joeware - never stop exploring...

When will it stop one may wonder?
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2006/062906-microsoft-loses-veteran-gm-to.html
 
 

Matheesha left a comment on Change Password versus Set Password entry that is actually quite good and I hear on a regular basis… That question being “Hey, what’s up with PWD_NOT_REQD??”
The short and sweet… Don’t use it. It isn’t required and shouldn’t be used.
The slightly longer and slightly less sweet… PWD_NOT_REQD is a flag specified [...]

After a previous post on ChangePW now being able to change passwords as well as set passwords I received several emails and a blog comment asking… Dude… WTF is the difference?[1]
When you change a password, you supply the old password along with the new password, if the old password is correct and the new password [...]

This is the new definition of generous…
http://www.forbes.com/business/2006/06/27/billion-donation-gates-cz_ts_0627buffett.html
Warren Buffett’s stunning announcement that he will give $30 billion of his $44 billion Berkshire Hathaway (nyse: BRKA - news - people ) fortune to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation shows that the billionaire titans of today want serious advances in the world’s health, science and education–and they [...]

Interesting comments in the blog below…
http://blogs.technet.com/usefultechnology/archive/2006/06/27/438172.aspx
I had no idea that Skype did this super node business… But then I am not a big Skype user. You see, Skype is another way to spell TELEPHONE and we all know how I feel about those. I have exactly one person in my Skype contact list and he [...]

I recently fielded a question on how to read/modify the ACL on a local group on a workstation. This made me think back because I haven’t done ACL mods on workstations in a while and then I realized I had never seen it done. I thought about it… does a local group in the SAM have [...]

I am sitting here watching Modern Marvels and working on ADMOD. I am _still_ working on the CSV/ADCSV functionality coupled with the flexible variable expansion I am putting in. It’s tough.
Even tougher will be trying to document _how_ to use the full functionality I am putting in. Seriously, it isn’t going to be a cake [...]

A couple of years ago a friend asked me to add the ability to do an actual password change instead of a password set in the ChangePW utility. I made a quick change for him and sent it off as it needed it quickly. I planned on going back and updating the usage/help and the [...]

Scoble has an interesting, but IMO, completely offbase opinion on why WinFS is dead. At least I hope it is off base, if it isn’t Microsoft is even more far off in their thinking than I ever thought and I need to start spending even more time on FreeBSD.
Robert seems to think that the web killed [...]

OI.
One of the biggest things that folks have been looking for out of Microsoft for some time now has pretty much been swept under the carpet.
If you read this and get anything other than WinFS has been 86′ed I would be surprised. It sounds like they have killed it and now are trying to strip [...]

Those who know me know I am not a phone person. I turn phone ringers off and even if they are on, I could let a phone ring for an hour without it bothering me one bit. I much prefer email for several reasons that I have outlined before but quickly I prefer the clarity, the [...]

Steve is a pretty smart guy that you should generally listen to. Definitely subscribe to his blog if you haven’t.
Spat wrote up a nice little entry on a “feature” in Windows Server 2003 Gold that was actually pretty dangerous that was sort of fixed in SP1.
I first heard about it while sitting in a bar [...]

I get this question pretty regularly… “How do you change how often lastLogonTimeStamp gets updated because I want this updated every time a user is authenticated…”
First off, no you don’t. Authentications occur a heck of a lot more often than you probably expect and not just when someone sits down and types their password in. If [...]

…have been busy little beavers. I have like five emails since the 10th. Someone got high speed!!!
We will go backwards through the interesting ones.
1. High School Valedictorian refused to bow down, has speech censored:
It seems some high school validictorian wanted to make some references to a god or christ or something like that and the [...]

Do you know the ever critical three laws? Do you have dreams of producing creatures like R. Daneel Olivaw? Do you have any clue what I am talking about at all?????
If so, this new SDK from Microsoft may be for you.
https://connect.microsoft.com/roboticsstudio
Microsoft has entered the robot programming fray.
From what I have been reading some of the [...]

HAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
http://www.stupidity.org/video/498
I love adult swim…  
 

So the 10 yards of dirt I had previously gotten turned into 20 yards of dirt and when it was all said and done i probably could have used yet another 20 yards. After using shovels and wheelbarrows for a couple of yards I said this isn’t going to work and ran down and rented [...]

Auto add of enabled functional users so you can build up a test pool of users or other objects….
 
[Wed 06/21/2006 22:46:46.36]
F:\Dev\CPP\AdMod>admod -e -add -autobase 25:cn=autouser,ou=autousers,dc=joe,dc=com -bmod {{*RDN*}}_{{*cnt*}},{{*parent*}} objectclass::user -kerbenc unicodepwd::{{*rnd*:6:8}} samac
countname::{{*name*}}_{{*cnt*}} useraccountcontrol::512 -exterr
AdMod V01.07.00cpp_ALPHA Joe Richards (joe@joeware.net) June 2006
DN Count: 25
Using server: 2k3dc02.joe.com
Adding specified objects…
   DN: cn=autouser_0,ou=autousers,dc=joe,dc=com… “UZ0Hn*#T”
   DN: cn=autouser_1,ou=autousers,dc=joe,dc=com… “R;MG]#0l”
   DN: cn=autouser_2,ou=autousers,dc=joe,dc=com… “S8Lks~J”
   DN: [...]

They found a hole in…
Today I noticed that I received a ton of spam to moderate for the blog. I thought… “How the heck are they getting in?”
So I made a quick change, still the spam was flowing through unabated which really shouldn’t have been possible. So started looking at the web logs closely which [...]

I have started getting some emails asking…. “Hey where the heck is the updated version of AdMod?”
Well I don’t know where it is. Well that isn’t true, it is up in another Window right now and I am taking a small break from it to write this entry. Adding my CSV/ADCSV capability is pretty serious [...]

Do you know what the Squeaky Lobster registry key is? If not, you won’t find this story as interesting as those who do but it is still an awfully funny look into coding decisions.
To the developer with the cunning alias of “Andrew Goodsell”, I feel for you dude and completely understand. And actually, I don’t [...]

BrettSH was heard saying “Eric is only about 5′10″ and you cannot even see him when he turns sideways but is running around with one of the biggest DITs in the universe…. Where does he keep it? Does size really matter? How much of that DIT is the product of fluff and how much is hard [...]

Still cleaning… I got through a couple of more sort drawers and found just masses of stuff that I shouldn’t be keeping such as an old broken linksys wireless cable router (I had dreams of tearing it apart and trying to fix it sometime…), old Borland Framework posters I never hung up, more IDE cables [...]

I was contacted about a bug in MemberOf. Stupid mistake on my part really… If a user/computer was in a member of a group that was locked down via permissions from the person running the tool they would have the opportunity to experience MemberOf hanging and eventually crashing. Again very stupid mistake.
This is now corrected [...]

Word on the street is that Robert Scoble, renowned blogger, is leaving Microsoft. This is sort of confirmed by Robert on his blog in that he says he is upset about what some of the people are saying especially in regards to Microsoft about it.
I am not certain this event is deserving of all of [...]

~Eric wrote up a nice blog entry on a huge ADAM DIT file he created (~2 TB) and the errors that pop up when you run out of Distinguished Name Tags (DNTS).
If you have even the slightest clue what I am talking about check it out at http://blogs.technet.com/efleis/archive/2006/06/08/434255.aspx
 
 

I seem to have developed packrat-itis somewhere along the line. I think this is something that has been brewing for years. As I got bigger places to live and more and more hard drive space I just accumulated things. You can read that as I had places to tuck things out of the way so [...]

I just recently watched Triumph of the Nerds by Robert X. Cringely again. That is such a good show if you are into the history of the computer revolution and how we got here and it is accessible to anyone, not just gear heads. Sure there are little problems with it here and there where [...]

So what do you use to capture VHS Videos? I picked up a DVD Express and it just completely sucks. I got it to work long enough to capture two 20 minute home videos. Pretty worthless.
It seems that my Media Center with Hauppage cards can capture as well but I don’t get any audio which [...]

I am a little late on this one but congrats to Sean.  I don’t really think Lee had a chance, as was said often, he was a politician, not a business person. Maybe Trump would want politicians but he seems to like people who get work done versus people who talk about getting work done. He [...]

Infrastructure Master: Dissecting the Active Directory architecture

http://searchwinit.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid1_gci1192821,00.html?track=NL-463&ad=554811USCA&ad=554808
 

I have updated the software for this blog… If you encounter an issue, please let me know.

I recently picked up a DVD of Cinderella. No, not that silly Disney movie… I am talking about a concert DVD for the hard rock band Cinderella. I love their music, great stuff. I saw them in concert in Detroit every time they came to concert from about 1986 or so (I even saw them two [...]

Just an FYI, there is an ADAM SP1 refresh up on http://www.microsoft.com/adam but don’t get excited, it is just the MUI (multi-user interface) stuff. The original install stuff is all the same.
There is a KB with it (KB902838) but it isn’t actually live yet.  I was asked about this yesterday in lunch and was like… [...]

Well got another AFA email today… The gist of it is that they are ticked that the MPAA has rated a movie with Christian content as PG…
I have several comments on this one…
1. PG simply means parental guidance. There could be material that a parent may want to be there for with their children… The [...]

If you took genetic material from the bone marrow in your rib and cloned yourself from it and changed the sex of the organism that results and then you raised it to adulthood, would it be wrong to have sex with the resulting creature?
Would that be homosexual sex? Or even masturbation?
If incest is so bad [...]

Thank goodness, just when I felt all of my tax dollars were not being wasted properly I hear the Senate is going into a three week debate around making a constitutional amendment that says gay marriage is against the constitution. This is being pushed as an issue by the Republicans and they already know that they [...]

Well I was looking at the traffic logs on June 1 and noted that MSNBot still hadn’t calmed down. I was looking at robots.txt info to figure out what to do when one of my MSFT friend’s pinged me about it (Did he have a reminder set in outlook too I wonder?). I indicated that [...]

I am not a GPO expert nor fan, I could be wrong with things here. If I am, be sure to comment and correct me. I do know for a fact however that the steps outlined will result in being able to use local machine policies while the machine is in a domain; I tested it [...]