Month: June 2006

Cincinnati


Kristen had the day off so I took the day off and we went to Cincinnati. We went to Newport Aquarium in the morning and I tried to do some geocaching.
We also saw Over the Hedge. I was not sure that I wanted to see it as the commercials looked too cheesy and I enjoy the comic online so didn’t want to get disappointed by watching the film. The film was very funny but the ironic thing is that the film has been plugged by Walmart and Kroger a lot – yet the film is about the excess purchasing and food eating habits of humans. My favourite character was Hammy – the squirrel (thats squ-ir-rel).
I’ve loaded some of the pictures we took up to flickr – there are more photo’s but these ones will do to start with.

blogrolling breaking my links?

Not sure how long it has been going on, but it looks like blogrolling is having some funnies with the links. For some reason blogrolling sends the html with single quotes around the parameters in the a tag. Something is escaping the single quotes with backslashes so the urls get broken. Anyone else noticed this and know when it started happening?

Symantec control centre failing to synchronise with server

I’ve had an instance with Symantec’s system centre not being able to show me the details of the client pc’s, complaining that the parent server was down. An initial reboot of the server didn’t fix the problem and most of the documents refer to reinstalling or upgrading symantec to fix the problem. However the document at Error: “Event ID 62: Symantec AntiVirus communications layer failed to initialize…” appears in the Windows Event Viewer – Application log asks for a restart of the service and changing the LoginCaCertIssueSerialNum registry entry – that did the trick.

Vista Installation – pt1

Urgh – the installation process has been horrible so far. Makes me want to put the new version of Ubuntu on instead! Incidentally, their timing was awful – everyone has blogged about the Vista upgrade and hardly anyone blogged about their upgrade. Maybe they should have waited a couple of days and then brought it out with the advertising of “Frustrated with waiting for Vista? Can’t Install Vista? Try Ubuntu and you won’t have to pay for an upgrade in a year!”

Anyway, back on track – I tried to boot from the dvd but the installation hangs after the first swoosh goes across the screen, after the files have been copied, the lights on the keyboard light up briefly and then the whole pc hangs – no more keyboard action and the whole pc needs to be switched off.

So back into Windows I boot and I have to delete a partition on the hard disk as my 10gb xp partition that I was originally going to install over the top of is not big enough. Setup starts and says it can’t copy a setup file – I hit ok and it continues anyway. After entering my licence number and not updating the install from the internet I get the message “At least one device driver that might be required to start your system is not available. Devices with missing drivers: A347SCSI Controller and D34PRT SCSI Controller – Do you wish to ignore and continue?

I have no idea what those two devices are – (a quick google search tells me it is my daemon tools drivers – thanks to tech recipes) but the Vista Upgrader Advisor didn’t have any problems with them and curiously enough – I’ve read that a good way to assist in installing Vista is to mount the vista ISO with Daemon tools and run setup.

UpdateWell the install from within XP didn’t work either and actually wasted even more of my time – not including the time taken to juggle my partition sizes and create enough space for a clean install. The setup routine within windows asks for my product key, asks which partition I want to install to and starts to copy files to the hard disk. Eventually the pc reboots….and does exactly the same as the install process from dvd – the pc freezes at the swish thing down the bottom of the screen. I’ve tried to see if I can find any diagnostic logs or debugging process like the safe mode in XP but no joy so far. – Ubuntu is being downloaded right now.

Update 2 Upgraded the BIOS and the pc will not boot off Microsoft’s WinPE version 2.

Microsoft Antigen for exchange

I downloaded Microsoft’s Antigen for Exchange last night and installed it on a server to remove some old virus’s that were stuck in the mail store (there is no scheduled scan of the mailstore as realtime desktop and smtp scanning is now used for virus protection). Although the product did the job of deleting the mail, the whole admin interface is awful to use and the support on the Microsoft website is non existant – there are NO documents in the technet database on Antigen version 9. With the various quirks in the admin interface and no support, this software really should be released as a beta. I’d only say beta due to the fact that it did remove the virus’s otherwise I’d recommend alpha status.
The extended entry contains my 22 points that I would provide as bug reports if it was in beta status.