Aaron Tiensivu's Blog

I can't explain it better than the source but I couldn't ignore the announcement either.

Check out the details:

http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/2005/11/victory.html

It is sad to think that in the not too distant future, I might have to fire up a virtual machine in either VMWare or Virtual Server to rip audio CDs (that I've bought!) just because I'm afraid of software getting on my main machine. It turns me off to buying CDs. If Sony wonders why sales is down, it could be for reasons like this.

Movie execs are concerned with lower ticket sales too. I can honestly say I haven't downloaded a "ripped" movie from the Internet, but I know I've gone to less movies in the past few years. It is economics. Do I want to feed my kids or do I want to go to the movies? Well, of course I'd like to go to the movies, but feeding my kids comes first. Plus, product placements in movies and a half hour of commercials before the movie starts are really starting to grind away at the overall 'end-user experience' for me.

This made me crack up for some reason today.
Unintended insults, from autogenerated code.

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' This code was generated by a tool.

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HEY!
That's not very nice to call someone.

I understand the reasoning, but I'm curious how it is going to pan out for organizations that are typically cheap on hardware. I love pushing 64-bit in general, so it is a good idea, but I'm curious if a lot of places are going to stick with Exchange 2003.

I guess we'll see how saturated the market is with 64-bit servers by the time Exchange 12 ships.
It seems like at least having the 32-bit version available would be a good idea.

This KB article on MS's support site makes me a little nervous. If I am reading it right, if an application (or a person) somehow sticks an invalid entry into AD, you effectively stop replication until you fix it up correctly. Unfortunately, it looks like 'fixing it' isn't that easy based on what is written there.

I don't want to be an alarmist or a 'tin-foil-hat' guy, but it sounds like a potentially serious problem from 2000 machines if some sort of worm gets admin rights, sticks in a few AD entries in on a domain controller, and goes on its merry way.

You probably wouldn't notice the problem right away since it would just log a few entries everytime the system does garbage collection and/or tries to replicate AD.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/907462

I recently accepted a new job which I will be starting at after Thanksgiving. If you had asked me if I would be changing jobs a few weeks ago, I would have said you were crazy.

Reason being, was that I really wasn't looking, but someone noticed my resume on Monster.com and sent me an e-mail that caught my eye. I decided to check it out and after a lot of thought, accepted their offer.

My biggest worry wasn't about being able to do the job but the timing of it all. One of my coworkers is at the last stages of building a house and taking a well deserved vacation soon. Anytime he is not there, my workload doubles and anytime I'm not there, his workload doubles. I also consider him a good friend so I didn't want to have him go on vacation and come back to work with no one there to help out. It bothered me the whole weekend before handing in my 3 week notice.

I did 3 weeks so that he could still go on vacation and have me there for another week to help out. The new place was cool with that, so I set it up that way. Overall things have worked out pretty well.

I'm pretty excited now.

Set the ring tone on your Motorola V710 to the 'Raaaaaaaaaaaaaar!' sound from Sinistar.
It works. People jumped at the grocery store when I got a phone call.

I also have Robotron sounds on the phone for SMS messages.
Overall I have about 10 different arcade sounds on the phone now - yeah, it's nerdy but it sure does sound cool.

My whole family has had it for the past 2 weeks now. The first one, as far I as know that had the sickness was Cassandra's dad. They stopped by a few weekends ago and the next day Sabrina was throwing up nonstop.

Later on Cassandra got it - but not as bad it seems - she didn't throw up but her sinuses were extremely clogged and practically lost her voice.

For a while, it looked as if Juliana and I would be spared but earlier this week, my nose started plugging up which happens with me a lot anyway but it's not spring or fall so it couldn't (shouldn't) have been allergies. I thought it was odd and ignored it as best I could. The next morning I knew I was one of the doomed.

The worst of it was Thursday night. Now that it's Friday night, I still can't talk without it being really painful, my sinuses are extremely plugged, and I'm just "out of it" more than usual.

Right now, Cassandra is at the ER because Juliana has a 103 temp and won't drink anything - which is a bad thing for a toddler with a temp. She's getting IVs now.

So, I'm sitting here, knowing I can't really do anything at the moment, but just worried about my family. Things will be OK I am sure but wow, this virus, whatever it is, really knocked us down. I'm typically the last person to get sick, but this thing really nailed me.

I can't say I told ya so, but it was only a matter of time.
Thankfully our good friends at the EFF (http://www.eff.org) are working on the case.

http://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/breplibot_c.shtml

I never trust these companies, so make sure to use a junk e-mail account since I'm sure they will spam you, unless companies are finally stopping that practice.

Either way, go to http://www.iload.com and fill out a simple form and you should get a $10 card in 4 to 8 weeks.
My guess is, the sooner the better, before they close the site.

I'm not sure if I like a name of iLoad or not. It sounds almost adult-movie-ish.

I do feel like I'm in airplane and I can't pop my ear pressure correctly, which results in impaired hearing, plus the stuff coming out of my sinuses could be used in a Ghostbuster movie, very easily.

Anyway:

One aspect that is glossed over in the installation guide for Office Project Server 2003 is that by default (at least when I installed it on our server), it does not populate the user tables with accounts from Active Directory automagically.

Normally that wouldn't be a problem, but I was thinking that it wanted my AD account information when I was going to the Web Access portal. Nope. It was looking for the username 'Administrator' with whatever password you assigned it on install.

On our domain, Administrator doesn't really exist (the SID does - but the actual name is renamed - security thru obscurity - I know, I know) so it was of course the last thing I tried.

So, save yourself some time and learn from my mistake - don't assume it is looking for AD credentials when you try to log into the Project Server. The error message was unfortunately not much help. It told me to ask the system administrator for help. Well, I can ask myself all I want, I still didn't know.

I've got a data plan through Verizon for my 'data' cell phone (Motorola V265 - non-defective) which allows me to tether the phone to my PDA or laptop at home. Currently, I don't have DSL or Cable available in the new house so I'm pretty much 'stuck' with what I have until Charter rebuilds my neighborhood for digital cable, or a wireless provider comes to town (not likely), or I bring in a T1 and start my own wireless company. I've toyed with the idea a lot.

Anyway, with that background information, with peak connections of 144kbit (basically a little bit better than a dual ISDN setup) over the 1xRTT network, I'm a bit bandwidth starved so it makes sense that if I want to share files from the office, it is going to be a little painful. Verizon is hoping to have EVDO in the Grand Rapids area soon and then I'll be able to upgrade to a 'real' EVDO PCMCIA card and get closer to 1Mbit.

You might wonder why I'm using a cell phone and not a PCMCIA card. There is a simple reason: Motorola has the best RF sensitivity of any phone/card offered that I have tried. I'm on 'the edge' of the signal where we live. Any PCMCIA card would get, at most, 1 bar of strength. With a V710 or a V265, I get at least 2 or 3 bars of strength and no drop outs. Attaching an external antenna helps quite a bit too if you want to make sure you get a solid '3 bar' signal strength.

With the original DFS in Windows 2000/2003, I wouldn't have bothered even trying to setup a nice DFS setup but with the compression and 'reworking' the DFS engine has gone through in R2, my data link makes a great test bed since the peak data rates can vary and so can the actual connection. At times, I feel like I'm on dialup again.

A lot of the data I transferred was the contents of a Sharepoint website sitting in C:\inetpub on NecroQuad and a few ISO images from MSDN, which amounted to around 300MB or so. As you can see from the results below, there was a good 30% reduction in overall data transfer.

For "fat pipes", that isn't a big deal. For a cell phone, it's a huge deal.

Not many branch offices run over a cell phone line but I know of a lot of places around Michigan that are still on ISDN or IDSL. This type of bandwidth reduction, and being able to schedule replication time windows easily, will be a driving force in my future R2 deployments for small businesses.

I've got more data I'm going to publish later, but I wanted to get this stuff 'live' before I have another hard drive failure on one of the test machines. That is always the double edged sword of older hardware - a lot of times you will get donated hardware or former production machines that can't be trusted, to use as test development machines. Free hardware is nice. Failing hardware is a bummer.

A misunderstood game of the 80s generation. People either loved it or hated it. My whole family loved it. I remember playing for about 4 hours straight on one quarter at age 7. It's quite a feat in programming if you think about it. According to folklore and rumours on the internets, it was written over a weekend and basically "shipped" soon after. I think there are 3 different ROM versions but overall there were very few bugs in the game.

I've crashed it many times with the 'snow death' crash by shooting in the upper left hand corner just right and of course there is the Brains bug that gets them stuck in the corner, but the sheer playability factor of the game still holds up today. It is great for hands/eye coordination training.

A lot of games today have lots of lush content and amazing graphics, but the replay value doesn't hold up. Back then, you had a few pixels and colors to paint your landscape, so you had better make it fun somehow, otherwise it would end up in the backroom next to Spy Hunter 2 and other forgettable arcades.

That said, I think I'm going to go play a few rounds.

[edit: After playing a while, I found a really good paragraph from Eugene Jarvis that supports what I said above, ironically]

[snip]

For me the retrogaming movement is more than just nostalgia of misty eyed Gen X'ers. It's a reaction to the current graphical overkill, the simulation obsessed gaming environment of the late 90s. In our quest for absolute graphical realism, we have forgotten the basics of gaming. Look at "Virtua Fighter 3" vs. "Virtua Fighter 2." Unless you are a proctologist, you can't find a dimes' worth of difference in the gameplay. It is clear that the design team focused on the beautiful water effects, facial expressions, awesome backdrops, and 400 polygon, fully rendered loin-cloth animations. Have we as game designers become mere interior decorators, spending months on the reflection mapping of candlelight, or loin-cloth motion capture? Have we forgotten the essence of gaming which is to present the player with novel and original challenges? Once you've seen the interior decoration, there's no need to come back. You need a game in there.

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This is nice, and should be a feature in the next version of WSUS.

WSUS stores the updates it downloads in directories and filenames that are no where near the original filename. Instead of downloading a hotfix you need many times over for systems outside your WSUS scope, use this little add-on that maps the filenames based off of the information stored in the WSUS SQL backend.

Grab it here:
http://wsus.collewijn.info/main.php?page=hotfixinfo_enu.php

Since I joined the beta, one of the most used R2-specific feature I was using/testing out was this module. Now that I can use my "management laptop" to keep an eye on "my" datacenter/terminal servers, it's wonderful.

Case in point, we have a bunch of forests on our network and within those forests are a lot of terminal servers with various printer drivers loaded on them.

Sometimes, outside of my control, someone will load a printer driver onto a terminal server that is an older style driver (aka NT 'kernel mode' printer driver). The unfortunate thing about those drivers is that if they don't sanitize/verify the data getting passed to them, it is very easy to take down a terminal server if there is a bug in the driver. Instant blue screens are usually the result because it is running in the kernel context. This is one of the primary reasons (I believe) that these type of drivers were given a 'penalty box' GPO in Windows 2003 and totally eliminated in Longhorn.

If a system seems to be tanking with blue screens, the first thing I would always check is to see if anyone added any older style drivers. You could always browse the '2' directory under %windir%\system32\spool\drivers\w32x86 but a lot of times it would be hard to figure out what file belonged to what driver unless you went mucking around in the .inf files.

The screenshot I'm attaching shows how PMC makes that job easier. I can sort by driver version (aka usermode or kernel mode or newer) and see a list of printers that could be causing the blue screen.

Being able to do that across forests is very handy, but to a certain extent might open up a security issue. It seems by default, Windows 2000 machines let you view all this driver information without any trusts setup between forests. If I were a 'bad guy' and somehow got access to the printer spooler, I could see that a server had an older kernel mode driver and try to send it specially crafted print job that would blue screen the system.

Windows 2003 seems to have default permissions setup so you can't do that sort of cross forest 'information mining'. Perhaps a 'print server permission lockdown tool' would be handy, sort of like the IIS lockdown tool.

Anyway, that is why I really like PMC on my XP laptop and just one possible use of it for people like myself.

Simple as that.

http://www.onenotesweepstakes.com/Home.aspx

I wish simply posting a URL would improve my chances of winning, but I doubt it.
One of those 'good karma' or 'good CARma' things I guess.