I'm in crunch mode right now... wrote 2400 words today, another 4300 to get back on target (need to write 1167 words per day to make the 50k target at the end of the month).

Not an excuse, really, but this was a stupid work week with stupid little things …

So last year I participated in National Novel Writing Month but didn't pull it off. The idea is to go nuts and write a 50k word novel during the month of November. People all around the world do it, and it's quite fun but very time consuming and pretty crazy …

Every time you turn around someone is posting about, talking about, writing about, or otherwise having something to do with H1N1. While I get this is a new flu, and the media have a job to do in increasing sales and readership, the sheer volume of "OMG! H1N1!" is frightening …

This week's TechMail is Keep IMAP email messages locally using OfflineIMAP. OfflineIMAP is an extremely cool program that lets you treat IMAP mail as local with two-way synchronization. Works awesome with mutt and allows you to keep a local copy of stuff for grepping or using mairix with, etc. Good …

This past week's mac TechMail was Use Shimo to create VPN connections in Mac OS X which talks about using the Shimo VPN client tool on OS X. I've tried a few VPN clients to connect to a Cisco VPN, and Shimo is the one that works the best for …

This week's TechMail is Configure Apache to support multiple SSL sites on a single IP address which talks about the new SNI (Server Name Indication) feature in Apache 2.2.12. This is a really welcome feature as previously if you wanted more than one SSL-secured site, you needed more …

And this week's mac techmail is about one of my all-time favourite applications: Optimize your Mac experience with the LaunchBar multitasker. Launchbar is probably the first thing I install after the OS itself. I've been using it for years and can't live without it. It actually makes me sad that …

Last week's mac techmail was Get system display options with GeekTool for the Mac. GeekTool is one of my favourite tools for the mac. Kinda like Conky on Linux, but more flexible since you can have multiple windows all over the place doing various things (i.e. my GeekTool shows …

This week's TechMail is Setting up a Cisco VPN connection with Network Manager which shows just how easy it is to setup Fedora to connect to a Cisco VPN using Network Manager (other distros too, I suppose). Also mentions OpenVPN as well. At any rate, this is an introduction to …

This week's TechMail is Using Corkscrew to tunnel SSH over HTTP which talks about creating an SSH tunnel using HTTP and the Corkscrew tool. Very cool and interesting stuff. Fortunately I've never been in such a restrictive environment where I've needed to use it, but it's good to know in …