dae's weblog

Goyza Dumpling Soup

Here I am at London Gatwick, having soup and charging my devices. I was clever enough to bring a UK power plug for my MacBook and the right cables to charge my cell phones. Well, two at a time anyway (only have two USB ports). I do have to buy a USB travel hub somewhere. I’m using my Galaxy S2 as a WiFi tethering hotspot with a prepaid SIM card on the UK 3 network.

BlackBerry Curve at LGW

Suddenly this guy shows up. He tells me he just bought a BlackBerry charger and his battery is dead! We talk a bit and he discovers he bought a Mini USB charger, while his BlackBerry Curve has a Micro USB connector. Bad luck! I unplug my Samsung Galaxy S2 and tell him he can use my cable. He’s off back to the shop to return his charger and I’m wondering: why does he trust me? Why do we trust complete strangers at an airport? I’ve had similar experiences, only the other way around, where I left two of my cell phones with a couple of girls who also got their phones charged with my charger in return.
I’m thinking: We trust people because we want to.

And it works!

Have a great day!

OS X Mountain Lion Preview 1

I am excited. Very excited! This MacBook Air is my first (real) Mac and the timing couldn’t have been better. Over the last few years I’ve owned a lot of different computers and they always used to have Windows installed. My work requires me to run Windows somewhere, although I often prefer some alternative operating systems on the side. My last few laptops  contained a dual boot system with Linux, meaning I always had to save my work, restart my laptop before I could do serious stuff (for instance directly connect my laptop to the internet using a customer’s cable modem – stuff that Windows is not really good at, to put it mildly).

Lots of reboots later, I decided it was time for a change. Maybe desktop virtualisation (well, laptop virtualisation). Something like the very thin and sexy hypervisor Citrix XenClient is, allowing me to run both Windows and Linux at the same time. The problem with that was, that XenClient’s HCL wasn’t that extensive and besides: the laptop I had didn’t have proper processor support for it and I wasn’t sure I was going to get one of the laptops off the XenClient HCL. Not to speak of the (lack of) matureness of XenClient. Read more…

Last night as I was trying to upgrade the BIOS of my Samsung X360 laptop, I got a “Loading driver failed. Restart system” error. I searched the entire internet and found a fix that suggested I should install Samsung Update Plus, which didn’t work. I was trying to flash from Windows 7 (32 bit) and I had a feeling that this tiny program wasn’t made to run under this OS.

Ultimately I decided to run the BIOS update program in Compatibility Mode. I right clicked it and Windows proposed to run the BIOS update in Windows XP SP2 Compatibility Mode. Yikes! It sounds scary and it ran way slower than I expected, but it worked and I got my update.

Yesterday, I was at the golf course, doing a Google Apps migration. A young boy sat down next to me during a coffee break at the club house.

I asked: “So… Do you have a handicap?”
He replied (without blinking his eyes): “Yes, sir. 11″
I: “And how old are you?”
He: “12, sir”
I wanted to tease him a bit and said: “Well, ok. It’s good you’re still young, so you have lots of time to work on a decent handicap”

He said nothing, just nodded his head.
I finished my café au lait.

Well, there you have it. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. I’m off to bed, now. Have to get up early tomorrow. I imagine waking up tomorrow and… the world will be out of IPv4 addresses. That feels weird! Good night.

Hurricane Electric IPv4 Exhaustion Counters

Did you know you can use your Mac to connect to any Windows PC? Microsoft has a client, which even allows you to relay audio. It’s pretty cool!

Remote Desktop Connection Client for Mac 2

Or click here for a nice chart of possibilities

Today I had an interesting challenge. I was working on an english retail Windows Server 2008 x64, that was configured as a Domain Controller, running DNS and DHCP.

It was still running SP1 and I wanted to upgrade it to SP2, which did not work using the separate download, but it worked using Microsoft Update!

SP2 installed successfully and it took a while for me to figure out that some services were not running afterwards. Those services included DNS, DHCP and… Windows Event Log. I tried to start the Windows Event Log service, but it would fail with a strange error about the service account not being the same as it used to be or so. Uninstalling SP2 didn’t solve the problem, nor did Google have a solution for me.

I checked the Services and saw the following line:

C:\Windows\System32\svchost.exe -k LocalServiceNetworkRestricted

The options on the Log On tab were all disabled (grayed out), but the radio button was set to Local System account, which was interesting, because the Path to executable referred to the LocalServiceNetworkRestricted account.

I decided to try my luck and I started REGEDIT on the server, looked up the following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\EventLog

There was an ObjectName which held a REG_SZ value of LocalSystem and I decided to change it to NT AUTHORITY\LocalService

It worked! The Windows Event Log service started without any complaints and so did the DNS and DHCP. My server was safe and I was happy!

Are you using Outlook 2010, just like me and do you have a LinkedIn profile?
Give LinkedIn for Outlook a try!
If you’re still on Outlook 2003 or Outlook 2007, don’t forget to get the Outlook Social Connector (which is included in Outlook 2010)