August 2003 – Page 9 – Absoblogginlutely!

Blackout in America….

By Andy on Friday, August 15, 2003

When I first heard about the Power failures hit US and Canada it was mentioned on WorldNewYork who was rather cryptic about his reasons for not having power and my first thought was that there had been another sept 11 type of bombing! It was quite a relief (to me sitting thousands of miles away!) that this wasn’t the case and it was *only* a power cut – but what a power cut. Apparently the biggest in the history of the states and affecting more than 50 million people.
Being the computer tech, I’d just love to know how all the Disaster Recovery companies coped with everyone calling them to get their servers online QUICK. I know of at least two bloggers who are probably affected, or at least their blogs are down right now – (not including WorldNewYork who used a dialupmodem, torch and laptop to post! His pictures really are worth looking at too.)

There are also some good photos taken by phone at blackout.textamerica.com with some pretty funny comments with them too.

Uncategorized

GrabClipSave

By Andy on Thursday, August 14, 2003

Installed GrapClipSave this evening at home which is software that automatically captures the alt-printscreen keypresses and saves the resulting jpg file into a directory of your choice so there is no need to keep loading paint or paintshoppro to save the images. Very useful when screencapturing a process.

Bugs Windows 2000

W2ksp4 fixes

By Andy on Thursday, August 14, 2003

From the Windows and .net magazine is an article providing details about the recent Win2K SP4 Bluescreen Fix; Terminal Server Bug Fix; and Citrix Logon Delay

Windows 2000

SUS version 2 beta…..

By Andy on Thursday, August 14, 2003

I received an invitation to join this beta today. Among the advertised highlights are –
Support for Windows, Office, SQL, and Exchange patches
Reporting capabilities – deployment status about download, install and impacted machines.
Ability to uninstall patches that support uninstall
More Administrative controls – patch install, uninstall, install by a deadline, and configurable client polling intervals.
Targeting of different updates to administrator defined groups of machines.

They should really have been in version 1!

Rants & Complaints

Coppers get off speeding charges

By Andy on Wednesday, August 13, 2003

Talk about one law for some and another entirely different one for coppers! The BBC reports that two BBC policemen beat speeding charges because warning signs had the wrong colour border……whats that got to do with the fact that they were speeding? Surely it doesn’t matter if there were warning signs or not? Just shows that speed cameras are a load of rubbish.

MovableType

RSS Feeds changed

By Andy on Wednesday, August 13, 2003

As per Chris’s request, my RSS Feed is now changed to send a complete feed instead of the first 40 odd words. All I had to do was change the line
<description><$MTEntryExcerpt encode_xml=”1″$></description>
to <description><$MTEntryBody encode_xml=”1″$></description> in my template’s.

Mozilla

Importing firebird bookmarks

By Andy on Wednesday, August 13, 2003

Tried to import my mozilla bookmarks from my laptop onto my pc and although it does import, it puts everything in different folders so the bookmarks Toolbar folder that I was hoping to import appears at the bottom of the new bookmarks list. I must say that it was a lot easier to manage the favourites in Internet Explorer.

Exchange / Outlook

exchange admin tools on XP

By Andy on Wednesday, August 13, 2003

Just tried to install the Exchange Administration tools on the XP laptop and it failed due to the message ‘The component “Microsoft Exchange System Management Tool” cannot be assigned the action “install” because the Windows 2000 Administration Tools must be present.’
This is because the install checks for the 2000 version of the adminpak which is incompatible with XP. (I had already downloaded the adminpa for Windows2003/XP. A patch is available from Microsoft that fixes exchange installation software to allow installation on xp.

ADSL

My router config pages…

By Andy on Wednesday, August 13, 2003

Whilst searching for a new adsl router on google (for the office) the first hit was for my own make and model of router. This page has a lot of configuration information for the router although the firmware download link is not available 🙁
How to set up DABS Conexant AMX-CA64E Router in the UK

Wireless

Wireless Lan update

By Andy on Wednesday, August 13, 2003

After ringing Netgear after having no response on the email, and spending 9 minutes on hold I spoke to a techie who said that the problem was likely to do with having a duff power supply. If i installed the usb manager software and got some specific error messages – “Device not recognised” or “DSU not recognised” (or something like that) then the problem was definately a faulty psu. Seeing as though that was the error message I got when I installed the usb software I persuaded him to send me a replacement PSU and I don’t need to send anything back so its a free replacement. The PSU comes from the netherlands so I have to wait a couple of days for it 🙁 Still I’ll be glad to be wireless again! The daft thing is that the phone techies don’t have access to the emails that are sent to the tech support address!

Month: August 2003