I think this product is pretty damn cool). Unlike all of the point solutions out there for spam and virus control, Mailstream Content Manager provides an integrated framework for message processing that ties together your choice of spam content filters, virus detection engines, and gives you a slew of ways to tie this all together to perform message processing and not just filtering.

For example, while some products out there can be configured to query against an LDAP server for a list of internal recipients, MCM lets you define complex processing that lets you use arbitrary LDAP queries, SQL queries, even web service queries to determine how messages should be manipulated. You can peak inside the attachments of a message and pull out text from PDFs, Office docs, HTML, search for elements inside those attachments and turn that in to new messages. You can implement complex logic based on where a message comes from, where it is going to, even based on if it is encrypted or not. All of this is defined using a web-based UI that has a dashboard to show you current message throughput and a breakdown of spam/virus/etc mail. Since it works as a milter you can plug it straight in to any sendmail installation, open source or commercial, and get instant control over the security of the mail passing through your gateway, in or out.

We also launched a snazzy new website, which I like very much.

For some reason, MT-Blacklist got a little over-zealous and wasn’t allowing any comments to be posted. I think I’ve fixed it now by trimming down my URL list quite a bit, but if you something goes funky in the future please feel free to let me know!

For a while now I’ve been considering applying to business school in order to augment my current career path on the Product Management/Marketing side of the house. After wes and a couple of other people mentioned it, I’ve been looking in to the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business Evening & Weekend Program. This three-year part-time program would be an ideal fit for my current work/life/etc schedule.

This evening I had the opportunity to visit an evening class entitled Managing Innovation and Change. I picked this course from a list of available visiting courses as it seemed like it would be the most interesting, especially considering some of the intellectual property issues I have been dealing with at work lately. I couldn’t have been more right. The entire discussion was very timely and very informative, I really got a lot out of it.

I know I should probably go back and check out a class that may not be as directly relevant to what I do today (like a Macroeconomics course or something), but tonight was a very compelling event to how useful and rewarding completing an MBA program might be for me.

Help! Using OSX on my Powerbook I regularly switch between using multiple monitors at home and at work, and then just the laptop screen when I’m other places. Problem is, sometimes I will create a window on a separate display, or somewhere further afield than the 1024×768 screen my laptop offers, then when I’m using the notebook on its own and try to open that document again the window is lost!

Finder clippings are notorious for this, as are a couple of non-mainstream apps I use for work (one of these kindly has a “Best Window Position” option. I know the windows are there cause Expose will show them to me, but I can grab them to move them. Any ideas?

Bruce Schneier has launched his own MT-powered weblog over at Schneier on Security.

As with all his books, newsletters, and articles, this site is loaded with fascinating, well-written articles. Now in a more convenient polling format!