DCortesi . blog

MSN Messenger wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t feel the need to ingrain itself in every other Microsoft communications program, i.e. Outlook and Outlook Express. Scratch that - It wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t require hacking the registry and unknown system config files to remove or even to just not start up when Outlook Express starts up. Alas, one must set this registry key if one does not want MSN Messenger to start when Outlook Express starts:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Outlook Express\Hide Messenger=2 (REG_DWORD)

I didn’t want it to not run at all, so I didn’t set some other registry keys that would prevent that or uninstall it completely. I just didn’t want it to run when Outlook Express ran…imagine that!

I have to go to Ohio tomorrow. More details later, but let’s just say I wasn’t even sure I was going until about 5:30 this evening.

I’ve always known what [sic] stands for, but never knew the true defition. From dictionary.com:

Thus; so. Used to indicate that a quoted passage, especially one containing an error or unconventional spelling, has been retained in its original form or written intentionally.

Makes perfect sence[sic].

I’ve had some time at work this week to get a lot done on our intranet site. We moved to a new server as noted in the previous post and I also took the development server and upgraded MySQL to the latest development version (4.1.1a).

One of the problems I ran into was a couple web applications erroring out after the upgrade:

Client does not support authentication protocol requested by server; consider upgrading MySQL client

Come to find out, MySQL 4.1 has implemented a new password hasing function which isn’t supported by a number of apps yet, such as PHP (or at least not in the version I was using).

MySQL has documented this on their site: MySQL Manual 5.3.11 Password Hashing in MySQL 4.1 and all I had to do was set the web application users’s account password using the OLD_PASSWORD() function.

Besides that, the only other thing I had a problem with was when I was editing a document in the wrong directory and wondering why the changes weren’t taking effect…I should have listened to Jeremy

While moving a website from an old workstation running Windows XP to a new server running Windows Server 2003, I had to map one directory on the website back to a share on the old server. I had a little trouble doing so…

Although both servers are on the same domain, I don’t have access to manager user accounts on said domain. So I figured if I added a user account on the old server, I could use that account to connect back to it. Well, try as I might, setting up an IIS 6.0 Virtual Directory to connect back to a share on the older server with a local user account just would not work. The web server would just give me an HTTP 500 (Internal Server Error) when I tried to access that directory. If I put in a domain account (mine), it would work, but I didn’t want to do that because I’m paranoid.

What I eventually had to do to make it work was add a user account with the same name and password to both servers. What a royal pain in the toush!

I believe I’ve never left a review of Shiroi Hana on the blog. This is the place I frequent the most in my newfound love for sushi. My first date with S was to a sushi joint and ever since then, we have it about twice a month. Shiroi Hana is just down the street from me at 3242 N. Clark St. I usually get the spicy tuna roll, although the dragon roll does look really cool. And then I go with a random assortment of sushi.

Last night while eating there with S and a few friends (one a sushi virgin!), we ordered 8 rolls and 37 pieces of sushi. It was the most sushi I’ve ever seen in one place. It was all pretty good though - even the sushi virgin enjoyed it.

At one point, I dropped some rice onto my plate. Unfortunately, part of the wasabi ball that I had put on the plate so I didn’t have to double-dip stuck to the rice. I picked up the rice and popped it into my mouth and the next thing I felt was the feeling of some sort of paste against my tongue. Wayyyyy too much wasabi if you can feel that. My eyes teared up and I coughed a few times, but I made it out without vomiting (ala Jackass The Movie).

I do recommend Shiroi Hana though - not too expensive and very tasty sushi. Make sure to order a cup of the green tea.

18 day(s), 21 hour(s), 8 minute(s), 0 second(s)

That’s how long my laptop has been up and running. This evening, I resumed it from standby and 9/10 of my applications died upon coming back from standy. I guess that’s why you have to reboot on occasion.

Yes, I left chapstick in my pants and put them through the wash…and the dryer. Now all the clothes in that load - most of my work clothes - have little chapstick spots all over them.

I run Debian Stable (woody) because I enjoy the superb quality of their software. Occasionally, however, I have the need for more recent software than the Debian Stable archives provide for. SpamAssassin, for example, is what I use to cut down the massive amounts of spam I have coming in to old accounts. Running the latest and greatest version of this is to my benefit in order to best identify recent spam. But how to continue using Debian’s wonderful APT packaging system with the latest software? I could use the unstable archives, but those usually require other versions of core system software.
Norbert Tretkowski’s (aka nobse) Backports to the rescue!

Backports are recompiled packages from testing (mostly) and unstable (in a few cases only, e.g. security updates), so they will run without new libraries (wherever it’s possible) on a stable Debian distribution.

What a wonderful solution.

My thanks to nobse for providing this invaluable service.

I had this odd dream last night where there was a tsunami in Chicago. As I was walking into the Sears Tower, I looked over my shoulder and saw this giant wave coming towards the city from the lake. I ran inside and up a bunch of stairs. As I looked outside again, the wave came crashing down and the water level started to rise. I kept running up. It wasn’t as if I was scared, I was just trying to get to a safe level. The water eventually came up to the 200th floor (I know, there are only 110 stories). I was eventually rescued by this cruise-liner type ship that was going around. It was quite odd because I could see the tops of many other buildings and this ship was just weaving in and out of them almost nonchalantly. Meanwhile, there was the thought in the back of my head, that this tsunami and the ensuing flood was somehow caused by terrorists…

Then the ship headed back to the Sears Tower to load up on some supplies. As it was “docking” it hit another building and started to tip over. It rolled completely over, though. Everybody was given 10 minutes to grab as many supplies as they could out of a store in the Sears Tower that had anything you could imagine. One item I picked up was an etch-a-sketch…and now that I think about it, this was probably due to the Will and Grace episode I watched last night. There was also some mid-eastern looking guy who was holding a stopwatch up to my face with 2:16 as the time remaining. For some reason, I decided to run upstairs to the 207th floor and ran into a couple of my roommates checking out a room. There were banks and banks of tvs, which for some reason, exploded while we were there and disappeared. Down on the floor below was a bunch of Cisco networking equipment that I wanted to snag, but didn’t have time. By the time I got back to the main floor, everybody was gone and there was a very weird scene which I can’t recall.

Definitely a very odd odd dream. Interesting though. I love being able to remember my dreams.