Month: January 2008

Undersea internet cable cut

You may have heard that an undersea cable was cut affecting various countries internet access. Initially I didn’t think this would concern me but apparently some of the companies who have off-shored their tech support to India like Microsoft are affected. This explains why it’s been over two days to receive a hotfix from the Microsoft support website. Fortunately I got tired of waiting and called them up for it but I still haven’t received my emailed version either.

A whole podcast just for me!

A couple of admins posted for questions for some future interviews that they had in the pipeline so I sent in an email about scripting. I’m currently proficient in batch file scripting but really struggled with Powershell scripting which is unfortunate as it looks like this is where admin scripting is going in 2008 with Windows 2008 and Exchange2007. So Steve kindly produced a 10 minute podcast that answered my questions about getting started in Powershell and that was all that was in it – a whole podcast produced for me (but I don’t mind other people listening to it either)- Thanks very much Steve!

Photography workflow.

Day 17 - TimeI think my daily picture taking process should get a bit easier now. Up until now I’ve been ejecting the compact flash, SD or XD card from the camera and then putting it in the card reader. However tonight I plugged the Canon into the usb cable and saw it come up as a mobile device in Windows Explorer. By right clicking on the device and choosing properties I was then able to select an action on inserting the camera. One of the options is to copy the pictures to a specified directory on the disk AND put them in a subdirectory of todays date, another option is to delete the pictures off the camera afterwards. Seeing as though this is a process I do manually at the moment, this should be really helpful. As the camera has a really good battery life (I’ve just swapped the batteries over for the first time) I’m not too concerned about draining the battery whilst the data is being copied across. I might use the card reader process on Saturday when I get back from the Columbus Ohio Flickr meet at the Southern Theatre. Seeing as though this trick has saved me some time, I thought it was appropriate that the photo for today was Time.

Blackberry 8703e reboots still continue

Our blackberry reboots continue to happen (although now that I’m on a 8830 my problem has stopped). In the Blackberry forums there was someone else who had the exact same issue that we did – I thought the person was actually someone else in my company! RIM and Sprint are currently looking at the issue as I blog. The funny thing is that two of the devices have actually rebooted whilst we have been on the phone wiith RIM and Sprint.
Update After 45 minutes on hold whilst the Sprint rep spoke to RIM , we find that RIM do know about this problem and are working on a solution but no eta yet. If you would like to be informed of updates to the software by RIM then send an email to [email protected], subject line Email Update Request for Reboot Issue and in the body put the fact you have an 8703 with issues rebooting at random and that you want email updates on when the problem will be resolved.

Taxcut Premium, Federal,State and Efile for $20

Thanks to the Fatwallet forums, you can get Taxcut Premium, Federal and State and EFile for $29.99 with a $10 in store check. You can order this online at OfficeDepot and when you select in-store pickup the price drops to $29.99 – the rebate form is here. Unfortunately our nearest officedepot closed at the new year and the next nearest is 30miles away….now Staples price match so…….. not sure if they will honour this one – ymmv –Update Staples wouldn’t price match for me in Columbus Ohio as there are no office depot’s near by 🙁

WSUS unable to delete log file.

One of my WSUS boxes had a log file in the C:\Program Files\Update Services\LogFiles directory that was 60MB big – normally these are deleted by WSUS itself, with a backup copy of the previous log kept as SoftwareDistribution.log.old. However the permissions on the folder were set such that Network Service (which WSUS runs under) did not have permissions to create new files in the directory. As it could not create files, it was unable to move the existing file to .old and create a new logfile to start writing entries in. By granting Network Service change permissions to the C:\Program Files\Update Services\LogFiles directory and then restarting the Update Services directory, the SoftwareDistribution.log file was renamed to .old and a new file created. Inspiration for this was found at EventID

WLG plugin for flickr issues

I was going to upload some photos tonight to Flickr using Windows Live Photo Gallery and the flickr plugin that I find very useful for uploading my picoftheday photo. Tonight however every time that it tried to connect it crashed. Initially I thought that it was a problem with the size of the files as I hadn’t uploaded the full size photos before so I switched to the web interface and then realised that Flickr had been taken offline for some maintenance work – unfortunately this broke the flickr plugin. You’ll have to wait until tomorrow for todays picoftheday. I have three photos that I can’t decide between so I’m probably going to start a 365 rejects set too.