Aaron Tiensivu's Blog

If you are an end user that absolutely has to have a working ActiveX widget that had been broken by the updates, you should install KB 917425. Please don't do the kneejerk reaction of uninstalling the update because this fixes (officially) the createTextRange() exploit hole.

If you are a website or application vendor, adapt your site to use the new methods details here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/ieupdate/

I haven't heard of a lot of problems yet so far, but time will tell just how many applications are affected.

Think of Nancy Reagan and just say No.

I haven't pinpointed yet but there is a machine that acts as an Exchange frontend, providing RPC over HTTPS for the enterprise, and also functions as the frontend for CRM 3.0. For whatever reason, they do not get along. I would love to figure out why but for the sake of keeping things running, I'm going to move the Exchange frontend to another machine as soon as I can.

I'm not sure how common this setup is, but it could be I'm the only one trying to do this type of setup. I doubt it is a recommended setup but we currently don't have a choice at the moment.

I'm sure there are a lot more out there but these seem to be the most common you might see in the wild, and this is what I've gathered from various sources around the Internet.

All start with 9.00.xxx and the number we care about is at the xxx. Typically SQL will spam the event log with the build number on startup but I don't think that is always the best way to determine the build number. When all else fails, you can always execute SELECT @@version from the Query editor.

Beta 1: 608
Beta 2: 852
12/04 CTP: 981
04/05 CTP: 1116
06/05 CTP: 1187
09/05 CTP: 1314
RTM: 1399.06
SP1 03/06 CTP: 2040

Any production server should most likely be running 1399.06 and any test box might be running one of the CTPs or Betas, but those should be retired ASAP.

I have been running the SP1 CTP without any issues so far, but my laptop isn't exactly a SQL transaction powerhouse.

Cassandra have been over in Troy ever since her breast reduction surgery happened last Monday. Normally, you'd expect the husband/guy to revert back to a bit of a nomadic existance while the kids and wife are away. Instead, I've spent most of my time either working on projects that have been long delayed at work, or trying to figure out what the best car replacement is for my Stratus.

Some may say I've been obsessing over getting just the right car, but these are decisions I don't take lightly because I tend to hold onto cars until they fail. I ran my first car, a Dodge Colt, into the ground after years of commutes between Lansing and Grand Rapids. After about 170k miles, the transmission finally died. I'm running into the same thing with the Stratus right now.

It doesn't help that everyone is over in Troy while I'm doing this. I've been a bit of a wreck, physically and mentally, trying to keep things together and keep people happy at home and at work. When I'm not working, or researching, I'm cleaning the house.

I also found out this weekend that a good chunk of the band Brother Cane are out on the road again with a few guys from Queensryche (who I never really cared for) and Sweaty Nipples (who I loved, from Oregon). Brother Cane in the mid 90s did one of the best covers of 'Whippin' Post' at the Orbit Room and I own and have worn out all of their Virgin records releases. Either way, I am happy to see and hear that they are out and about as 'Slave to the System'.

They are playing at the Intersection tonight but I am still gathering mortgage papers so I can use some of our home equity to get a new car. I can't say enough good things about my employer right now because they are letting me use the company car as my own until I find some type of transportation. A lot of places would not go out on a limb like that for their employees.

If I am lucky, I will be able to catch the show at the Machine Shop in Flint next Saturday, the night before Easter. I'm sure they are putting on a great show tonight, because Brother Cane was always a great live act, and this new CD has a lot of great songs on it.

I used to have a Dell Axim X50V but had to give it up when I changed jobs last year. If I had it, I'd probably be trying out this client since we're trying out CRM for internal use. There are a lot of things I like about CRM but there are also some things that don't quite make sense to me, but I'm sure they are done that way for a reason.

You can grab the client here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=ea5a3566-7ec8-4afe-bbfa-91e7210c55c4&DisplayLang=en

x64 drivers and Vista support is lacking in many areas still but this will at least get you printing if you have one of these printers. It is technically a workaround or what I would refer to as a 'kludge' until something official comes out.

Overall, try to install the USB printer as a DeskJet 990C and see if that works for you. It should use the built-in Windows drivers to do the dirty work, and you probably won't have all the features of every printer, but it is a lot better than downloading a 200MB ISO image for a 50k driver. That should also tip you off as to what featureset/language that these printers are using, so you could also get Linux printing working if you have one of these printers.

I've always loved my LaserJet 4MV since it can do PCL and Postscript but I have avoided the WinPrinters in general because they typically have very finicky/picky drivers that never quite work right. Things have gotten a lot better than the 'good ole days' but I've been burned too many times by multi-function devices doing 4 things poorly instead of doing one thing excellently.

Multifunction can also mean multi-failure.

I think these days most WinPrinters 'know' a subset of PCL so you can typically get them to limp along with a generic driver or like in the instance of the DeskJet, they know old-style DeskJet language.

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?lang=en&lc=en&cc=us&docname=c00625738&lang=en&cc=us#

I haven't tried this product yet but they are giving out 5 free application licenses.

http://www.2x.com/applicationserver/application-publishing.htm

Very cool stuff - specifically the Jingle extension to the Jabber protocol, looks to be a very cool combination of software.

http://www.networkingpipeline.com/blog/archives/2006/04/asterisk_server.html

The specification for the Jingle protocol:
http://www.jabber.org/jeps/jep-0166.html

Enhanced support for clusters, and other little 'nice touches' that make this program even more of a 'must have' for anyone doing Exchange work. Worth more than the price of admission (free) and catches a lot of problems before they impact your organization.

It has also been known to make some system integrators look bad by how many items are setup incorrectly. There have been many times I have used this program to fix a server I have taken over from someone else that didn't know what they were doing. Don't be that guy. Use this program.

http://blogs.technet.com/exchange/archive/2006/04/05/424431.aspx

Please contact me if anyone knows where I can find any. Kosher Coke comes out around Passover time and is made with real sugar cane instead of corn syrup. It is the only time I typically will drink a non-diet soda. It is harder and harder to find Mexican Coca Cola these days so this time of the year is the only time of year I can have my own little indulgence of diabetes-causing goodness.

Some people like cigars. Some people like beer. I like soda in a glass bottle made with sugar cane, especially Dublin Dr. Pepper.

It is the ultimate stocking stuffer, outside of a severed foot.

Has anyone seen a massive assault from spammers using @invitel.hu e-mail addresses? This is the first I’ve seen it but for a good couple weeks, a site has been getting nailed by these people, and they seem to shift every few hours from IP to IP, which thankfully is long enough to get on some blacklists but not long enough all the time. On the really bad/common IPs that I keep seeing from overseas, I’ve blocked at the SMTP service, but of course that only does good for so long.

Just curious if anyone has seen anything like that.

I always wondered why this option wasn't available with IMF, since some people do not want e-mail blocked, even if it is potential spam, for addresses like 'sales@konkeydong.com' since they do not want to miss a potential sales lead.

I'd be very surprised if that is a valid e-mail address, but it sure sounds funny.

Hotfix:
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=912587

I'm not a big fan of American cars at the moment. Driving back from Troy on Saturday night, the 1996 Chevrolet Caprice, half way between Lansing and Grand Rapids decided to do a weird misfire - I wrote it off as a fluke or bad gas. Anyway, I get to the now legendary exit 40A on I-96 which is for Cascase and the engine starts to sound like the Tasmanian devil on a bad day. It acted like it had sucked junk into the fuel injectors or something along those lines.

A little gas later and a little swear words later, I was back on the road but the 'check engine' light was now on for good. Now, if I were to believe the gas gage, I had nearly 1/4 of a tank of gas yet it acted like it was empty.

OK, no worries.. I drop off the car at the car place, and my parents pick me up to drop me off at home. All is well, right?

Well, coming home today the slight whine the 1999 Dodge Stratus had last week has turned into Spookie Oookie from Jimmy Neutron - that's the best way I could describe the noise. Oh, and I forgot one other part, it wouldn't shift out of 3rd gear anymore. When I was researching cars the other week, I happened upon a Dodge forum website and the general consensus was that the 1999's were great cars except for the transmission. At the time I was thinking, "Boy, I sure have been lucky with mine so far! Maybe I lucked out for once!"

I wish I was making this up but I ended up passing O'Neill's Transmission on old 28th Street just the other day, and there were 3 late 90s white Stratus cars in the parking lot. Did I mention that a black cat crossed my trail last night too? Yeah, it happened.

So, both cars are at the car place, and I'm driving the 1996 Ford Aerostar that is in need of a tuneup. It has more shakes than a junkie in rehab but at least it goes down the road until I can figure out what I'm going to do with my car situation.

I need some reliable wheels.

On a good note, Cassandra's surgery went fantastic today.

Mostly useful only for debugging situations but I'm trying to track down a strange ASP.NET crash on shutdown so this is helping the cause:

'RUNDLL32.EXE %Systemroot%\SYSTEM32\WBEM\WMISVC.DLL,MoveToAlone'

You will have to reboot your system for it to take effect.

Once you have narrowed down the problem, or fixed it, you can restore the default behavior by running:
'RUNDLL32.EXE %Systemroot%\SYSTEM32\WBEM\WMISVC.DLL,MoveToShared'

If you think WMI is seriously damaged, run WMIDIAG on it.

Missing, but registered SNMP DLLs ended up being my problem.

The syntax reminds me of a cross between C and Perl. You can use .NET assemblies, and you can make a 100 line VBScript script shrink down to a 20 line Monad script very easily. I don't have any good examples yet but as I get more comfy with Monad, I will post a few.