Mind Circus

OK, so I’m lazy; I want to drop off a load of letters with a minimal amount of effort.

Now, for some bizarre reason, Royal Mail don’t have a Post Box finder on their site. All I can find is this page, which states:

Nothing could be simpler than dropping your mail into one of our Postboxes. There are 115,000 Postboxes nationwide, so wherever you find yourself, there’s one not too far away.

Cute. But why can’t you tell me how “not too far away” one is! You can tell me where my nearest Post Office is, so is it really that much more of a stretch to give me the closest postbox?

I wonder if there’s a social-networking-type website that maps out Post Boxes? I’m envisioning a Google Maps mash up type thing! Hmmm…

A friend of a friend just started work at Red Gate in Cambridge. I’ve heard about them before, when they won a Best Small Companies to Work For award last year; and from looking at their website, it’s clear to see why.

Here’s some things that stand out for me (and that a lot of companies can learn from):

• Their site is insanely easy to navigate - and crucially, it’s easy to identify where you are in the site infrastructure.
• The fact that Red Gate’s career pages give a completely transparent view inside the company.
• Red Gate has ethics, and gives back to the community - and helps employees to do so
• The principles behind the Feel Good Fund, not to mention things like Massages, yoga, and the feel good fridge!
• Red Gate has quiet areas. Open Plan offices are fantastic, but sometimes you just need to lock down and concentrate without any chance of interruption.

What do you think makes a good company?

Check out bbPress, a Bulletin Board application from the people behind WordPress.

I just discovered that the NSA publish a fair amount of Security guides on their website. Looks like some very interesting content - not to mention free

Found via Network Geek (which I found via Ma.tt)

To automatically download every hotfix released for Windows XP post Service Pack 2, just run this script. [Source site].

You’ll probably want to drop wget into your system32 directory before running the command, otherwise it’ll try to use your browser to individually download the files.

Once the script has finished, you can then integrate the hotfixes into your XP SP2 source and burn a bootable ISO using something like nLite. I’ll cover more options for integrating hotfixes in a later post.

The reasons for wanting to integrate post-SP2 hotfixes are numerous; but mainly, it saves time (using both WSUS and Microsoft Update take a while), and, overall, makes for a cleaner install.

It took me ages to find this via Google, so much kudos to Ross Smith for creating such a useful script. Thanks Ross!