Recently in Rants Category

Ok, I'm frustrated with my team. I'm loyal to a fault but here's my threat to Maple Leaf Management. (Yes, BC'ers, I'm a Leafs fan and nobody, even Luongo is going to make the Canucks my first team - I won't lower my standards that much ;-)

But here it goes. If the Leafs trade Mats Sundin, whatever team/wherever he goes, is going to be my NEW team. That's right, for the rest of the season I'll be backing wherever Sundin goes. He's a hero as far as I'm concerned, a great role model, a class act, a terrific talent and the Leafs don't deserve him if this is the team and intensity they can muster.

Hopefully, he isn't going anywhere and instead they package up some of the buffoons (and all of management, shit rolls downhill folks) and trade them for some matching luggage for Mats.

*SIGH*

PHP - amateur hour on the installer and I went with the latest...

Anyways, found the reason why PHP pages wouldn't display (of any kind) and I was getting 404 errors instead.

Turns out after installing PHP and having it configure IIS, it would use the 8.3 file name in the IIS, website, properties, Home Directory, choose Configuration, under Mappings choose the .PHP extension and change it from the (in my case) "C:\PHP\php5is~1.dll" to the full "C:\PHP\php5isapi.dll" (browse to it for accuracy).

Sigh. There is a reason why I like working with Microsoft stuff. I can actually get coding right away and doing what I need to do. Setup works, everytime. This PHP/MYSQL process has meant reading tonnes of newsgroups (forget their documentation, it is inaccurate and all over the place - thanks to a 'community' where no one particular person can get canned for not doing the job right) just to get the install done. Once it is working, then I can start figuring out the next level of lameness. *SIGH*

Still totally happy with my LCD (probably because it it 120mhz) and the comments about Plasma being cheaper are balogne from what I have seen, quite the opposite - at least here in Victoria. The LCD I bought was $1500 cheaper than the equivalent Plasma in the store - and the LCD looked 30% better - the plasma seemed very highly overrated. My eyes told me they liked LCD far better, maybe I have lousy eyes?

As for viewing from a 45 degree angle, who does that? Isn't the purpose of a wall mount to put it in the centre of the room?

http://www.digitalhome.ca/content/view/2197/206/

All in all, pretty weak arguments but finally found them in one place. But I have my LCD and I ain't parting with it for any plasma... :)

I've seen these before, as recently as a coworkers (Hi Louis) desktop so it was worth documenting.

Issue 1:
1. When connecting to OWA (Exchange Webmail), when composing a new message, a red x appears in the body area of the message, as though it wasn't accepting an activex control or otherwise. Popup blockers were not to blame.

... Had to choose options in OWA and download and install the S/MIME control. Now, creating a standard email should not requiring a tool needed for signing or encrypting an email but ... whatever ... it worked, first time

Issue 2:
2. After getting the above control working, then IE7 would crash completely when I clicked send after composing a message (Come on Microsoft, you can do better than this by now!?).

... had to install a patch on the Exchange Server (2003) in order to stop this problem from happening (did not require a reboot for those of you wondering). The Patch

Argh, this keeps happening to my dad (and me on occasion).

Vista just decides (seemingly, pretty sure I'm not doing the keystroke combo) to change the keyboard language from the default setting of US English to Canadian French (thus I get e's with accents, etc. - seriously, those are as lame as Poutine! :)

Anyways, the fix is the Left ALT+Shift...

Alternatively, to see this changing happening, go into the control panel and choose Regional and Language Options. Then Keyboards and Languages and press the Change Keyboards button. I found the most useful was to have the language bar "docked in the taskbar" and the checkbox for "show text labels on the lanaguage bar" checked.

Dad, are you reading this? :)

Well, this was a wierd one and worthy of blogging.

After much troubleshooting (of hardware, drivers, fresh profiles, etc. using the file transfer settings wizard, which migrated the 'problem' :)...

A user could login to Windows XP, but could not use the keyboard once logged on. In fact, the keyboard appeared powered up but even numlock keys, etc. would not function.

Guess what it was? The person had held down the right Shift Key enabling the 'FilterKeys' function in the accessibility options. She had held the key down (probably leaning on it) and was prompted with an option to accept, which she did (not knowing why, sigh).

Anyways, it behaved like the keyboard was dead. In the end, I had to go into the control panel, accessibility options and disable the Filterkeys function. Alternatively, I could have held down the right Shift key again....

Anyways, a wierd and time consuming one for the ages...

I kept getting this, which was driving me crazy:

"windows cannot access the specified device, path, or file"

Turns out, that although I was referencing a UNC, that the IE7 advanced security settings were bunging it all up. I could view the share contents (.bat file) on the local computer but not remotely.

So, to resolve, went into Add/Remove Windows components and pulled the *delightful* IE7 security enhancements off my server.

Now this is dumb.

Buy a Dell Computer, have Outlook installed (in my case 2003) and when you edit an appointment (i.e. second time, not creation of the appointment), the appointment becomes a recurring appointment and can't be converted back to a non-recurring appointment.

LAME LAME LAME.

Well guess what, if this is happening to you, you probably own a Dell. And in your Add/Remove Programs group, they have put a moronic application (what it is actually meant to do, I have no idea), called "Outlookaddinsetup". If you uninstall it, the problem is gone. You'll of course need to fix the appointments that were now recurring but at least new one's won't have this idiotism.

It took some time to find this solution in Google Groups so I thought I'd post it in my blog in the hopes that others will find it faster in the future.

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Ok, this one took a while to sort out and I believe people will have different results...

In my case (but I don't think it was even specific to MS SQL, just the result of it, an MSDE database (MSSQLSERVER) service failed to start. After much troubleshooting and only "Error 193: 0xc1" to work with (no event logs, nothing!), I managed to figure out that it was because there was a file called 'program' at the root of the D: (whatever drive impacts you). Not sure at this writing how it got there (no it wasn't a virus, probably just bad code by somebody or a pipe) but that file wasn't needed but the SQL Service was following that path instead of honouring the path it should have (as identified in the service path).

So, I renamed the file called 'program' to something else and voila, I was back in business.

I hope this helps someone, somewhere faster than I was able to help myself :) Let me know about if it helped you - heck buy me a beer - www.itgroove.net/beers

Cheers,
Sean

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Users receive a "Loading" message when they use OWA to access their mailbox after you apply a hotfix or a service pack to Exchange Server 2003

Well, lame-o but ran into this tonight. Strange thing is I had to find this fix using Google as Microsoft's own KnowledgeBase didn't give me the response I would have hoped. Sure enough, a system where I had updated the front and back-end servers, one system used one update (and updated exchweb) but didn't do the other.

Anyways, I've referenced this as I'm sure I'll see it again...

Man, I love this product and what the future holds.

That's all. Just really jazzed. Watch this space as I shift a bit of the focus of this blog to SPS and WSS.

Not all of these Quotes/Statements are necessarily my own, but if anyone has worked with me, you've heard me say this at least once... :)

- Anything is possible in IT - its how much it costs that decides whether it will happen

- I know what I know and I know what I don't know

- I tell the truth because its easier to F$%&#* remember

- I think its a chair to keyboard interface problem

- Must be an ID Ten T error (ID10T)

- That's wierd

- Whack whack, splat dot splat Bang Pound At!

Well, everyone wants to be busy in business and I'm getting what I worked for. Sadly, this blog is taking a hit (not that I spent that much time on it anyways). Back soon, promise.

someone asked me why I hate Norton so much so thought I'd share with you my response to him...

Well, I don't do much (preferably none) small business/home work but on corporate networks where they are installing 100's and 1000's of Norton, it crashes servers, is completely unreliable/unstable and even after you remove it, its still buried deep in the bowels of your PC.

But one thing I notice in 90% of the cases where I've removed Norton ... is that the next AV product I put on (doesn't matter which) will find 5-10 viruses on a machine where Norton was and didn't find a virus. ie. its a false sense of security as it doesn't catch everything ... often...

...my issues with Norton also date back a few years (actually 7 or so) when I was tasked with evaluating 10 different AV products for the company I was working for. I had a test machine image with about a dozen viruses on it and only 7 out of 10 of the AV packages I tested found all of them. The three that failed were McAfee, Innoculan and the worst offender was Norton.

...read into that what you will... the best antivirus regardless is smart computing...

- don't open messages from people you don't know
- don't use P2P file sharing software (Kazaa, Limewire, etc.) on a computer you care about
- do backups and store the media (tape, CD, whatever) away from your computer
- eBay hasn't closed your account and Paypal doesn't need to check your credit card details
- always run AV software but never count on it
- if you get infected with virus - format your computer. I don't mean finding a virus, I mean a virus that actually causes harm on your computer (because you didn't have AV or because the virus hit the wild before your AV software had an update). Just because the virus was removed, doesn't mean the harm (or holes it poked) are gone... possibly making way to a bigger attack next time.

Whew, rant over... ;)

Napster.ca - All the music you want. Any way you want it.

Well, these jerks have pissed me off. I signed up for Napster a while back looking for a particular song. I couldn't find it (great catalog you fools!) and so cancelled immediately. Napster went and charged me for two months of service claiming I never cancelled my account. When I insist I did they say 'Prove it'. Umm, you are the jerks with the logs Napster - you are the one's that can tell I never downloaded a single song or had any activity beyond the first day I was on your system.

Suck Eggs Napster.

Your backups are only as reliable as the last time you did a test restore.

If you haven't lately... maybe you should...

QuickPost | Telus Mobility

Telus sucks. I'm sitting here at Vancouver International Airport. They want $8.00 for lousy wireless Internet access for ONE HOUR. For 24 hours, they want $15.00. $8.00 is ridiculous but offering 24 hours as the next option is plain stupid and corrupt. That, and this connection is barely maintained for 5 minutes before I drop off again. Gee, hope I can at least complete this rant at 80 words per minute. Telus - you deserve every bit of negative attention you get right now!!!!

Had this been 5 years ago, I might have cared more. Then again, this might help drive a little more innovation style to the PC industry.
PCWorld.com - It's Official: Apple Switches to Intel

No porn site will pay for a .xxx domain and use it exclusively

ICAN = pansy-pushover. .xxx addressing should be enforced. This way we can block this crap on our corporate firewalls and keep it away from our children. Instead, they are charging more for this 'privelege' that will never be used, exclusively anyways (ie. you know they will keep a .com type alternative). What a waste of time, resources and sensisiblity.

CBC News: Coming soon: .xxx addresses for porn sites

Bet Microsoft is secretly enjoying having a business reason to advise customers to uninstall Netscape. Netgoat is so far off the radar though, that I can't imagine many have installed it. Gotta say, although Firefox has its own limitations and problems, shear speed and reliability leaves me thinking Microsoft must be hoping Firefox breaks IE in the future so they can give the same advisory for them!

Microsoft advises IE users to uninstall Netscape 8 | Tech News on ZDNet