April 2008
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I am The Cyberwolfe and these are my ramblings. All original content is protected under a Creative Commons license - always ask first.
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Archive for April, 2008

Return of The Little Black Beastie

Posted in Life on April 29th, 2008

So there I was, figuring I had heard and seen the last of the Beastie as I drove off the dealer lot in my new Kia January of last year when Lo and Behold, a letter comes for me.

A bill for towing and storage fees, and notice of auction for one black 1987 Cavalier.

It seems the dealership sold the car to someone, who never bothered to re-register the vehicle in the 14 months since I traded her in, then went and ditched her someplace where she got towed. Of course, the towing company waited a solid 15 days before sending me the letter, and haven’t returned my calls for two more days (they charge by the day for storage, so they are not in any hurry) so now whoever bought the Beastie would have to pay over $500 to get her back… and she was worth maybe $250 when I traded her in.

Poor thing. She’s going to end up on the auction block.

Write the author – it’s worth it.

Posted in Geekery on April 28th, 2008

So, new spam filter, right? When I first installed it, the image at the bottom of the right sidebar had white corners, which looked bad against the black background. I whipped off a quick note to the plugin author requesting that the background of the image be made transparent to solve this.

Within mere hours, the author wrote me back saying “that’s a great idea! It was fixed, here’s a new build for you.”

My kinda service, lemmtellya.

In the ensuing conversation, I mentioned my gripe with the WP upgrade process (his plugin’s auto-updater worked great), and he tripped me to another plugin (by a different author) that automates the process. You can find it here.

If you can read this, it worked. There was a slight hiccup at the end – it was supposed to re-enable all the plugins, but that part didn’t work. I have a feeling it was my fault, so I’ll reserve judgment on that until next time.

What a relief!

New filters and more housekeeping

Posted in Geekery on April 27th, 2008

While it hasn’t been published anywhere else, there is a small blurb on Dave’s blog that he will be dropping support for Spam Karma 2 and moving away from WP in general. Serendipitously enough, I ran across the WP-Spam-Free plugin via a link on my dashboard and have installed that.

As a true test of it’s mettle, I have also disabled the Bad-Behavior plugin. We’ll see how things go.

This all comes about after a whole weekend of site-updating activities. As I said in the earlier post, I launched the new Rogue Leather blog, and have downloaded and tested about 30 different themes over the weekend. So far, I’m liking this one and the one I have over at RLdc pretty well. Haven’t had to tweak too much.

Getting back to Dave and his dropping WP, he does go on to explain his reasons, or rather, he points to someone else’s reasoning here: Yong Fook’s 10 reasons to ditch WP

One point of all that I can certainly agree with is the upgrade process. In my case, not 2 days after I finally updated this blog to 2.5, 2.5.1 was released. And the damn admin dashboard tells me on every page that I really should upgrade.

Well, if it didn’t mean uploading the whole thing all over again and cherry-picking folders and files out, then I might. I just don’t want to deal with that right now.

Among other annoyances is the update to the post-writing portion, in which they have taken the “Categories” section out of the right admin sidebar and put it down below the edit box. Why? It was perfect where it was. With proper sizing of the edit box in the previous version, I could get all the important post-writing oprions into one screen of my laptop, and now I’m scrolling up-and-down on every post instead of just the ones I wanted to post pictures in.

Bastards.

Ok, enough ranting for now.

New site is up

Posted in Life on April 27th, 2008

When I started the whole leatherworking thing, I thought about selling my stuff, and with that comes a website – so I went and bought www.rogueleather.com

After a few months of making sure the guy who owned it before me didn’t want it back, I finally decided to do something with it – only I now realize that I don’t really have the time or inclination to sell my leather stuff on any sort of regular basis. So, I turned it into another blog. I will probably copy some of the posts I have done here over there, and any new leather-related posts will be at the new site.

Just thought I’d let ya know.

Exchange 2003: mail stuck in local delivery queue

Posted in Geekery, Work on April 26th, 2008

This one was a bitch, and since the closest thing I could find to a remedy online was to delete the store and create a new one (not bloody likely) I’ll publish the results of a call to MS Critical Support for the benefit of the masses.

The problem was one user had almost 50 emails stuck in the local delivery queue. They could send email inside and out, but incoming would never get there. I believe the problem was a corrupted mailbox.

To fix the user’s mailbox, I exported their account to a .pst using Exmerge. I then deleted the user’s mailbox and created a new one, adding back in all of their aliases. This got new mail flowing again without too much fuss. The mail in the local delivery queue, however, was still stuck.

To get this going to the right mailbox, we had to ‘recategorize’ the existing mail to the new mailbox.

  1. Stop the SMTP service.
  2. Open Regedit and navigate to the following key:
    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\SmtpSvc
  3. Creat a subkey named “Queuing”
  4. Select Queuing and on right hand pane create new dword value with name “ResetMessageStatus� with value 1 in hexadecimal.
  5. Restart the SMTP service – check the queues and see if mail is being delivered. Also check the account mailbox at this point.
  6. Once all the mails are delivered to that user, stop the SMTP service and change the value for �ResetMessageStatus� to 0 and start the SMTP service.

That should do it. Seems simple, right? HA! I bashed on it for almost two hours, then called crit support and tech#1 bashed on it for an hour, then called in tech#2 who took another half-hour to come up with the registry fix. We still ended up losing a handful of emails, but that was because it took the user two full days to tell me something was wrong, and our queue alarm didn’t catch the problem.

Which, of course, will be step 3 of this process…

 

*Update: comments closed due to excessive spam. Glad I could help all of you with this post.

*Knock*knock*knock* “Housekeeping!”

Posted in Life on April 24th, 2008

I don’t pay a whole lot of attention to the site here (as if you haven’t noticed) but Da Roomie is pretty good about not only keeping up with things, but posting about them as well, so I will end up finding out about it.

Since he went out and updated his site, I got to thinking about doing the same here. Well, it just so happens that I had an hour or so today where I could watch a progress bar crawl across my screen, or I could do something a little more useful. Hence, a fresh update to WP 2.5 and a new theme.

The old theme carried over fairly well, but I thought it was time for a change anyhow. Luckily, at least one designer out there has a proper sense of color and design (snicker) and I didn’t have to give myself a headache with tweaking CSS and whatnot.

Except, of course for all the snarky little quips in the forms. Those I had to add back in, which has kept me up way late. Goodnight, folks.

The Hell you say!

Posted in Life on April 14th, 2008

Man I made a terrible mistake tonight – I watched some of the news at 10. That’s a sure way to get my blood pressure up.

Some of the top stories:
A man drives into a residential neighborhood late one night, pulls over and tells a girl on the street that he has an emergency and needs to borrow her cell phone. He then grabs her and hauls her into the car, drives off and rapes her. Cops circulate an artist’s rendering, and the picture definitely looks like a black guy. They then describe him as white or hispanic… WTF!?! Were you not looking at the picture? Or was the artist talking to the girl and just drawing whatever he wanted?

Teens at Bridgeport Village Mall harassed another kid earlier this week. Once the kid got free of them, he went to a guard for help. The guard was less than helpful at first, but later at least tried to be useful. The kid calls his folks, and they come to pick him up – only to be attacked by the group of teens? A bunch of girls dog-pile on the mom, and then their boyfriends gang up on the dad when he wades in to help mom out. How the hell do children get the idea that they can get away with this shit? And why wasn’t the dad swinging harder!?

The Human Race is almost run. The vast majority of Americans are too bloody timid by far to stand up for themselves anymore, let alone stand up to their own children, and they’re being ridden over roughshod. That dad should have gone in with both barrels – if he had, chances are those kids would have freaked out when they met real resistance to their animalistic behavior. That girl’s parents should not have been letting her wander the damn streets at 1:30 in the morning.

I don’t care how freaking un-PC is is to say this, but parents: beat your children. And to the Welfare people: Let them! Crap like this didn’t happen on a daily basis back in the 50’s, because if you got caught, chances are whoever caught you would beat your ass, then frog-march you back home where your mom and dad would say “thanks” and then beat you some more.

Pain, my friends, is an excellent teacher. It is the parents’ responsibility to raise the child, not the State’s, and you need to get off your lazy ass and do it yourself. Yes, your children will be pissed when you do it, but they will eventually get the hint that the belt only comes out when they do something stupid and will start to think before they act.

And all of you bystanders out there trying not to be seen? Step up! If you see some kids doing something stupid or dangerous, get their attention and say something. Just shout “HEY!” at the top of your lungs and give them the evil eye – you’ll break their concentration and probably diffuse the situation with nothing else being said. Quit depending on the government to do everything for you and take some responsibility for your life, your own welfare, and your safety.

Quickies

Posted in Humor on April 8th, 2008

This post on Coyote’s not-a-blog damn near made me fall out of my chair.

————

According to the license plates on the car outside my office today, all the popular Sith lords are driving these:

2002_pontiac.jpg

It just goes with the hat I guess.

darthvader.jpg