Aaron Tiensivu's Blog

I wasn't aware that something like that could happen.
I practically slept all day, unintentionally, and woke up right before SNL's TV Funhouse marathon.
Now I'm awake and really should be sleeping, but the stuff coming out of me is nasty.

If you are in need of comment anti-spam filtering, check out the new API provided by Akismet. If you use the Serendipity blogging software, you can easily integrate the API into your blog. You can read up on it more here: S9y blog talks about new API

My friend Jorge sent over a link to an amazingly little game. The concept is simple, but I'm pretty impressed with how fluid the swarm routine is. If anything, download it to check out how fast the swarm surrounds things. It is great mindless fun either way.

http://www.experimentalgameplay.com/game.php?112368

I typically enable this registry setting (or Group Policy, if it is more than one machine), when trying to debug problematic systems. This setting will show you more information as the system boots up and you log in, so instead of just seeing "Applying computer settings...", you will see much more information as each module/subsystem comes online.

It is particularly handy on Terminal Servers, but I have also used it on severely broken XP boxes. One thing worth noting though, is that some of the messages will reveal the default %WINDIR%, if you are nervous about that type of information disclosure on locked down systems.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\policies\system\

Create a DWORD called 'verbosestatus' and set it to '1'

More information, and where to specify this in a GPO, is here: KB 325376

Nelly Porter from Microsoft answered my many questions about the new RDP client features, in the newsgroups, and here is the info I was passed along:

[snip]

Aaron,

Public mode:


When the TS client is running in public mode it does not persist to disk or
the registry any private user data (e.g. username, domain, password, etc.)
on the machine which it is running, nor does it make use of any saved
private data that may exist (e.g. trusted sites list, persistent bitmap
cache, username, etc). In essence, the client operates as if there is no
registry or secondary storage present for private data. However, the client
still honors GP settings. To run the client in public mode, the /public
parameter is used:

mstsc /public

About /span and /h: /w: mode

Applications running in TS session can make use of additional monitors. For
example, if you have a large, high-resolution display for a CAD application,
the application can use monitord for output. That means you don't have to
worry about accidentally dragging windows onto that screen. For this
specific modes we

1. Limit Max Resolution to 4096x2048

2. No Dialog Repositioning, including win-logon dialog

Dialog repositioning ensures that dialogs appear in a user-defined location,
rather than in the center between two displays. For the /span mode we fully
rely on the user actions to reposition the dialogs to one of many possible
locations. As a side effect, the logon dialog can be difficult to locate and
use.

3. BBar or Connection Bar

When user starts remote session bbar is displayed with the logon screen.
Currently Bbar is positioned in the center and can eventually being outside
of the visible area of the screen, so when users would like to close the
remote session using bbar, they would have difficulties to locate closing
buttons. We scale bbar with the goal to center it on the primary monitor,
so user would be able to locate it and use any time.

4. Client Maximization option

If a client window is maximized, the screen is enlarged to cover all the
primary and secondary displays, if and only if the resolution of displays
are the same and their geometry is well positioned, it means the bottom
coordinates of both monitors are the same and the heights are the same.
Otherwise the maximized client window only enlarges to cover the display on
which it resides.

5. /span option

To automate correct maximize experience of the TS client window, the /span
option is introduced. It would automatically maximize TS client window,
instead of require users to calculate the sum of the width of their
monitors, the span option should be used. The span option would provide
convenient automatic way to maximize the client boundary windows to fit all
screens if and only if the geometry and resolution of all screens match.
/span option would hide the scrolling bar and would be very similar to
full-screen mode.

. when /span option is chosen or span:i:1 set in the rdp file, the
client would automatically start in maximize mode.

. /span option provides help to describe the option to user when
mstsc.exe would run on command line

. when both /span and /h: /w: options are present /span option
would take preference

. to override /span option in rdp file user should delete it or set
to 0, span:i:0

. when /span option is selected, the "Display" tab should have
grayed out slider for remote desktop size, so users would not be able to
change the initial setting and confuse themselves even more.

. /span option will not be saved to rdp file automatically

Thanks for asking, hope it helps.

Nelly

[snip]

3Com is announcing the end of sale of its wired Desktop and Server NICs effective April 10, 2006. 3Com is discontinuing the Affected NICs, as defined below, so we can better align our business with our corporate strategy of delivering Secure Converged Networks to the marketplace.

[/snip]

I remember "back in the day" when 3com was THE standard for ethernet cards on PCs. With Intel, Broadcom, and many others dominating the market these days, it makes sense for 3com to bow out. It is just a shame they let the others pass them by.

This reminds me of when I first met her.
After 2 kids, she was up to 36J.
Believe it or not, they actually make a bra that size.
The back problems should be gone now too.

For a limited time only. Use TS262 as the promo code to get the discount on exam 71-262. I think I am going to take this one since I've deployed LCS in the past and I always like "free" notches under my belt if I can get them.

Originally spotted here:
http://blogs.technet.com/jamesone/archive/2006/04/24/426161.aspx

Update: I'm scheduled May 8th

If the clock on your PC is set to the future, or way in the past, OGA will give you a terse error message stating:

"Error code: 0x8018110"
"Validation Incomplete."

Maybe it is vague on purpose, I'm not sure, but it is worth noting.

You can read more about it here: KB 918000

SBC/AT+T/corporate-conglomerate-of-the-month-name has about 25 routers in Michigan, Ohio and Indiana down today, with residential and business customers affected. You know it is construction season when fiber lines start getting cut in Michigan.

I'm not sure if that is the root cause of the outage but all I know is that it has made my morning a living hell with various businesses we support having problems with their connectivity. Without a redundent path to the Internet, I can't do much except wait for SBC to fix their connections.

I'm not having the best day today due to most of our machines at work having a lot of HP software that conflicts with the original release of MS06-15. I ended up creating a registry file as suggested in KB 918165 as a temporary workaround with the known bad Nvidia and HP entries. You can cut and paste this into a '918165-xp.reg' text file in Notepad and import it if you like:

[snip]

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Shell Extensions\Cached]
"{750FDF0E-2A26-11D1-A3EA-080036587F03} {000214E8-0000-0000-C000-000000000046} 0x401"=dword:00000001
"{A4DF5659-0801-4A60-9607-1C48695EFDA9} {000214E6-0000-0000-C000-000000000046} 0x401"=dword:00000001
"{1e9b04fb-f9e5-4718-997b-b8da88302a47} {000214e8-0000-0000-c000-000000000046} 0x401"=dword:00000001
"{1e9b04fb-f9e5-4718-997b-b8da88302a48} {000214e8-0000-0000-c000-000000000046} 0x401"=dword:00000001
"{1cdb2949-8f65-4355-8456-263e7c208a5d} {000214e6-0000-0000-c000-000000000046} 0x401"=dword:00000001

[/snip]

If you are running Windows 2000 and have trouble with the v1 release of MS06-15, you can simply remove the '0x401' from the end of those CLSID's because the calling conventions changes between the 2000 and XP kernel.

Note to self: Don't make a system change and reboot a machine 100+ miles away if it is having hard drive issues. Obviously, the system is back up again but I did end up with a little bit of egg on my face.

Thankfully, the hard drive hasn't died, yet. I'm working on getting a replacement. This is a bit of a 'community' server that is all run on donated hardware from various friends, so it isn't the most top of the line server, but it serves pages wonderfully when it works.

Thanks again Tom and Ron for getting the system online again!

Finally a use for those TPM chips that have been shipping in new laptops and desktops. One of the main functions of the chips is to add hardware support for DRM but one other aspect is to provide a secure hardware-based encryption chipset that can be used by software to encode/protect your bits.

You can still use BitLocker without TPM but it isn't considered as 'strong' as using a dongle combined with a TPM-enabled laptop/desktop. It looks like a lot of the shortcomings of EFS in Windows 2000 and 2003 are being addressed with BitLocker also.

A good step-by-step walkthru of BitLocker can be found here:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsvista/library/c61f2a12-8ae6-4957-b031-97b4d762cf31.mspx

The tinyURL version of that link is:
http://tinyurl.com/h4nc8

I'm not sure if it is supposed to or not, but it looks like you can force install the exFAT driver into Windows XP and 2003 installations. I'm not sure if this will work with newer Vista builds, but for testing out removable media between Vista and XP boxes, it can be a handy trick.

I'm sure it is extremely unsupported but I'm not keeping any mission critical data on any exFAT partitions yet anyway.

For the curious, exFAT is the new way to get around the 32GB FAT32 limitation in Windows (2TB in theory), which is not backwards compatible with FAT32, but is aimed to be simple enough to put onto embedded devices, cameras, etc.

I'm already on the Vista/Longhorn beta but this looks like it is a special group of testers that will be like a 'steering comittee' for the upcoming technologies.

Go here to apply:
http://blogs.technet.com/keithcombs/archive/2006/04/19/425635.aspx