Diary of a Wolfeman

Some good news discovered whilst tripping through the local game store: Space Empires V is available at your local store. I could have sworn I signed up for the notifier, but I didn’t get anything.

Anyway, I happily dumped cash on the counter and took a copy of this awaited favorite sequel, and installed it on the work laptop as a test-run. Very pretty, and especially nice in the wide-screen, which is different. You can move all the sub-windows around to maximize use of the whole screen.

When I got home today, I went to install it under Vista, but Vista wouldn’t even start the installer. No idea why, it just balked completely to do anything with it. Now, the Vista install was merely a test platform from the get-go, so I had no qualms at all about shutting it down and booting back to my old XP install. With one minor problem, that I did not see coming.

You see, in the Vista Start menu, there is an icon with a rendition of the standard line-in-a-broken-circle “Power” icon. This is actually the Hibernate button, not the shutdown button. The system went dark, yes, but then my keyboard lit back up, something it had not done before. I shrugged, turned off the power switch at the power supply, plugged the IDE drive back in, hit the switch again and then pressed the power button.

Nothing. No lights, no fan spin, no response.

A wail of anguish split the clammy afternoon air across the town.

Further troubleshooting tells me it’s either the processor or the motherboard, most likely the latter. (When the proc goes, the motherboard will at least beep at you; I get nothing.) An email has been sent to the mobo manufacturer, as the system is less than a year old and should be under warranty. (I is a smart monkey and kept the receipt.) Hopefully they won’t send me through too many hoops before authorizing an RMA.

I will probably be relegated to the laptop for about two weeks if they have any decency, three if they don’t and I end up having to purchase a replacement – from a competitor. All in all, I really shouldn’t be that surprised, as the on-board NIC failed about two months into use, and the northbridge fan has been making noise this last week or so.

Yep – another beautiful Sunday at Chez Wolfe.

Some geekery for the weekend-

A while back, the new Boss gave me and the Roomie a new Sonicwall TZ170W to play with here at Chez Wolfe. This is cool, because it does offer some nifty extra security features.

This is bad, because some of those new security features mean that the old Orinoco wireless card I had in the garage lappy no longer works. So, I bought a new Linksys model to replace it. Works fine in Win2K, but the older version of Kubuntu I was running had no idea.

So, I installed the latest release of Kubuntu, but I was unable to get the wireless working in that as well. Honestly, wifi is one of Linux’s weakest points, mainly because the wifi makers have no real interest in devoting dev time to the open-source community.

It had been a while since I had done anything with the Win2K install on the lappy, so tonight I decided to upgrade Firefox from 1.0 to 2.0. Normally not a big deal, but for some strange reason, it won’t login to my blog admin interface. It doesn’t throw any errors, it just punts me back to the login page. (If I try the wrong login, it gives me the correct error, but the correct creds just go back to login.)

WTF?

**Update** – Duh, friggin’ cookies were turned off. I am such a yutz.

A few thoughts after having run Vista for the week:

The stupid thng couldn’t identify a simple network card, but it did correctly identify my Creative Zen Micro MP3 player, and asked me if I wanted to sync my music files when I plugged it in.

They almost have security figured out. It only asked me to create user passwords on install, not a user and an administrator password. When installing software or mucking with system settings, it pops up a window telling you that something possibly hinky is going on and asks permission to continue. Better than before, but still not on a par with the Unix / Linux model.

The built-in games have a new look to them, and a couple new additions. These include Chess, Mah-Jong and another bouncing-ball based game where you draw lines on the board to deflect the path of a ball towards a goal. Beats playing solitaire all day.

Hardware management now includes a way to rate your PC for performance, which is pretty cool. If ths works right, game publishers will be able to give you rating numbers to hit, instead of making you remember all the minutiae of your system specs. “Graphics score of 3.7 or better” is so much easier than “Video card: 32 MB with 3D Transform and Lighting capable, DirectX® 9.0 or later.”

(As a side note, those are the specs for Microsoft’s Halo, which makes me think the rating system won’t work. Sure, Halo will run with 32MB of video RAM, but you’ll get maybe 4 FPS.)

As for software compatability, there are some quirks still. Yahoo! Widgets must be launched through Widget preferences; double-clicking a widget file in Explorer won’t launch it. Settlers: Heritage of Kings installed and plays just fine, and the no-cd patch still works. OpenOffice.org gave me no problems. I haven’t tried the new version of Outlook Express (which is back to being Microsoft Mail again.)

All in all, it looks like the extra time the developers took has been for the better. Time will tell.

The Pookster has recently joined a Brownie Troop, and tonight they had a special event at OMSI, which is always a fun place to visit. This month, they are having a special Star Wars exhibit, featuring a nice batch of movie props – including the original 4-foot model of the Millenium Falcon.

As many times as I have watched the original trilogy, this is the first time I’ve had leisure to really stop and look at the old Lady, and it was really neat to see all the detail. She sits behind glass, so it is hard to tell for sure, but it appears they used a combination of aluminum and plastic in the manufacture.

They really did go all out in the construction – the use of metal appears to be solely for the purpose of correctly rendering the dings and dents she has accrued over her lifetime of service. The ventral plating on the starboard side has a delightfully nasty-looking curl to it, as if Han bounced that side off a docking clamp making a getaway.

If you look closely, you can see where the makers utilized existing pieces to speed the process. On the ventral surface back toward the engines, it appears that the forks off a Harley FLHTC adorn the plating. On either side, at the point where the mandibles join the main disc you can see the side of an automotive transmission casing. (It’s mounted backwards, with the output shaft pointing forward.)

Well worth the money to see the exhibit, even if you didn’t like the second trilogy.

Feeling adventurous today, so I am going to try and dual-boot my windows disk to Vista. I’ll be writing this entry as the process goes forward, so don’t mind my changes of time tense. This is a long post (obviously) with pictures, thanks to having a roomie with more gadgetry than I. I’ll tuck the rest of this behind the linky…and my apologies for the lousy pictures, strictly operator error.

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I seem to be encountering a lot of beta software lately, so I figured I may as well go whole hog and started a download of the latest Vista beta release.

Mind you MS may be calling it a Release Candidate, but it is most assuredly still a beta release – and will stay that way, in my not-so-humble opinion, until Service Pack1 is built for it – at which point it will become a launch product. If history repeats, Vista SP2 will make it stable.

I will take a moment here to advise any who are thinking of partaking of the recent “Buy a computer now and get a free Vista Upgrade” program to NOT do so. Just wait until you can get it pre-installed if you absolutely must have Vista. M$ upgrades have NEVER worked right, and you will only bring yourself grief.

As for me, I’m going to pick up another hard drive and not even try to dual-boot Vista, I’ll just use my swap bays. The rest of the hardware in Hyperion (my desktop) is more than capable of handling the advanced features, so this will be my first chance to see it running live. Yeah, I’ve seen tons of screenshots, but it ain’t the same as having your paws on the keyboard.

As I run it through its paces, I’ll do my best to break it so the rest of you will know what to watch for. I’m expecting to run into problems with my media collection due to content licensing, and I am also figuring on there being issues with software installation. We’ll see just how well their “limited user” accounts function.

For this test, I will be using the 32-bit version. I figure I will deal with just one beta at a time, and last I looked there was still a scarcity of 64-bit drivers. If the 32-bit works out ok, I’ll re-burn it with the 64-bit build.

Wheeee.

And you shouldn’t ask it to come in.

Ok, that is a pretty fast opinion. I installed it last night and gave it a quick trial – literally less than ten minutes. I only gave it that long because that’s all it took for me to realize it sucked.

First and worst is the layout. Yay, they got tabs – but they put a row of buttons in the tab bar that can’t be moved elsewhere. It can be slid to the right to hide it, but it includes the “Home” button, so at least one button will always be there taking up tab space. The rest of the directional controls are spread out across the toolbars, and you can’t move any of them either.

Some might say this is a bold move, but it seems pretty stupid to me. Any device or piece of software should have all of the navigational controls in one spot. Look at your tape or CD deck – Stop, Play, FFWD and REW are all right next to each other. Why should my browser have Forward and Back in the top left, Refresh and Stop between the Address and Search boxes where the Go button should be, and Home on the tab bar?

Let’s get back to those tabs again. Yes, they have them, and you can even save a collection of tabs into a bookmarks folder. Cool. The problem they still have though, is that you can’t open more than one bookmark at a time still. One of the most-used features on my Firefox install is the “Open In Tabs” extension. How could they have missed this?

Speaking of extensions, there is a selection of them for download – although I can’t imagine a real use for any of ’em. Oh – and not all of them are free. Yep – you could pay up to $30 for a freaking browser extension! Gaah! Ok, that is actually a misnomer – these are not fast-and-light browser extensions like you find in Firefox and Mozilla. These are stand-alone programs, most of which display information to a toolbar or sidebar in your browser.

Top the whole thing off with the fact that someone found a security flaw less than 24 hours after releasing the product, and I highly recommend you avoid IE7 for at least a couple months.

So the Boss gave Da Roomie and I a new wireless firewall to play with – something that has some real security to it, compared to the Linksys model we have been using to date.

Installation wasn’t too much of an issue – I have used this model before, so it was just the usal jumping-through of hoops. The real fun came when I went down to the garage and tried to get the laptop online.

I had taken special pains to keep the setting the same, as I couldn’t remember at the time the name of the obscure file I had had to edit the first time I set this up. Still, no luck, even after a half-hour or so of bashing on it.

This morning, I gave in and booted the laptop to the Win2k install just to check my daily webcomics, when wouldn’t you know it? It didn’t work in Windows either! Now we’re getting somewhere!

It turns out that the Orinoco card that I am using is the culprit, due to them being cheap in the driver code. Orinoco cards only use the WEP key for encryption, not for authentication like everybody else. According to the article on the forums, I only need to change one thing on the firewall to make it work. So basically, to use the shiny new security device, I have to disable half of its security.

Dontcha just love standards?

Well, now that I have a real job again, I can add a new wifi card to the list. Come to think of it, maybe I’ll just dig a used lappy out of Craigslist or something while I’m at it.

CLIENT: Our internet is spotty as hell, and the ISP says everything is fine on their end. Any ideas?
ME: Hmmm…reboot the router for me.
CLIENT: Ok, the lights are coming back on, looks like normal now.
ME: Okay, I’m in. Let me nose about for a bit and I’ll call you right back.

Poke poke poke…hmm. Nothing terribly out of the ordinary, let’s check the firewall logs. What’s this? Intrusion Prevention System says it has been fending off attacks? From inside? MEDIC!

So we dispatched a tech, and he brought us a present this morning: a horribly infested laptop, the many infections of which were swamping the network in attempts to propagate themselves to other machines, or phone home or whatever. Needless to say, little 128K fractional T1 line was not up to the task.

Neither was our 2.5M DSL line at the shop, as we found out when Mr. A+ plugged the damn lappy into our network – on the internal side.

Yet again, I am amazed at how someone with a certification can get one. A very stupid mistake. I can only hope that our systems were hardened enough to prevent infection.

If you’re like me and have ever had a problem where your Symantec Corporate Edition clients have either ceased speaking to the server or you’ve had to migrate servers, have no fear – I have a solution to your woes.

The Symantec website has almost all of this information, but they don’t give you an easy example of how this can be done, they merely hint at it. The cure is to copy the Grc.dat file and the xxx.x.servergroupca.cer file to the client, in two different locations. The next time the client goes to check in, it will redirect itself and you’re home free. Simple, but damned annoying if you have say, 30-some-odd clients that need these files. The trick is to use a login script (assuming you have a domain running these clients.) Here’s how I did it.

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