Dr Who – The Transformation

June 19, 2005 – 10:59

If you missed it last night, you missed a bit of a treat… just in case some people haven’t seen it yet I won’t spoil the surprises. You can find the trailers and teasers for the whole series here

On another note, Catherine and I are feeling much better, we haven’t eaten much in the last couple of days so we are a little shakey on our feet, but on the mend. Hopefuly I will be well enough to go into work tomorrow.

Worst Best Man… EVER!

June 18, 2005 – 16:17

If prizes were handed out for those people who were the worst at partular roles in life I think I would probably be up there in the Worst Best Man chart. Yesterday evening Catherine was in pain, really suffering from something… so I phoned the doctor who says it sounds much like gastroenteritis, all she could suggest was that she gets pleanty of fluid and doesn’t eat anything… so this morning I wake up at about 5AM in major pain… oh crap!

Yes you guessed it… I am suffering from the same thing that Catherine was suffering last night, so much for paintball (so much for anything in fact) I now feel like the worst best man in the world, because I can’t even manage to make it to the groom’s stag do!

Dr Who

June 16, 2005 – 8:46

Excited dosn’t even begin to explain how I am feeling about the climax of the current series of Dr. Who; I am not going to be able to watch it on the night so that is going to get to me even more knowing that I am going to have to wait an extra day to see the end of the series.

The thought that this episode explains how Christopher Eccleston comes to an end as The Doctor? how the Daleks managed to survive the time war? are the time lords still in existance? Aaagh so many questions.

Month of Madness!

June 13, 2005 – 21:48

This month could possibly be the busiest month of my life, I am feeling quite stressed as it is because Catherine has been feeling much worse with her arms, so I have been doing more round the house. Starting a new job is always tiring particularly when you have a 1 hour round trip by foot to get there and back. My body was rebelling against me over the weekend, I ached from head to toe and honestly don’t feel rested in the slightest.

So next week is Pete’s stag do, I am best man which probably means I will get the pain of getting shot at by 30 people along with Pete, which will be fun. To be honest I am more than a little nervous about paint balling again, last time I went I got quite a bit of paint in by eye (just from it dripping down of my mask) which was absolute agony.

After that, Catherine have got two weddings in a row, first one the weekend after next is one of Catherine’s friends getting married in London, shouldn’t be too bad as we are only going to be able to make the actual ceremony as the reception would prevent us from getting back, shame though as it would have been an opportunity for Catherine to get together with some of her friends again, and a good opportunity for me to get some ideas about my Best Mans Speech. That’s the second wedding the next week, being Pete’s best man is an honour, but it is also a nerve racking experience!

Somewhere in between these manic weekends I have to write a speech, pack and move house… I am going to need a very, very, very long rest, unfortunately I don’t think I am going to get one.

people actually read this!

June 7, 2005 – 16:32

I can’t believe it, people out there actually read my blog, I am fairly impressed I thought I was blogging to myself… not a necessaraly a bad thing that.

New Job

June 6, 2005 – 19:11

Started a new job today, won’t tell you lot where ;)


Seems like it is going to be a challenge though… I am sure I am going to be making an occasional post about what I am doing, but basicly my task is to take the Environment up from Windows NT 4 to Windows 2003… sound familiar?

What happened to Windows Installer 3.1

May 6, 2005 – 8:23

n Aprils raft of patches, hotfixes and updates delivered via SUS, WSUS or Windows Update; Microsoft chose to release Windows Installer 3.1 the updated version of the install engine Microsoft has been pushing for the last 2 years.

However at the beginning of the week Steven Bink of bink.nu noticed that the update had been pulled from SUS, further inspection showed that it had in fact gone totaly missing from the Microsoft Website. Many have pointed to KB Article 898628

This blunder by Microsoft could cause some major headaches for IT Administrators who rely of Group Policy Software Management to install and update software throughout their enterprise.

Websites

May 5, 2005 – 18:42

I should mention to my faithful readers, I am not the only amature web developer in the family! My father seems to have a flair for imparting information through HTML.

daveslater.co.uk – chessproblems, countdown calculator and photo graphs!

imagesofjazz.co.uk – my fathers next door neighbours website, with, strangely enough, images of jazz!

Software Update Services (SUS) Problems

April 28, 2005 – 13:44

We have been having a couple of problems with the soon to be replaced Software Update Services (SUS):

First and formost, large files do not syncronise between the Master SUS Server and the Slave at a satalite site. The two that have caused us the most problems have been Windows XP SP2 (266MB) and Windows 2003 SP1 (337MB). The error message is the rather criptic “0x80072EFE: The connection to the server was lost“. The soloution, however, is a simple one. Simply take the files from the Master SUS server on USB key or CD and dump them on the Slave SUS Server.

Second problem, was Active Server Pages EventID 5 messages in the application log, seemingly caused by SUS in the Default Application Pool. What it turns out is permissions on the IIS directorys were preventing the SUS application (or any other application for that matter) from writing fairly meaningless information to disk. The steps for resolving this message are found at this KB Article (842493)

However! put up with SUS for the time being, WSUS is on its way soon™

InstallShield

April 13, 2005 – 21:15

I have discovered a serious gripe, I have been trying to deploy all sorts of applications via GPSI into a Windows XP domain. For the most part I have had great sucess, old executables with a setup.exe I have been able to extract the files and install them manualy, or take an instalation image. Some new installs I have just been able to copy the install MSI files.

However there is a certain company who creates a product called InstallSheild, that produces the most convolute, screwy, malformed MSI packages you could imagine. Why? I don’t know, everyone else manages it perfectly well, maybe it is so that we all have to use their AdminStudio package to re-package our software, who knows.

Anyway, if you value your systems administrators don’t use this software, you could be causing them a nightmare.