"No Knobs"

Here is a great excerpt from the MIT paper entitled "The End of an Architectural Era (It's Time for a Complete Rewrite)":
"Current systems were built in an era where resources were incredibly expensive, and every computing system was watched over by a collection of wizards in white lab coats, responsible for the care, feeding, tuning, and optimization of the system. In that era, computers were expensive and people were cheap. Today we have the reverse. Personnel costs are the dominant expense in an IT shop."

Smart alarm clock?

Seth Godin made a brilliant post about alarm clocks recently:

"For twenty cents or so, alarm clock manufacturers can add a chip that not only knows the time (via a radio signal) but knows what day it is too. Which means that they can add a switch that says "weekends." Which means that the 98% of the population that doesn't want to wake up on the same time on weekends as they do on weekdays will be happier (and better rested.)

So why doesn't every alarm clock have this feature? Because most people in that business are busy doing their jobs (distribution, promotion, pricing, etc.), not busy making products that people actually want to buy--and talk about."

So why are alarm clocks stuck in a 10-20 year-old technology gap? Why don't they connect to your PC with a USB cable, and allow you to program them? If my GPS can receive MSN Direct (an FM radio-based digital service that includes weather, horoscopes, stocks, news, sports results and calendar notifications), why can't my alarm clock?

This is definitely a rift.

Here is someone who did something similar as a hack.

Generate PFX file at the command line

A PFX (Personal Information Exchange) file is packed in a standard file format called PKCS#12, and used by both Microsoft ISA and IIS products.

PKCS#12 format contains the certificate, private key, and all the CA's in a certificate chain. Here is how you generate it from the openssl command line:

1) Generate private key
openssl genrsa -out emeaextranet.lendlease.com.key 1024

2) Generate CSR
openssl req -new -key emeaextranet.lendlease.com.key -out emeaextranet.lendlease.com.csr

3) Get the certificate signed by CSA

4) Save the resulting signed certificate into a file.

4) Concatenate the private key and certificate into a new file.
cat emeaextranet.lendlease.com.key emeaextranet.lendlease.com.crt > emeaextranet.lendlease.com.jeff

5) Export the concatenated file in PFX format.
openssl pkcs12 -export -in emeaextranet.lendlease.com.jeff -out emeaextranet.lendlease.com.pfx

Sharepoint uploads timing out?

Add an execution timeout value for the upload.aspx page in the main web.config file.