Monthly Archives: February 2009

Politics

Snow Emergency Soliloquy

Saint Paul declared a Snow Emergency last night. I had to do some driving yesterday and I know how bad it was, so the snow emergency was a good thing.

For those of you out in the suburbs, I’ll explain that Saint Paul keeps snow emergencies simple so that anyone can handle them. The night of the snow emergency you move your car off of any street with a Night Plow sign. Between 6:am and 8:am you get up and move your car back to the Night Plow streets (which have already been cleared) so that the plows can finish their work. All done in less than 24 hours.

This morning my wife got up early and moved the cars, took my son to school, did some shopping, and came home to find that a Chrysler Steroid Le Behemoth had been left in front of our house. We have a double lot, but the plows had to skip our entire section of street because of this thing. That means that we had a big pile of plowed snow where we usually park, where neighbors usually park, where the folks who go to the church at the corner on Sunday usually park, etc.

Continue reading Snow Emergency Soliloquy →

geekgather

February Geek Gather

4 Comments

For those couple weeks every year it’s colder than a witches body part in a brass article of clothing, and every year we are surprised by it and curse the winter. But now it’s February and winter seems to have broken, even if only for a little bit. So come celebrate the Vulcan’s victory over King Boreas and his minions. Celebrate with microbrewed beer, great food, and Strawberry Lemonade.

Yes, I think we’ll go back to Chatterbox this time.

  • Geek Gather
  • 6:30pm
  • Tuesday 2009.02.10
  • Chatterbox Cafe, Saint Paul, MN

Directions are here Google Maps if anyone needs them.

And, believe it or not, we still don’t know who our second Senator is. How sad is that.

OS, Software, TechSupport

Alternative RDP client for Mac

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We’re looking for a replacement for the Mac RDP client.  We have one client whose clock is off no matter what in Outlook.  Using a Windows PC is not an option for various reasons.  Using parallels isn’t really an option.  This was tried and it created more calls for us than using something more native to OS X.  This user is on an x86 Macbook Pro laptop.  She has limited technical skills.  We are trying to make her life easier and simplify the process for her to connect to the terminal server farm where all of their data lives.  RDP6 for Mac (Remote Desktop Connection 2) is the best solution we have so far, but it still sometimes has issues with the timezone for her.  Lastly, using Entourage 2004/2008 or Mail is also not an option – the business owner does not want any local data to reside on any PC due to security concerns.

What we want to do is run the Windows binary of RDP5 or RDP6 on a Mac or more easily run the Linux rdesktop command with a GUI wraper.  I run this tool frequently from the command line or the GUI wrapper in Ubuntu or other distros and it works great.

Can someone with an Intel Mac try this:  http://desktopecho.com/iMKS/ and let me know how easy it is to setup and use?  It replaces TSClientX, an opensource GUI wrapper of the opensource RDP client.  TSClientX was awesome – a GUI wrapper to rdesktop.  Unfortunately it isn’t supported in 10.5 and the 10.5.5 or 10.5.4 update broke it (changes to the x11 environment I believe).  We want to see how easy it is to setup and use RDP, either the Linux tool or the Windows binary for RDP5 or RDP6.

The other thing we’d like to try is WINE:  http://wiki.winehq.org/MacOSX with a walkthrough here:  http://davidbaumgold.com/tutorials/wine-mac/.

The last time I looked, the Windows RDP5 binary worked.  RDP6 was not.  This may have changed as that was six months ago.

We have tried CoRD – http://cord.sourceforge.net/ – but it feels slower than Microsoft’s RDP method or rdesktop.