Laurel and I attended the Funky Town Halloween Party, hosted by Mark Lusher and his roommate, Matt. I was witness to some very interesting costumes, and hopefully they’ll be posted to the web site in the near future.

Also, Mark is going to have a new opening in his house beginning November near Little Five Points. The rent is only a hundred dollars more from what I pay now, and its convenient downtown location is making me seriously evaluate the offer.

Unable to change virtual machine power state: Failed to connect to peer process.

I’ve been struggling with this error message all day and haven’t yet found a resolution. I’ve already checked the usual suspects:

VMware Workstation 5.0.0 build-13124

barik@chronos:/usr/local/lib/vmware/bin$ ls -ld vmware-vmx
-r-sr-xr-x  1 root root 3636940 2005-10-25 22:12 vmware-vmx

But still I’m able to run everything successfully as root, I’m led to believe that there’s some sort of permissions problem somewhere.

This problem also appears under Gentoo, for entirely different reasons, which requires the following solution. After adding yourself to the vmware group:

chmod u+s /opt/vmware/lib/bin/vmware-vmx

Update: Hah, the solution was very anticlimactic. After running strace, it turns out that /var was out of disk space. I really need to learn to check for this situation first, before pulling my hair out.

What do you want to do with your life? It is not an easy question to answer, and you shouldn’t have to answer alone. Just discovered the 43 Things web site, and I’m already hooked. You’ve got space for 43 Things on your list for goals you want to accomplish, big or small. WordPress is also one of the supported weblog platforms, which makes me even more excited about making the eventual switch. And with tools like Flock, the "social Internet" is starting to look really exciting.

Just did a regular apt-get update and discovered that OpenOffice 2.0 has made it into Debian unstable. See the OpenOffice 2.0 Features for some new additions to this Microsoft Office alternative, including the OASIS Open Document format and XForms support.

Michael Earls has recently accepted a Developer Evangelist position from Microsoft right here in the Atlanta field office. Though Michael and I have a lot of obvious differences, I know that he’ll do great work. Since he’s no longer sitting on the sidelines, I hope that he’ll be able to influence some change from within to bring better, more compatible Microsoft products to the market, however indirectly.

Microsoft has done it again; I just discovered today that Microsoft has single-handedly managed to prevent S/MIME encryption from ever being used to send e-mail. While many accountants, lawyers, and other professionals use S/MIME signatures, most of their clients don’t.

But that’s okay. Most sane mail software products allow you to reply to a digitally signed message without signing it youself. Except Microsoft. When you try to reply to a digitally signed message, you get the following error:

You cannot send digitally signed messages because you do not have a digital ID for this account.

At this point you have two options. You can hit Get Digital ID, or Cancel. Cancel is certainly not what you want, so let’s try the first link, which takes you here. Lo and behold, it’s a broken URL. Most users at this point will assume that the e-mail message is simply broken and delete it.

If a client uses Outlook Express, they can reply to your message as they normally would, but first they must go to "Tools" in the File menu and uncheck the "Digitally Sign" option for the reply e-mail. They must do this for every digitally signed message. But I don’t see how any inexperienced user would know that they need to do this. And since we can’t tell whether a user has Outlook Express or not in advance, we can no longer use S/MIME to send messages.

There’s an even better solution though. Stop using boneheaded Microsoft products and get some real e-mail software. Sure, Microsoft may pay your bills now, but you’re digging your own grave in the long haul.

Update: To be fair, the full version of Microsoft Outlook does not exhibit this issue. But then again, it’s a commercial product. Also, there’s no official way to actually uninstall Outlook Express.

I thought it would be difficult to get Japanese fonts working under Debian, but it turned out to be quite simple:

apt-get install ttf-kochi-gothic
apt-get install ttf-kochi-mincho

As a test, try Yahoo Japan with Mozilla Firefox. Now I can go back to playing Sudoku in peace.

Candis and her sister Jessie once again both amazingly managed to win tickets to the Our Lady Peace 99X Live X performance. They played a few acoustic versions of their tracks from their newest album, Healthy in Paranoid Times, as well as some old favorites. Afterwards, we made a short stop to Cafe Intermezzo, whose steep coffee prices only amplified my search for a new job. Take a look at the 99X contests page for more free events.

Another month, another blogger meetup. This time, the folks met at Park Tavern near Piedmont Park. Lori made a scan of the napkin. Like last month, most of us are still unemployed, unhappy with our jobs, and a little poorer. Except for Mary, who will be richer than J.K Rowling because of her upcoming ThreadBared, the book. Welcome Chance, Rebekah, and Dave, to the Atlanta Bloggers.

Three explosive devices were found on the southeast side of Georgia Tech campus. The Georgia Tech newsroom has more details, as does 11 Alive. At least no one was hurt. I should probably make some witty remark about terrorism here, but meh. Vinny has provided a more detailed write-up of the affair.