Part of me wishes it would function as a JBOD array rather than the automatic protected storage system, but I'm sure that when a disk goes bad I'll be glad it's protected

Nothing sucks quite as hard as having to move... I suppose the blessing in Cayman is that 99% of rentals are furnished so you don't have to rent a truck and move all that heavy shit around. Still, all that packing and unpacking is a pain in the arse.

I realized that the biggest gripe I had was the memory size; 16gb. Then I realized that I had been making do with 1gb on the PSP, and had even stopped carrying the PSP with me on the plane because it was getting too be too much to carry around. The only plus for the PSP was that it also played games, but I haven't used it for that in over a year.

It turns out that I'm being actively blocked from downloading any content from XBL Marketplace because my IP address identifies me as residing outside of the US and A. That's right, region coding. "This content is intended for US residents only".

We've started receiving computers from Dell now with Vista Business edition on them. Fortunately it's only been ten so far and they're all Optiplex 755s, the new ones. Microsoft has a program in place to allow you to buy new machines with Vista Business stickers/COAs on them and then receive a free product code to "downgrade" it to XP, then when your company is ready to roll Vista out, you already have the license and don't have to pay anything to upgrade.

I got the usual screen, validation required, so I clicked on Validate Now and of course it couldn't run because I was using Firefox and it used an ActiveX control to test your system. At least it's smart enough now to recognize that you're using a browser other then IE and prompt you to download the plug-in for Firefox to allow it to run. I downloaded it, installed it, ran it and.. validation failed.

Yeah Yeah, I know. It's been five or six weeks now. I was on vacation last week, so I didn't do any running, plus I was waiting to get some new shoes as my old ones seemed to cause shin splints. I bought some new shoes while I was in Vancouver (enough shoes that I thought I was starting to grow a vagina and Bank of America actually called/emailed me and cut off my card because of "irregular activity" on the card! I hadn't bought shoes in 7 or 8 years, so I did actually need new ones. New Doc Marten's, new work shoes, and a new pair of trainers for running.

I tried on about 20 pairs of runners before narrowing it down to a pair of Asics, a pair of New Balance and a pair of Nikes. In the end I went for the Nike Air + Pegasus. They felt good AND they had the little hole in the bottom to put the Nike+ iPod transmitter. Being a nerd, I opted for the iPod integrated shoes. :)

I worked late last night and didn't go for a run, so I left early (6ish) while it was still light out, put the transmitter in the shoe, jacked in the receiver to my Nano and shoved it into my armband and went for a run. Unfortunately I didn't TURN ON THE WORKOUT so it didn't register anything! Bunch of arse.

It was kind of noticeable right from the beginning the difference between my seven year old gorilla-glued-together Adidas. My feet hurt, pretty bad at one point on the outsides of my feet but I wrote that off to "new shoes" and pressed on. No pain just below my knees like before, but I've also not been running for nearly two weeks. I could actually feel the springiness in my step. I also finished above pace and ended the last interval right by the Texaco in Hell. I'm hoping to run again Thursday and Saturday and start week two next week. Like I haven't said THAT before!

The problem arose when I tried to sysprep the machine. I ran Sysprep and got an error that said There is an incompatibility between this tool and the current operating system. WTF?!

I've been putting it off since November, but my laptop needed a "Windows do-over" from all the shit I installed, then un-installed and re-installed and crudded up. I kept putting it off because it's 18 months old and Im getting ready to sell it and get a new one while it still has a significant amount of warranty left. If I went through all the trouble of re-installing Windows NOW, I would just have to re-do it again when I sold the laptop.

Thursday I decided that this weekend I would bite the bullet, take the plunge, back up all my data and do it. I was out of commission last night so this morning I started the data consolidation between my laptop and desktop and moving stuff offline and finally did a Ghost image of the entire partition just in case.

I was ready to do the re-install. I wanted to use the built-in DSR thing which uses a version of Symantec Ghost re-branded as Dell System Restore. I couldn't remember the key-combination to launch it and finally found it on some message board or another as Ctrl-F11. I rebooted, waited for the BIOS screen to show up and pressed Ctrl-F11. Windows started booting. I poked it in the eye to hard-reset it (what do I care if I corrupt the Windows install at this point, right?) I tried it again, nothing. I tried Shift, Ctrl-Shift, Alt-Shift, Ctrl-Alt-Shift and nothing seeming to work. I was getting frustrated.

I went Googling to see if I was doing something wrong or maybe my partition had become corrupted or something, but I didn't think so. I read the directions very carefully. It said that once the BIOS screen shows up, you have about two seconds once the keyboard becomes active to press Ctrl-F11. Still nothing. Finally, just on a whim, I waited and on the NEXT screen, after the BIOS splash screen, I pressed Ctrl-F11 and suddenly it changed... it worked.

It was actually quite quick, it only took about four minutes to restore the partition compared to the 62 minutes it took to back it up first. I clicked the reboot button, it changed the MBR back to boot off the Windows partition and came up with the Dell Warranty/Service Tag screens, exactly how it came out of the box from the factory.

I stepped through the Windows Setup, named the computer, assigned an administrator password and that sorta sorta and then it came up to the desktop and opened the Start Menu. I saw the MSN Explorer icon on there along with Outlook Express and Windows Messenger, which I normally remove along with some other junk that comes with Windows. When I opened Add/Remove programs in the Control Panel, there was about two pages of shit that was pre-installed. Unlike the story that's getting a lot of press last week about the new Sony Vaio that had about 25% of the hard drive with crap and trial-ware, mine only had something called Photo Click. The rest of it was drivers, Dell System Restore, Intel PROSet wireless drivers or something. When I ordered this laptop, I specifically requested no crapware on it, and there was none on there. Still a lot of junk though. :)

SO, to avoid an hour or more of frustration, make sure you wait til you pass the Dell BIOS splash screen and it's on the SECOND screen before pressing Ctrl-F11 to get into the Dell System Restore partition.

Is anyone else getting a deluge of "I've added you as a friend of Facebook, blah blah blah" in the last week or so? This seems to be almost as annoying as the sms.ac "friends" site a couple years back that asked permission to look up your entire address book and IM buddy lists and then spammed them all to add you as a friend. Is MySpace dead already?

Who knows. If I set one up, I'll post the link to it here.

If you've never used multiple monitors before, try it. It's like going from a Honda Civic to a, well.. a Honda Accord. :) Within fifteen minutes (if it even takes that long) you'll wonder how you ever got along without it for so long. I have a single monitor at home, it's an Acer 22" widescreen, but at work I recently switched to a pair of 17" LCDs and the productivity increase is staggering.

Then there are crazy setups that take it to the nth degree. Rich has a setup with an Apple 30" Cinema widescreen flanked by a pair of Samsung 21" widescreens in portrait mode for something ridiculously crazy like 3600x1200 resolution. More and more people (developers mostly I guess but also flight sim enthusiasts) are setting up monitor rigs like this now that the prices of LCDs are coming down down down. Dell makes a 30" widescreen that actually beats the Apple Cinema in the specs department, yet is marginally cheaper (and if you throw something like techbargains.com into the mix for Dell discount coupons it gets even better).

Yesterday I was scanning through some of my rss feeds in Newsgator Online and there was a post by Scott Hanselman on his site about multiple monitor setups for developers. Usually most of the stuff on his website goes straight over my head, and I cherry-pick the little tidbits relating to HTPC, Xbox 360, PSP, Torrents and things like that but the one absolute GEM that I took away from his post yesterday about multiple monitors was for a little app called Ultramon. it "fixes" Windows (ie does something that Windows should do built-in) to let it better deal with multiple monitors. If only for allowing one wallpaper to stretch across both (or x-) many screens it would be a neat utility. The dealmaker though is the taskbar. It stretches the taskbar across all your screens, and whichever windows are open on THAT screen show up on THAT taskbar. There are some other cool tricks it does, but within seconds of installing the trial version and seeing the new taskbar on the other screen, that's worth the $30 price of admission right there.

I was in Florida again this weekend. Miami Int'l Boat Show AND Daytona 500 in S Florida jacking up hotel rates artificially again. Have I mentioned lately how much I hate yield management software? Sure it's great if you're the money-grubbing cocksmoker on the other side of it, but as a consumer, it sucks the bag.

I had the wrong time in my head for my flight back to Cayman from Fort Lauderdale. Fortunately it was later than I thought, not earlier than I thought! I decided since I was in FLL to go to Varsity Cycle, the Vespa dealer up there and poke around and see what kind of cool stuff they had. I couldn't remember where they were, and rather than drive up and down US1 for a couple hours I thought I would look it up.

The only problem was my Cingular SIM card for Miami doesn't have a data plan, and I didn't know what the connection settings were for my phone anyway. Then from some deep, dark recess in my mind I remembered that Google had an SMS service. I sat in the car after running into bed Bath & Beyond to pick up a baby frypan for Kendi and txt'd 'Vespa ft lauderdale' to 466453 (GOOGL3)

Within a minute I got two SMS messages back from Google with the name, address, phone number, etc for the two vespa dealers in Ft Lauderdale area: Varsity on US1 (the one I was thinking of) and Riva Cycle on Davie blvd just south of FLL int'l. How cool is that??

Boxing day sales are for chumps. Aside from spending all of Christmas Day and Boxing Day in the kitchen, I didn't have TIME to go out and brave the crowds shopping for things I don't need and can't fit in my suitcase anyway.

Tony got a Nintendo Wii a couple weeks ago when they came out. He paid someone to stand in line for him for 13 hours and got a Wii, Zelda Twilight Princess and an extra controller. He brought it over on Boxing day and we all took turns playing Wii Sports (the game that comes with) There are five sports on it: Baseball, Tennis, Golf, Boxing and Bowling. I didn't have the patience for baseball and only played a couple games on it. Tennis was fun but requires more practice. Golf was good, boxing was good (and worked up a sweat) but bowling was the best of the bunch. I went about nine rounds in four bouts with progressively tougher opponents (although the toughest guy I fought had a skill level of 250 of a possible 2000).

Bowling was the best for multiplayer though. We bowled a few frames in four player mode and had a really good time with it. You can maneouver your bowler back and forth on the boards, and then also vary your angle down the lane. Because of the accelerometers built into the Wii remote, you can also put spins on the ball as you follow-through. By moving a couple boards to the left, aiming for the far right corner of the lane and putting a spin on the throw, I was making the ball dance across the boards, Munson-style! On the second game of the night, I hit two strikes, then an 8-pin split, then four more strikes, and then another 8-pin split and then two more strikes and then I tanked the 10th frame and got a (family) record 196 points. Every time I threw a curving strike, I would throw my hands up in the air, Munson-style. When I got the Turkey for a triple strike, I grabbed my brother's piece of pizza off his plate and took a bite. My other brother, who "got" the reference to Kingpin started laughing his ass off and singing "Stayin Alive" by the Bee-Gees. I tried to do a front-split after that, but got about half way before it felt like I was going to burst my baby-making equipment and fell over. We were all laughing so hard we couldn't continue for about ten minutes.

As cool as Oblivion looks on the Xbox360, and with all the 1080i hi-def glory of the PS3, I think the Wii is going to blow both of them away because even though it's "only" 480p low-def graphics, the games are FUN to play. A gorgeous hi-def game that sucks is still a sucky game and that's what Sony and Microsoft got wrong with their consoles (aside from the blu-ray drive and the EXTERNAL HD-DVD drive for the 360).

I just sold my Xbox system with all the controllers (including the karaoke mic that plugs into the controller, too) just before xmas and I'll probably get a 360 later this year when Halo3 comes out. Hopefully by then the Xbox "preimum" bundle includes the HD-DVD drive internally and not as a clunky external. If I had the chance to have two consoles, I'd definately get the Wii just for the playability of the games, and the ease of just "picking it up" and playing when having friends over. It's just that easy.

We installed the Opera browser beta on the Wii and connected to the internet through my wireless network here and were surfing YouTube and making the videos full-screen on the TV. The relatively low-resolution made the videos look OK at such high screen sizes, and the text input was soooooooo much easier than on the PSP which practically works against you. My dad was able to pick up the Wiimote and play baseball and boxing with us, that's how easy it is. It's how things SHOULD work.

Wizmo is a neat little utility written by Steve Gibson, the guy who wrote Spinrite and Shields Up!. He's doing a podcast called Security Now! on the TWit network and while sometimes it's a bit dry, I'm usually able to listen to the whole thing through.

I'd heard about Wizmo before, read what it does and then moved along. It's a Swiss Army Knife for Windows. You run wizmo.exe either from the command line or as part of a desktop shortcut. After Wizmo.exe you put what they refer to in the notes as "action verbs". There are a bunch of action verbs available, and I believe that it's extensible, so you can write your own action verbs if you want. There's Wizmo Blackout which blacks out your screen (it doesn't turn it off, just blacks it out like a screensaver), wizmo blank starts your currently selected screen saver, wizmo standby to send your computer into standby mode (if it doesn't have a suspend button or it's not a laptop). Other commands are hibernate, logoff, exit, reboot, shutdown which are all self-explanatory, monoff which shuts your screen OFF into standby mode and gravitron, the GRC screensaver with all it's own settings.

The reason I was looking at it again was because my new monitor, my Acer AL2216WB 22" widescreen didn't always shut itself off. I don't know if it's something in the system tray, or maybe one of the Yahoo Desktop Widgets preventing it, but if I was laying in bed watching TV (either from my AverMedia Ultra300 USB tuner or uhh, recorded shows) I'd have to get up and push the button to shut off the monitor and go back to bed. How 1980...

I started searching Google for some way to programatically send a "standby" command to the monitor and two or three links down was Wizmo. WTF? Cool! I went back to GRC.com and downloaded it and configured a shortcut on my desktop to shut off the monitor. Now when I'm done, I fire up VNC, double click the Shutoff Monitor shortcut and close VNC and it's nice and dark and off I go to sleep.

A few months back, when the exploding dell and apple laptop batteries first started coming to the public attention, I wondered if my laptop would be affected. Eventually Dell set up a website to deal with it and published a list of PID's (part numbers basically) that were affected and subject to recall. I remember looking through the chart for my serial number, and it wasn't there. Great, no need to worry about my laptop catching fire and burning the building down while I was at work. I still left it unplugged while I was out though, just to be safe.

Two weeks ago, while I was on vacation, I noticed my laptop battery seemed to discharge pretty quickly. I know that batteries start to degrade over time, after about 500 discharges and charges, but I didn't think I was to that threshold yet. Rich's Dell Battery stopped charging when an internal counter hit 500 and just refused to ever work again.

When this laptop (Dell Inspiron 700m) was new, 18 months ago, I could last about 4.5 hours with the WiFi radio on and the screen at full brightness. It was pretty kick-ass. On the plane ride home from Vancouver, the battery died before I even finished watching a single DVD movie, with the screen brightness turned down a bit and the WiFi radio off. That was less than 50% of what it was when new. Not good. Within another week, I noticed it dying even quicker.

I unplugged it at 100% charge and carried it over to the bed and watched a TV show. 21 minutes later (gotta love no commercials) the battery said 46% remaining (1:20). I watched another episode.. at the end of that 21 minutes, the battery was 8%, the red x was over the battery and the little bubble popped up saying main battery very low, I should change battery or switch to AC power to avoid losing any work. Before I could GET the ac power, it dropped to 6% and then 4% when I plugged it back in. 42 minutes from full charge to "you should change your battery immediately to avoid losing work". Well that's no good at all.

I was on the phone with Dell Support (since this is part of Latin America, we get call centers in Panama with thick eSpanish accents... sometimes I WISH for Indian call centers... but I digress) the next day at work, making some claims for warranty work for some of the machines at work that piled up in the "fix" pile while I was away. I have to say that I've never had a "bad call" with Dell. It's under warranty, I explain the problem, and the new parts are out by UPS to their local supply chain partner and in my hands inside of about a week. Pretty friggin good. That's one of the reasons why we continue to buy Dell at work but again, I digress.

While I had the tech support rep on the phone, I asked about my laptop battery. He asked me for the serial number... which I didn't have. I explained the situation to him and he advised me to make sure the battery was fully charged, unplug it, turn it on and go to the BIOS and let it sit there on the BIOS screen and see how fast it discharges. I should make a note of it and call Dell Support with the service tag #, the battery serial number and the data collected by that little experiment. He informed me that Dell warranties their batteries for one year from purchase. Uh-oh, this machine is just over a year old... But I have CompleteCare, that covers it, right? If I drop the laptop over the side of the boat, so long as I dive down and get it, and have the carcass to give back to them, it's covered. Somewhere in the fine print is a sentence exempting batteries from CompleteCare, and spelling out that batteries only have a one year warranty. Yeesh.

Tonight I was sitting at my desk, deleting 650 or so splog trackbacks from my website, when suddenly the laptop powered off. No low battery warning, no windows is hibernating, no nothing, just powered off. I plugged it in and charged it back up and then shut down, unplugged and booted to the BIOS screen, just like they said. If it lasted a few hours, then I could look back at my process list and see if something was causing the processor to work at high utilization, generating heat, which requires the fans to spin and drain the battery quicker. No dice, it discharged completely to 0 and shut off in 46 minutes.

I went to support.dell.com and logged in to my Dell Premier Support account and punched in my service tag number. I selected "request support" and thought maybe I'd get lucky and they'd see that I have close to 1000 systems under my profile and throw me a frickin bone.. or a battery. Before I got that far, I got a popup saying I should check the Dell battery recall site as my laptop model number is one of the ones that are under recall. I already checked it a few months ago, but hey, what the heck, I HAD the battery serial number right in front of me already, so I punched it in and hit "submit". Lo and behold, I was told that my battery should be replaced immediately, fill this address info out and expect a new battery within 20 days. Sweet. I filled it out and sent it in and now just have to wait for a new battery to arrive.

The only WTF moment I had was "How many days have I left my laptop plugged in to the AC while I wasn't at home where this could have caught fire and burnt the whole building down???" yikes. I'll be unplugging and removing the battery from now on when I leave the house until I get the new one!

I'm just sayin... Saw this on Digg this morning and couldn't resist passing it on.

#2: Be direct. Geek guys tend to be in a shell. They are generally defensive and aloof. They aren't cold in the least; they're just extremely polite. Geeks tend to live by "do unto others". A geek guy who doesn't kiss you is worried about forcing himself. Grab him and plant one. Let him stagger and shake it off, but if he shows signs of recovering too quickly, grab him and plant one again. Subtlety and coyness completely fails with geeks; they'll be confused and expect that you're not on Pon Farr or are a nun or something. Where other guys need no provocation, a geek guy has to be brained on the noggin a couple of times, then he'll get the idea.

You can read the rest of Penguin Pete's tips here.

 

For the past few years, I've been using Cloudmark Spamnet for my spam-filtering needs. It works pretty darn well, too. Very rarely did any spam get into my inbox, and even more rarely did a real email get marked as spam. I think it was $39/year subscription, but I had the first year (of paid filtering) at half price because I was on the beta team for it.

The only problem I had with it is that it worked at the client level, when I checked my email through Outlook. If I was at work or on the road and went through Outlook Web Access, then I had to manually scan through all the spam looking for legitimate email. Not such a huge thing, but it put a huge damper on wanting to check my email on my phone, or heaven forbid setting up push email on Exchange 2003 SP2 to automatically send it to my phone, Crackberry-style

On average, I was getting about 500 spam messages per week. I would un-officially keep track of it by emptying the folder every Sunday night. Talking to Rich (who was hosting the server) the SMTP logs were in the neighborhood of 15-20mb PER DAY. That equated to over 60,000 SMTP connections per day. Yikes. That's WAY more than we get at work, where we're supporting over 350 mailboxes.

About a month ago, I noticed that a couple weeks in a row, the spam dropped to about 250-300, or almost half. I asked Rich if he had done anything and he said yes he was trying out Trend Micro ScanMail for Exchange and the Real-time connection blocking filter. Suddenly, the spam shot back up to 500+ per week. Turned out that the RBL was a 30 day free trial.

While I was at home last month for Ork's wedding (pics to follow, a few are on Flickr) Rich was telling me about a new service that he was going to try out, called Mailroute.net. Basically it's an SMTP proxy service. You change your MX records to point your email at their servers, they scan and filter it via a wholey crapload of virus engines and of course, spam filtering using various RBLs, DNS blacklists and even a Bayesian filter and lexical analysis. You configure your Exchange server to ONLY accept connections from Mailroute's IP range, and the ONLY emails you will get will be ones that have been 'scrubbed' by Mailroute.net. Of course, there's always an outside chance that one could get marked falsely as spam, so you can log in and review everything that's been quarantined for the last few days.

We turned it on for the Docjelly.com mail server last Thursday. Even taking into account the delay for DNS propagation, I noticed on Thursday that my mail volume dropped drastically. In the last seven days, I've had 43 emails come through from Mailroute and get tagged as spam by either Cloudmark or Outlook's built-in junkmail folder. Even being lazy with the math, that's only 10% of the email load the Exchange server has had to deal with, and that I've had to download. Suddenly, running Outlook in Exchange Client mode using RPC over HTTPS can work and Push Email comes into the realm of possibility (aside from not doing it because the Cable & Wireless data plans are too expensive)

So my spam has been reduced by over 90%, I've had no false positives and the Exchange logs dropped from 30mb per day to 6mb per day, and after pointing all the MX records to Mailroute's servers, the SMTP connection log has dropped to 600Kbytes. Not only does Mailroute work as advertised, but the decreased demands on the bandwidth, processor cycles and storage lower the return on investment time period. I don't know how long Mailroute has been in business, but I wish I had a solution like this five years ago. :)

When I came home from work today, I decided to go for a walk around the Safehaven golf course. It's 3800 meters, or just under 2.5 miles and takes me about 45 minutes. I end up getting back home just as the sun is setting, and after a quick rinse in the shower i'm ready to cook or go get some dinner.

To pass the time, I generally listen to my iPod while i'm walking. I have maybe a half dozen podcasts subscribed, and usually I listen to them while I'm working, but I find concentrating on listening to what people are saying, rather than just music, takes my mind off the exercise. I was listening to This Week In Tech tonight, which is four days old, but whatever. Usually they're right about on an hour long. I got home, and I looked at the iPod to see how far along I was so I could ffwd to there on iTunes and finish listening here while I checked my mail and whatnot.

What I didn't know that iTunes did that I instantly thought "now that's cool" is when I stuck the iPod in the dock and then double-clicked on the podcast, it started up at 52:13 automatically, right where I left off!

I just thought that was kinda cool and didn't know that iTunes did that. Now you know :)

 

Sweet mother of resolution! OK, Ok, it's not a full 1920x1200 HD resolution, but it's darned close. This is the new Acer AL2216W 22" widescreen monitor. I've been lusting after a 24" monitor for about a year now, since I saw Rich's monster 24" Samsung and then Dell dropped the price on their (then) 2405FPW to around $800. Then they came out with the 2407FPW and the lowest I've seen that drop to was $750 with free shipping. About two months ago I saw a post somewhere talking about this new 22" from Acer with some nice specs that was MSRP'd at just $399 US. That's practically pocket change!

I sold my 32" CRT TV and put the money aside for oneof these bad boys, but no one seemed to have it in stock or even know what I was talking about. Finally I found a listing for it at Insight so I called up our rep who takes care of our corporate orders and he looked into it for me. He called me back about 10 minutes later and said that they had 2000 of them in a container, but it hadn't been delivered yet. I gave him my CC# on the spot and it finally arrived on Monday. Bliss. It's big enough that when angled like it is in the picture, I have a big widescreen TV display when I'm in bed. Ignore the messy desk. :)

I do a lot of desktop support at work. That means I do a lot of drive re-imaging and re-installing of Windows. I used to rely heavily on Norton Ghost and Ghostcast server, so that when we got a new flock of machines, I could set one of them up the way we wanted it, run Sysprep and then make an image of the hard drive. Once I had that, I could use Ghostcast to push that image out to the other machines (the highest # of machines I ghosted at a time was 15, using a 16 port switch). It was a great solution, and if one of those machines got buggered with a virus or spyware, I could re-ghost it and have it back in service in about 25 minutes.

The downside of that is Windows XP's product code/licensing and now Windows Genuine Advantage. Every time I ghosted a machine and started the install process, it would not accept the XP license code that was on the sticker on the computer. Even if I got past that, the OS would not activate. That meant a phone call to Microsoft, waiting on hold forever and then getting the joy of trying to understand Sandeep or whoever was on duty in the call center in India. I would have to read them off a 25-digit code, then they would verify it, then they would read me back a 25-digit response code, I would verify it, punch it in and then it would activate ok. It was a colossal pain in the ass and drove me to looking for cracks and patches for XP on more than one occasion. Ultimately it got to the point where it was faster for me to install Windows from scratch, manually, and then download all the security patches and whatnot (last time I did it earlier this month, it was 54 updates worth abut 80megabytes of downloads) and then install our applications, join it to the domain and all that sort of thing. There had to be an easier way.

Fortunately there is. As I was Googling around, I came across this site who's title was Automatically Slipstream Windows XP with SP2 and All Post-SP2 Security Hotfixes with a Single Command. Sounds like just what I was looking for. On top of that, this guy Ross updates it every month after Patch Tuesday! He has a windows script/batch file that will copy all the files from your source CD, then download ALL the patches and slipstream them into the folder structure. It's a bit of manual labor/clicking, but it sure beats having to download all that crap everytime I have to do a reinstall. There's also a make file for if you have Cygwin installed to run the script, download the patches, verify the downloads using an MD5 hash, integrate them to the folder structure and then burn it to CD, all in one step. I figured I'd give that a try, I installed cygwin and it didn't work. Then I went back and reinstalled some of the packages for Cygwin, and it still didn't work. I finally gave up on Cygwin and the make script and went back to the Windows batch file, which worked. If you're a Linux command-line freak, Cygwin will probably work for you, but for me it's just one more reason why Linux just won't catch on for the mom n pops and grandmas.

The next step was to create a bootable floppy disc which, even in 2006, is still a pain in the ass and easy to screw up. I've done it before, but I couldn't remember exactly how to do it. I made about a half-dozen coasters last month trying before I "stopped and asked for directions". Enter The Elder Geek. I've been to his site both directly and ended up there from Google a few times in the past and he has good stuff there in simple, easy-to-understand steps (at least for me). His tutorial on making a bootable CD-Rom has instructions for both Roxio and Nero 6. I was using Nero 7, but the dialog boxes were close enough that I could figure it out. The reason I kept making coasters was that I had the "number of loaded sectors" set to the default of 1, and on the tutorial it says to make it 4, or they won't boot. What "number of loaded sectors" means, I have no idea and would not have thought to try and 2, 3 or 4 by trial-and-error. I burned the new image to a disc and popped it in a cow-orker's unsuspecting computer and the Windows XP autorun menu came up. Good, but I'd seen that before. I rebooted and saw the magic "Press any key to boot CD" message come up, pressed The AnyKey and saw the Windows Setup screen come up and start loading files. Woohoo! As I type, I'm making 3 more CDs so that two of us can do the install on two machines at once. Once Windows Setup finishes, there might be a few downloads left, but a few downloads is better than 80mb of downloads.

I can sit all day and talk hockey. Less so with football (NFL or CFL... how many teams are left in the CFL anyway? 4 or 5? not much of a league if you ask me). I watch the last couple weeks of NFL playoffs and the Super Bowl, I watch the World Series, I'll watch the NBA finals but can't possibly follow a whole season (especially baseball). I even watched the NCAA basketball tournament this year (and won the pool!) and sort of keep track of who's beating who for the last five or six years. Then there's soccer/football. Down here with the British influence, Premiership coverage in the sports pages are fairly prevalent (as are cricket and rugby) so it's always there on my back burner

This year of course was a World Cup year, and in 2004 before the hurricane I was following the Euro because it was a championship. (see above) This weekend are the first matches of the Premiership over in the UK. I'm just saying, now, before the season starts, that I'm putting my support behind Tottenham. Say what you want, that's where my support is going. This just could be "their year" (of course as a Canucks fan, I've been saying THAT since I grew my first pube) and if I'm right, then next year everybody will be wearing Spurs jerseys and saying that they've been fans all along...

Speaking of soccer, what's up with the Vancouver Whitecaps?? I remember going to their games at Empire Stadium when I was a kid, and then they played some games at BC Place in the mid-80s but then they (and the whole NASL) just sort of faded away. Now they're back, they're trying to build a new stadium, and who's the manager of the team, the guy pulling all the strings and greasing all the skids? None other than Bobby fucking Lenarduzzi! My first thought was "well no doubt, who else would?" but the second was "You GO, boy!"

Just a couple months ago I was saying to someone that I was getting "sports'd out" with Stanley Cup, NBA finals AND the World Cup going on all at once, but I think that was just a warm-up. NFL is in preseason, NHL training camp starts soon, World Series is coming up and the EPL starts this weekend, too.

On a somewhat related note, I downloaded and tried out Sage TV V5 the other day and it's stunningly gorgeous. The only problem was that it didn't recognize my TV Tuner, the AverMedia UltraTV USB300 so it made the whole exercise pointless. What with weird channels and weird times, I may have to upgrade to a PCI dual-tuner card and time-shift games to catch them all... or just spend more time in Legendz than I already do.

I saw this post on Gizmodo this morning about the US Navy's new deep diving suit that can work at depths up to 2000 feet. Ideally this suit would allow someone to get down to a stranded submarine in advance of the rescue sub to check things out and assist where neccessary.

“At 2,000 feet, I had topside turn off all the lights, and it was like a star show. The phosphorescence that was naturally in the water and in most of the sea life down there started to glow," Jackson said.

The Hardsuit 2000 was built by OceanWorks International in Vancouver (w00t! go Vancouver!) which I would further venture a guess that they're in North Vancouver and the guys who developed the NewtSuit as well.

Yup. I was right, they're in North Vancouver. I certified a couple of engineers from OceanWorks for their PADI Advanced Open Water Diver certs back in the day when I was living in Vancouver and teaching at Great Pacific Diving in North Van. 

For reasons unknown to me at this time, I've decided to start messing with my Linksys Routers again. I've posted before about it, about my trials and tribulations (mostly tribulations) about getting it to work. Getting WDS to work, trying to link an entire apartment building with Sveasoft's Alchemy and Talisman firmware, replacing the default rubber duckies on the main router with some higher gain antennas and then, when I thought I had everything set up and everyone in the complex was happy with their internet access, I'd realize that the VoIP would drop calls, or Xbox Live wouldn't work very well at all and we'd get our asses handed to us (faster than normal) in Halo 2.

Once that was all out of the way, then it was the Prismiq's turn to squawk. The Prismiq also only supported WEP and not WPA or WPA2 encryption, so my encryption was only WEP. I've given up on the Prismiq now, it's sitting on the floor behind the TV, unplugged. The SVideo and L-R audio cables that were plugged into it are sitting there looking lonely, but I plug my laptop into them now when I want to watch stuff on a bigger-than-12.1" screen. With that out of the way I can now move up to WPA encryption.

I'd also like to get the VPN endpoint set up so that when I wander into a random hotspot and connect to the big 'ole Internet, I can tunnel through to here and then go out from my router,keeping all my info that's transmitted to the public AP encrypted. QoS is also important, for the Packet8 phone and the Xbox, as well as making sure that any torrents that happen to be coming down don't choke out web surfing or emailing.

After using Sveasoft firmware for nearly a year, I'm switching to DD-WRT. It does everything I want it to, and has better documentation. One of the biggest sources of frustration was getting answers from the Sveasoft forum. If you had good search-fu you could find where someone else had already asked the same question you had, but more often than not, it was not answered by anyone, or answered by someone saying "it's been answered already. use the search function" and lots of messages from Sveasoft saying "it'll be fixed in the next version." "But when is that?" 'soon.' I still have the binaries I downloaded for my routers from Sveasoft, so I can always go back if I need to, but for now Im switching to DD-WRT. If you don't see me online for a few days, you'll know why :)

Notes on installing the Slingbox Media Player

Pucker factor: 9

We got eight new computers at work, all identical Dell Optiplexes that are going to one department. Generally what happens in situations like this is that one machine is opened up, started up, configured & apps installed and then I take a Ghost snapshot of the hard drive, and push that image out to the other machines using Ghostcast Server. That way we end up with 8 identical machines, and then Scripts and Group Policy futher refine the settings and restrictions on those machines based upon where they are going and who is going to be using them.

Since these ones are going to be going into a controlled environment where we want to absolutely minimize any downtime caused by people surfing the net on them and putting them at risk to drive-by downloads and other forms of crapware, we lock them down pretty tight.

On that note, I've been playing with the Microsoft Shared Computer Toolkit and it's pretty cool. You can lock down a machine so tight that it squeaks when it tries to fart. It's also geared towards computers that are operating alone, and not part of a domain. There's a whole chapter related to using the MSCT in a domain environment and I read over that this morning. Basically what you need to do is set the initial security settings on the machine (or the machine prior to imaging it in this case) and then use the included Administrative Template for Group Policy rather than the Shared Computer Toolkit interface.

So after talking it over with the other network admins this morning, I created a new Group Policy on our domain and called it “%machinename% Experimental Group Policy” and applied it to the machine name that I was working with. That way the changes and restrictions and lockdowns that I was experimenting with would ONLY be applied to that computer. That's where I made the fatal error.

In Windows 2003 Server SP1 and the 'new' Group Policy Management Console SP1, when you create a new policy, it defaults to the Authenticaed Users group (practically everyone). In this case, the ACL said Authenticated Users and machinename-01. I went about locking down machine-01 and testing it, not realizing that the changes I was making were affecting the entire domain, in every country we operate in. Bad. Very bad.

I realized that it was locked down too tight for one of our critical applications to work, so I backed off, and then backed off some more, testing each step to make sure it worked. After a few rounds of that, I noticed it was getting late and went for lunch. Second fatal error. By the time I got back from lunch, the changes had replicated to all the other servers and were trickling down to client machines.

I got an email from a user asking why their homepage had changed in Internet Explorer, but I was just getting back from lunch and ready to crack back into the testing of this new machine and didn't really clue in. I hit the Windows key on my keyboard to bring up the Start Menu... and it was blank. I had my last few programs opened, Internet Explorer and Outlook up at the top where they belong, but the only thing on the right-hand pane of the start menu was Administrative Tools. No Control Panel, no My Computer, no My Documents, no nothing. I thought to myself “that's weird, I don't remember making any changes to MY machine... and even went so far as to ask the other admins who was pulling my leg. No one fessed up, so I tried to open Group Policy Management Console to check it and change it back when I got a Windows Critical Error and the message “Access to the Microsoft Management Console has been disabled. Please see your Network Administrator”. Not good, I AM the network administrator, don't tell me to go ask myself! OK, well I'll VNC the console of the PDC... Log in there, hit Start Button... and it's empty.. To quote $imdb(Ralphie Parker) “Only I didn't say "Fudge." I said THE word, the big one, the queen-mother of dirty words, the "F-dash-dash-dash" word!”

That's when the email about the changed homepage popped back into my mind, and a frenzied attempt to get into GPMC via any DC in the datacenter and a phone call from another admin who had gone offsite about 20 mins before all happened at once. He was not amused when i told him what happened. We hit up Google with a passion, looking for a way to “un-fuck” ourselves. We found a couple things: registry keys, some obscure MS command-line tools, and ultimately, the same situation we found ourselves in and what saved our (mine especially) bacon in a newsgroup post. Someone had done exactly the same thing as me. His solution? He was lucky. As was I. The offsite location that the other admin was at had not been updated yet due to a slow WAN link. Getting in there and making the change to the GPO and saving it caused it to have a newer timestamp, and therefore it replicated ITSELF back to the network here rather than be overwritten itself by the “bad” GPO. If that had not happened, I would probably be on the phone with Microsoft for most of the night while the rest of the guys made plans to roll back the entire AD to a previous state.

We waited five minutes and then I got antsy so I did a gpupdate /force on my machine, and once it was refreshed, I hit the start button and everything was back to normal on my machine. After that I relaxed a little, and was still searching for a solution in case it ever happened again (not bloody likely) or it happened to someone else and asked me for help.

I found a message thread in Usenet/Google Groups about the same thing that I did. The solution that he found was the same thing that saved my ass: one of the other domain controllers hadn't updated yet. If it did, he would have been screwed. (as would I)

This could have been one of those COLOSSAL fuckups that define a career (or at least the downward trajectory of one) had it not been for a slow WAN link. It's one of those mistakes you only make once, as the fear of it actualy happening again/for real is SO MUCH that it will make you pause and check the settings every friggin time you go into Group Policy Management Console for the rest of your life.

In just 12 months, the RAZR has gone from vapor to release to ubiquitousness. Three times.

Along with the website outage I had yesterday due to hardware at the server end in Vancouver, we've been having problems with internet connectivity period down here. Wednesday night (when Wilma was making her closest brush to Cayman) Nat called me and was having trouble with DNS resolution (that's what happens when you type in www.docjelly.com and the network says “oh yeah, docjelly.com, here it's 216.whatever.whatever.whatever” and connects you to it). Since then, the internet has been up and down and up and down. When it's up, it's slow. When it's down, it's down.

People have been calling me non-stop for the last few days asking if I could come “fix” their internet connection and I've had to try and explain that it wasn't anything that I could fix, that it was a problem with Cable & Wireless. “But I have a cable modem from WestTel!” Yeah well, then I have to explain that Cable & Wireless owns the fiber that goes off the island, so any other ISPs that pop up still have to lease circuits fro C&W, so in effect they still have a monopoly, even though it was “dissolved” very publicly over the last couple years.

I started to wonder if something happened to the submarine fiber optic cable, since it got washed ashore during Hurricane Ivan last year. I didn't know where the other end of it went until today. There are three links: one from here to Cayman Brac, one from Cayman Brac to Jamaica (and from there I don't know where it goes) and then the other side of the link goes from Grand Cayman to.... Cancun! Yeah, Cancun. So that link has been knocked offline and the entire IP infrastructure for the Cayman Islands is now travelling over the backup link from here to Jamaica. So while we DO have connectivity, the speed of it is waaaaaay down. No real sense of when it can be repaired, either. Im guessing they havent even got anyone on-site that can assess the damage, nevermind when it can get fixed and put back online.

Bunch of arse.

been offline most of the day.

I put my webcam up if you wanna see what it looks like out my window.

long technical post about my media streaming stuff. skip if this sorta thing gives you headaches

Local TV & Gov't documentary about last year's Hurricane Ivan and it's effects in the Cayman Islands.

What the HELL does that mean???