I attended the Windows 2003 (subsidised) Hands-On Labs this afternoon. Non Techies may not want to bother reading the rest of this.
Overall I think it was a bit of a waste of time, but there were some interesting things. Each delegate had one pc to use, but through the use of vmware each machine was running XP on the desktop, and then two virtual servers in a vmware window. This enabled us to test the upgrade of a domain to a 2003 infrastructure and not a lot else. The rest of it could have been done with just one 2003 server. Things to note are below:-
Complex passwords are now turned on by default, no more password or password1 for passwords. Now you'd have to use P4ssw0rd.
When you shut the server down, it now asks why you are shutting down. Any information that you enter into the dialog box gets entered into the eventlog so you can trawl through and find out the reasons for all those the occasional reboots.
Allegedly there is better support for unix integration although this wasn't noted in the lab.
IIS6 has been improved and is apparently more robust. Personally i've not seen any problems with IIS5, although I've only hosted a couple of sites on each server as opposed to hundreds of sites. It's now possible to instantly enable or disable various plugins to the server, such as .net services, asp pages or whatever.
Active Directory has been improved - you now now drag and drop users from Organisation Units to another one - not a big deal in my book! More interesting was the fact that you can now change attributes on multiple AD entities in one go, ie you can set the logon hours for multiple users all at once. This was meant to be a big feature, but its actually putting back functionality that was available in UserManager when you could do this! (Ironically they asked what we'd rather use - AD Users and Computers or UserManager - my answer would have been the command prompt and resource kit utilities and batch files! or Windows Scripting Host can do this, but its too complicated and not very well documented just how to use wsh).
They made a big fuss of Volume Shadow Copy - the service that I was led to believe allowed you to roll back to previous versions of documents, so that if you deleted or corrupted a word file, then you just rolled back to the previous one. The advantage is that the user can do it, so less interruptions for the IT staff, but the stupid thing is that it's done on a time/scheduled basis. In other words the administrator schedules when a snapshot of the drive (its done on a drive by drive basis) is taken and you can only roll back to these occurances. So its NOT a roll back of versions, more a "instant/userbased restore to a fixed point in time". I think this could have been drastically improved.
Terminal Services is more integrated - its now automatically installed and there is no remote admin/application mode. The ability to only allow one session per user is now an option, although when the second instance attempts to log on, strangely the server kicks off the original user with no intervention and automatically logs the second instance in. This seems REALLY bizarre to me and could cause real headaches when people are in the middle of a word document and they get kicked out! Mind you, its a great incentive to stop people sharing their passwords around the office!
Another feature was billed as a remote control MMC, which seemed to be badly mis-represented. It's not Terminal Services as normal, instead you get remote control of the CONSOLE of the server. This means that you would see the output of AT commands etc. If someone is currently logged on at the console, the console screen gets locked, and you end up with the same desktop - it acts as a software version of a dual monitor switchbox.
Apparently improved clustering is available, with up to 8 nodes on the standard Advanced Server, but seeing as though i've not used clustering then I can't comment apart from that.
DFS is now built in, instead of being an optional addon.
XP now has User State Migration, if you've bought a new machine, this utility (which you can save on a floppy or use over a network/parallel cable) apparently makes a snapshot of your system settings and migrates them across to the new laptop. I didn't get the impression that this works very well and I've recently purchased some other software, BackRex Backup Expert that does this job - and does it well.
Folder redirection is improved in Group Policy and can now be switched on and configured per User Group - no longer OU dependant.
The instructor was fairly good, although wasn't aware that 2003 was actually available for purchase - pretty scary for a promotional training course, although this seems to be a classic case of IT Trainers not having any real world life/experience and therefore not knowing what is actually going on in the real world!
The major downside was that we didn't get any freebies, not even a demonstration copy of Windows2003 so I can't even play around with it at home (especially as we don't get demo software with our technet subscription). So far I've not seen any incentives to upgrade to 2003, for a brand new network installation I would definately put in 2003, (as long as it was not being used for a non-MS application server). I think you really need XP on the desktop for full benefits and also a complete 2003 server farm..... I don't really see any point in upgrading a w2k server to 2003 though. Microsoft's marketing/technical/promotions department needs to work a lot better to get a half decent proper roadshow lab out there. The labs were free (actually they cost £49 but MS pay the training centre) and I would have been very annoyed if I'd paid for the half day.
Recently in Imported Blog Category
Spent about an hour trying to work out how to get MoveableType installed on my latest host, absoblogginlutely.net. Finally got it working. The problem was that ftp was showing the path as /public_html when infact I needed /home/usernam/public_html. As soon as I figured that out, I was off......
MoveableType 2.64 has been released. They've included some security bug fixes and also made sure that the css styles work properly with internet explorer (sometimes the css pages would get terminated half way through the download - previous two presses of the F11 key would fix it, now they've added an extra CSS entry to the head content of pages.
Also, why do they decide to allow planes to land and take off over hotels between the hours of 9pm and 11.30pm when they didn't fly over earlier in the night? Not much sleep last night.
As I was working in the middle of London I had to pay the £5 congestion charge. It took me twenty minutes (this was meant to be straightforward) and I thought it was ironic that I was eventually pointed to London Underground to purchase my ticket. I'm not sure why if I'd driven into London I would want to use the underground...seems very strange logic.
I was in London this morning and whilst driving down the A4 towards Picadilly I thought I'd put PocketWarrior on and see how many wireless networks were available...I found the following SSID's, 2ACF3100FD, Linksys,katzeye,ritz_wireless,My Wireless, Montblan,3Com, Wireless*2, AKQA. The scary thing is that at least two of those are probably default sids, so its unlikely that any of the other settings have been tweaked, and indeed they are not using WEP encryption.....so they are probably wide open as are 6 out of 10. 2 of the SSID's tell you who's network you are piggybacking on....
Interestingly the XP pc picked up a wireless network automatically whilst I was working in the client office, but XP doesn't show me the stats of the network.
Following on from my post about The Matrix, check out the spoof Matrix-XP before its taken down by the copyright lawyers. Its a big download but for those of you on cable it'll be quicker (and more legal) than downloading that alleged high-res cinema rip of the real thing.
Whilst working with the new laptop I realised it already had a built in wireless lan card - there's a very small switch to the side of the unit that had been moved to disabled....a quick slide of the switch, configuration of the access point and i'm now using the built in nic, which means the pcmcia card can go back into our own home laptop.
Thanks to Freedom Specific I was able to delete the partnership on my w2k machine at the office and re-sync it back to the Axim. NO idea why the pc suddenly wouldn't synch, but its pretty annoying. PS blogger has been down for remote publishing with Bloggar or other remote tools, hence the sparseness of updates.
Kristen and I went to Biddulph Grange over lunchtime today. Had a nice walk around the gardens and took loads of photo's which i'll put up online sometime in the near future. Its been two bank holidays that we've had nice weather - thats pretty amazing!
The developer of b2 has finally come back online again and also mentions that there is a security bug in 2 of the pages. Check out the main site for more details.
I fixed the blogger comments with longer digits than the current 8 numbers. I can't get blogger to realise that I *did* request to be upgraded to the new version so I had to test the upgrade by downloading my main webpage, saving it to hard disk and then hacking the blogid so that it did have a longer id number. I then saved this as aspcomments.html. I changed the aspcomments page to aspcommentsnew.asp and copied the existing database to aspcomments.mdb. The aspcommentsnew.asp and aspcomments.html both had a global search& replace for aspcomments to aspcommentsnew and the resulting files saved.
This way I could mess around with the code without effecting any of the existing webpages and databases.
After a big of digging, which basically involves putting quotes around the blogid component in the sql statement everything worked. Note that there are two sql statement area's - one for the inserting of a blog comment, the other for counting the comments to be displayed.
To sum up, the things that you need to change are detailed in my documentation for long blog id's.
Burnt my knoppix cd yesterday and rebooted the machine into linux. I was very impressed as it coped with the video, sound, network, usb webcam and everything without *any* tweaking at all. The speed was pretty good too considering it was running completely from cd with no installation to the hard disk. I even managed to find the screen capture program and take a snapshot of the desktop (right). Click for a larger image.
Just got back from watching the Matrix which was really pants. The whole film consists of either scenes of Keanu Reeves snogging, action fight scenes where the whole thing is speeded up so you can't see whats actually happening (or the computer editing) or boring ten minutes of monologue from someone......definately a waste of time!
Had to move the "Documents and Settings" folder on our server as it was filling up the disk space on the c: drive. Take it from me, if you ever get a chance to specify settings on a server that will be frequently logged into (ie a terminal server) then set the Documents and Settings folder up to a different drive when you install W2K. For more information on all of this, look at Q236621 on Microsoft's support site.
Forgot to mention that I found my first wireless hotspot whilst wardriving the other day in Sandbach. PocketWarrior beeped to let me know it had found a hotspot but as I was driving it was not obvious as to whether the lan was open or not, although it did have a SSID of WLAN!
oh dear oh dear oh dear. Someone at techrepublic should get shot, or at the very least get the sack. Whenever I sign up for email lists I always use a unique email address so that if I ever get spam I know who leaked the email address. Today I got a copy of W32.HLLW.Mankx@mm, the one that supposedly comes from microsoft's support email address to this unique email address. As its unique and only on their systems it MUST have come from one of their computers, nowhere else. Now I'm not sure when this virus was discovered, but anti-virus software has been updated for at least 5 days and as the virus spreads via email with a pif attachment, you have got to be pretty stupid to open an attachment like that, especially when it comes from Microsoft as everyone knows they don't send patches out. It makes you wonder why someone is working for a supposedly technical computer organisation that doesn't have uptodate software, doesn't follow standard precautions when opening emails and we are meant to take their advise??????
Its been a bit quiet on the blog front as i've been out in the evenings this week. Two nights ago I went to see phatfish live at Stoke on Trent - was a fantastic gig. The sound was perfect - you could hear every note and word that was played and sung with no distortion at all. Purchased 3 of their 4 albums on the night (I already had the other one) and the one I've listened to so far sounds just as good on the cd as it did live!
Have been doing some more remote control work in the office and found some more useful tools that help in this.VNCTools has various tools to audit for winvnc clients running on the local network.Remote Control Tools has various Remote Control software tools, mainly for Terminal Services, and there is also Tier6 which has one interface to control a remote server with pcanywhere, TSClient, WinVNC, Citrix etc. This means you don't need to create or configure connectoids everytime you need to control another server. Great when you have loads of client machines you need to control.
I meant to mention that Activesync 3.7 is out for the pocketpc.
In response to my post about blogger's new numbering convention I did a bit of digging and this is what I wrote on the original page Mike posted about :-
"Actually its not as easy as that as aspcomments won't accept those large numbers in the database (it's only using a double integer for the database). if you convert the database to integer and then use a decimal place of 20 then you get the aforementioned error. So just putting a string round it won't work, unless you change the database to look for strings instead of numbers.... Thats not something i'm willing to try on my live data!"
I'll probably load it up on a home pc and try it that way - when I've got some time. The alternative of course it so switch from using blogger to using something like moveable type. The only problem i've found with mt is that there seems to be an overwhelming number of addon's that need to be installed for comment flooding protection, smilies etc etc etc. That and that I've yet to find a host that will support a Moveable Type installation on a Windows 2000 server for a reasonable price. (or one that supports the MT installation and asp pages).ASP is necessary as a lot of my web pages are written using asp and i don't have the time or skill to transfer to php. I use asp at work so there is no point in learning a new language just for my blog...well there is a point, I just haven't got the time to do it instantly on a switch over :-( I'm looking more and more to running my own server on the network here - it would just be a pain if I went on holiday as I'd have to leave the computer on all the time - or have a vanishing web site!
Fixed the problem I had with AventBrowser insisting on opening webpages when a url was clicked in an email or from the run line. Although Phoenix had been set as the default browser, AB was still loading. This was actually due to the fact that in explorer, tools, folder options, file types, view, and then scrolling down to N/A URL: HyperText Transfer Protocol, clicking Advanced, I had an extra entry under actions saying AvantBrowser as well as the Open action, which was set to use Phoenix. Deleted the AvantBrowser entry and everything opens in Phoenix now! (and I didnt use google for this one either :-)
Installed Phoenix on the office pc yesterday and it seemed to hang when it was first started up - Apparently this is due to the way Phoenix tries to import your favourites from ie. If you have a favourite that points to a network drive, then Phoenix scans the rest of that network drive to see if it can find any more favourites. Due to a tweak in the registry, ALL of my favourites are on a network drive, so it was scanning our 40gb+ network drive and took over 30 minutes - in the meantime I'd googled to see if I could find a solution. It's simple - Move your favourites out into another folder before you start Phoenix up for the first time, then move them back afterwards. The only downside to this is that you won't have your old favourites imported in. UpdateNeil suggested (as I forgot to mention) that you can export your favourites in ie, and then import them again in Phoenix afterwards.
Mike posted about a potential problem with comments with the next release of blogger out soon, which has problems due to the postings now been referenced by a 18digit number, which a lot of comment scripts will choke on as this is no longer a large number (8 characters) but a bloomin big number
Someone tried to send us the W32.HLLW.Mankx@mm virus as they were infected. The scary thing is that this worm has not been around for very long, and a lot of the av companies have only released patches yesterday (in NAV's case) or today in Norman's case.....although thats a quick response, it probably means this virus is going to spread very quickly, especially as lots of people only update their product patches once a week (if at all!)
Just wrote a quick utility to screen dump an application (as text output) to a file automatically every 5 seconds thanks to the sendkey tutorial and windows scripting host. Was very impressed and so was the client :-)
GrapClipSave looks like a good utility that captures bitmaps from the clipboard and saves them automatically in a pre-determined folder as jpg's - no need to keep opening paintshoppro to edit/save the files.
Kristen got me a good cd album this week which brings back memories - Schooldisco.Com, 4 cd's worth
Google has now indexed my complaint about ebuyer so i did a quick search on ebuyer in google just to see where I'd end up...then I got sidetracked into the other complaints as other people got loads of rubbish/bad experience from them. There is even a ebuyerdotcon website for them! This site is down, although you can see a cached copy of customer complaints against ebuyer courtesy of google!
Earlier on this week I spent two days at a customer site reinstalling our database and application onto a new nt4 server after their existing PDC which had our application and data on kept crashing as NT4 started to boot up. As the option to reboot automatically had been enabled I was not able to see what the problem was. After trying to edit the registry from a linux boot disk I had to give up as the required bit of the registry was not available from linux. However, today I thought I'd take a look in Google for CrashDumpEnabled and then I found a posting on Microsoft for article Q174630, which tells you to do a parallel installation to edit the hive. That was something I didn't really want to do, but I'm glad that I know that I was thinking in the right direction. For those of you who are in charge of servers - DON'T set this option as although it might mean your server will reboot and come back up again if it crashes - just imagine how long it's going to take to reinstall nt4 on the server just to edit this registry setting....unless you install nt4 on all your servers twice just in case something like this happens!
Just installed JetAudio on the new laptop and I knew I wasn't going mad - there *is* an option to associate a lot of media files with this player, but RealAudio files for some reason are missing from this list. Instead you have to go to preferences and set the associations yourself.
Now that Phoenix0.6 or Thunderbird or whatever they're calling it is out, I've installed it, and the blinking thing has gone and changed my preferences back so that a lot of the links to the configuration tools doesn't work! For example, its not possible to get to the linky configuration options anymore!
Phoenix Version 0.6 is out now (since yesterday). Off to download it now as it's my browser of choice at the moment!
Thanks to ScriptyGoddess's pointers on printing, this page will only have the content (ie the posts themselves) when you print. It's something I've been meaning to do for a while, just not got round to implementing it. The best thing about it is that everything always fits on one page - no annoying right margin cutoffs! (Incidentally I don't know how you would print the entire page off with the sidebar etc!
Went paintballing today - just call me Commando Helsby from now on :-) Had a great time - managed to be one of the last two men in the last game and we captured the flag - although I crawled through the (wet) grass and rain for what seems like miles to get a good sniper position. Only managed to get shot four times - only 2 of them actually hurt. The last one was on the toe of my foot almost straight away in the last game - very embaressing!
Tried to put the wireless network card in the new laptop (on loan unfortunately) and just could not get it to work. In the end I used the snmp configuration on the desktop pc to double check all the settings....then I realised that the SSID was likely to be case sensitive. As soon as I changed that, then everything was hunky dory. Still I suppose it doesn't harm to have the latest version of the drivers for the card (although the firmware download for the card itself is older than in the card already!
Found this neat Terminal Server documention webpage which explained some of the mysteries to me. This has allowed me to get terminal services via a web front end working through the firewall to our Terminal Server. Now we can logon from literally any pc....Can't quite get it to work with phoenix though - either access denied on the webpage OR nothing happens...need to play around a bit more.
Phoenix on my home pc is a lot better now that I zipped up the office installation, transferred it home and unzipped it again. Its handy having VPN connection to the office and remote control of my office machine as I forgot to do it whilst in the office so I was able to do it all by remote. Still not worked out how to do the reverse and control the home pc from the office - at least securely anyway!
Ack. Installing the latest IBM network drivers whilst users are on is not a good idea - you'd have at least thought it would say "Are you REALLY sure you want to do this NOW?" On a side note, going to ibm's site and then click on "My Product Page" you can then check the status of patches etc.
If you use Outlook and customise the today page, and have installed Microsoft's latest ie cumalitive patch, then you won't be able to customise the today page anymore. A workaround, which temporarily disables the patch is available from Microsoft's Knowledge Base.
The problem with having three browsers on your system is getting them to play nicely. I have ie6, Phoenix and AvantBrowser. Phoenix is set to be my default browser, yet if I enter a url in my quicklaunch bar it loads it into AvantBrowser (which then pops up to say that its not my default browser, do I want to set it as such!). Weird.Phoenix in the office also looks radically different to phoenix at home so I might zip up my version at work which looks better, especially when customising extensions (ie linky options goes to a page that exists where I can customise linky), and put it on the pc at home. Thats the nice thing with having a utility that doesn't have an install feature :-)
The guy who took the photos at the Ultimate Event is a lucky dude, having a view like this one - I'm in there about 5 from the front, on the right hand side with the red baseball cap on backwards as I was taking a picture at the time.
Although we've not been directly affected, one of our customers has already been hit by the latest Fizzer virus. We only found out as it caused a gpf trying to run iservc.exe (the virus' payload) and they thought it was a problem with our software!
The pictures of last nights yfriday concert at St Mary's church in Burton on Trent are now online. I think the smoke machine confused the camera as a lot of the pictures came out a little fuzzy....but it was dark and there were loads of lights flashing all other the place!
Further to the post about the trainline.co.uk I tried to book online. The first thing that happens when you ring up it asks you to state your destination and departure times, dates and stations and attempts to voice recognise it all. Holmes Chapel came out as Chatsworth, the 30th May came out as the 9th (although why I'd want to book tickets for LAST friday I don't know) and the time came out as 9.30 instead of 11.30. So I wasted even more time having to correct all the details. Then they tried to sell me a ticket at £13+ instead of the cheapest, for the same train of £6.75! NOT a good experience at all.
Somehow on my work machine at the office I managed to loose the standard toolbar in outlook, so I didn't have options to send, save, spellcheck, add attachments etc. A quick googlesearch later told me to delete outcmd.dat (whilst outlook is closed) which worked a treat! Don't know why it happened though.
Ever wonder how Cropcircles get made?
This is scary, if you put an input box into your webpage, with the type set to crash, ie promptly does as it tells you....The previous link WILL crash your browser if you are running ie!!!!. Thanks to who I found via blogstreet.
I found my site on BlogStreet after getting a referrer via google this morning. It gives you a list of blogs that link to you via blogrolling and also tells you which blogs are similar to you. The funny thing is that in the street, I've never read any of my neighbours - I'll have to do that sometime soon.
The quick and dirty pictures (no not that kind) of The Ultimate Event 2003 are now online - actually there were online within 2 hours of the event last night. I've not bothered editing, formatting or rotating the pictures yet - that'll be done in the near future. The first band, Supervision, were not bad - having won the battle of the bands, but the next billing, Superhero will really awful. Total lack of stage prescence and the music was not good. yFriday came on and were great as usual - this was the third time I'd seen them - the fourth time will be in two hours time! thebandwithnoname came on after them and although I'm not that keen on their type of music the crowd loved it and their stage antics - the old style rap music complete with the hand movements and breakdancing (the funniest thing was the sign language interpreter translating the words as her hands made her look like she was joining in the rapping!). Finally and eventually Audio Adrenaline came on set, complete with a wicked mohican/mohawk wearing Will and played loads of songs - half of which I didn't recognise. AND they played my favourite song whilst I was queueing up for the disgusting loo :-(
Good night was had by all though - can't wait for next year, which will be the tenth anniversary.Update Page now has all the pictures the right way up and some of them have been cropped to make it a bit easier to view.
I'm fed up of getting spam messages to my mobile, so each one I get is now filed with ICSTIS as a formal complaint. Hopefully it will get some of these spammers shutdown. Update To answer Kelly's question in the comments, It was an sms - short message service (text) to the phone so they didn't call. In the uk we don't pay to receive calls on the mobile either - just to make them (although you have often have to have a monthly subscription to keep your phone active). its annoying getting a message at 20 past midnight when the phone bleeps and lights like a maniac. It is illegal to send messages to your phone promising that you've won prizes but that you need to make a premium rate phone call to claim them - often just holiday vouchers which you can get anyway and only good if you spend 200 quid with the company in the first place. I've now registered my number with the Telephone Preference Service which does make it illegal for these companies to sms me after 28 days have passed.
Done a bit of fiddling with the html today - the first makes it easier for me by including the base tag in the header of the page. Now rather than having to specify a url of http://www.helsby.net/whatever, I can now just put whatever. Normally this is not really needed for this web page, but if all goes to plan it should mean that images etc will still display properly when the page is viewed within a RSS reader. I've also added a stylesheet that puts the menu on the left hand side of the page. I'm still working on getting one that removes the menu altogether, which would hopefully make the blog page more readable in pocketpc's. Update Skin to hide the menu bar is now available. There is also a "default skin" link at the bottom of the page to reset back to normal (otherwise you would not be able to get back to choose other skins if required). Unfortunately Pocket Internet Explorer doesn't use javascript so the links on the Axim don't work :-( After testing I think its actually that Pocket IE doesn't support cascading stylesheets so you can't change this sort of thing. Oh well - at least it works on a pc!
I took the TruSecure TICSA sample security exam just to see how I would do. Some of the sections I had no idea what they were on about, but others were pretty easy. One assumption that the exam seems to take is that you know or assume you are talking about a Windows System. I was quite pleased to find out that I had passed with 74%, passmark being 67%. The good thing is that the end result shows you what you need to improve upon, in my case PKI and digital certificates (I just didn't know the terminology). Some of the other sections were "which is the best......." which are always subjective and tricky to answer if you don't know the examining companies preferred answers. Overall I'm quite pleased, will swot up some more and take the real exam.
Microsoft's passport authentication was hacked according to The Register and other sources. Of interest in this article is that Microsoft said they sent out a warning. Not sure who to as I've never received anything in my personal email. Sending stuff out to the actual passport address itself (aka hotmail address's) is pretty pointless if a) the account has already been compromised or b) people don't check their hotmail as they only use passports for certain microsoft authentication schemes such as MCP sites. Either way I know I've not received notification to my MCP email address that is associated with a passport account. Will be interesting to see just how Microsoft try to get out of the potential 2.2 trillion dollar lawsuit. Doesn't give much confidence in their trustworthy computing initiative either.
I sent an email to a hosting company yesterday to let them know their site didn't work in mozilla and there were several spelling mistakes...their response was three words "And you are?? - Not exactly the kind of response I was expecting.
Discovered yesterday (when trying to recover some emails from deleted items) that when we had rebuilt our exchange server that I had not set the setting under Administrative Groups / Servers / ServerName / StorageGroup / MailboxStore - properties, Limits, to keep deleted items for X days.
As soon as I changed that setting, any newly deleted items appeared in the list. Funny thing is that the server has been running like this for a couple of months and no-one had realised!
Just tried to use The Trainline to order a ticket for a Windows2003 lab event. After registering as a user I got to entering my credit card details, hit the place order button and nothing happened....
When I then tried to log into the system to check to see whether the booking had been made, it tells me that my email address and password is wrong....If I then tell it to send me my password via email, it tells me the email address is not on file. (That and the initial link to "My Account" uses backslashes instead of forwardslashes in the url!).
When I rang to ask whats going on, the guy tells me to use the website to email the webmaster and that he doesn't even have the train station that I am going from on their database! As a user experience of ordering online, this was a pile of pants.
The Register has an interesting article about how Google may be getting it's own tab for blogs. Mainly due to the often irrelevant answers that popup on search engine results from Blogs. I can see both the good and the bad side of this, but it would mean that if you wanted to search both kinds of websites you'd probably need to enter two searches. I'd also like to know how they are going to determine whats a blog and what isn't. I know from my referrer logs that most of my hits come from google, and I rank number 1 for the search on Helsby - a position I don't really want to loose from a standard web page. I also know that people have searched for things like virus information or Microsoft Exchange bugs and they often get the information they need (I hope) as the search string tends to match the content of my post. Personally I think adding a -noblog rule to the web interface would make more sense than having a seperate tab.
From today's lockergnome is a useful tip for those people who use mozilla and or netscape and don't have ad filtering software on their firewall or other software. FloppyMoose (neat name) has a cascading style sheet that hides graphics that meet certain naming conventions. However, from my understanding of how this works, I think that the graphics WILL be downloaded, they just won't be displayed. So although this stops them appearing on your pc, you are still wasting precious download speed in pulling them onto your pc in the first place. UpdateThe file should be stored in "C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Phoenix or Mozilla\Profiles\default\random number\chrome" for windows2000/xp
When a company trims its employee's of dead wood, does anyone ever stop to consider what made the living wood die?
I managed to make some progress with our terminal server setup in the office today. After struggling to work out how to get into the Compaq Evo T20 thin client pc, I had to ring up and get the factory reset key combination (See my comment below for how to fix this.) Then I managed to install SBClient, our terminal emulator package onto the system - this had failed on one of our Terminal Server machines which was also a Domain Controller). Eventually managed to get this software licenced properly and then it was off to install Office. This was fun as the documentation for this is all other the place. In the end I found a Microsoft Knowledge Base article on "How to install Office Disc 1 on a Windows Terminal Server" which talks about using a transform file and how to create your own transform file to be merged with their supplied one. This enables you to silently install and customise the office installation for all your terminal server users. I've looked into this installation several times, and this was the first time I'd seen this document and it was very helpful and made the office installation a breeze. Now all I have to do is lock the profile down so the users can't change it (much) and life will be easy.
Lockergnome posted a link to K9 which works in the same way that Popfile does, but this software only runs under windows systems. It's probably a bit faster, but can only classify between spam and nonspam, whereas Popfile can classify into as many types of email that you wish (I have 5 settings on my setting). I've not downloaded K9 as personally it doesn't fit my requirements, but might be of use to some other people.
Spamnet have moved from a beta release of their anti-spam software for outlook, to a paid for service. At $40-60 depending on whether you were a beta tester or not, this seems an expensive way of clearing spam - especially as I found it wasn't that accurate and I still had loads of spam downloaded, despite it being VERY obvious it was spam. I think one of the problems that I had was that being based in the uk, I got a lot of the spam before the US woke up, so that I was one of the people flagging mail as spam, so others benefited, but I didn't! I'm finding the Popfile software a lot better, and a lot more accurate too. However, both these solutions don't work with outlook in corporate mode (whereas Popfile can't be bothered with what email client you are using)
I must be doing well in the world as I've just got an invitation from Lord Willoughby de Broke inviting me to join his country club. Normally this is the sort of thing I'd expect to get in a spam letter, but this was actually through the normal mail. It looks quite impressive being on thick heavy card and gilded lettering. Mind you, alarm bells start ringing when I see the surname of this Lord.
Been on holiday - had a great time. It's now back to work :-(
Tried to use winvnc on the pocket pc to the home sc .However, when the password box is displayed the system does not allow you to enter the password . So instead I am posting this wth the normal web browser
Wireless Lan is now working on the Axim - its really nice to surf wherever you like -even in the loo if you wanted (Wouldn't have to worry about there not being anything new and uptodate whilst in there!). I downloaded a copy of PocketWarrior that lets you scan for wireless hotspots - so far I've found one - mine :-) I'll maybe get a chance to try it in town later today and also in the office building next week.
I got a spam email this morning which is meant to be a tutorial about using ebay. Not only do they forget to include the link to their product, they've also broken the unsubscribe link as they didn't even get their own domain right in the url! Once I've worked out a way of easily updating my spammers page I'll get it online - just not thought of a way yet. A blog would be ideal, but unfortunately it dates - I want all the information on the page at the same time.....Update - Spammers page now online
Mike has been testing MSGTag which puts a tag on your email in the form of a webbug - a graphic that gets loaded in html email clients, gets logged on msgtag's servers and then you receive notification (in the form of an email in the free version) that the email has been read. Personally I think this is a bad idea as it's an invasion of privacy - I don't want other people to know that I've read their email UNLESS I'm asked if I want to notify them at the very least. With this software you don't have any choice in the matter.. Still, in the case of MSGTAG it's very easy to defeat - just use TheBat or Outlook 2002 or any other client that does not go and get external html content when displaying emails. Alternatively add the following to your hosts file 127.0.0.1 img.msgtag.com. This software works in the same way a lot of spammers track email mailshots, so I can't see it lasting very long, or until it gets the notice of privacy organisations! RealNotify.com has (more) similar features and works in similar ways, but again this can be defeated by not running external html. However, for Realnotify emails I just bounce them by detecting their mailserver in the header of the email. MSGTAG uses its own proxy server so you can't do this.
Installed the latest Rom update to the Axim this afternoon before installing the wireless card. Instructions are below for anyone else thinking about doing something similar. Note that the whole process probably took 90 odd minutes!
Whilst out at Xmen2 the delivery man tried to deliver the Wireless card for my axim - so I have to go pick it up tomorrow. Thankfully it's arrived before they said it would, but the company I got it from do not know how to trade or do customer service! I'll let you know how the wireless card gets on!
Thanks to Netscape Devedge I've added some bookmark keywords so I can now instantly search for google web,image,newsgroups,directory,news, Microsoft Technet, Microsoft KnowledgeBase Articles. Now if I can work out how to link these bookmarks.....These are the same things as the Microsoft ie5 webtweaks that are available for download.
Thanks to a Phoenix/Mozilla add-on I can now do all sorts of things with links on a page - such as open them in new tabs etc.
Noticed that all the currently opened webpages in mozilla had favicons on them - it looked pretty good. I think that would look neat on blogrolling to have everyone's favicon next to their name.
Update You can generate your own icon at favicon.co.uk
I thought that Mozilla looked different at home than at the office! When I checked the version numbers at home I got back Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030426 Mozilla Firebird/0.6, whereas the copy in the office brings back Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.3a) Gecko/20021207 Phoenix/0.5....I'm not sure whether this is due to me downloading the wrong thing at the office or whether its due to the fact that I already had Mozilla installed at home.
I had my first crash today in Phoenix at the office too :-( Unfortunately it took out the entire browser, including all the windows that I had open. At least IE can be set to just close each individual copy, and the AvantBrowser addon tends to save the windows you have open (although not in a crash situation admittedly)
First day in the office with the "international helpdesk centre" reduced by 33% due to redundancy - already I'm spending time solving more helpdesk problems. Still I'm now officially 2.5 hours into my holiday until Wednesday and enjoying every precious second of it!
Mike had a bit more time to play with JetAudio the player I commented on recently and discovered hidden in the preferences a tick box to set it as the default player for RealAudio feeds. Sure enough, it worked. Now I can get rid of RealPlayer for good. Thanks for the heads up on the software AND the setting Mike!
I might have to contact trading standards again! I recently purchased something from ebuyer.co.uk which was currently out of stock. Their web page states that they don't charge credit cards until the goods are despatched. However, on their order acknowledgement email they stated my credit card had been charged.
When I queried this, they said this was to reserve the item for me (despite the fact that when I placed the original order they warn that goods can't be reserved!). I'm awaiting a response to this. In the meantime I would strongly suggest you stay away from them, especially if back-ordering out of stock items!
UpdateI've had a response ignoring my question and telling me yet again that they need it to hold stock. No reply as to why they have done this against their stated policies.
I think I'm going to start a blog with details including email address's of the companies that spam me - at least the genuine companies - not the flybynight viagra spammers. Hopefully if they get as much spam as I get due to crawling on the webpages it just might annoy them!
Downloaded Phoenix at work this morning, and when I loaded it up, it went to the Mozilla home page and told me "Hey! You're using an old version of Mozilla. We can really use your help testing Mozilla 1.4 alpha. Download it now! Thanks!" I think something has gone wrong with their software detection routine!
Using Outclass in conjunction with Outlook and Popfile should make life a lot easier when training Popfile what is an what isn't spam as it's an addin to outlook that gives you single click classification. Unfortunately I don't use outlook at home anymore, and haven't setup popfile at the office as I get hardly any spam at the office and we don't use pop3 for our email there either! Thanks to Scott Finnie's newsletter
I downloaded and installed Phoenix, the new Mozilla build and boy does it fly. From what I've seen so far, pages are downloading MUCH quicker. The standard test is to download my companies webpage as its on appallingly slow servers at Demon, who won't/can't improve the speed - yet the page downloaded really quickly. I AM impressed.
.Mike posted about a new media player, JetAudio which supports most audio formats, including RealAudio - so you don't have to use the RealPlayer with all its spyware stuff in it. I've downloaded and installed and it seems pretty good - looks nice too! It didn't set itself up as the default player for RealAudio, which it should have done, but when I opened the URL to the current BBC News audio feed, it played it without complaining. Apparently you can also use the software to stream audio out to users too!
It absolutely chucked it down with rain last night yet the sun was shining really strongly - it was pretty hard to see where I was driving. However, on the way back the sun was behind me and there was a very vivid, brilliant full double rainbow. As soon as I got home I jumped out the car, took some quick pics and then went indoors to dry off and eat the chinese. The album, which doesn't really do it justice is in the sidebar or here
This picture symbolises everything great about a lazy Saturday morning, hot coffee - steam rising, the glint of sun, and Wallace & Gromit staring back at you!
If you see any strange people on the webcam, don't worry - the relatives are here today!
Just signed into my AbbeyNational banking site. Not only do you need your card number, you need a 8-16character passphrase, and a number exactly 5 characters long (that rules out date of births I guess!). So I can tell its going to be really easy to use - I have enough problems trying to use my other bank accounts online! Out of curiosity I can upgrade my Mozilla 1.3 browser to various versions including ie 5.01 and netscape 4.75 although how changing from Mozilla to ie 5.01 is an upgrade I don't know. Having said that the site still seems to work although worryingly they warn that I could inadvertently double click and submit some transactions twice....doesn't sound like a very good banking system to me if I can do that - most transactions would normally give a "are you sure" prompt?
Always Write has a neat new design using css to draw lines around *some* of the items in the blog. It looks really cool, quick to load too as there are no tables.
Thanks to pointers from