A Day Late

Remember how I was complaining about what a pain it is to keep my address books synchronized? At work I have my Microsoft Exchange contact list that I use with my dell laptop and Compaq iPaq handheld. At home I have my Apple Powerbook which connects with my t68i cell phone via bluetooth. In other words, I’ve basically been trying to keep 2 address books synchronized, by hand. My method was to use my Exchange account as the master and occasionally export it to a file, wipe out all the contacts on my powerbook and phone, import the file I created from exchange into my “Address Book” on my Powerbook and then sync it to my phone. A few problems I’ve run into with this approach:

1. I can’t update anything in my phone or on my Powerbook because it’ll eventually get wiped out and replaced with what’s on the Exchange server.
2. My Powerbook and phone are often out of date because I only do an import every month or two. The out of date Powerbook I could live with, but the phones become a real deal breaker.

Those are basically the only two issues, but they’re big ones. Well, tonight I was thinking it was about time to do another import and I was looking around in “Address Book” on the Powerbook and noticed a setting in the preferences that says “Synchronize with Exchange”. WHY WHY WHY did I not find this sooner? I punched in my Exchange server connection settings, opened iSync, clicked “Sync” and voila. Everything synchronized, the Exchange server, Address Book, cell phone, EVERYTHING! Everything stored in one central location, ya can’t beat it. Well, actually you can, it only works with Address Book, not iCal. I can live with that, I’ve never been concerned about having my calendar on my Powerbook but it would be nice.

P.S. Is it sad that I get excited about things like this? Yeah, it probably is.

When I got my powerbook I switched from using Internet Explorer to Safari solely because Safari had tabs and IE didn’t. I was happy with Safari but then heard rumors it suffers from a memory leak. I decided to continue using Safari, once again, solely because of the tabs. At about this time I got my new x86 laptop at work with Windows XP which means I was back to IE (at work anyway). Honestly it drove me nuts opening a new window for every page I wanted to view. Not too mention when you open 3 or 4 windows of the same program in XP they scrunch together as one on the task bar, making it cumbersome to navigate between them.

A guy I work with recommended Mozilla and when I realized it had tabs I was sold. I installed it on both my Powerbook and Dell D600 and have never gone back or felt the need to try anything else. The only thing that’s been annoying me is when I click on mailto links, it tries to open the Mozilla mail program (composer). I’ve searched the “Preferences” window repeatedly for a setting to “Use the system default mail program”. Tonight I finally decided to search Mozilla’s site, figuring at least a few other people have found this annoying. Sure enough I found the solution. Now my web browsing world is perfect.

Mozilla also comes with a built-in Javascript Debugger, very nice for a web developer. Also, since I’ve started doing full time web development I’ve gained a greater loathing for IE. The behaviour amazes and disgust me at times.

For example, today I was tweaking a page for a new site I was working on. Basically I copied a template from another of our sites and proceeded to change the graphics, menus, etc. On the top of the page there was a logo graphic 90 pixels tall, to the right was another graphic that was 70 pixels tall and another below it 20 pixels tall (all with borders=”0″). It looked fine in Mozilla, but when I checked it in IE I was stunned when I loaded the page and noticed the logo graphic had a gap on the top and bottom. I checked the other two graphics closely and they appeared to stretch from top to bottom with no gaps. I double and triple checked the graphic dimensions and img tags with no luck. I loaded the site I took the code from and everything appeared fine. I switched the graphics with those from the site that was working and the gap was still there. The code was almost exactly the same except for one thing. The site that was working used javascript for the top right image (70 pixel one) to automatically select a random picture when the page was loaded. The code looked something like this:

<script language=”JavaScript” type=”text/javascript”>

var random = Math.round(Math.random()*(4-1))+1;
document.write(’<img src=”/images/top_images/image’ + random + ‘.jpg” width=”469″ height=”70″ border=”0″/>’);

</script>

However on the new site I only had a single graphic so there was no need to use the javascript I just replaced it with:

<img src=”/images/top_image.jpg” width=”469″ height=”70″ border=”0″/>

No problem right? Not with IE. Since that was the only code difference I could see, I replaced the img tag with the following javascript:

<script language=”JavaScript” type=”text/javascript”>

document.write(’<img src=”/images/top_image.jpg” width=”469″ height=”70″ border=”0″/>’);

</script>

Reloaded the page, and suddenly the gap disappears, all is well with IE again. Strange and utterly annoying. How much time did I waste trying to figure out what was going on? TOO MUCH!!

Everytime I open up my dell laptop from sleeping I can’t help but notice the bottom left corner of the screen. The fact there’s a simple button on my computer that claims to be able to “turn me off” is a little strange. Clearly whoever designed the button failed realize it’s not that easy. I’ve looked around a little, but I still haven’t found a button that claims to be able to “turn me on.” That’s just my luck, only turn offs.

The Microsoft RPC vulnerability came out a couple days before I left on vacation. I read through the vulnerability notice and decided I really needed to patch the systems before I left. When you read things like:

An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability would be able to run code with Local System privileges on an affected system. The attacker would be able to take any action on the system, including installing programs, viewing changing or deleting data, or creating new accounts with full privilege.

you get concerned. Well I setup a startup script to run on all the machines to install the update and left on my trip. While I was gone I read a few emails from a technical mailing list I belong to at work about how some unpatched systems were having problems. Thinking all my systems were patched and running fine I didn’t pay much attention to’em. I was a little surprised this morning when I went to work and found nearly all the desktops and laptops infected with the W32/Blaster.worm. The mistake I made? I never verified the startup script I setup actually ran. Stupid stupid stupid!! Those are the stupid kinds of mistakes you make when you try and rush to get things done. It took me a little while to figure out what the problem was but once I did I had all the machines reboot which automatically applied the patch and ran a virus cleaning utility. I’m just lucky the worm wasn’t very malicious. I’ll probably have nightmares about coming in and finding a hundred unbootable machines. Do I love my Powerbook and my linux servers? YES! (although, they still require being responsible about installing patches). Should I feel stupid? Yes. Do I feel stupid? Yes. Should I have known better? Yes. Was it a good lesson learned? Yes.

I really wish I could convince the “powers that be” to get rid of Windows on our servers at work. Over the weekend I migrated one of our drives to a new server. It’s a relatively small drive that all users map to to transfer files. I didn’t want the drive to become just another place for users to store their data so I enabled quota management on the drive. Anyway, I took the drive offline and copied all the data to the new drive (which also had quotas enabled), created the new share, changed the logon scripts and figured that was it.

As an after thought I checked the quota entries on the new drive and wasn’t surprised by what I found. Since I was logged in as and Administrator when I copied the data it changed the ownership on all the files to Administrator (who is exempt from quotas). I didn’t consider it that big of a problem since I could just modify the “ownership” on the 30 or so directories on the drive to the proper users. That would’ve been nice until I found out there is no way to change file ownership on Windows 2000. It’s possible to *take* ownership of files but not change the ownership to a different user. Oh how I miss my chown command. Apparently you can buy the Windows 2000 Resource Kit 1 which comes with a script to change file ownership. Sorry…I refuse to buy something that should come with the damn operating system.

I’ve spent the last few days at work working on some Windows logon scripts. Unfortunately it seems that Visual Basic Scripting is the best option for doing it. I’ve never touched Visual Basic and my only experience with Basic amounts to a few classes when I was in 6th grade. Am I the only one that finds Visual Basic a completely non-intuitive language? Honestly if I didn’t have some script archives and resources I dunno what I’d do (by the way, the script is working fine, so far at least).

Ya know, sometimes after working with something for the first time it’s difficult at first but then you start to gain a greater appreciation for it. This just hasn’t happened with Visual Basic. I want my C/C++, Java or Perl back. Anything but Visual Basic. Yuck!

I wrote a nice long rant yesterday about Qwest DSL with MSN as the ISP, but I wasn’t paying attention and closed the web browser before I posted it (hate it when I do that!). Anyway…my temper has cooled a little since then which is probably a good thing. Maybe I should make it a rule that I can’t rant about something until it’s been at least a day since it happened.

Anyway…what happened was one of my brothers built a new house and had it wired with Cat-5 cable. He asked me to come over and setup his network and such. He already signed up with Qwest DSL with MSN as the ISP and they had shipped him an Arescom Net DSL modem. I setup the network, connected a wireless access point, etc, then connected the DSL Modem to the hub. At first the DSL modem wouldn’t connect up through Qwest so I spent a few hours on the phone with MSN tech support (most of the time on hold) and they finally decided to send a Qwest tech out to check the lines. Turns out they had configured something wrong on the line when they hooked it up, so that was fixed and I got an internet connection. I checked his laptop and it successfully got a DHCP address from the DSL modem and connected up to the internet fine.

I figured that was it, but my brother called a few days ago and said he tried hooking up a second computer to the network and couldn’t get it to work. I was trying to think of a cause when I remembered something strange I noticed when I was on the phone with tech support the week before. The subnet mask on the modem was set to 255.255.255.252. I remember at the time thinking that was very restrictive (my binary skills are rusty so I didn’t realize HOW restrictive until I thought about it some more). That’s right…the DHCP on the modem will only give out 1 IP address. I meant to check on it the week before but got distracted and forgot about it. I did some searching online and came across these two links: link1 link2. Yeah…so I guess this NETWORK modem they sent only works with 1 computer. How dumb is that? I told him to call MSN and cancel his service and call Qwest and have them change his ISP to XMission (who is an AWESOME ISP, by the way). So he called MSN and they said they’d credit his account for 4 months of service if he wanted to purchase a router to connect the multiple machines up to the modem. I have to admit, that’s a pretty good offer (this is what tempered my rant). The router I bought was cheaper than 4 months of service would have been, so that’s what we did. Everythings working just great now. I still think the network modem they sent is dumb, but oh well. One of these days I’ll have to write another rant about Qwest. It’d would be a long one though, so I’ll save it for another day.

The other day at work I was browsing the web using Internet Explorer and I started getting an error message indicating I needed to “reboot for the settings to take effect.” Now, consider I did NOTHING but type in a url for this to popup. At first I was nervous the site I was viewing executed some mailicious .NET code or something, but one of the sites was Macromedia’s Coldfusion site, so I figured it was something else.

After a little troubleshooting I determined it was popping up because I didn’t reboot immediately after installing the latest Microsoft security updates. I never do, I HATE rebooting! Well, I guess some portion of the web sites I was viewing was part of the affected security updates and that’s why it kept asking me to reboot. Am I the only one that finds that a little unnerving? The fact that just viewing HTML can initiate a prompt to reboot. In all fairness it might have had something to do with the Flash plugin, since I’m sure Macromedia’s site was using flash.

I understand that web browsers aren’t perfect and require security updates just as much as other types of software. What I don’t understand is WHY do I have to reboot for the updates to take effect? Is it really necessary to integrate the web browser that deeply into the system to require rebooting when it’s updated?