Radio-Locator

What a great site! A friend forwarded this site that lets you find radio station information by city or state, not to mention if the radio station is on the internet or not.

You can even search by country or station format or country.

Thanks Brent!

WSUS Update

I have had WSUS installed and running since Monday. On Tuesday, I had finished playing around with my test group, and I decided to go ahead and use it on the whole company. Let me tell you, I really like it.

Reporting Capabilities:

WSUS has some really nice reporting capabilities. You can pull reports on all of the computers that need updates, and then drill down to see what updates. One useful option is to pull the reports on all computers that have updates with a failed installation. This report even lists the error code for each of the failed updates.

The error I have run into is 0x80070643, and KB Article 836937 lists some methods to fix it.

FIX: Search results may be unusable when you search a network location in Windows 2000

I was just reading my latest Technet Flash, like the good Microsoft Flunky that I am, and I ran across this hotfix "FIX: Search results may be unusable when you search a network location in Windows 2000".

I know that I have run across this behavior a few times. Glad to know that there is finally a fix for it.

WSUS is here!!

WSUS is here!!

I for one, have long been waiting the release of the new update services from Microsoft. I had played around with SUS, and never had much luck with it. So now that it is out, I have downloaded it, and will try to start using it in my network.

For a little back story, SUS is Software Update Services, Microsoft was planning on giving it the ability to update not only windows, but also office and other MS apps. For some reason they didn't want to continue using the name SUS, so they were going to rename it Windows Update Services, I guess they didn't check out what the acronym sounded like. I heard many complaints along the line of "I don't want to be called the WUS administrator". Anyway, it looks like they went with Windows Server Update Services (WSUS), which is better, but I think it is a little misleading. Oh well, as long as it works.

The install went pretty smoothly, with the dialogs screens explaining what is going on. WSUS uses MSSQL for its database, it offers to install the SQL desktop engine, but I already had it running on that machine, so it created a database for itself, all on its own.

It looks like the default is to download all languages for the selected updates. I changed this to only download the English updates, to conserve on disk space. By default, Critical updates and security updates are approved automatically. This was ok for me, so I will leave it as is for now. There were several types of downloads which are not synchronized, and I included pretty much all of them, such as feature packs and security rollup packages. I did not however, include drivers. I bet that would eat up some serious disk space.

After the install, I set up the group policy for a few machines. You can test it out by running wuauclt.exe /detectnow from a command prompt, and then the computers should show up on the WSUS machine. It allows you to create groups of computers for administration.So far it all looks pretty neat. It looks pretty easy to work with, I will be playing around with it over the next few days, and I'll make sure to post anything interesting that I find.

Photoshop Competition

Have you heard about Microsoft's Acrylic? Evidently it is going to be some competition for Adobe. It would sure be nice if they included it free, either with Windows or with Office. They both are lacking a good graphics editing package.

Download the beta here.

Problems with MP3 Players

I used to be a big fan of Winamp, and it is still ok, but I really liked the artist match and genre category stations on Musicmatch. Winamp has shoutcast, but it just doesn't seem to be all that good.

The only problem with MusicMatch is that it is a huge processor hog. My computer would start running really slow, and sure enough, MusicMatch was using up all of the CPU time.

Recently I have started to use Windows Media Player, and it seems pretty good. The advanced tag editor is a little slow, but the player doesn't use much in the way of CPU time. I haven't tried ripping CDs yet, and that is one think that MusicMatch does well.

General Update

1/31/2007 UPDATE: I posted a little more about this in "The Great Jeep Mishap", including pictures.
Well, I know, there haven't been any updates lately. I have been on vacation, and while camping the weekend of June 4th, we were doing some four wheeling, and I broke my Jeep.

What happened is that in the process of hopping mud puddles, I soaked my distributor, which is bad enough, but while messing around with things, I am pretty sure that I dropped the air filter's wing nut into the carburetor. I had my hand over the opening, and I dropped the wing nut and couldn't find it, but I didn't think it could have slipped through my fingers.

On the way home the next day, the jeep started clanking like crazy, and I thought for sure I had thrown a rod or something, so I got a tow home. The week of my vacation, I took the engine apart, and when I pulled the head, I found 2 pieces of metal in the cylinder. I can't really tell if they are the wing nut or not, they were stamped flat by the cylinder.

Anyway, the only thing left for me to do now is to clean the parts, and put everything back together, which I hope to do this weekend. Between the Jeep (which is a 84 CJ-7 btw) and my homework, I have been pretty busy. This week I came back to work, and am still sorting through all of the problems and catching up.

When I once again do something interesting, I'll make sure that I do an update.

Slapdown on Forsake our troops.

I am sure that all of you have heard of the worthless waste of disk space called forsake our troops (don't bother visiting it), and I hope that everyone agrees the people who run the site are idiots who would have some very bad things happen to them if they tried this in other countrys who may not have such a high regard for free speech. But.....

Someone posted this on a discussion board for one of my online classes, and it sure is worth the download. It is a video link to the founder of forsake our troops getting torn a new one! You have to put up with a commercial before the main event, but it sure was nice to see that idiot get a good "talking to".

Since I am on this subject, I would hate to think that even one of the members of our armed forces thinks, even for a split second, that the forsake our troops web site represents how the sane people in this country feel. It doesn't.

You are all doing a great job, keep up the good work, and come home safe.

Semper Fi!

Jeep Concept Vehicles

Besides computers, I really like jeeps. I have owned 5 of them, 2 of which I still have. The 2 I still own are a 1998 Cherokee and a 1984 CJ-7. Anyway, I don't much like what Chrysler is doing to the Jeep line, and don't plan on buying any new models, not that I could afford them now anyway.

The only thing that I think Chrysler is doing well is producing some really great concept vehicles. A friend told me about the Gladiator, and Holy cow is it cool. You have to check it out. It looks a whole lot like a Willy's. I really like the merging of the old style with the new design. Unfortunately I have heard that they are not going to put it in production.

While I was looking over the site, I noticed this page about the Hurricane concept vehicle. If you look through the pictures, you can see that the driver actually pointed the back tires away from each other, and the front tires towards each other, and it spun in circles. Not sure how beneficial that would be, but I sure would like to have one. I bet it won't go into production either. I am also not sure what is going to happen with the Jeep Rescue concept vehicle.

Instead of making really neat vehicles, Jeep is going to make Isuzu Trooper Copies and imitation Dodge Durangos.

If anyone happens to have one of the abandoned concept vehicles laying around, please let me know, and I'll gladly accept it as a gift, or trade you some Karma. You know, father's day is coming up.

What is Ben Stein Talking about?

My buddy Matt sends some of the coolest / strangest links in the world. The latest one is a story in the American Spectator where Ben Stein writes about Nixon and Deep throat. I'm usually a big fan of Ben Stein, former Marine, smart guy, but I don't see why he is so flustered about the whole Nixon thing.

I agree that all he did was lie, and that isn't such a big deal now, after the whole Clinton thing, but I really don't think that you can credit him with pulling our troops out of vietnam, and turn around and say that he could have stopped the defeat of the south vietnamese government. Also, I have no idea how Nixon could have stopped the Khmer Rouge from taking power in Cambodia, I am pretty sure that we had our hands full at the time.

I think all of the other things that Nixon did were great, but let's not portray him as all powerful.

Blogger is just too cool!

I have been playing around with the settings, and just want to say that blogger is just too cool.

The thing that prompted this is when I noticed that I can create an email address for my blog, and then send emails to that address, and the email gets posted. I then poked around a little more and realized that Picasa, which is also free, allows you to download helo, and publish pictures to the blog.

Awesome!

It takes something really neat for me to be impressed, and I am impressed.

The death of Blogging.

I just realized that I have made several posts all in one day, so I wonder if blogging will soon die. Usually, by the time I pick up on something, it isn't cool anymore. I guess we will see.

Good blog names

I know that I can title my blog whatever I wanted, but I can't get the cool URL. I wanted thenetworker, but This guy has already taken it.

The next choice was thebitbucket, but This guy took it. Oh well. The bit Bucket wasn't posted to since 2001, and thenetworker has not been posted to since August 04.

I guess I can't say anything, since I just started and all. For all I know in a year someone will be complaining about my blog not being updated, and how I have the name he wanted.

Sophos virus analysis: W32/Mytob-CP

Mean old nasty virus! Just had quick bout with a MYtob-CP variant. The closest match I could find was here.

The one I ran into was a mutlimailer. Placed an exe called www.lienvandekelder.be.exe in the windows system32 directory, and added registry settings in run services, and run. The really neat thing about it was that it killed processes, like command (cmd), task manager, antivurus, and all sorts of other good ones.

This one sends emails saying that your email account has been suspended, with a zip file attached. The zip file has a pif or .scr file in it.

Luckily I only had one user who opened it. So it cleaned up quickly.

What a great site: Microsoft TechNet

Well, I figured that I would just mention how impressed I am with the changes that Microsoft has been making to Microsoft TechNet. They seem to be putting more and more information into Technet that is Valuable.

I know that all of the Linux folks and the anti-Microsoft crowd would give me a ear full, if any of them happened upon this post, but I think that MS is really making an effort to get some good information to the people who need it.

Also, if you have any idea on how to script, or would like to learn how to, then you have to check out the Script Center on Microsoft's Technet site. I am not a big programmer, but after a little bit of reading, I was able to paste together scripts to do all sorts of neat things.