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What a pain in the arse! I was installing Microsoft’s SharePoint Portal Server 2003 for the good majority of today and kept running into a problem with the Central Administration website - it wouldn’t start! When trying to start it, I would only receive the error “The parameter is incorrect”. As it turns out, the required application pool wasn’t getting created for some unknown reason. It took a little bit of digging, but I did find the reason at the usual place. Apparently you need to use the form server_name\user_account instead of simply user_account - the install isn’t smart enough to resolve the name without explicitly defining the server name. That seems a little ridiculous to me. You would think the install would do some sort of verification during the install. Guess not!

I’ve been building some XP images for our lab at work and figured I would throw the release candidate of Service Pack 2 onto them. As one might expect, the networking components are severely disrupted, resulting in nmap syn scans coming back as all filtered. TCP connect scans come back fine, however. I tried to figure it out using different versions of winpcap (but later versions require an unreleased version of nmap to work) and digging into some of the firewall options on sp2. It’s not just the firewall, though, as I can disable it completely and still have nmap not work. ...

Did I mention we got a pool table at our place? I’ve always wanted one…life is good.

It took two years, but I finally pimped out the bimmer! The best part of that upgrade is the Pirelli Pzero Nero tires I put on - those suckers stick to the road like glue, it is amazing! They’re also much quieter than my previous all-seasons. Why must Illinois have such a lack of twisty roads!?

Sometimes there just aren’t enough hours in the day.

I volunteered for the Chicago Cares Serve-a-thon last weekend. It turned out to be a really fun event. We went to a school where they needed some classrooms, lunchrooms, and lockers painted. My group was lucky enough to work on the lockers, which actually proved to be somewhat difficult, given the requirement to tape the locks and numbers so they don’t get painted over. It was a great day, though. The best part was when the vice principal walked into the room where the volunteers were congregated and was simply overwhelmed by the number of people that had showed up. ...

Oops –> I turned on the water in my tub the other night to clean it out as it doesn’t get much use. Silverfish have been known to show up if I don’t flush the jets occasionally. Unfortunately, I forgot about it. Thanks to some engineer for drains at the top of tops, or else it would have been a bad night!

It seems that the 486 is 15 years old. This is pretty big for me as the (2,3,4)86-based systems were some of my first. I can remember writing book reports using the LeScript word processor on the old computer in the basement. I can also remember begging my Father for a Pentium-based computer, solely so I could play Quake. Happy 15, 486 - I must be getting old. grin

Every once in a while, I find myself challenged by work. I don’t mean challenged as in “boy, this is tough - how will I ever do this”… (I have that every day) I mean challenged as in “this is possible - it’s simply a matter of time, luck, and skill”. Time is running short, luck is for the lazy, and skill…well, skill will only get you so far without the other two. ...

I recently utilized the awesome PearPC to install Mac OS X. Here are some screens from the process. It went very smoothly, largely due to this installation guide [emaculation.com]. There are some other guides on the emaculation.com forums.