Month: April 2004

Security patches

With Microsoft’s latest round of patches available this morning (typically on a day that I’m not in the office!) it was interesting to note that there were some NT4 patches on there – you remember NT4 – the OS that microsoft was going to stop supporting on various dates sometime last year. The other weird thing is that my XP box at home downloaded more than 4 patches today – even though there were only 4 patches released.

Weblink broken

I sent an email to one site after mentioning that a link which was coded as &lta href=”http:\\www.sitename.co.uk”&gt didn’t work. After the initial response of “it works on my pc” I was told that 98% of browser users are Internet Explorer, which accepts the slashes in the wrong direction. Fortunately they changed the link. What they don’t understand is that the original code is plain and simply wrong, a basic bit of code that is almost the first thing you learn when coding html – but then again if you code a web page using frontpage……..

Offline Files are synchronised all the time

The problem I have with offline files synchronising whenever *anyone* logs off the computer is documented at kbAlertz which although doesn’t reference the site, can be found at KB article 811660). Annoyingly it looks like a call needs to be placed with Microsoft to get this hotfix – or wait until service pack 2 (I guess). Although it doesn’t bother me too much it does annoy the other people in the office when I log onto their computer 🙂

Caching trips

As documented on my Caching blog I managed to do 9 caches over the weekend and collect 3 travel bugs and two trig points which is a pretty good tally. My knees are aching a bit though and I was very glad of my two walking poles when coming down the hill at Shutlingsloe. I was able to use them as crutches, put my weight on them and allow me to navigate down the hill without too much pain. Today, two days later, my knees were protesting a little bit when we doing the caches, even though I’d specifically chosed caches with terrain less than 2 (although that relies on you parking in the correct spot for the cache!) but I was able to walk without much assistance. So as the Doctor said a week or two ago – I just need to get used to it. As soon as they’ve recovered a bit more I need to get back on the eliptical cross trainer to build the strength in the knees.

Marketing Viagra

We had a package addressed to our marketing manager. On the front cover of the label was a label saying “contains delicate medical material – ViagraLolly”. This caused much amusement in the office as you can imagine. Inside was the Viagra Lolly – an effective cure for idea impotence. Although its a spoof item to help your “creative juices flowing” in the wrong companys hands (ie ours) this could cause major problems with a lot of mickey taking and embaressment for the recipient.

Email Mapping with csvde

As part of the move to the Azur Group I need to add email address’s of the other users to our mail server. Apparently Microsoft have a utility, csvde, which allows you to Import Contacts and User Objects into Active Directory as documented by this knowledge base article. However there are several changes you need to make to the source file, extracted from Exchange 5.5 and the mappings that need changing are described in KB 281563. The daft thing is that the first page tells you that you need to change various field names, giving examples and to see the second page for more information. But the second page doesn’t mention the examples that they use. So in the end I recreated the contacts by hand.

obj-class