March 2006 - Posts
Adam Szofran has got his Terrain Technology presentation up on www.fsinsider.com
Well worth the read. Good Job Adam!
I got the IMac back yesterday and I have not broken it yet. I even created a movie using IMovie last night, very cool stuff (So cool that I have put Adobe Premiere in the attic). Oh yes, I also managed to find the download for the RDP Client for Mac so I can connect to my terminal server.
An interesting tip for anyone else new to IMac's.... when you edit a movie and spend 2 hours looking around for the captured video files...
...well, don't.
Simply copy the project file to your storage device and everything will follow. Clever stuff ;)
Edit: Corrected title ;) Thanks Derek
Also, registration is now available via www.partneroutreach.com
I have been asking Jeff to come to Ireland for ages, he has finally agreed! This is a free event, please register with dhouston@indigo.ie as we need to ensure we have space for all.
This event is ideal for IT professionals, IT administrators and Business Owners. Below is the summary of the afternoon event.
14:00 - Jeff Middleton - The Business advantages of Swing Migrations
14:45 - Q&A
15:00 - Jeff Middleton - Disaster Recovery: How would you recover from a natural disaster?
15:45 - Further Q&A
16:00 - Nick Whittome - Windows R2: We've read the notes, but what does it actually do?
16:45 - Q&A Ask the MVPs anything you can think of :)
17:20 - Exam 70-282 : Want to become a Small Business Specialist and Why should you become one
18.00 Finish
ISA2004 really does wind me up :)
We have a client that is running SBS2003 and recently (rightly) upgraded to SBS2003 SP1 complete with a move from ISA2000 to ISA2004. For once, the whole install of the SP went pretty well. So well in fact that I made it home for dinner.
However, this morning, the client contacted me and reported that the FTP traffic to the Intranet servers on the other sites was blocked from all clients. You see, this client has three sites. Each site is independent yet they all use each others Terminal Servers and FTP sites to share information. The ISA server was configured to consider that the internal network set included all of the three remote site subnets. There was a rule to allow RDP and FTP traffic to these subnets.... it should work.... it did work with 2000....
The other catch is that all internal traffic gets redirected from the ISA server to a Cisco Router. Again, this should not be a problem as I am allowing this in ISA. Nightmare!
As of yet, this is not resolved. Microsoft is connected to the server as my head is hurting... they have been at it now for 4 or so hours... bless them....
I still get my dinner...
I note that Wayne Small has picked up on this now. I had mentioned it a few posts back.
Personally, I think the community need to speak up NOW, before it is too late. SQL needs downgrade rights so that clients that are running premium can get the CAL improvements but keep SQL 2000.
I was testing this build with Joel last week. The good news is it is now public information that two major fixes have been made in 3.0.5 of Squawkbox.
From Joel:
"Some excellent news. The plane visibility bug that first appeared in version 3.0.4 has been fixed. As well, the stutters and hangs that a number of users have experienced since SquawkBox 3's original release appear to also be resolved. They are a lot harder to reproduce though, so a small group of testers is testing the fix to confirm that it no longer occurs.
Both of these fixes will be rolled into the upcoming 3.0.5 patch release. After a bit more testing, the patch should be ready for public release."
Be sure to update when it is released!
I have a Jeep. In that jeep I have a satnav system called smartnav. The only problem is that because the OSI do not release data to anyone, unlike EVERY other country in Europe, I cannot use the system. What annoys me most about this is that it is my tax that is paying for them all to sit around and give nothing back.
Anyway, whilst searching about this situation I found this blog on an open source project called OpenEir. They are looking to get promotion, so here it is.
OK, that has to be a record for me... :) A new computer that decides to stop functioning in less than two hours.
The IMac decided to go belly up, but I am not worried.... Why you ask?
Well, the AppleCare support team were fantastic! Very professional, extremely understanding and best of all worked past the closing time to ensure that I am booked for a full replacement unit. I have to say, I was surprised as to how quickly they have dealt with my problem.
It seems that I have been pretty unlucky. The two engineers I dealt with were extremely shocked as to the issues I was having and said that this was indeed a "very rare situation".
So, on Monday... Possibly Tuesday I will have a totally new replacement unit.
Well, whilst the delivery did take two whole weeks, I am glad the IMac is here! I have to say, it is a very tidy box and the setup was painless. The last time I looked as Mac OS X it was really nasty to get it to connect to a SBS Network. This time it took me a grand total of 5 minutes. Impressive for a non-apple person I think ;)
There is a cool "Windows Media" type program that allows you to view videos, listen to your music with a tiny remote control. This is pretty cool except the fact that there is no storage place for the remote on the IMac which I really would have thought that Apple would have thought about. Mind you, I suppose the fact that they got everything including a dual core Intel processor into the monitor was impressive enough.
I was chatting with Vlad Massek from the IMac with MSN Messenger 5.1 and I asked him if he knew how to do a CTRL - C to copy as this did not work on the Mac. He said "right click and select copy".... can you believe it but I actually went to do it! Doh! (Of course it is actually THATFUNNYSQUIGGLYSYMBOL - C to copy on a Mac :)
Actually, that reminds me.... Vlad has a great post up at the moment. Take a read.
Edit: I take it back, its cool.... the wee remote is magnetic and sits nicely on the side of the monitor!
Do you have those haunted planes that appear and dissapear when you are flying online?
Do you have planes that stutter and freeze your system?
Who you gonna call?
1800 JOELBUSTERS
My good friend Joel has let me know he is hot on the triail of these issues and even hinted that he may know how to fix them. That would be good news for a new build eh? Keep an eye on www.squawkbox.ca
Let me pick myself up off the floor. Michael Z made a post on his blog ;)
Read into his post what you will... to me that sounds good... what about you?
Listening to Guy on the public webcast this evening on SBS R2.
Things I like:
Expanded CAL Rights.
Brilliant! That means you can now have a second Exchange Server 2003 or SQL Workgroup 2005 Server on your SBS network and have the CAL's from your SBS network cover that server. Very cool. You do, of course, still have to purchase the licences for the server.
WSUS Integration is very cool
'Nuff Said
Things I still don't like:
SQL2005 requirement with R2
OK, this sucks.... big time. It is madness that Microsoft are forcing you to move to SQL2005 Workgroup (No backward / downgrade Licence). Do they not understand that most LOB applications don't yet support SQL2005?!
I can live without Windows R2, but Quota improvments?
As per my previous post, a load of Windows R2 features are not included. I can get used to that, as a lot of them are related to enterprise only requirements. But please give me the new folder level quotas!
I had some pretty major crashing on the new build of IE7 whereas the previous build worked just fine. The error reported is:
Faulting application iexplore.exe, version 7.0.5335.5, faulting module mshtml.dll, version 7.0.5335.5, fault address 0x000d850d.
For those that do not browse the usergroups, the fix that worked for me is to disable the Web History checkbox in Google Desktop indexing options.
Poor Arno. I drive him mad with debugging issues :)
Tonight we both worked on an ongoing issue where CAT / Actigate animated gates were failing to function correctly. You see, the idea is that you can park your aircraft at a gate in Flight Simulator and then when you set the parking brake on the aircraft the module will read your aircraft type and animate accordingly.
For those that do not know what Actigate and CAT are or do - this is a quick video I did a week or so ago. I was testing that moving into the bounding box, and setting the parking brake, detected that I was using a 737 and animated that movement.
The cool thing about using the bounding box is that when you go to spot view the gate does not "jump back" to its start position because you move out of the field of view. You sometimes see that happen with add-on sceneries because they are using a viewpoint condition instead of the bounding box. The other cool thing is that the gates alongside (with a bit of tweaking) do not animate at the same time, only the one where your plane is situated moves.
Of course, doing this takes time. You have to create an animation for as many aircraft as possible. You then have to try to manually align them which means exporting a gate to FS lots of times! This can be a life sucking experience for any designer.
What I would love to see in the future is a way of doing an IK animation of FS gates. What that would mean is that aircraft designers could essentially mark an X where the door is located and then the gate exported from the modelling program would always find the door. Imagine how cool that would be....
I must go nudge Adrian Woods (Modelling Superbrain) and see if he has any thoughts on the subject.
For 10 or so years now I have been working either with companies that sell Sage Line 50 / Line 100, or with clients that are running these products.
Sage Line 100 (until recently becoming MMS) used Retrieve 4GL Data structures and, oh boy, that did not like the file locking on NT based networks. We had to disable opportunistic locking, make registry changes on Windows 98 and 2000 machines, set the FILES statement in the configs, etc. Bottom line, it sucked…
Since then Sage did finally start to resolve the file locking issues with Line 100, but you can sneeze near a network cable and it'll still corrupt data.
Sage Line 50, even though it has a nice Windows Front end, is still (from what I can make out) using a DOS database structure. It is slow, the file locking sucks and if you “push” the product in any way data corruption occurs. I have worked with a couple of developers on “plugging in” to Line 50, and every time it ends in tears or a nervous breakdown.
The stance of Sage was always “it's your network” and with this latest article on their knowledge base I just had to write this blog post. At NO point in this article do they say “Actually - you know what - bad software design / data design by Sage may also cause data corruption”. Surprised? :)
There is one more thing that annoys me about Sage, and that is the fact that they constantly release versions of products with serious bugs. (Version 9 of Line 50 was a massive disaster). I recently had a client with a bug in version 9 where it only saved the first line of any multiple line remittance and I confirmed this was a known issue with Sage. I was then told that you need version 10 or above to fix this, there is no patch! I have no idea how they get away with it.
I have not yet found an open forum where Sage users get together, but I am sure that one is needed. The community really does need to give them a kick in the backside about these issues.
No, but I did buy an iMac today...
Don't panic just yet... I am not quite ready for the Apple switch; I simply purchased this to understand the "Other Side". I am fed up of going to client sites where the Mac exists and not being able to answer the user questions (especially when it is sitting on a SBS Network).
But you know what.... the REAL reason I decided to purchase the iMac was simply due to this advert. I think that our friends in Apple have finally figured out that to get to people like me, they need to say things like "Intel" or "Microsoft Office on the Mac" etc. (But I should say the commentary is different on the Irish / UK version of this ad, and convinced me more than the one on this webclip).
I'll let you know how I get on.... ;)
Michael Zyskowski or "Z", may have a rather
empty blog. However, we can forgive him because he is spending his time writing great articles :)
Check it out on the FS Insider site!
A friend of mine sent me these pictures today.... Totally amazing flying skills but not something I would like to try! Apparently this is the "Nissan Harvard Team" and was performed at the Marula Sun Power Races. Frans did a great job of capturing these images.
This made my day... still laughing.
Mike on Mark Minasi's forum posted a link to this, thanks man.... he said:
This link goes to a message board where sound gear enthusiasts get
together to geek out. One guy uploaded some pictures of singers
during a recording session, and asked everyone if they could help him
identify the microphone that was being used.
About the 3rd message someone posted something like "To heck with the
microphone...these pictures are hilarious!"
And off they went. The thread goes for about 9 pages, but it is SO WORTH IT to check out all 9 pages. Creative minds + a very funny picture + Photoshop = about 2 dozen hysterical parodies of a picture that is already very, very funny. It starts to get really interesting about the 3rd page....be patient."
http://gearslutz.com/board/showthread.php3?t=56959
Forewarning, this is a rant…
My company recently took over a site, one with a lot of potential for future business. The reason we took over this site was simple, the company before us was well….. Crap. Whilst this company get a lot more passing business than us (because of the shop front), I cannot see how they hold onto clients when they have the basics incorrect yet they do….
Before you think I am simply company bashing, I am not. This is the third site in a row that I have visited in my area that has been supplied by these guys, so I hope they read up here and learn something. So, to you.... here are the basics:
DNS
When you install a server, you do NOT set the client machines to use the ISP DNS Servers. The client PC’s must always use the servers DNS and that server should be set to use forwarders to the ISP.
DHCP
Using the router as the source for handing out IP addresses is both lazy and not integrated with your DNS. Don’t do it, use the server for DHCP and it all integrates nicely. Oh yeah… if you have DHCP, don’t give machines static IP addresses with the wrong gateway addresses!
Antivirus
Well duuuur…. Come on people, you MUST have a working antivirus solution on your networks.
Patch Management
Either patch machines manually with Windows / Microsoft Update or go and spend 30 Minutes and install Windows Software Update Server. It’s Free!
If you can’t be bothered to do the above, simply give the client my contact details, I will happily take them off your hands!
/Rant over.
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