Some Brisbane Guy

Today I had to go and visit a client of the Brisbane ISP I work for. I wasn’t sure I could fix the problems they were having, but I thought I’d give it a try anyway.
They’re running Microsoft Exchange, IIS5 and some accounting software on their Windows 2000 Server (actually Small Business Server). The box sure earns its living. The problems were that nobody could logon to the domain, nobody could login to their Outlook/Exchange accounts, and the backups kept crashing every night because of a disk corruption. If you tried to view the Active Directory Users and Computers console, it wouldn’t let you in, saying that the logon attempt failed.

The disk corruption thing was easy to fix; they’d tried to run Scandisk, which looks to me like a GUI front-end for chkdsk. So Scandisk would find that there was a problem on D:, but couldn’t fix it because, like chkdsk, it can only fix problems when the volume isn’t mounted, such as at system startup. So I just brought out trusty cmd.exe and ran chkdsk /f on C: and D:, just to be safe. We had to wait for a while before all the lusers had finished putting their luser babble data into the system (as if computer systems are meant to be used for actual data) before restarting. It obediently replaced some index or something on D: and the problem was fixed. Hopefully the backup problem will go away — we’ll find out tonight! Ooooh.

Now, the other problem, that of the AD Users and Computers and such, I didn’t know how to fix. Luckily for me, the best search engine ever was close at hand. So I searched around and searched around and searched around, until I found out how to fix it when Active Directory MMC snap-ins fail. Apparently, the Windows 2000 security settings became corrupted. Windows handily keeps a backup in %SystemRoot\Repair\secsetup.inf and secdc.inf, and you can just use the commands specified in that page to restore it back to its former glory. I tried it and it worked. Whooo!

That was my one success this week. Everything else I have tried set straight has made a mess of my ego. I hate computers.

Ooh, tried to log on to blogger.com earlier tonight and it was down! Lots of changes going on after the google buyout, I suppose?

I picked up my new monitor today. It’s awesome — well, for $AU250 worth of awesomeness. I use other monitors at work all day long, but having this one sitting next to my old piece of shite (in my kool dual-monitor setup) really shows the difference.

Online shopping? Look at these sites for interestingness…
martialartsupply.com
Buy lots of evil martial arts weaponry that, with some training, allows you to kill people quickly and efficiently, or slowly and painfully! You choose!!

tshirthell.com
Funny and offensive t-shirts sure to piss off your Mum, Dad, Grandma, little sister, neighbours, friends, acquaintances….

I never posted my new house! This is my new house.

kentwell.net now has a forum. You can go there and stuff, see it, taste it, smell it. Feel the flow of thoughts and ideas. Lovely.

In other news, I purchased hardware today. A new Samsung 753DF. It’s a flavoursome 17 inch monitor that suits my budget nicely at only $258 inc GST. You can read a review if you’re obsessed with me or interested in the thing at dansdata.com. He seems like a reliable reviewer type bloke.

So now my dual monitor setup that I’ve been enjoying profusely will be rendered even tougher than before. I’ve got an S3 Virge DX or something as the PCI card, at the moment just my old Mitsu Diamond View 15″ monitor, faint as it is, and an old miscellaneous 15″ screen on the S3. Works like a charm, kind of.

I don’t think I ever mentioned the HZ Panelvan burnouts - with pictures and video that a guy called Jamie from Western Australia sent. thrashcar’s burnouts section continues to grow, if only it was more quickly.

Hooeeee this post comes all the way from Sydney, Australia. OK, it’s not that far from where I usually am, up in Bris Vegas, but it’s a long way to drive, which is what we did to get here. Just over 10 hours of driving time. It went fast though, had a mate, Richie with me for the trip. Well, really I was with him but that is being pedantic.

Looks like the new graphics card is going OK.

I’m trying to get my shit packed up at the moment so that I can move into a new place! Yee. Should be fun; it’s a fairly old Queenslander-style house, 1920s vintage apparently, owned by the first people in Salisbury (a southern suburb of Brisbane, Australia). They used to have a bunch of land but sold it all off as subdivisions, and now there’s just a little house on a little block, in behind all the other houses. This bloke is putting in a new kitchen and bathroom, and we’re moving in. Should be interesting.

I had intentions for this blog of being something interesting, with useful comments about the workings of the world. But it’s just turning out to be the usual blahblah about my life. I’ll try not to do this. If you’re reading this I’m surprised, anyway.

Registered janebrosnan.com today for the cool girl of the same name.

I’ve been looking at IP Australia’s site tonight, trying to clue up at least a little bit on intellectual property and all that kind of interestingness. It’d be a bitch to create stuff and then have it copied, then to have no legal recourse. Like Frank Bannigan of Kambrook, who was MD when they invented the power-board, and didn’t patent it. Then it was copied by every kid and his Grandma, who now sell them for 5c on every street corner, or something.

A friend also showed me australia.internet.com, who knew about it? Not me. And we want to go to Search Engine Strategies 2003, but who can afford $1200 for the two days? Or even $780 for one day? Not us, poor uni students we are. Next year, next year. Even though there’s going to be people there from Google, Looksmart, Altavista and Yahoo there. Check out those names, all in a row.

I forgot to mention in my last few posts that I bought a new graphics card for my home PC. It’s not very exciting and nobody cares, but I still need to write it.
Well, it’s actually secondhand, not new. But it’s way better than the old one, which was a shitty 8MB Rendition Verite 2200. I’ve had the driver at that page for a few months now, it gets a steady stream of hits from people who want a driver that works with the card for Windows 2000/XP. It’s a shit card, though.

Anyway, so I bought the new card, chucked it in and buggered around downloading and installing drivers for a while. When I finally got the driver installed and kind of happy, it would freeze the display whenever I tried to resize a window!! Not happy. I turned down the hardware acceleration in Display Settings->Advanced… and it seems to have fixed the problem. The old card would randomly freeze the computer without notice, at least this new one is more predictable. It doesn’t seem to freeze at random times when you have hours of unsaved work on the screen…

spamradio.com - live stream of spam emails. Cool graphic of an old radio with a CAT5 cable plugged into it.

movies.collude.com.au - web service that downloads and parses movie screening times from birch.com.au (WSDL Description)

What’s the go with LiveStats? We use version 5.03 from Media House, now known as DeepMetrix, which is a way cool new name, or something.

Anyway, I’ve been tracking my car thrashing and burnouts site using LiveStats and my own web counter written in PHP. It seems that my counter is more accurate — at least it’s more plausible. Today LiveStats said thrashcar had 2317 sessions but only 1551 page views! How that can make sense I do not know. My own counter said a more reasonable 2013 page views and 571 sessions. I guess LiveStats does use log file parsing, maybe it could be parsing the logfiles wrongly, or … hang on a second…

It’s because my site is listed on modifiedcars.net and they’re using my banner ad by linking to my site. So all the people who view the page with my banner on it start a new session on my site! But not a page view hit, cause they’re only retrieving an image, aren’t they? (Yes). So that’s why it sucks, because I got all excited about the insane amount of users on my site, when really it’s only around 500. Which is still not bad.