odrakir.com

Happy 2011!

May 2011 allows you to fulfill all your dreams and wishes.

In case you didn’t noticed, I’m now part of the best portuguese Tech Blog community – Planetgeek.org

Hey guys, am I the last member of 2010 or the first one of 2011? 😉

… but it’s now back from the grave.

I have a Macbook Pro built in 2008. It was the last “Discrete” model made before the “Unibody” model. Although it’s a great machine, the graphics card was the cursed Nvidia Geforce 8600M GT. Basically, I hade a time bomb inside my Mac, and by Murphy’s law, it should detonate on the worse day possible. Well, it did blow up. On the morning of last monday (27/12) may Mac screen was all garbled up, full of artifacts and no image on my second monitor. Reboot, battery off, resets, nothing worked. Powered up my netbook and surfed the web to find out that the behavior was consistent with the nvidia problem.

A few friends recommended me to take the Mac to Tou Aqui Tou Aí, an Apple Certified Assistance Center in Lisbon, but since I work on the other side of the Tejo, I decided to ask for a pickup at my place. 15 minutes after I pressed the submit button on the form, I received a call from them, scheduling the pickup for the same day. The next day I had the diagnostic confirmed and the hope that I might still be getting my Mac back this year, depending on when they would get a new logic board from Holland.

Yesterday I had the confirmation, by phone, that my Mac was ready and on my way. Today I got my mac, at 10:00, looking like sparkling new (yes, they cleaned it 😀 ) and at zero cost. Even the pickup and delivery was free of charge.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is SERVICE. It’s how every company should work and treat it’s clients.

Obrigado Tou Aqui Tou Aí

For me , as a gamer, arcades are one of the major symbols of gaming. A few years ago, arcades were one of the best ways to play great quality games, when consoles didn’t pack that much power. Who doesn’t remember playing their first Street Fighter match on a coin-op, or your first Sega Rally lap?

In Portugal, the arcades are dead. You can still find a Arcade Saloons but not many as you would in the 80’s and 90’s. And while this might be a world wide phenomena, Japan maintains their arcade tradition. These guys are working on a Japanese Arcade scene documentary and after seeing the trailer I wish it would be finished before fall 2011 🙂

100 YEN: The Japanese Arcade Experience from Brad Crawford on Vimeo.

I wrote a post a few months ago explaining briefly how to integrate a Squid proxy with a Microsoft Windows Active Directory.

While with Windows XP and Vista the single sign on works flawlessly, with Windows 7 it needs a little tweak.

You’ll need to change your a GPO on your AD:

Computer configuration > Policies > Windows Settings > Security Settings > Local Policies > Security Options

Find “Network Security: LAN MANAGER Authentication Level”
Set it to “Send LM * NTLM – use NTLMv2 session security if negotiated”

This happens because Squid uses NTLMv2 after version 2.6 but it is Negotiated NTLMv2, rather than
straight NTLMv2 (dunno why). Windows 7 refuses to negotiate by default and accepts only NTLMv2.

You might come across with other issues in some apps like having to authenticate manually, Dropbox is one example but there may be others.

As usual, do this at your own risk!