Anyone have any ideas why my w2k machine would just suddenly reboot itself to the bios screen and start backup again? It doesn’t seem to be a windows crash as I’d expect a blue screen if that was the case. Sometimes it will do it at random, but other times its reproducable. I downloaded a gif file this morning and everytime I loaded it into a certain application it would reboot. However loading into paintshoppro, saving as a jpg it was fine. Resizing the itunes app to fit the width of my screen (they don’t have a maximize button strangely) caused it to reboot.
Booting to recovery console and chkdsk of all drives initially said they were ok, but then I did a chkdsk c: /p which forces it to do a chkdsk and it found some errors, so then it was a chkdsk c: /r to repair. Then i’ll have to do f,g,h,i,j and k….. a long afternoon.
Loads of people have blogged about itunes being available on Windows machines. Interesting to see that the software is only available for W2k or XP machines though. Still thats ok by me, so I’ve Download ed iTunes 4 and will update you on how good it is. I just hope that the songs that I want in particular are available to download. It will certainly be cheaper for me being albums on itunes at $10 than it would for the same album in the uk at £13
Update Well it would have been nice if you could actually use the service in the uk, but apaprently you need a billing address in the states (and it looks like the bands that I wanted to download are not on the list anyway)
What a horrible language! Just spent ages debugging a if-then-else loop only to find that comparisons of strings don’t use if $fred == $jim but instead use if $fred eq $jim and seeing as though $fred was a variable but $jim is actually a fiixed string I had several combinations to get correct before it would work, and I have no reason why using lc($fred) to convert $fred to lowercase didn’t work. Unfortunately Demon don’t support php or asp on their server so I can’t program in these languages (which I know a little more about).
I’ve been a bit quiet on the blogging front as I’ve been very busy at work, including sorting out three companies who had not had a successful backup for at least a month. The register has an article that reckons 25% of companies do not backup. I am wondering if there is a market there for providing backup services and ensuring they actually work.
I’ve been spending the morning trying to write some generic form scripts for the new work website. Its a nightmare developing the backend when someone else has designed the frontend and all the fields are called textfield1 textfield2 etc. Demon’s help on debugging is available at their Using cgi-bins page
Alan Sugano writes an article on checking a server for the Backdoor.Beasty Virus and details checking various autorun locations in the registry – the last one I wouldn’t have checked (and neither did he first time round).
HKLM\SOFTWARE\ Microsoft\ Windows\ CurrentVersion\ Run
HKCU\Software\ Microsoft\ Windows\ CurrentVersion\ Run
If the machine is running Windows Server 2003, Windows XP, Win2K, or Windows NT, you should also check
HKLM\SOFTWARE\ Microsoft\ Windows\ CurrentVersion\ Policies\ Explorer\ Run
A useful utility that can be used in conjunction with Microsoft Systems Update Server. If you have a pc that needs installing (or patching) but isn’t normally on the lan, then this utility forces the client to update against a named sus server, apply the patches and then on reboot sets it back to use Microsoft’s servers. Excellent for patching friends pc’s or remote worker pc’s who are not normally on the lan and are WAY out of date.
Microsoft have certainly been busy overnight with 15 new updates and 20 updated updates to our SUS server downloaded overnight. Thats going to take a while to roll out around the network. It does make me wonder how you are meant to test all of these first though!
Just a quick note to point out that you can’t pass URL’s to filezilla without breaking them down into username, password, host and directory which is annoying and something useful I use in Leechftp
I’ve installed James Seng’s Bayesian filter for MT on this blog and laboriously went through all my comments and marked them as not spam. (A button to mark ALL comments as spam or not spam would be nice for first installations. Most people have probably already cleaned out their comments from spammers when they install something like this). Now it reckons that all my comments are 50% likely to be spammers and 50% unlikely to be spam. Will be interesting to see if this changes over time!