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The trailer for Fahrenheit 9/11 is out.  Looks like it’ll be a great movie - hopefully as interesting as Bowling for Columbine was.

Myself and a number of co-workers entered the IntensIT competition here in Calgary.  The competition is designed for IT workers, the goal being to write as much of a complete system as possible within eight hours. 

We ended up taking 1st-place overall thanks entirely to the excellent meshing of our team.  I suppose this proves that methodology doesn’t matter whatsoever, but people do…  at least when you’re creating an entire system in eight hours, that is.

Oh yeah- using NUnit, NAnt, Draco.NET and CVS really do make your life easier when you’re under the gun.

You can see the other winners here.

Looks like Vorbis walloped WMA on the Multiformat listening test.

If you’re interested in how the test was run, Roberto Amorim has a page with all the details.

Personally I’m still using MP3s as my primary ripping format as it’s the format supported by pretty much every piece of software and hardware out there.  After this, I’m considering switching to Vorbis.  Unfortunately, I’ll have to give up my coveted iTunes at work unless I can find either a plug-in for Vorbis music or an iTunes clone (for Windows) that supports it.  Any hints?

The second-place winner,Musepack, is something I haven’t heard of until I saw the test results.

I’ve been playing around with Fedora Core 2’s Cyrus IMAP a bit and discovered the cyrus-imapd-nntp package.  This lets you export a shared IMAP folder via NNTP.  The cool part about this is that it’s a standard IMAP folder, like every user’s INBOX and custom folders.

This means that to set up a newsgroup, you only need to run cyradm and enter the following commands:

cm netnews.some.newsgroup  
setacl netnews.some.newsgroup group:users post

Assuming you’ve added newsprefix: netnews to your imapd.conf, this will add a new newsgroup “some.newsgroup” and give everyone post permissions.

Cool, eh?

The tricky part for me was figuring out how to actually connect to the Cyrus administration tools.  The secret was the reset the password for the “cyrus” account and connect with cyradm -u cyrus --admin=login localhost.

Not only was 1&1’s server hosting my site down for a few days, but they’ve managed to bring it up with incorrect permissions so that I can’t modify anything within it! 

At least it’s still accessible to the outside world.  Sigh.