Toys
Trying new things and attempting to control the damage to old ones


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Toys


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Permanent link: Tuesday, May 06, 2003 Tuesday, May 06, 2003
 

Bigger not better


I made the mistake of "upgrading" to AIM v5.1. Now I'm stuck with this huge buddy-list window. This stuff should get smaller, not larger.
10:06:51 PM  Permanent link   Categories: LiveJournal Toys

Permanent link: Tuesday, April 01, 2003 Tuesday, April 01, 2003
 

Windows DNS caching


Windows caches DNS lookups, including failed ones that it will refuse to look up again for a period of time. This is almost never what I want, as I have the next upstream DNS source do the caching.

The relevant registry entries live under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetServicesDnscacheParameters

DWORDs MaxCacheEntryTtlLimit and NegativeCacheTime are the timeouts in seconds for positive and negative lookups respectively setting NegativeCacheTime to 0 disables failed lookup caching.

For an added bonus, DWORD QueryIpMatching set to 1 will reject DNS responses from servers that the resolver did not query.


8:28:31 PM  Permanent link   Categories: Toys

Permanent link: Wednesday, December 11, 2002 Wednesday, December 11, 2002
 

Working net


I've been having a problem with networking in the lab after waking from from hiberation when I come in for the day. Typically I would have to do a cold boot and was unable to shutdown Windows while the problem existed. Removing the campus VPN client, which never worked in the first place, seems to have improved things.
3:36:21 PM  Permanent link   Categories: LiveJournal Toys

Permanent link: Thursday, August 22, 2002 Thursday, August 22, 2002
 

Win2k SP3 autoupdating


How to defang Win2k SP3's auto updating. We think this covers it - any more contributions? [The Register]

It seems like windowsupdate.microsoft.com doesn't work after this. Can you be sure that you can manually download any updates... beter yet, can you be sure to FIND OUT about them?


1:10:57 AM  Permanent link   Categories: Toys

Permanent link: Thursday, August 15, 2002 Thursday, August 15, 2002
 

Pegasus v4.02


I've upgraded my mail client from Pegasus v.312c to v4.02. I was holding back due to the number of known issues discussed in the newsgroup. However, since my new laptop with WinXP tends to stay up longer between reboots (on occaision up to a week!) I would also tend to leave Pegasus open. On numerous occaisions this has caused WinXP to blue-screen. No such problem with v4.02 so far.

The v4 series has a nifty preview mode that avoids the opening of billions of gratuitous windows that I never enjoyed. Still no mail sync with Palm, though. In all honesty, I admit that I want something that is like Outlook without being Outlook. Word has it that Evolution is like that, except it doesn't run on Windows.


5:45:07 PM  Permanent link   Categories: Toys

Permanent link: Tuesday, April 09, 2002 Tuesday, April 09, 2002
 

Dual head with Win2k


I have just moved my Win2k desktop to a dual head setup. It was quite an Out-of-Box Experience.

I bought a Matrox Millenium II 4 MB graphics card with a PCI interface off EBay for $15. It's a card that I often see recomended on multi-monitor sites. They're cheap, look good, and play nice with other cards. Even with 4 MB, it's more than enough to drive my second monitor.

I shutdown the machine, stuck the card in a random slot, plugged in the video cable (this cable actually goes to a KVM, so that the monitor can also show console from my linux machine), and booted Win2k. It detected the card, I stuck the Win2k CD in the drive to get the default Windows drivers. Voila, two monitors.

(The only problem I had was self-induced. I always forget to take the Win2k CD out of the drive before rebooting. When the machines boot from that CD, it rearranges the drive ordering. I boot from a SCSI drive, but have another drive in the system that's IDE, so I have to set the search for a bootable drive to start with SCSI first.)


9:11:26 PM  Permanent link   Categories: Toys


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radaR's LiveJournal 4/24/2003
BulletDown and Out in Westchester County.

Visited IBM Watson Research Center, in Yorktown Heights and Hawthorne, NY. My uncle is an important perosn in Global Services, who has important friends in Research, etc. I swear that IBM Research has at least one of everything, and that I TALKED to at least one of everything.


It turns out this was an "informal" visit, so that if there was a job oportunity I'd have to do it all again. And I alread blew a lot on money on cabs running around between the places. The last cab didn't go to the lobby in back like he was told, so I got to the train station just as my train was pulling out. So I got an extra stay in Croton until the next Amtrak came through.


And now it's freaking cold.

By radar@poboxes.com.

Bulletheather made me sick!.

Quite a trick for being 1751 miles away.


I've got another job interview tomorrow, and I've got to get up super early to get my travelling started. I may as well go to bed right now.

By radar@poboxes.com.

BulletAlmost had it. I almost thought my Wednesday trip to IBM was worked out, but then they threw a monkey wrench into my plans. They've scheduled meetings at two different facilites, miles apart, and 30 minutes to get between the two. By radar@poboxes.com.

BulletIntel.

All of the interviewers made sure to ask me at least a few things I didn't know. There were plenty of oportunities to prove myself a fool, and I took advantage of them all. There wasn't too much obvious disgust, so I suppose I did well.


BTW, ground transportation thoroughly sucked. The shuttle van driver taking me out to Hillsboro drove past the hotel twice. I should have known things would be bad when he asked me what exit to take. The hotel van to the interview site didn't have me on the schedule, even though I asked at the front desk when I checked in. And the van never picked me up at all to go back to the hotel. Air transportation was only mostly bad, including the 18 plane lineup to take off from Chicago.

By radar@poboxes.com.

BulletThe marvels of modern technology.

"let's do some data mining". My sister is getting married on June 1st, and she’s just started a registry on target.com (at my suggestion, since... [mamamusings]


Now that you can put giant packages of Pepperridge Farm Goldfish on your wedding registry, complete spiritual fulfillment can be obtained.

By radar@poboxes.com.