Andy – Page 25 – Absoblogginlutely!

Windows 958644 direct download locations.

By Andy on Friday, October 24, 2008

I have spent all day patching servers, workstations and trying to find a direct download for the 958644 patch that got released last night. I was amazed when Microsoft even called us to join in a webconference for Microsoft partners about this patch – that is something new.
I was not so pleased when I called PSS to ask for a direct download to the patch as kb958644 does not have direct links, windows update services was timing out and the catalog website is badly broken. PSS informed me that as it was not a hotfix they could not provide me with the file and there was an 8-12 hour delay on callback from the server team. So instead I’ve been configuring wsus for servers (that were not already configured), approving patches and downloading by visiting windows updates – a VERY time consuming.
Anyway, without wasting more time – here are the download locations – I’d grab them before the server falls over too.

Thanks to Larry and Derek for the help in finding these.

Dell Work

Dell’s omclean to remove Open Manage remnants

By Andy on Wednesday, October 22, 2008

If you ever get a problem with Dell Open Manage failing to install because previous components are already installed AND you can’t remove the old components as the setup program will not initialize, take a look in the support\omclean directory and double click omclean. Click ok if it prompts you with the same errors that you got when you tried to uninstall from add/remove programs. You will be prompted to reboot at the end of the process. I’m not sure if clicking the ok button forces a reboot, but you can click the close button and the machine won’t reboot. At that point in time the offending software is no longer listed in add/remove programs. Arrange a reboot when convenient and install the new version of Open Manage, – 5.5 came out earlier this month. (omclean is also bundled in this download)

Exchange / Outlook Work

Outlook address not updated from AD when not in cached mode

By Andy on Wednesday, October 22, 2008

There are tons of reports on regenerating the offline address book and forcing outlook to download a new version once a change has been made, but that doesn’t really apply when outlook is not being used in cached mode.

I had renamed a couple of distribution lists but they were showing up as the old name in outlook for all my users. Turns out that I had renamed them on a server without the exchange add-ins which made it harder to troubleshoot as it all looked good on there! However, because of this I had not changed the Exchange General tab which includes the Display Name – sure enough this was showing the old name. I changed this and the users address book came up properly. Next time I’ll do ALL renames on my exchange server 😉

Exams Microsoft Work

Second Shot enhancements

By Andy on Saturday, October 18, 2008

The Second Shot promotion is still running on Microsoft’s website, but now has an extra reward if you pass the exam on the first attempt. If you take a test before the end of the year and pass on the first attempt, you will now get a 25% discount on your next exam (if you take it by June 30th). Looks like it’s time to get the study books out again and push the guys at work to study too. So far for me the second shot promotion has just taken the pressure off of taking exams as I’ve passed each one, so this will be a nice reward. Thanks to Born to Learn for the heads up.

Firewalls Wireless Work WRT54G XPSP2

Linksys WRT54G upgrade and WPA2

By Andy on Tuesday, October 7, 2008

I upgraded my wrt54g to the latest dd-wrt firmware over the weekend from v23 to v24sp1. The annoying thing is that they highly recommend the unit is set to factory defaults which means re-entering the config in by hand after the upgrade. This is not a quick and easy task, especially whn you have to get the config off the there doesn’t seem to be a “print config” page. However, by using the screengrab firefox extension it didn’t take long to open up each dialog page, right click and choose screengrab, save, complete page. Saving all the screenshots into a unique folder means I have a nice copy of the config that I was then able to refer to when rebuilding the unit.

The new firmware also supports wpa2 so I enabled that on the router and then found that my xpsp2 box couldn’t see the router. I was pretty sure I had all the updates for xp on the laptop but I guess not. A quick download of the hotfix 893357, one reboot later and I was connected with wpa2. I’m sure we’re going to see more of this sort of thing on client laptops so this will also be a good placeholder for work.

I haven’t got the openvpn configuration sorted out, I think I have to set this up from scratch as I forgot to save one of the keys – but openvpn seems to be more integrated in this version – at least there are dialog boxes for openvpn – there didn’t use to be.

Email Exchange / Outlook Office

Removing pesky paragraph marks

By Andy on Monday, October 6, 2008

I’m sure you’ve all had the annoying experience when you are typing in a Word document or an outlook email and all of a sudden the screen is filled with backwards P’s – the paragraph marks. I’ve never been able to work out what triggers this to occur until today when I decided to find out after yet another helpdesk ticket came in asking how to turn this function off. (It is especially tricky in outlook as the button does not appear in the standard toolbars within outlook.)
I found that pressing ctrl, shift and 8 (or more correctly ctrl *) will toggle the paragraph mark status. I suspect that the keyboards are registering the ctrl key being held down at the same time as the shift 8 key is being pressed to get a * displayed in the text.
Note that you can find out what other shortcut keys take affect by right clicking an empty part of the toolbar, clicking customize, selecting the Options tab and then enabling “Show shortcut keys in Screen Tips” and then clicking ok to close the dialog boxes. Turning this on helped me determine the buttons to press.

Flash Games Music

Jamlegend

By Andy on Saturday, September 27, 2008

FretsOnFire has been around for a while and allows you to play GuitarHero on your own machine, but JamLegend is an online version. Using the 1-5 buttons for the frets and enter to strum you can play like Guitar Hero.
There is some pretty good music on there from bands you will have never heard of – I didn’t see any music that I recognised, but I guess this will eventually come, but in the meantime this is a fun way of finding out new music. One of my favourite tracks so far is Go On by Blue Judy and the neat thing is they also provide links to other sites where you can get the music to download. In this case there is itunes, cdbaby, lastfm and others. The other good thing is they have good taste in tshirts – see the right most tshirt 😉
There are showdowns and Duels where you can compete against other people in realtime. It also has social features where you can add friends and you need an invite to play – I currently have three invites for (regular) blog readers if anyone wants it leave a comment.
One down side that is really annoying is that my flash player stutters – normally when I get to around 50 notes which means it breaks my streak and I have to start again. Seeing as though continual play is the best way of advancing through the ranks this is REALLY annoying. I’m not sure if it’s a problem with flash – I suspect it is as it also affects youtube and other flash video viewers 🙁

FriendsInTech Photos

New FIT post on Shooting Raw

By Andy on Saturday, September 27, 2008

Just uploaded a new post to the Friends In Tech blog on how to quickly create JPEG files from Raw files – the free utility allows you to save space on your camera card and reduces the time taken to write the files too or just register to download IJFR

Real Life

New number plate.

By Andy on Sunday, September 21, 2008

It’s that time of year again when we have to renew the tags on the car. As we’ve had a shuffle around of the cars and I now drive Kristen’s old car,I now have the chance to choose the number plate again. It is amazing how many techy/geeky options have already been taken. The funny thing is that entering reb00t as a number plate gives the error message “Your request has been found to be inappropriate, you have entered too many characters or your plate request has been found inappropriate due to its meaning.” I’m not sure what is inappropriate about reb00t (reboot was already taken).

Some of the suggestions that we came up with were bloggr (I can’t get blogg3r back as I guess it is still in the system from the old car even though I actually have the plates themselves already), iblog, googlr, ktxbai, igoogle, wonky, havepwd, r3boot, form4tc and hey up.

Can you think of any other good ones that aren’t already taken? You can check availability online at oplates.com

Links

Retaggr card.

By Andy on Sunday, August 31, 2008

Retaggr is a new service that provides links to all of your profile pages on the various social websites, provides twitter updates and affiliation links all in one card. Mine is included below and will eventually get added to the side bar of the website (or added to the AboutMe section)

This functionality is great for gathering all the buttons together and keeping people up to date on your latest tweets etc. It’s also great for stalking someone or for doing research on a job applicant!
I did notice that the goodreads link was broken – shot off an email to them and less than 10 minutes later it was fixed – very impressive. I’ve added a request to have links to the geocaching website added too.