It's A Wonderful Life

Just finished up It’s A Wonderful Life - such a nice movie. I’ve probably watched it every year for the past four years and I still like it. Who knows how many times my Mother has seen it, but she still watches it too. I wonder how many people still watch that ‘ol movie…

December 25, 2004 · 1 min

Addicted

Seems like Scoble is addicted to the Internet just like I am. On this eve, here’s a post from a couple years ago…ah, the old blog…memories. Expect a fairly lengthy blog post sometime soon…

December 24, 2004 · 1 min

No Way - Maniac Mansion Deluxe!

via [Wired]: It seems some fan of the old game Maniac Mansion (I played the Nintendo version) have created a remake, Maniac Mansion Deluxe - an exact remake with the exception of a new MIDI soundtrack and 256-color graphics. /me plays Maniac Mansion Deluxe on Chritmas Eve, hehehe.

December 24, 2004 · 1 min

Different privileges in Visual Studio Debug Mode

I’m mucking around with process tokens in C++ lately (stealing tokens and whatnot…) and was having an odd problem when I would run my application in Visual Studio versus when I would run it from a command prompt. In the case of running the program from Visual Studio, I could use the OpenProcess function fine, but OpenProcessToken would fail with access denied. In the case of running it from a command prompt, OpenProcess would fail with access denied. I figured it must have something to do with certain privileges debug mode enables in the application. ...

December 23, 2004 · 2 min

Just got schooled in VBScript

I just read a blog entry by Eric Lippert about VBScript and the Terminator and man did I just get schooled in VBScript. I almost wish I could do that kind of stuff full time so I would have the chance to learn all those intricate details.

December 22, 2004 · 1 min

Microsoft needs to do a better job with documentation

I just discovered today that there is a /random parameter that you can pass to the net user command.C:>net user test /add /random Password for test is: gLsaP_QH The command completed successfully.Well isn’t that convenient! Now answer me this - why is there absolutely no mention of this in the “net help user” documentation? Please, Microsoft, proper documentation would make our lives so much easier. Note that I’ve spent almost an entire day of experimenting with the previously undocumented NtQuerySystemInformation API, so I may be mildly bitter. grin ...

December 21, 2004 · 1 min

Monitor Network Shares using Windows Scripting

Somebody asked a question on microsoft.public.scripting.wsh recently about monitoring network shares using Windows scripting. I wasn’t sure if this was possible (i.e. using event sinks or something of the like), so I started Googling around to see what I could find. After several unsuccessful searches, I finally came across something useful - Running a Script Based on an Event [WMI]. Although it was a little complex, it got me on the right track regarding monitoring events and the Win32 class I would need to focus on, Win32_ServerConnection. Once I knew what I was looking for, it was only a matter of time before I found some sample code to monitor connections to network shares. ...

December 15, 2004 · 2 min

Yahoo! Blogger in town and me with a corporate event

Jeremy Zawodny, a hugely visible blogger from Yahoo!, will be in town this Thursday. It’s too bad I’ve got a corporate event on Thursday night, but I just realized he may be getting in on Wednesday night… Who’s up for a geek dinner in Chi-town?!

December 13, 2004 · 1 min

Google Suggest...been there, done that

Scoble blogs about Google’s new Google Suggest. That is awesome! PHP.net did something similar to this over a year ago with their search page. I tore their javascript apart in hopes of using it for some of my own functionality and that is some impressive coding. It took me a good few hours to even begin to understand the design behind their search page. I’ll have to check out Google’s (if possible) and see if it is similar at all.

December 10, 2004 · 1 min

Configuring Visual C++ for Unicode

error C2664: FormatMessageA : Cannot convert parameter from LPWSTR to LPSTR I was getting this error on a brand new project to take over a user’s session in Windows (w00t!) in which I was reusing code. Turns out it was a Unicode problem - after adding UNICODE to the Preprocessor Definitions in the project properties (Configuration Properties -> C/C++ -> Preprocesser), the project compiled with no errors. It’s little things like these that is probably common sense for most c++ users, but when I switch between PERL, PHP, C++, and WMI on an almost-daily basis I tend to forget.

December 8, 2004 · 1 min