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Paulolo has eaten enough and decides to show me what he’s made of!!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwKAt-XR0mY[/youtube]

my Costa Rican horse, Paulolo, didn’t like me very much!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qcr02XVM8M[/youtube]

Some of you may remember when I was sent to Madrid by my old employer. I had already planned a trip to Portugal with my father-in-law and his brother when I was informed that a customer needed an engineer in Spain. The dates coincided with my time in Portugal. I not only saved the frequent-flier miles I’d planned on using, but I earned many more! I felt like I’d won the lottery.

I ran across the pic above today at notesfrommadrid.com. It shows Madrid’s skyline as viewed from El Escorial, a town northwest of the city. While I was there, I worked in the Torre Picasso for a couple days, overlooking Real Madrid’s Bernabeu stadium. It was a ridiculously easy job, too. Ah, the memories!

I hate Microsoft crap. Most of you probably already know that.

Every time I need to do an ldap bind against AD, I end up banging my head against the wall for at least 10 minutes. Granted, I’m not much of a MS guy, or even an LDAP guru, but it seems to me that Microsoft might make it a bit easier to view the LDAP schema. Most external authentication services/tools that have to bind to AD need to know what the base DN is. Guess how many Windows admins I’ve run across that can answer that question? Try none.

In order to view the schema, you’re forced to use a couple tools from the Support CD, ldp.exe and/or adsiedit.msc. Guess how many Windows admins have these tools installed? Try none.

You may be able to use the built-in Active Directory to find this information, but I don’t think so. I’ve looked several times.

This post will serve two purposes. The first was to bitch about MS and/or Windows. I honestly don’t understand why people subject themselves to such madness. Moving on….

The second purpose is to document, once and for all, the command I need to search an LDAP schema from my linux laptop. Rather than google it, I’ll be able to refer here when I need to do this again.

ldapsearch -x -b dc=domain,dc=tld -D cn=Administrator,cn=Users,dc=domain,dc=tld -h x.x.x.x -W

Of course, the command needs to be tweaked to the AD environment in question.

You may be wondering why I hadn’t just documented this here before. Because I’m an idiot, that’s why!

UPDATE: I found a win32 command to display User DN’s:

dsquery user dc=domain,dc=tld

Check out the photos of Christmas Eve through our impromptu New Year’s Eve get-together last night!

(click the photo to go to the album)

I’m trying to re-purpose an Akimbo set-top box as a Mythtv frontend. I’ve gotten Ubuntu onto the hardware but I’m having some issues configuring X. Most of the problem stems from the fact that there is no vga out, only tv-out.

In an attempt to get X squared away, I’ve installed XFCE, with GDM as the desktop manager. But I realized that once GDM starts, I didn’t have a way to control the console. This guy gave me my answer.

First place is occupied by Hartford’s own La Paloma Sabanera. (here ya go, Luis, a little bit of Google juice for you). They’ve got it all: great friggin coffee, a cool atmosphere and free wifi.

Then, there’s Panera. They may not have the best coffee in the world, but this place is a traveling geek’s dream since they also offer free wifi. The agreement they flash in front of you before allowing access to the internet essentially says “Be courteous”, meaning don’t hog the big tables when we’re busy and you can stay as long as you like.

Even better, as I went up to the counter just now to order a coffee, the girl asked if I wanted it in a mug or a cup. I thought that odd since it was a couple minutes before 9pm, their closing time. When I pointed that out, she says “Oh we don’t kick anyone out…we’re here cleaning until at least 10pm anyway”. Man, that’s just awesome.

Take this as a lesson, Starbucks! You charge more for wifi as you do for your over-rated coffee and for that reason I’ve *always* headed to the nearest Panera when I’m on the road and in need of wifi. Bitches.