Aaron Tiensivu's Blog

This is a handy link to have if you suspect there might be an issue that needs fixing. Most likely, the items listed here are fixed in SP2 when it comes out, or you can request them for PSS.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;914962&sd=rss&spid=3198

In the past, this wasn't a built-in feature like it is for some other browsers, and I know people have been wanting this for a long time.

For all the coding details:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=254021

Bottom line: At some point in the near future, probably Firefox 2.0 I am guessing, tabs will have this feature.

If you want it today, use a trunk build if you want to see it live.

http://www.firewallleaktester.com/removewga.htm

Rationale: If you have a real copy of Windows, there is no reason to phone home everyday to Microsoft. I know any type of phoning home on my slow internet connection at home I can eliminate makes the household's internet connection better, especially if there are a few WGA'd machines there.

Stuff like this happens in all organizations, small or large. There is never a perfect company or a perfect job but this is a very interesting read into what is going on with Vista and the stumbles along the way. I am still a bit leery of the user interface changes, but the underlying core seems to be getting solid as time goes on.

I know the author is getting slammed by a lot of people, but I don't really think he puts the company in bad light overall, as long as you read it subjectively.

Either way, I recommend reading it, and the comments:

http://blogs.msdn.com/philipsu/archive/2006/06/14/631438.aspx

Hopefully, he isn't another person fired for something they said in their blog. That has always been the driving censor factor in anything I put online here. Dirty laundry is just that, every place has it. It doesn't mean it is a bad place to work overall.

Of course, if dirty laundry is piled up to the ceiling and there is nothing good overall, you work on changing it or you bail before it becomes the Titanic. Thankfully, things are pretty peachy where I am working at now, and I'm not writing that just because I know coworkers read this blog from time to time.

Tl;dr folks: Vista is late.

This is a truely nerdy pet peeve that I've had ever since cable companies have been using radio ads with modem 'sounds' for DSL. DSL does not use the same technology that the old analog modems used. My first modem, honest to god, was an old 300 baud modem that plugged into an Atari 400. I was living large once I upgraded to 1200 baud.

I even ended up getting one of the 'brand new' 14.4k Supra modems through their BBS sysop deal, before they went bankrupt for the first time. By the time I was middle school, I was able to get the ultra l33t US Robotics dual standard HST modems. I think I still have one or two that used to run Black Horizons BBS way back when.

Yep, BBSs, where the closest you got to World of Warcraft was cheesy, but so very cool at the time, BBS doors.
I remember hacking away in Pascal on the old Telegard 2.5j source code that leaked, which eventually spawned the Renegade BBS craze. Running Desqview so I could sort-of multitask on my machine while people used the BBS. Desqview/X was my first 'dive' into anything Unix-like, outside of KA9Q and dialing into modem banks using SLFP instead of SLIP because SLFP didn't require a username or password. SLIP ended up getting replaced eventually by PPP.

Before Telegard, I ran the BBS on an Atari 1024ST with a ported version of Citadel.

I think the best thing I ever did when I was 8 or 9 was solder on 48K of chips onto my Atari 400, so I had a grand total of 52k overall, depending on what dipswitch I used. Some software didn't like the last bank of RAM so you'd have to disable it down to 48K overall. My dad helped me with the project and the memory upgrade kit looked a lot like something you'd see on a modern day X-box mod-chip setup. I guess I was born to be a hardware hacker. I love doing stuff like that.

First hard drive? A 10MB Seagate connected to the same Atari 1040ST with the bastardized Atari version of SCSI in an external enclosure.

It is strange what memories an annoying radio commercial will trigger sometimes.

This is the software that this site runs on, although currently I have been running the daily snapshot builds due to the cool new features. v1.0 is a great starting point, but I'd seriously look into the v1.1 snapshots once you get comfy with the software because it is turning into quite a little package. If you aren't familiar with PHP or can't tolerate occasional bugs, stick with v1.0

http://blog.s9y.org/archives/129-Serendipity-1.0-released!.html

I'm not forgetting Beta 2 of Vista either. It has been a big week of patches and new releases.

The public beta release (build 8.0.0787) is newer than the last beta release I had installed (build 8.0.0689), and I suspect as time goes on those betas will expire and/or be locked out.

I've been uber-busy lately so I haven't had time to post must.

This is more fallout from the removal of the EMBED tags for Active-X due to the patent dispute. You will want to install this on your Exchange servers that host Outlook Web Access or else I have a feeling your help desk calls will start going up.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/911829

Also, if you are having trouble using IE 7 or Vista with OWA, or you have applied the May or June 2006 IE updates, you will run into this issue unless you install this KB.

There was an earlier build available previously, but it looks like it has been updated to a release candidate build.

http://www.microsoft.com/isaserver/2006/beta.mspx

If your system performance slows down over time, and you need to restart it to restore normal functionality, you are probably running into this issue with 'Save Content on Conversion Error'. It looks like Exchange never closes the file handles related to the saved contents.

There is a hotfix available for it though:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/917142

Windows Live Bookmarks, sort of, for Firefox.

Google Browser Sync

Using version 4.04 of multitail no longer goes into a spawn cycle when system logs rotate. The program author, Folkert van Heusden, contacted me in e-mail and sent me a version of 4.05 which I am also going to install shortly, but it looks like the fixes between version 4.00 and 4.04 did the trick!

Great program! Great author!
If this were an e-bay auction, "A++++++++"

I haven't seen this one firsthand but I've been mainly retiring Windows 2000 machines as fast as I can. Any hyperthreading support for 2000 has always been a bit of an afterthought/fix-up since hyperthreading didn't exist when 2000 was being programmed.

Thankfully, it is just a registry fix to return CPU temps to pre-Update Rollup temperatures.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;919521

I can't say enough good things about this program. One of my favorite features is that you can enable 'auto-whitelisting' for various people. For instance, someone calls your help desk and complains that they can't e-mail you due to their mail server being listed on a blacklist.

Easy. Enable the auto whitelisting and send the person that called an e-mail. They are automagically added and can now e-mail your company/server.

One of the other nice things about it is that it is not mail server software specific. At a bare minimum it just needs the Windows 2000 or Windows 2003 SMTP service since it registers itself into the event sink of the SMTP service. So, for instance, you could setup a little 2000 or 2003 box as your smarthost for your business, and have a qmail server, Exchange server, Domino server, and Postfix server sitting all behind the ORF software, in theory.

Typical installs are on top of Exchange 2003 server, or on another server outside of the Exchange server.

Either way, I can't say enough good things about the program.
I've had good conversations with Peter at Vamsoft over various bugs and fixes the past few years and they always get back to me quickly. I can't say that about a lot of other places.

Read more about it here:
http://www.vamsoft.com/orf/beta/

They also have an RSS feed here:
http://www.vamsoft.com/orf/rssnews.asp

This is a new one to me. A virus that encrypts your files and then demands you send money to the developer to decrypt your files. Obviously, a bad idea overall, and people are actively working on a 'crack' for the virus already.

More info here:
http://msmvps.com/blogs/harrywaldron/archive/2006/06/06/99618.aspx