Category: General

ROMWNET Changes

In preparation for my move I’ve had to make a bunch of changes.

The only effect the outside world should notice is all my certificates have changed, long story short is I made my domain controller and certificate server have been converted to a virtual machine. My goal is to be able to take my whole network infrastructure with me on the plane. I should just be able to plug it in when I arrive and go.

It turned out to be a lot more work than I had anticipated. For some reason dcpromo croaked when I attempted to demote my original domain controller.

Apparently something was messed up and I had to use ntdsutil to forcibly remove the old domain controller and promote the new DC. What I didn’t know about was the notion of a root domain controller, apparently their are a few settings that point directly to the root domain controller and are not exposed via and of the active directory management tools.

—– Rom

Reference Articles:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/332199
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/255504/

Updated my blogs look a bit…

So I spent some time this weekend tweaking my blogs look and feel. Saturday afternoon I just got a burr up my butt and decided to do something about it.

I ran into an article that had some useful pointers:
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/weblogs.html

I took some of his advice and made the following changes:

  • Added a profile
  • Moved my contact info and email signing certificate to the header
  • Optimized the viewing space for 1024×768

I went so far as to include links to translate my postings to Spanish, German, French, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese, and Arabic.

I’ve contacted the Feedburner crew about fixing the link text for the actual links within the RSS feed itself. For some reason the encoding’s get borked.

Hopefully the translations Google does for me won’t offend anybody. 🙂

Well catch ya all later…

—– Rom

Previous articles:
Blog Moved

IT Employees and Multiple Monitors

Are you more productive with multiple monitors?

I personally, am more productive with multiple monitors, I have 3 17″ LCD displays. My roommates have three displays a piece.

Microsoft Research has been looking into this for awhile, and now a french researcher states roughly the same thing about larger monitors.

I’m not sure I would ever want to go back to a single monitor for a desktop rig again.

On my left display I have Outlook and my IM clients, my center display is for whatever I’m working on at the moment, and my right display is for my web browser and online books.

It is nice to be able to glance and see if there is an email I really need to deal with without having to change the focus of the application I’m working on.

—– Rom

References:

Robert Scoble
Toward Characterizing the Productivity Benefits of Very Large Displays
Could a 30-in. monitor help you do your job faster?

Web Server Overload

Sorry about the erratic web server behavior today.

Most of my 24/7 computerized services all run off of one machine. The machine runs Windows XP Media Center 2005 and has Virtual Machines for my email and web services. Since it is my everything computer I normally don’t pay attention with what I do with it, but today I started a video conversion job today which took 12 hours or more. A few hours ago I noticed that the web server started to reject people with a web server busy message.

The disk queue length grew large enough that all the services running on the machine started having problems.

In the future if I start another video encoding job I’ll be sure to adjust the process priority such that I won’t have to worry about it again.

—– Rom

BOINC Workshop and Vacations

So I’m starting to get prepared for various trips in September.

For the first week in September I’ll be traveling to Anchorage, Alaska to meet my new niece. My sister gave birth to her first child a couple weeks ago, so this will be something of a new experience for me. On the 6th I’ll be leaving Alaska and head to Florida to check out my new diggs which I’ll be moving to at the end of November. On the 11th I’ll be returning home for a week. I bought some toys for my nieces and nephew, holy cow, toys are expensive.

September 18th I leave for Geneva, Switzerland to attend the The 2nd Pan-Galactic BOINC Workshop. I’m looking forward to meeting several of the scientists of the European BOINC based projects. I found out today that David Kim of R@H is going to go to the conference, so we are trying to sync up for the long flight over. My grandparents are going to meet me in Geneva and after the conference we are going to go tour around for a bit. Right now, I really don’t know where I’m going or where I’m going to stay, it is going to be something of a surprise. My grandparents are a lot of fun to travel with and I’m really looking forward to it.

On the 28th I head back state side and recoup. I’m sure the next couple of days after that will be spent relearning all the things I will have forgotten about BOINC. That is normally the sign of a really great vacation.

I have turned off various forms of article tracking for the blog that spammers like to try and abuse, so the favorites section won’t change while I’m away. Sorry about that, but I don’t know what my Internet connectivity situation will be like next month and I really don’t want to come back to a bunch of auto insurance, and poker advertisements to clean up.

—– Rom

Upgraded my blogging software


I upgraded my blogging software today.


Hit a few bumps in the road, the new version wanted ASP.NET 2.0 and since it was installed onto the web server in a way that aspnet_isapi.dll wasn’t included in the web server extension list. It took me a while to figure out that it wasn’t registered as a valid extension and that is what was causing the 404 errors.


I also managed to get a hold of a Newsgator plugin for my blogging software so I can post from Outlook now.


In my stumbling around with the blogging software I discovered that my email server hadn’t been doing regular backups since April. Ouch. I have now fixed that issue too.


Hope everyone has fun this 4th of July.

Blog Moved

Prior to today I was hosting my blog was being hosted on a WinXP machine.

Starting today, it is on a Win2k3 machine.

Now I just need to finish setting up Exchange and the web server for RPC over HTTP and then I’ll have my universal inbox up and running. That’ll allow me to have the same inbox on my desktop, notebook, and any other device I may wish to use. Another perk is access to my inbox over a web browser should I be away from any of my computers.

You just have to love modern technology.

—– Rom