PC Doctor has a useful article on some easy removable molex’s (the power connectors to hard disks etc). These normally swine bits of plastic have been the bane of my existence when working on other peoples pc’s and several times I have managed to scrape the skin off my knuckles whilst trying to pull these power connectors off the hard disks, especially when they are in a confined space – in a computer case.
Unfortunately pc doctor doesn’t say where he got these new connectors from. Even a google search took a couple of attempts until I came up with a source from Whitedog at 4 pounds for 10 which seems a reasonable price. You do need a UV light for best effect though, which would also mean a pc case with a window in it, so you are talking pc modding territory here.
Month: September 2005
The rehearsal on Friday went very well with lots of direction so we all knew where to stand, move and stay 🙂 Afterwards we all went to Fratelli’s in Roswell for a fantastic feast of italian food. Everyone had the chefs special which seemed to be about a 20 course meal. It started off with 2 plates of salad, Fruschetta (sp?) bread and calamari. After that course, the entree’s started arriving and continued to do so for a good 20-30 minutes. They timed the arrival of the next dish to be just after the previous one had done the rounds around the table. By the end of the meal I think I counted about 9-10 different entree dishes on the table. Each one tasted really good and left you wanting more, but knowing that you shouldn’t as there was more to come.
The dessert looked (and tasted) delicious too. It had different types of cake on the plate – chocolate cake, Canoli’s (sp?), Tiramisu and Cheesecake. My favourite was the cheesecake, but that is hardly surprising for someone who’s irc nickname was CheesecakeBloke on occasions.
I’ve been accepted onto the Microsoft Onecare beta so as soon as I’m back to base I’ll be installing this onto the main machine. Hopefully the antivirus software will be compatible with google desktop (which STILL doesn’t work with Nod32 antivirus or properly on my desktop pc). There is no antispyware software at the moment but that is slated to come at a later date.
We’re having a nice time in Georgia – the weather is nice and warm hot and the hotel, the Amerisuite in Alpharetta is great. The room is stonkingly huge with a kitchenette, lounge with sofa and single chair, the tv has a vcr and games in, there is a safe in the room (not that we need it), nice air conditioning and free breakfast and newspaper. They also have pretty fast wifi internet access although our laptop is soooo slow it wouldn’t matter if it was a dialup account, the bottleneck would still be the pc.
I’ve only managed to find 1 cache in Alpharetta after hunting for 6 others this morning, but there are about 5 just down the street from the hotel so I hope to get out sometime and do some more. With the cache density in this area, I should be able to get to 400 caches found but time and the heat (and the family) is not going to let that happen. We had a nice time with the bride and groom to be (Kristen’s brother and fiance) last night, with brats and yachtsman’s salad – mmmmmmmmm. Katie made a birthday cake for Dave so we sang happy birthday and I’ve got some goofy pictures I might upload later. We then finished the evening by playing 90’s trivial pursuit but I was at a real advantage as ALL the questions were american so I had no chance. I did manage to get the first cheese though and it went rather nicely in my pda game piece.
I’m not sure why, but a couple of times this week I’ve been unable to ftp files to any of my remote hosts from a command prompt (or within leechftp – my client of choice). When it failed, I would just get a connection refused error message before the username/password handshake takes place. As I’m running service pack2 and have the windows firewall enabled, I looked in the c:\windows\pfirewall.log file (something that I learnt about whilst doing the MCSDT exam – I didn’t know it did a log or that is where it put it!) and I was getting some dropped packets but no reason why. After a bit of digging on google I came across the How Windows Firewall Works document and it mentions that the Application Layer Gateway Service is required if you enable Windows Firewall on a computer that is an FTP client that does not use PASV ftp. The ALG service was running on the computer but a quick restart of the service and I could start ftp’ing again. I don’t see any obvious errors in the event logs as to why this service was not working properly but restarting the service is a lot more convenient than having to reboot the entire machine.
There has been an important fix to coppermine to prevent a Cross Site Scripting hack. The patch and discussion can be found at the Coppermine forums. I am surprised that they do not have a (working) announcement mailing list to find out when patches such as this are released. Update A workaround is to go to the forums and click the notify button. You will probably need to be logged in though.
I’ve just had a scam email pretending to be from Bank Of The West (who I’ve never even heard of) saying that there has been fraudulent activity on my bank account. A DNS lookup on the domain that they’ve registered (on Tuesday) has an address in New Orleans – probably as they know that it is going to be impossible to trace that for the forseeable future.
As usual the website is actually hosted in the far east – Vietnam in this case.
Amazing satellite imagery from google maps of New Orleans. I’ve linked to one of the areas where the flooding is pretty intense.
Auto Window Manager is a great utility that allows you to set any window to be on top, transparent or minimise to the system tray. I’m using it to keep a WMP window of news from WWL-TV about New Orleans in the top corner of my browser whilst I catch up on rss reads.