Archive for the ‘Computers’ Category

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Machine Re-pave done!

Wednesday, July 11th, 2007

Well the IS part of re-installing the operating system part has. Only took three goes. Something funny made it fail the first time. The second time my primary disk was named F: not C: so IS scripts didn’t work to well. Third time success!

Some of the things I’m doing differently this no. For starters I’m avoiding installing anything I can avoid.

One of those things was ScrewTurn Wiki, I had been running the Desktop Edition, and the team have been using it, so it’s now on the build machine, via IIS. Issues that needed solving:

  • Repairing .Net Framework 2.0 after installing IIS 5.1 - MS KB555583
  • Give <MachineName>\ASPNET modify privilege to the Wiki folder

Changed from using a *cough* borrowed version of CASE Studio 2 Lite to using the freeware Toad Data Modeler. Same program, same issues, but legit!

Plenty more tools I have not installed yet that I will have to, but the aim is to keep the machine fast and responsive as long as possible.

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Long chain of sadness (or geekiness)

Tuesday, May 8th, 2007

Well, because I downloaded the DirectX SDK (April 2005) and went over my monthly traffic limit,

I have been running uTorrent just because I can,

because of this, Xtra has squashed my bandwidth down to 6KB down 8KB up, so the WWW is slow,

So I have been connected to work via the VPN (to sync the codebase via svn), and remote desktopped onto the build machine and my machine to build the software and test my current bug.

Surprisingly, things (the UI experience) are manageable.

So I’m posting this from work (but at home) because I can (and the VPN blocks all Internet access while connected).

That seems to be the justification for a lot of geeky things.

….Builds done!

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Shutdown Day

Friday, March 23rd, 2007

In 12 hours, 3 minutes and well, 40 seconds from the time of writing this, Shutdown Day Begins - see http://www.shutdownday.org/ for details.
To summarise (or rather, to steal their summary):

It is obvious that many people would find life extremely difficult without computers, maybe even impossible. If they disappeared for just one day, would we be able to cope?
Be a part of one of the biggest global experiments ever to take place on the Internet. The idea behind the experiment is to find out how many people can go without a computer for one whole day, and what will happen if we all participate!
Shutdown your computer on this day and find out! Can you survive for 24 hours without your computer?

See the website for details, counts, comments from people on what they plan to do instead of using their computer, and more.

Cheers Mark

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Laptop Computer

Friday, December 8th, 2006

Well after about two days of Installing software, I now have a functioning laptop for the trip to Montreal.

I was thinking as I installed my often used tools, that it would make a good list of what I like to use, and have to use.

  • Might & Magic IX (for entertainment)
  • Visual Studio 2005 & MSDN
  • Subversion
  • TortoiseSVN
  • SQL Express
  • Our product
  • Firefox 2.0
  • Beyond Compare 2
  • RSS Bandit
  • Wireshark
  • XVI32
  • ProcessExplorer
  • Live Writer
  • 7Zip
  • InstallShield 11 (used often but not installed)
  • ScrewTurn Wiki Desktop Edition

Wifi/LAN work at work. At home the LAN just works, but the Wifi “connects” but I can’t ping the gateway. Might play more this weekend. Grrr, it should just work.

This was posted from Laptop via LiveWriter, so I know it will all work before I leave.

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Microsoft Virtual PC and MS Domain issues

Tuesday, August 29th, 2006

Well I have just butted heads with our domain policy and Microsoft VPC. The summary of the problem is the domain server and your windows PC exchange a secret password, and it’s updated at a random interview (inside a configured window), once the domain server negotiated a new password the old one become invalid. This is fine expect for, when using a virtual PC, where you throw away the changes after each session, which I have been doing as I’m testing my installer, and want it all nice and clean.

There is a registry key option as noted below, but this appears to be required on the server as well as the work station, so the understanding IS guys are not touching it with a barge pole. Which means I’m now rebuilding my VPC image again. Current service pack 2 is been installed, and after that I have ~50 patches for it two install. Yea har!

Anyway, I’ve got a copy of the hard drive image, prior to joining the domain, and I’m going to leave my new image running over the weekends, to hope this is when a new password is exchanged. Otherwise this is the only fly in the virtual machine ointment, which still best the pants of having a ghosted machine.

Here is a VMWare forum discussing the issue (with snapshots) with the registry key been:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINES\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Netlogon\Parameters\DisablePasswordChange REG_DWORD 1

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