lpetersson

What the hell is wrong with people?

There has been chocolate in our kitchen area all day, and I'm the only one stuffing my face with it :-(



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Wow, i actually had something interesting to do yesterday for nearly two hours.
Of course, if I had remembered a little utility called psexec.exe I would have done it in 10 minutes instead...

Basically, I had to automate updating the registry on 30 or so servers tonight.
The update was a registry file that needed to be imported.
Aha, easy peasy I thought... rcmd.exe can do that.
But alas, rcmdsvc.exe isn't installed on the servers...

Not a problem I thought, I can work around that...
Nothing a little script to install rcmdsvc on each of the servers, launch it, import the registry file, kill rcmdsvc and then remove it again can't handle.
Easy. Nothing to it...
After boxing with this for a little while a kind chap over at the Microsoft Newsgroups asked why I didn't just use psexec.exe to accomplish this...
'Hmm' I thought, what a splendid idea.
10 minutes later...
A couple of shiny batchfiles to sort the problem.
About as elegant as an elephant, but it'll do for now.
Later I'll see about making something a bit prettier to do this.
Especially since this will have to be done again at some point.

How not to get a job :]
Glorious :)

It's all fun and games here in the investment banking word...

• The software on my new phone has been broken after I tried to install Good Link on it /sigh


• Active Sync from Microsoft is a swine to use, set-up and still doesn't work properly at home


• I'm trying to install a Blackberry Server in dev and it's just not working


• Finding proof that having more than 3000 items in a folder in an Exchange mailbox will lead to performance degradation is proving more difficult than I would like...


• Waiting impatiently for my new MP3 player


• Also waiting for my new knife set to arrive...


• While the left side of my mouth was numb last Friday I managed to bite the inside of my mouth which hurts like a bitch...ARGH...


• The hole left by my now departed tooth is itching like hell...


• I don't have WoW anymore :(

Since I now have a smartphone with Windows Moblie 5 on it, I thought it would be silly not to play with it and just use it as a phone.
And so I did.
And so it broke.
Installing Good Link Mobile Messaging is reasonably simple and easy and I've done it before.
You make sure you have the correct GPRS settings from your network provider, go to the relevant Good website on the device, download the correct software, install, configure and use the license key you get when you were provisioned on the server. It all went well until I discovered that my colleague had provisioned my Exchange 2003 mailbox rather than my Exchange 5.5 mailbox.
Not a problem, I'll just do it myself and do it right.
And so I did.
Except, I didn't remove the existing Good Link software as I thought it would be clever enough to overwrite the existing software.
Needless to say that wasn't the case...
The device now refuses to go further than the boot screen where it seems to initialise GPRS and the phone software but not start the GUI properly.
A soft reset essentially just re-boots the device and didn't do sweet FA and for some reason a Hard Reset which is meant to wipe all data + software off of it and restore it to a pristine factory condition doesn't work.
Nevermind, this is a good lesson and I will find a solution.
In the meanwhile I'll be using my Nokia 6230i as my phone.

Active Sync is, as I said, an absolutely swine. I can get it to work once at home and to get it to work again I need to wipe the device. Bloody useless.
When I plug it in, it activates, pretends to try to sync and just does nothing no matter how long I wait. Quite annoying. I will look more into this at some later stage and probably end up looking for alternatives...
It's working fine in the office though, but here I have a proper grown-up mailserver which seems to make it happy. I have of course gone through the helpfiles and set-up both the device and Active Sync as suggested to make it work with a home based Outlook that just has a pst file to work with, but no dice...

Installing the Blackberry Enterprise Server is not fun. First I had what I thought was SQL errors, but turned out to be Exchange 2003 related.
When an enterprise level application says that there is a database error and this application is heavily reliant on an SQL database I think it's forgiveable to make that assumption.
As an aside, it's funny to see two indians taking the piss out of each other. Especially when one of them are about the size of fayeshine and the other is like a big version of Samwise.
Anyway, it turned out that the Exchange 2003 servers RAID array which hosted the storage groups had melted. That would certainly break Exchange 2003...
After that got fixed I then had to fight my way through the Blackberry Technical Knowledge Center trying to find a solution.
Again no dice, so I'm now waiting for T-Mobiles Technical Helldesk to parse our logfiles and see if they can figure out what's wrong.
Woe.

I caved in and bought a Creative Zen Vision:M. It was too pretty, too siny and too comfortably big to pass up. I had to have it...
And it should be arriving tomorrow...

My knife set is currently with Parcel Force who wanted me to pay Customs charges before they'll deliver. That has now been paid and hopefully it will be with me by the weekend...

I finally got rid of World of Warcraft. Again.
It's a time sink beyond belief and I'm glad it's gone.
I now have one machine that functions as my fileserver, imaginatively called [Server], one machine for e-mailing, LJ'ing browsing and so on called [Nurgle]. This machine could theoratically play WoW if I turned all programs off and ran WoW at all the lowest possible settings. And it would still not be good to play... The machine I used to play WoW on, formerly called [Slaanesh], and my other Compaq which used to be called [Khorne] (Anyone see a theme here?) now both have Windows Server 2003 on them and soon they will be introduced to Exchange Server 2003.
I will really put my head down and get those darned exams over and done with...

This will be helped by the bill I just received for my dental work. £990...
I will be having a quiet October I think, so don't expect to see me out too often next month.
Shame really, especially since I had just started looking for a decent NAS...

And now I'm off to see Blind Guardian...

That was close...

One of our Exchange services have been falling over all day and we haven't been able to figure out why.

Since I'm on call, I'd be the one getting a call everytime it breaks over the weekend, so I thought I'd be clever and set up a schedule to automatically get it up and running if it goes down again.
But then I suddenly realised that I'd be missing out on the call out fee each time it falls over and quickly disabled the scedule.
Damn that was close. This looks like it could be a profitable weekend for me :-]

Or at least find a new supplier until our contract with them runs out...

We have been trying to get our ceversheets changed and dear lord, their staff are so goddamned thick it's unbelievable.

I'm not normally rude in e-mails ( but I finally flipped and wrote this: )

And deeeeep breath...
I feel so much better now.