Ever since Mark Russinovich started a Sysinternals blog, I have loved reading the information he posts over there. He’s had a series of posts lately about registry polling by poorly written software. The detail with which he digs in is so simple, but elegant that you can’t help appreciate and know that they know their code-fu. I love their tools, especially Process Explorer and couldn’t imagine troubleshooting on Windows without such awesome freeware.

Sorry for gushing, but I’m just constantly amazed at what these guys (Mark & Bryce) do.

I love those little Snyder’s Buttermilk Ranch Pretzel Pieces, but I have one word of advice if you do too. Never, under any circumstances, and I mean never snort one of those little suckers up your nose or down the wrong pipe.

I am in so much pain right now.

errata/buttermilk_ranch_pieces

Being the lazy guy that I am, I decided to script up Ben’s tip on non-integrated mouse in Microsoft Virtual Server.

Since Virtual Server apparently doesn’t have an easy way to turn off mouse integration (as opposed to Virtual PC), Ben posted the exact change to the config file that needs to be made. Using Virtual Server’s COM interface, this can be easily automated as long as you know the path to the parameter. I had to reset my virtual machine for the change to take effect.

The code below simply toggles mouse integration on and off when called with the following syntax: cscript toggleMI.vbs “Virtual Machine Name”

Enjoy!

Okay, so Scoble is a Tablet PC evangelist. In my interpretation, this means that he is responsible for prophesizing the wonders and benefits of Microsoft’s Tablet PC platform to anybody he can interact with whether it be online, offline, or through a chain of 30 blogs. To my knowledge, Microsoft has all kinds of evangelists (keyword search on Microsoft Careers turns up 45 openings) and I’ve even met one such evangelist at a Chicago Nerd Dinner. I’m going to see how many times I can squeeze the word evangelist into this entry…

So these people, these evangelist’s exist solely to proclaim the gospel of Microsoft, to mis-quote wikipedia. These people are here to spread the word and awareness of what Microsoft can do for you.

Now to my question. Is there a scripting evangelist at Microsoft? Do people realize the power of the .vbs? Do these MCSA’s and MCSE’s that have been pushed through training classes by their company even realize or know how to use wsh, wmi, vbs, adsi, and jscript?? Sure, there’s the Technet Script Center and the Scripting Guys, but you usually only come across those if you’re specifically looking for something. Hell, the most recent Scriptomatic even has the ability to output in Perl and Python!

Do MS professionals realize to what extent you can script a Windows box?

Do MS professionals realize how much easier they can make their lives??

Does MS need a scripting evangelist???

tents fingers

Maybe I’ll just have to hit up the newsgroup more often and evangelize a little myself…you know I’ve tried to do so here. Of course, I’m no comparison to Eric Lippert…

Speaking of Scoble, let me just re-iterate how much I love my Audiovox SMT5600, commonly known as the Scoblephone. Although I don’t have a miniSD card (yet…it’s on order as of 2 hours ago) I threw a few mp3’s onto my phone this evening before I went rollerblading in the beautiful Chicago weather. I slapped in the headset and I not only had some good tunes to blade to, but I was ready to take an all-important call at any second without missing a step…or roll, as it were.

I can’t wait to get my miniSD card and then I can try out MSN Video Downloads.

I am not a praying man, but oh my god! Google Maps has a satellite view!!!

amazed

What I find most amazing is the directions view and how you can mantain one view in the popup window and another one in the main window.

via forevergeek

Now Google, who bought the company that makes the Keyhole software, is offering satellite images on their Google Maps beta site. Although you cannot zoom in as close as you can with their Keyhole software, its still fun to play around with.

You can even drag the satellite image around just like you can the map, as well as switch between the satellite and map images without reloading the entire page.

This has kept me amused for the past hour, straight.

I use the Outlook Connector for IBM Lotus Notes/Domino at work because I’ve come to find Outlook much more usable than Notes. Unfortunately, for the past few months I’ve been getting an error when I start outlook: The system cannot find the file specified error. I figured it was due to a botched Japanese language install and ignored it until I got my laptop reloaded on Monday and it started doing the same thing. After a quick Google, I found somebody with a similar problem.

Cause

McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 8.0i has a Lotus Notes email scanning component that needs to run before any Notes-based program is launched. This component does not exist in the BlackBerry installation folder.

Resolution

Copy the NCDaemon.exe file into the BlackBerry installation folder

It figures…McAfee is the culprit. I cannot tell you how much I despise recent versions of McAfee. While I understand the direction they are attacking and the market they are targeting, McAfee is a bane to those who understand the risks of the Internet. Due to the recent uprise of malware, McAfee is attempting to address these issues by identifying any piece of “troubling” software on your system. Unfortunately, for a security professional like myself who maintains a large library of malware, “hacking tools”, and other “unwanted programs” (McAfee terminology), deleting these files is not desirable functionality. Of course, these features can all be disabled…unless you happen to be under the power of McAfee’s ePolicy Orchestrator. Of course, you can be given a special policy to address some of these issues…unless your laptop does not like to apply that policy. It’s so frustrating.

To get back to the point, I managed to solve my outlook problem by copying NCDaemon.exe to my

1

C:\Program Files\Common Files\System\MSMAPI\1033

directory. Why there, and not the Outlook installation directory? For whatever reason, that directory is the “Current Directory” that Outlook runs from.

The International Lizard of Mystery took a trip to NYC recently.

Apparently he had a pretty good time.

ILoM-NYC-Home/manhattan

I stumbled across Asterisk, a software PBX, today.

Looks pretty sweet and gives me another reason to try out software-based phone system which I did about three and seven years. It’s about time again.

I received my first ever piece of SMS spam on my Cingular/AT&T mobile phone today. Suck. I don’t know if Cingular sold my number or not, but at least they do appear to have an opt out option on their website.

The odd thing was that the message appeared to pop up on my screen without any interaction whatsoever. I’m not 100% sure because I dropped the phone before I noticed I had the message and could have opened it, but I’m fairly sure. It is definitely some sort of custom message, though, because instead of “Reply” and “Menu” for the soft buttons, it has “Later” and “Delete”.

/me is not pleased