Office Communicator and Linux

Posted: October 29th, 2009 | Author: | Tags: , , , , , | 1 Comment »

As with most things in tech, large companies catch on to the power of instant messaging late. Where I work is no exception. They rolled out Microsoft Office Communicator a couple of months ago (as a side note, that is a horrible landing page) and made much of the new and improved power of communication between employees. It’s a great thing that I can finally communicate using instant messaging, but the proprietary software threw a monkey in my desktop setup. After some research I found out how to get my desktop to connect to the Office Communicator server: Pidgin and SIPE.

First, I needed to install Pidgin

sudo apt-get install pidgin

Then, I installed the TLS plugin for Pidgin

sudo apt-get install pidgin-encryption

Now, the important piece of the puzzle was SIPE, which is needed to connect to proprietary server. I initially tried the usual

sudo apt-get install pidgin-sipe

But the version of SIPE available for jaunty was version 1.2-1 and it didn’t work. So, I went with the old school way of compiling my own binary. I got the code from here and followed the simple instructions on the same site. They are as follows:

tar -zxvf pidgin-sipe-1.7.0.tar.gz
cd pidgin-sipe-1.7.0
./configure --prefix=/usr/
make
sudo make install

Once installed, I started up Pidgin and after entering the necessary info connected successfully. You can see the detailed info of what I entered in the pictures below.
pidgin and ocs
pidgin and ocs


VIA Rail Website Failures

Posted: July 28th, 2009 | Author: | Tags: , , | 10 Comments »

via railSomeone at VIA didn’t think that introducing a 60% off sale would slow the site to a crawl. Since yesterday, their stunt (thanks to the strike) has made their site and all the services they offer through it inaccessible to the public.

I’ve been on their site for 2 days trying to get a ticket. During the day it’s non-responsive and even past midnight the site doesn’t function. I’m not sure if they thought about this rise in traffic. But in today’s world, this kind of weak infrastructure really looks bad on the organization, especially the guys greasing the wheels in the server room!

Here’s a thought guys: before you put out a call for a going-out-of-business sale, buy some bandwidth!


Twitter Has Come Of Age

Posted: May 5th, 2009 | Author: | Tags: , , | 7 Comments »


What’s the hottest new thing these days? Why it’s twitter! And where people are, the spammers will surely follow. Like the parasites of the internet ecosystem, they will find a way in. Then they will start hammering away, sending messages until they get a click here and a click there.

I woke up this morning to see that 5 or 6 people had started following me on twitter. When I went to their profile to check who they were I was greeted with the page below.

This can mean bad things because twitter’s sign up page has the standard anti-spam measure of captcha. So either the spammers are using sophisticated technology to get in, or they’ve outsourced the sign up process to a large number of human workers. I would prefer if it was the latter since it means there’s a limit to how much spam I will get. Although I remember a reading a while back that Gmail’s captcha was broken.


My Surfing Habits

Posted: February 26th, 2009 | Author: | Tags: , , , | 10 Comments »

Yesterday I was feeling a bit unproductive, and a bit guilty for not doing more during the work day. So I looked at my trends on Google Reader and realized I could improve by looking at its data.

weekly stats
So as the data above shows my websurfing is at its highest on Mondays after coming back from the weekend. This statistic makes sense to me, considering I don’t read any news over the weekends and I try to catch up on the news. But on the other hand, I think the opposite would be better for my productivity. Where I work getting the bulk of work done on Mondays and Tuesday is more beneficial and leaves me the rest of the week to debug and troubleshoot.

daily stats
This graph is a bit embarassing and I could do a lot to fix my work habits just based on this. Here’s what I see along with my excueses in italic:

  • I do most of my browsing during the work day. I guess it’s a form of a mental break at work!
  • At 9am and 10am I do a lot of websurfing, along with 12pm (during lunch) and at the end of the day. I just start my day a little slowly that’s all!
  • My surfing remains high during the work day and is never that high in the evenings. I prefer to chill at home!

So what’s the point? I’m not sure. Can you interpret these graphs?


Balatarin is back!

Posted: February 5th, 2009 | Author: | Tags: , , | 2 Comments »

Balatarin ( Farsi: بالاترین ) is a farsi website dedicated to social information sharing and link aggregation. This site is much like digg but mostly for the Iranian internet sphere. (wikipedia article)

A couple of days ago, the site was hacked (most likely their DNS or the registrar info) and suddenly the importance of this site to Iranian internet users became quite apparent.

Well, the good news is that the site owners have now gained control of the site. It will come back soon, but in the meantime here’s the message on the front page:

balatarin is back