Nice but DIM

I'm going on holiday tomorrow. (Pauses to whoop gleefully.) This means setting up a holiday auto-responder on my email. Yeah, I know you folks all have your exchange-enabled outlook auto-responder wizard to do this, or your webmail can set it up with a few clicks. But for us old-fashioned types the thing to use is the vacation program. Originally developed by the near-mythical Eric Allman it's now being developed by Chris Samuel and Brian May. (Of Queen fame? Maybe, maybe not.) Download the source from Chris's site: http://www.csamuel.org/software/vacation if your flavour of linux doesn't provide it. (Hint: before it would compile, I had to "yum install gdbm-devel". Your mileage may vary.) Create a file in proper email format in your home directory, and call it .vacation.msg: From: you@yourdomain.co.uk (Your Full Name) Subject: I am on holiday Thanks for your email. Unfortunately, I am currently on holiday and so will probably not see (or reply to) your emai

I own a shiny new-model macbook pro, which I delight in very much. However, a couple of months ago I came across an initially very alarming problem which turned out to have a simple fix. I've finally got round to blogging about it in case anybody else should witness the same behaviour. Now, much as I love Apple's hardware and software, I sometimes find their decisions a bit arbitrary and annoying. For instance, they removed a perfectly good DVI port from their macbook pros and replaced it with the new mini-display-port thingy. This means I had to buy two adapters -- one for DVI monitors and another for good ol' VGA. Anyway, that is by-the-by. This story is about what happened when I connected a "big telly" to this preposterously tiny port on a fine day last August. I did this as I wanted to watch a DVD (the most excellent Lives of Others, since you ask). This procedure went well. When finished, I pulled out the displayport adapter. At this point, I noticed that th