Aaron Tiensivu's Blog

Do you remember what you were doing the night of 3/1/95? If you had asked me this the other night, I wouldn't have had any idea. Digging through old clothes that I had stored away a long time ago, I came across quite a prized possession.

For the longest time, people never believed me when I said that the Dave Matthews Band played at the Michigan State Auditorium in the early 90s and I never had proof because I didn't have any ticket stubs or pictures from the show. The auditorium is tiny, which lends itself to intimate shows. I love small venue shows, and I tend to avoid enormo-dome shows like the plague because they seem so impersonal.

The prized possession I found was the RHASE 'STAFF' shirt from the show. RHASE stands for "Residence Halls Association Special Events". I had friends who organized these shows so I ended up working pretty much any show that came through East Lansing, even if I didn't particularly like the band. I remember seeing Widespread Panic, Phish, and a bunch of other bands that I wasn't particularly a fan of, but always had a good time.

DMB were on tour for 'Under the Table and Dreaming', Big Head Todd and the Monsters were on tour for 'Strategem' and Ugly Americans were on tour for their self-titled debut. I was blown away by how good the Ugly Americans were. Bob Schneider, their singer, is still out and about in Texas making music now. I ended up picking up their album soon after. I was mainly at the show that night to see Big Head Todd and they didn't disappoint. I was pretty impressed by DMB too.

Honestly, working those shows were a music lover's dream because you would see shows for free, get to arrive early and see the soundchecks, which typically resulted in hearing new songs or skeletons of songs that would be released later. During the DMB soundcheck, we ended up hearing songs that would end up on 'Crash'.

Everyone who worked the RHASE shows would get a unique shirt from the concert. Typically, you either ripped tickets or showed people to their seats, and didn't get paid, but we didn't really care about that. A lot of the same people would work the RHASE shows so it ended up becoming a fun social event. I remember lots of people during the Phish show tried to buy my shirt.

The same friends that were part of RHASE also worked at Impact 89FM, so through a strange chain of events, I ended up being able to DJ the station one night for about an hour. I have a recording of it somewhere and I was truly awful on the air, but at least I was able to play some Ramones, Reverend Horton Heat, Skunk, and a few other bands.

It is surprising how finding one shirt can trigger so many memories.

I still listen to all of Ugly American's CDs, and the same can be said for Big Head Todd. I still think his cover of Eric Clapton's "Forever Man" is better than the original.

http://www.iexbeta.com/wiki/index.php/Windows_Vista_RC_1_Hardware_Compatibility_List

http://www.iexbeta.com/wiki/index.php/Windows_Vista_Software_Compatibility_List

Also, if you want halfway decent Java support, you will want to go the Early Access section of Sun's site for the newer Java 6 JRE - http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/ea.jsp

A 21MB download. Do not try to install older versions - they won't work.

http://www.diskeeper.com/trialware/diskeeper/vistadownload.asp

I was near Allegan county on Friday, working on a project at a school, when the Forecast Fox extension and Weather Watcher program alerted me to the fact that Allegan county and Ottawa county both had tornado warnings. I wasn't too worried about Allegan but more concerned about Ottawa where my wife, kids, and house are.

As soon as that happened, 3 cell phones ring in the room. One of them was one of the admin people at the school, another was an IT intern (I think), and mine. All 3 calls were about the tornado warnings. Not 5 minutes later, the normally empty conference room filled with about 40 4th graders with books over their heads.

Soon after, the warnings expired and things went back to normal, although the running joke of the day was that "I better go grab some lunch now before any of the fast food places get blown away."

It did result in some cool photos that ended up on WOOD TV 8, including this one:

My only major gripe about Office 2007 so far is how much the programs hog screen real estate due to the new 'ribbon' feature. If you have a laptop that has a maximum resolution of 1024x768, the ribbon can really cramp your style.

Thankfully, you can enable and disable it with [Ctrl]-F1!

Office Excel 2007 with the ribbon:


Office Excel 2007 without the ribbon:

Consider this scenario, which tends to be very common:

You are a lawyer that sorts e-mail by client into subfolders of your Inbox. You recently migrated from Groupwise and would like to give your secretaries rights to the client folders in your Inbox subfolders.

As an example, let's say there are 50 lawyers in the firm and each lawyer handles around 200 clients. You can probably see where I am going with this - with Outlook currently, if you want to do template-based access rights that apply to subfolders, you need 3rd party products that cost more than Outlook itself. A good example is Symprex's Folder Permission Manager.

Ideally, I'd want a permissions model much like how Windows handles file permissions, where you can have inherited rights from the parent folders. I don't think it would be very easy to implement due to the way Exchange/Outlook stores permission values within the database structure, but those values could always become 'legacy' permissions with a brand new branched off permission structure.

Do not use non alpha or numerical characters ($!*%, etc.) in the password on 3Com wireless bridges. It is not supported, and fix requires you to open the wireless bridge, press the red button for 5 seconds to reset back to factory defaults.

I'm hoping a future firmware release removes this limitation. Most devices these days do not have that type of restriction anymore.

I removed the IPs and computer names to be safe, but obviously, there are a decent amount of machines on the network in this example screenshot that need updates. This network is a perfect candidate for the mobile virtual machine on my laptop, called WSUS-in-a-Box. It downloads the updates from our WSUS server when I'm at the office and when I am out and about, it can be used on any local network as a temporary WSUS server while I am there. Great for deploying new machines that are using older Ghost images or shipped from the factory with outdated updates.

If you have a free moment, send out some good vibes and thoughts for my uncle, Jeff Lambries. He's has stage 4 lung cancer and come to find out, all the arteries around his heart are clogged quite a bit.

If he wasn't so weakened from chemo and radiation, they would have cracked him open earlier in the week due to the severity of the blockages. They advised him not to do any surgery but he wants to get a few stints put in, but even that is very dangerous. There is a good chance he'll die on the table, so I'm kind of freaked out today.

Overall it is a gamble. I know I wouldn't want to walk around with a known timebomb in your chest. I think if I were him, I'd be doing the same thing his is right now. One of his daughters just had her first baby and another is getting married at the end of the year. I am really hoping he is around for that.

All in all, I'm really happy we had our huge July 4th party at the park earlier in the year with everyone gathered.

HTTPDisk lets you mount your ISOs located on a webserver as a local drive under Windows. I'm not sure how fast the performance is yet, but it is a very cool concept.

This little device driver/IFS is from the same guy who wrote FileDisk, which gives you Daemon Tools-ish support in a tiny package. Another cool IFS on the same page is the swapfs driver which lets you use Linux swap partitions as Windows swap drives without much hassle.

Homepage of HTTPDisk and other drivers

Common misconceptions about 'Exchange Push' in Exchange 2003 SP2:

#1. True, about 309 bytes worth of traffic goes back and forth between the phone and the server as a heartbeat signal. The default "rate" is 15 minutes but it auto tunes, so you probably will not see 309 bytes of traffic every 15 minutes for every mobile user. It isn't an e-mail "pull", but a "heartbeat", much like a clustered server checking availability.

#2. SMS is not used at all if you are using native Exchange support with Mobile 5.0 that has the Security and Messaging update on it. Before the update was available, some providers used SMS-piggybacking to give it pseudo-push support.

#3. Get the extended battery. With the standard battery, your phone will not last a full day under normal use. I don't have a Motorola Q personally, but it is a common theme I hear from everyone that owns one.

#4. It doesn't work. If people are telling you it doesn't work, they are most likely trying to sell you on a Blackberry solution, which is fine, but there is a lot of FUD out there.

I haven't seen it written about much but I've seen it on a few machines running Windows XP SP2. The most annoying part is that it affects my laptop quite a bit during the boot process. Anything network related will hang until RasMan finally launches, which typically will be 5 minutes after the system has booted and the desktop has been painted.

Once the service 'unsticks', everything works normally. I've tried to narrow down the causes but I haven't found anything telltale yet. Just curious if anyone else has had the same type of problem out there in the wild.

For now I've disabled the service because, for the most part, I'd rather have a working machine than the ability to dial out on a VPN connection.

I've always loved the Pentium M chip. It is a supercharged P3 core with bits of P4 sprinkled and retrofitted on top. Of course that is an overgeneralized overview, but considering the P4 was designed around RAMBUS and the P3 had trouble clocking above 1.2 Ghz, the Pentium M is quite a little wonderchip. People always wondered why I avoided the P4-M chips like the plague until they saw the battery life, performance and lack of burnt pants from the Centrino laptops.

Anyway, I've been following a very cool program that used to be called Centrino Hardware Control, but has branched out into more of an overall notebook performance package. My favorite feature overall is the ability to tune the voltages of the Pentium M chip based on what multiplier you have set.

Most people wouldn't care about this, but considering that I can tune down my 2Ghz Pentium M from 1.34V to 0.9V and have a rock solid machine is a great example of the yield Intel has developed with these chips. I know this isn't typical results overall, since this seems to be a special chip overall, but it definitely extends battery life nicely.

The program is also a good example of a .NET 2.0 application that doesn't work and feel like a "clunky" .NET program. I highly recommend it.

You can grab it from here.

One strange thing I have noticed is that if the CPU is running at 1.93 Ghz, it will interfere with CDMA data transfers and cell phone reception. At first I thought it was a fluke, but everytime the laptop is running at 'full blast' at or around 1.9 or 2.0 Ghz, which is near/within the PCM freq. range, cell phone data transfers will start dropping packets.

The HP laptop seems to have enough shielding on it, so it is a bit puzzling but it happens every time.

I'm still tweaking the 20x multiplier voltage settings. It seems a bit crashy around 1.1 volts and is very stable at 1.2 volts. I suspect there is a sweet spot somewhere in between. I'm just impressed that some of the nearby multipliers can go so low, voltagewise, without any problems.

I haven't seen it announced anywhere yet but it looks like the version 1.0 RC2 installation files for PowerShell/Monad are available thru KB 925228

If you ever plan on using Exchange 2007, you will want to get comfy/familiar with this scripting language. If you want to reduce the size of your VBScripts into scriptlets, you will want to look into this scripting language.

One of my favorite features is being able to traverse the registry as if it were a "drive", much like doing a "cd HKLM/Microsoft"

Edit: It looks like I jumped the gun on the release. The KB article was published to RSS before the actual web links went live, outside of the internal MS 'monad' website. As of 09/27/06, the files do seem to be online correctly.

The official announcement seems to be located here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/powershell/archive/2006/09/26/Windows_PowerShell_RC2_Now_Available.aspx

Apparently there is a bug in the MSGINA.SYS of Windows 2003 SP1 that will cause it to trim the working pages of Console 0 applications, which typically are system services, which can be a bad thing if you are running Exchange or SQL or anything else memory intensive.

Thankfully if your swapfile is getting saturated and/or running out of space, you can request this hotfix. I stumbled upon this KB due to the updated definitions in Exchange Best Practices. Another nice addition is that ExBPA can now scan to see if your systems are ready for Exchange 2007.

Plus, I just like using the term "SWAP FRENZY!"

Microsoft KB 905865