dave-smith.co.uk

Theme

Found the theme I had just moved to under drupal, just need to update it to support widgets (and from taking a quick look at the code a whole load of other changes - which I’ll never get around to doing), once I get the chance I’ll quickly post up the process I went through for migrating from Drupal, someone, somewhere might find it useful. - Thanks John.

Of course I’ve just realised that one of the themes I quite like is desk-mess which looks a bit familiar.

New BMS, new server, new danger

Well I went for it, and to make it work I’ve changed the DB server, the web server, the BMS and then done an import of all of the old posts and comments, I’ve a few pages left to build, a theme and widgets to find, but it is interesting having a new play thing….

Blogging

So a recent post over on Johns Adventures got me thinking, especially after the “upgrade” of Drupal I did at the weekend didn’t go as smoothly as planned (mainly due to user error, but that’s not the point). More

Site trashed (*updated*)

Amazing, I’d never be so slapdash with a client site, and yet here I am with my site, updated, but missing the modules I was running on it, and the theme I’d hacked together…

…and no backup

*twat*

Update - looks like I’m mostly back up and running, time to take a backup of the files, and not just the database.

(and if you ever need to convert a Drupal 5.x theme to 6.x this will help.)

Using Linux gets you a detention

A teacher in the USA (Texas) has demonstrated just how switched on the education establishment is to the uses of Linux and how much it is used around the world:

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Being social

So these days I’ve gone social, not as in going out and meeting people and that sort of thing, just in registering for a few “social” sites and then a couple of content aggregation sites I seem to have developed a circle of sites I keep up to date with little random comments, pics and tweets.

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Auto-Scaling

Came across an interesting comment piece on why auto-scaling in cloud computing is bad, if you are looking at cloud computing as a silver bullet or bored of the current marketing buzz surrounding the “cloud” it’s worth a read.

Changing the game

So I’ve been a user of an iPhone for a couple of weeks, one of the justifications of switching from T-Mobile was that I had no reception which on a company mobile when you provide a level of IT support isn’t great, and prior to T-Mobile I was on Vodafone again with a faraday cage effect almost as soon as I stepped in the door…. so when Mike visited and his iPhone worked it seemed like there might be a solution after all…

So a few weeks in and where are we…. well I’m not quite sure I’ll call it the Jesus phone as they do elsewhere however it really is the best bit of kit on the market (not sure the Android is there yet) and with the Storm not having WiFi it was an iPhone or the Bold.

Bold - Fantastic bit of kit, best Blackberry on the market, works well, still crashes and is slow on the reboot (as are all Blackberry’s) however the raison d’être of the Blackberry is corporate email, even though the Storm, Bold and Javelin would have you believe otherwise and as ever it delivers, a Blackberry running on BES (not BIS) is almost unbeatable as a mobile device, take in the speed of the Bold and also the screen and you have a great device, not perfect, it crashes too often for that, and if you come from a Pearl (I always want to write PERL) the keyboard switch can be interesting. Is it a more consumer based device, no, BIS and plugging into a computer for the USB sync is not a great combination, in the professional market, it’s the best device out there, it has all of the right acronyms to work anywhere and has WiFi (The Storm doesn’t - WTF?)

Which kind of brings me on to the iPhone, no copy and paste (everyone knows that) no MMS (ditto) but the best touch screen / interface / mobile internet experience on the market, I’m a member of several social websites (no idea why, but I am) and they work fantastically well, they encourage you post, safari built, let’s use the internet while out and about, without even thinking about. Touch screen has always been the perfect solution, your small handheld device gets the screen size needed to relay a sensible amount of data / information to the user, the problem of course is how do get data in, with a Palm Vx (my previous favourite handheld device) you had to use graffiti, not that hard to learn, pretty effective, but was there a better way?

Apple thought so, with the Newton and it’s primitive (now) handwriting recognition (sort of graffiti really) you had at the time a cutting edge overly expensive device, that given the processor power of the time was too slow, at the time I wanted a PSION but as someone who worked as a store manager for BBV that was never going to happen and the PSION 2 wasn’t that great (later editions I would want, especially the 5) so years later and after countless rumours the iPhone emerged, I wanted one. It looked great had the online experience I was after although only on 2G to start with and promised a seamless UI.

Now I have a 3G version, the downsides, the battery life, copy and paste, MMS, that’s it. It’s the device I’ve wanted since I became a geek, it sync’s with my work email / calendar / contacts it also has all of my personal data on it using Mobile Me, (ok so we’ll ignore notes syncing) the online experience is good safari online works well and the screen is big enough, especially with the easy to master multi-finger actions. The “bundled” apps work well, but like the iPod the secret is in the extra +iTunes bit, the app store gives you access to all the bits you feel your new toy is missing, obvious omissions are a decent IM tool, and the fact that you can’t run multiple programs on the device, so if there was decent IM program as soon as you went away from it, it would close.

erm, I’m rambling.

I’ve signed up for ADC and I’m going to see what sort of things I can create to work on my iPhone, nothing useful to anyone else, but it will be interesting to see what you can do with it, and of course it’s good to learn something new.

iPhone, love it, not the Jesus phone, but there best there is at the moment.

Windows 2K3

So I’m in the process of finally getting Active Directory rolled out and am hoping to reap the benefits of easier (l)user management and also more secure machines to extend the time to rebuild, in the process of getting the servers in place globally and getting them all talking to each other I’ve come across some really dull stuff and also spent a lot of time scratching my head at why windows would do something unexpected.

So now I’m so close I can almost taste it (and I’m really looking forward to the complaints as everyone loses local admin rights)

I’ve extended Active Directory using Likewise added in support for AFP on Windows file servers with the added bonus of OSX print queues where the old (and full) XServe RAIDs have been replaced using ExtremeZ-IP, and for purely “green” reasons built in print queue monitoring by user (assigning a cost per page printed) so we can see those that print the most (and no doubt waste the most) and I’ve started to build Group Policy Objects which will hopefully make life easier…. and this is where the story of WTF really starts.

This whole process has taken a long time, mainly because the work has been completed around a large number of other tasks and also because there was no budget to buy the servers, and so the cost justification for each server was based on a benefit elsewhere. Still all the servers are now in place, they are all joined to the AD and all send DNS info backwards and forwards. They also talk to each local SonicWall so that users can be authenticated against AD and assigned into the relevant group and then VPN into their home site when away from the office (VPN rollout commences once every machine is connected to AD and we deploy end point security.)

So on the test machines I can deploy updates and software using GPO’s block users from adding all of those crappy toolbars that they insist got there by “magic” and all sorts of other goodies, if only my bloody GPO’s wouldn’t keep disappearing….

Leave the PDC for a day or so, then open up Group Policy Management to check something or make a change and the message “Object not found” would greet me along with not being able to access the Default Domain Controller Policy and also the Default Domain Policy

*bugger*

I fixed this a number of times using dcgpofix but the problem would always re-occur.

So this time around when it happened whilst working from home I had the ideal time to try and finally fix the problem (still waiting to see if I really have)

Checking in event viewer got me this error “Windows cannot access the file gpt.ini for GPO” and lots of the nasty red-crosses got me to here which in turn led me KB842804 which might have provided the solution.

This is a known issue which SP1 fixes, but only if then do the further registry hack at the end of the article. Seriously *WTF*

Anyway I’m waiting to see if this has finally fixed the issue but in the time I’ve wasted searching for this “answer” I’ve spent a lot of time suing dcgpofix

Now to do the registry hack on the remaining 8 domain controllers and see how it all goes, it would be nice to be able to focus on the next bits of this fun (logon scripts using VBS) and try and crack getting ODBBC connections to deploy using GPO but that would be a much longer story than this one….

Update : Still losing the GPO’s hunting for the magic spell that makes the problem go away (take windows out and shoot the server not being an option disappointingly)

Buying a phone

So for the first time in five years I went out and purchased a mobile phone, not just any phone though, I was after the Jesus phone, so last Wednesday I found myself in an o2 shop dealing with their sales team and wondering why nothing had changed since the last time I had purchased a mobile phone.

I’m still not sure what I was expecting, but I thought / hoped that since the last time I’d dealt with a mobile phone sales process not dealing with hundreds of devices that the process and experience would have generally moved on.

It hasn’t, there was nothing I can say that was done wrong, there was the usual and expected attempted upsell of both handset insurance and other services that o2 could offer - “broadband of 20megs? yes I’m interested, what’s the contention ratio? / no idea, what’s a contention ratio?”

Anyway about 15 minutes later after sitting there and thinking I should’ve offered to help with the typing up of application I was walking out with a new toy.

First impressions to follow, but on Thursday evening I had a phone call from o2 asking for my thoughts and experience of the sales process, it would seem that telling them the process was “ok” but not being able to tell them why it was only “ok” wasn’t enough.

As I’ve written here I’d just hoped that since I had last purchased a device from a shop dealing with a bog standard sales monkey, rather than a corporate account sales monkey, that the whole process wouldn’t have left me feeling a bit sullied and dirtied by the experience. (and oddly relieved for having past the credit check)