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Information about joeware mixed with wild and crazy opinions...

7/17/2007

New Utility – Unjoin V1.1.0

by @ 10:54 pm. Filed under updates

My friend Dean was griping about NETDOM a while back and how it wasn’t working for him on something. I was, as I seem to be most of the time now, swamped under water with a reed to breath through so unfortunately I didn’t have much time to chat with him about the problem and try to figure out what might be the issue. So I figured I could write my own version of the tool quicker and did so and sent that off to him and voila he is happy.

I then was pinged by a few more people with similar needs and finally it just got to a point that I figured I might as well clean it up for general release and post it so here it is….

http://www.joeware.net/freetools/tools/unjoin/index.htm

 

It will unjoin a machine from a domain and not even start to ask the domain for permission or even tell it it did so, zip, out of the domain, have a nice day. You will find that this will likely be faster than NETDOM for any unjoin ops. It allows you to specify connection creds and will also allow you to specify a reboot. Of course it has a built in safety in that you have to specify -forreal to get it to do the real work or otherwise it will just tell you the current join status of the machine in question (i.e. in a workgroup named xxxx or in a domain named yyyy).

Have at it and have fun.

     joe

Rating 3.00 out of 5

7/12/2007

LDAP Application Developers get off your collective asses already

by @ 9:44 pm. Filed under tech

I am about sick to death of running into LDAP apps that need hardcoded host names. What the hell is wrong with you people? There is a perfectly good RFC out there for locating LDAP Services (as well as other services) that works quite well and you still refuse to use it. FYI, if you don’t know about it, it is RFC 2782 – A DNS RR for specifying the location of services (DNSSRV) – http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2782.txt

All you are doing is making your apps susceptible to single server failure and requiring businesses to try to solve issues with failover for you. You look like a bunch of schmucks, stop that shit. I know it can be done, I saw people doing it on UNIX more than five years ago.

Rating 3.00 out of 5

7/9/2007

For my friends that work at VMWARE….

by @ 10:09 pm. Filed under general

Remember me when you are rich. 🙂

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19684842/

“VMWare IPO could raise $1.1 billion”

I don’t quite understand why Intel is buying 9.5 million shares… Anyone understand that?

Rating 3.00 out of 5

PS3 60GB model cut by $100

by @ 10:02 pm. Filed under general

IMO, still ridiculously high and I can’t see myself spending money on it.

http://blogs.pcworld.com/gameon/archives/004841.html

Even the XBOX 360 is too expensive but when the new Halo comes out, I expect I will be buying it.

Rating 3.00 out of 5

Finally upgraded XP Media Center to Vista Ultimate

by @ 9:46 pm. Filed under tech

I meant to do this last December/January but it just wouldn’t come up on the “I have time to do” list. Well my XP Media Center started acting really weird with stuttering sound the last few days and acting like it was out of resource but it had plenty of CPU, RAM, and disk IOPS available. I did a checkdisk and it showed some bad data issues so obviously something went pear shaped.

I figured I could troubleshoot it or I could just do what I have been meaning to do the last seven months and upgrade it to Vista this evening. If it blows up on the upgrade or doesn’t fix the issue, what did I really lose?

So I ran through the upgrade and it went quite well. The one thing that I did that turned things sour was when I went through the video configuration routine. I let it choose what it wanted to do and it completely screwed up the picture quality. It looked like a bad satellite signal for everything it played including stuff I had saved from before that I knew looked great, tons of pixelization and interlace/scan lines, etc. So I rolled it back to the last hotfixes I applied right after the OS load and before the Media Center Configuration and told it to skip the auto config for the video stuff and all is pretty good now. The picture quality still isn’t what I recall for XP Media Center but it is good enough.

I really like the performance enhancements, much faster. I am not a fan of the new look of the recorded shows. I don’t need to see a picture of the show to know what it is. I’m sure it will grow on me but I miss the summary of how many hours of TV are currently recorded. It was good for me to see because then I knew if they had a BattleStar Galactica day on sci-fi or something and I now had 30 BSG episodes from the 70’s to delete.

I was sort of hoping to see some of the more logical things broken out into menu options like show all conflicts, specify date ranges for original air dates of shows (so I don’t get the 30 BSG episodes from the 70’s recorded in the first place), etc.

I am expecting I need to dig out the Media Center SDK and look through to see how difficult it would be to put in the features that I think should be there. That will happen the day I get so pissed off about something and it becomes my number one irk-item on my list I guess. Or I guess if I figure out a way to make some cash on it. 🙂

Rating 3.00 out of 5

7/7/2007

The iPhone

by @ 10:03 am. Filed under general

$600 for the phone and $90 for the replacement battery….

Come on… Are people really standing in line for that thing? Can’t wait to see their expression when they drop it in the toilet or on the road and it gets run over… The expressions will be priceless.

I am really enjoying my, what was it $50 SLVR, and I think it still does too much. If it rings and I can hear someone and I can dial out and they can hear me I am all good.

Rating 3.00 out of 5

Microsoft and GPLv3 article

by @ 10:00 am. Filed under general

Kind of interesting

http://tech.monstersandcritics.com/news/article_1326936.php/Microsoft_claims_exemption_from_GPLv3

Personally I think MSFT should say, you know what, fine we won’t play here, then go work with the BSD folks like Apple did. Stallman would be standing there with no one else to play with. Long term I see a space for the UNIX-ish Operating Systems but I also think that whomever MSFT embraces will be the primary winners there. Teaming up with Apple on it is just goodness, get the artist and the engineer together more often.

Nearly everything MSFT gets into in the OS space becomes the de facto standard due to overwhelming deployment numbers. I fairly regularly hear people complaining about MSFTs LDAP and Kerberos implementations but it doesn’t matter, they are the most used, most deployed versions out there now.

One thing I find interesting is the whole “going after MSFT” aspect of GPL yet two of the largest computer companies most in bed with GPL/GNU are the two companies that beat everyone else out in the number of patents granted every year. How do the people in charge of the Open Source stuff in those companies deal with the fact that their companies want to patent everything coming out their doors? Just seems interesting to me.

Rating 3.00 out of 5

7/6/2007

VMRCPlus is here… and if you use Virtual Server you should be using it…

by @ 12:52 am. Filed under tech

I mentioned this tool previously. I was one of the lucky bastards who received a copy of it a long time ago and used it exclusively for managing the Virtual Server I have (mostly because it is great but also because my IIS VS Management Console melted down). Now everyone can have it. 🙂

http://blogs.technet.com/matthts/

This version is significantly polished over the version I had which is like a year or so old. The new version seems to suffer from the same problem on my laptop that Livewriter suffers from, slow launch times. The older version didn’t have that issue. I am wondering if it is the significant polishing or the move from the 1.1 to the 2.0 framework. I also found (and reported to Mattijs) an issue where trying to manage a Virtual Server that was on a domain PC from a workgroup PC throws some odd interface issue.

Rating 3.00 out of 5

Trend Micro does it again…

by @ 12:09 am. Filed under tech

For anyone running Trend AV products I have to say a heartfelt “I’m sorry”. Not for anything I have done, but because Trend is reporting CPAU as a virus again with 4.583.02. I came home to _many_ emails describing the problem, thanks to everyone who took the time to write. Several mentioned opening tickets with Trend and I also sent an email to them as well with the history from the last problem so hopefully they will get it fixed ASAP.

Here was the last case with Trend

http://blog.joeware.net/2007/03/02/820/

http://blog.joeware.net/2007/03/05/823/

Rating 3.00 out of 5

6/27/2007

Allison Stokke – Wow.

by @ 12:42 am. Filed under general

I sense an impending growth in the interest in pole vaulting in this country…

http://barstoolsports.com/randomthoughts/2007/05/29/#stokke_show_back

http://www.withleather.com/post.phtml?pk=2811

http://www.withleather.com/post.phtml?pk=2994

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/28/AR2007052801370.html?hpid=topnews

Very smart, sports talent and incredible looks… We are looking at the next millionaire to come out of Newport Harbor High School I expect if she can learn to live with the attention she is no doubt (and in her mind right now unfortunately) going to get.

Pole vaulting 13+ feet… I would be happy to clear 4 feet and I have at least 6 inches in height over her.

And again… Wow. Good luck Allison.

Rating 3.00 out of 5
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