Aaron Tiensivu's Blog

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1.1. What's New In Fedora Core 5 test1

* Xen virtualisation software and yum package manager are now well integrated within the Fedora installer. The installer interface is more streamlined. Remote logging and improved support for tracebacks is included.
* Pup, a graphical updater using yum, has replaced rhn-applet.
* GNOME 2.12 and KDE 3.4 desktop environments are available.
* GNOME Power Manager and GNOME Screensaver are available as a technology preview within this release.
* OpenOffice.org 2.0 final release is included. OpenOffice.org now uses system versions for many of the libraries leading to increased performance and efficiency.
* Xorg X11R7 release candidate 2 has been included in this release. This is the first modular version, which helps in providing additional features and bug fixes at a faster pace.
* Kernel 2.6.14 is included. Software suspend is enabled in this release.
* SCIM has replaced IIMF in Fedora Core in this release.
* There are changes in the animated mouse cursor theme.
* Fedora Project now has a new logo.

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Hopefully it won't have the "Bloated Evlis" feel that FC3 and FC4 have. Even on a fast machine, FC3 and FC4 seemed to run a bit clunky.

Nothing says Happy Thanksgiving like a dead mouse in your furnace filter.

That's not what killed the furnace today though. A quick call to a furnace repair place with the LED diagnostic code, screw driver, and a couple Tim Allen 'More power' chants, and I had a working furnace again.

Lots of TTL based chips on a simple little breadboard on these Goodman furnaces, which I think got bought out by Amana. 6 LED flashes meant it had an open blowout (?) apparently. Resetting the switch on the blower did the trick, for about a half hour. After it had done that a few more times, which meant dismantling the whole side of the furnace each time, I made a 1am trip to Meijer's to get a replacement filter.

For being Black Friday, the place was empty, but I think the official sales don't start until 6am, which I'm thankful for. I try to avoid going out on the day after Thanksgiving. I'd much rather cocoon like a bargain basement Howard Hughes.

According to Consumer Reports, Goodman is on the bottom of the list for furnace reliability. If this *year old* furnace keeps breaking down (this is the 3rd time in less than a year), I'm biting the bullet and getting a different brand of furnace. Unfortunately, this is the furnace that came with the house. A brand new house. It is still under warranty for now, but I don't want to be stuck with a lemon and make these late night holiday emergency trips. It's supposed to be 96.6% efficient but I'm more concerned with "uptime" at this point.

I learned quite a bit about HVAC in the process, at least.

It is scary how she doesn't look 4 years old, but she really is. It is also scary how good of a photographer my wife is.

Reading this thing made my head hurt.
I have seen a lot of code like this though.

Apparently this has made the rounds around the Internet but it is the first time I've seen it.
It's a nice HOWTO on writing unmanagable code.

Yep, unmanagable.

http://thc.org/root/phun/unmaintain.html

This was my favorite:

void* Realocate(void*buf, int os, int ns)
{

void*temp;
temp = malloc(os);
memcpy((void*)temp, (void*)buf, os);
free(buf);
buf = malloc(ns);
memset(buf, 0, ns);
memcpy((void*)buf, (void*)temp, ns);
return buf;

}

I've seen this on a few Exchange servers now and it is a bit strange. Something tells me that either the setup program doesn't check the right spots, or possibly some post-SP1 hotfixes register a few IMF registry entries when they really shouldn't.

I haven't narrowed down the reasons why, since it is easy to just install the old IMF for real, then go right back into Add/Remove Programs and remove IMF for good. That seems to make the SP2 setup installer happy.

Very strange. I'm sure someone somewhere knows why, and if I had time, I'd run the setup program thru regmon to see which keys it is querying.

This is just plain neat and clever. I found it at: http://terminal.servebeer.com/php/reset_winstations.php

For /f "tokens=2" %i in ('QWinSta ^| Find /i "listen"') Do Echo y | RWinSta %i

In a perfect world, spammers would get caught, go to jail, and share a cell with many men who have enlarged their penis, taken Viagra and are looking for a new relationship.

As seen on bash.org

Oh, and they would have also worked from home, and just refinanced their mortgage, while high on all the drugs they got from overseas pharmacies.

Yep. Totally.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/downloads/activesync41.mspx

Hopefully, this version works with Windows Mobile 2005 on Axim X50v devices. I could never get 4.0 to work properly.

I've run into this a few times I believe. It tends to show up more with VPN links and when there are varying MTU values along the way, between client and server.

Setting MTU to 576 on the server fixes it for everyone but that kills large window packet performance - so this is a much better fix.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/898060

This is just plain cool. I wish more bands did stuff like this, or should I say, were allowed to do this.

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BARENAKED ON A STICK! ... is a USB flash memory drive containing songs, videos, and exclusive content from the Barenaked Ladies, and will go on sale November 22, 2005! Essential for any BNL fan's collection, the 128mg USB flash memory drive (about the size of your pinky finger) is a fast and easy way to share music, videos, pictures and other data. It is PC/Mac compatible, re-usable and incredibly low priced at $29.98 (close to the same cost of the device on its own with no special content). It will be available on Amazon.com and Werkshop.com (Nettwerk's online merchandise store), and will also be sold at all BNL shows this winter.

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Excellent collection of information right here:
http://www.3dvelocity.com/articles/win64compatibility/win64softlist.htmhttp://www.3dvelocity.com/articles/win64compatibility/win64softlist.htm

HP is playing catch up with Citrix and Windows 2003 SP1, but this driver will be quite handy for servers out there running Terminal Services on Windows 2000 and/or Windows 2003 RTM.

It's too bad they didn't make a driver like this around the time NT4 TSE came out. I honestly think Terminal Services would be more popular today if the printer subsystem didn't have such a black eye in terms of management and issues. Sure, it's not HP's fault, and it's not Microsoft's fault either. Parts of the printer subsystem are being used/abused by things it wasn't originally designed for.

That's why I'm hopeful the new XPS system that is coming with Vista (I believe it was/is codenamed Metro) will fix a majority of the problems.

We can learn from our mistakes. The challenge is to not reimplement them in the next revision. That's what I try to do with all my little quick and dirty programs, and life in general, to a certain extent.

Anyway, here is the link to the HP driver:

http://tinyurl.com/drnm4

HP likes to change the links on their website every week it seems, so that link might not work a few months down the road.

Strange. We have a webserver that hosts a lot of ASP.NET websites (v1.0, v1.1, and now v2.0 too) and one day this week it decided to stop launching ASP pages with access denied to the global assembly cache. I checked all the usual suspects for that sort of problem.

I also noticed Windows Updates from WSUS were failing on install, almost instantly. So, I fired up 'tail -f %windir%\WindowsUpdate.log' and watched the log as I tried to install the updates again. The very first error that kicked off was a COM error about not being able to launch/attach to the process.

So, I tried to look up the error code and it seems to relate to the DefaultAccessPermission key in the registry for Ole. Yep, good ole Ole from way back when. Anyway, I still have to double check the websites after I bounce the server and repair the dot net binaries.

If you can't seem to launch any COM processes, go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Ole, and delete the key "DefaultAccessPermission"

The next time an app uses COM, the key will be recreated with sane default values.
I still wish I knew what corrupted the values in the first place.

I'm sure there is a more elegant or 'proper' way to fix this, but the values in that key did not look right at all compared to other servers.

Many thanks to Dr. Eldarion from the Something Awful forums for posting this:

Go to:
http://www1.us.dell.com/content/topics/promo.aspx/promocompare?c=us&cs=04&l=en&s=

Click on the 9150
Click "customize it"
Click on the $849 model
Add the "SAVE $200! 24 inch UltraSharpâ„¢ 2405FPW Widescreen Digital Flat Panel" option under monitors
Use coupon code MNXFBLWGB4L34P at checkout.

Final price for computer and monitor is $993.
The monitor *by itself* is normally priced $959.20
The coupon alone knocks off about $450 off the total.

It ends up being a P4 3.2Ghz PC with 512MB and a bunch of other goodies.

Dr. Eldarion also has an excellent 'Deals' site at http://www.dealmein.net

It always comes with a cost, though. The biggest one is that client side certificates cannot be used anymore, plus a few other gotchas.

It's all controlled by a DWORD key at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\Services\HTTP\Parameters\EnableKernelSSL

0 = user-mode (default)
1 = kernel-mode

More details here: http://windowssdk.msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/http/http/kernel_mode_ssl.asp

It might be old news to some IIS wizards, but it is new to me as I bumped into it when debugging an ASP.NET 2.0 error. I keep getting 'Access denied' to the global assembly cache by ANY asp page, even though all the usual permissions on the huge list of directories it needs read access to are already set. It had been working previously and I'm not sure who or what changed anything on this webserver.