Month: September 2003

by

The Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren

The book is well written and probably very effective on many people who are “plan your work, work your plan” people. Don't get me wrong I like the book and the importance he put on the five purposes of life:

  • Worship – you were planned for God's pleasure.
  • Fellowship – you were formed to be part of God's family.
  • Discipleship – you were created to become like Christ.
  • Ministry – you were shaped for God's service.
  • Mission – you were made to tell other's about Christ.

What I do know about myself is that I feel I have been most successful as an oblique learner. At an early age I realized that I frequently cannot get to my more difficult goals from the most direct route. When I got stuck with a difficult problem in school, I realized a successful strategy for me was to back off.  I would work on something else or work in a different direction realizing that in the end I would have to work even harder to make up for lost time. I remember in college I was working on a programming problem for several hours and seemed to be getting no where. So I called it a night and headed back to the dorm. As I crossed the drill field I started to reschedule my next day's activities to allow time to work on this problem again when I realized the solution to my problem. Naturally I turned around and went back to finish the problem. My gut tells me that the growth in my faith has occured primarily in activities I did not consider as on my direct route to Christ. God's plan has frequently not been my plan. It sure helps to be flexible if you are not perfect.

by

Temporary Files – Revisited

I continued to work on the temporary/miscellaneous installation file problem. I started to examine my disk with a utility I have used in the past, i-disk. Its okay but it could be nicer. So I went looking to see if there was a newer version. I had some problems finding it but I finally found it listed on a website called WebAttack.com. In their review of i-disk they were ambivalent about it so I decided to see what they really liked. They had a page where they reviewed a slew of file utilities like i-disk and they seemed to like a utility called foldersizes. Foldersizes is a visually more appealing product with a couple more bells and whistles. Its got a nice XPish motif and some nice reports. I downloaded it from their website, www.foldersizes.com. It worked fine until it ran into a folder left over from an aborted trial of Undelete called Recovery Bin. It never finished scanning that directory. Something was screwed up in the folder and the data should have been deleted months ago, so I deleted the folder. Since I had a “disk” problem, I decided to check the disk with Norton Disk Doctor. NDD found a couple of errors with the indexes and told me to schedule a chkdsk at bootup to fix the errors. I think my disk drive is lean and clean. My file search works much faster now!

by

Nothing temporary about temporary files.

While I was writing this the operating system informed me that I had run out of space on Drive C, my system drive. That was surprising because I had gone through a cleanup routine just a few days ago. I had no more obvious places to go to get back space, so it was time to run my Find Large Files script. This time it didn't find much that I could delete, but I watched as it ran, it showed me the names of thousands and thousands of files I couldn't find browsing around the file system. Then I realized — they must be hidden files. In a deeply nested sub-folder of Documents and Settings called Temp. I flipped the bit and sure enough there they were. The thousands of one-pixel gif web bugs, and all the Shockwaves, gigabytes of them, that I had looked at since I bought this computer many months ago. In other words Windows just consumes disk space. I wonder if Microsoft bought some stock in one of the disk drive makers. This is just appalling. How is a regular user supposed to find these files? Why should they have to? As we use MP3 more and more, do we need to write some utilities for people that make their systems perform better? (BTW, I'm sure Scoble will say “That's fixed in Longhorn.”)

[Scripting News]

After reading this post I examined my temp directory and found it full of useless files. The biggest culprit was IE5 files which somehow had never gottem deleted by the various disk cleanup programs. Since I had manually run Norton's Fast & Safe Cleanup I was a little disappointed. I deleted the files manually from my temp directory and the windows temp directory.

by

Custom Outlook Form fix

I created some custom Outlook forms to automate some of my sales response tasks and then Outlook started to complain about the item contains active content that cannot be displayed in the preview pane. Today I finally found an answer in the M$ knowlegebase article, Q331788. It said I needed to apply a hotfix and manually edit the registry. I checked the file versions and my files are up to date. As much as I dislike editing the registry this fix cleaned up the problem.

by

Log on as a batch job

Yesterday I figured out my problem with the task scheduler under Windows XP. Norton Anti-virus's NDETECT.EXE would run once or twice while I was active on the computer. If the computer's password protected screensaver was active, it would not run. It would fail with a: “0x80070569: Logon failure: the user has not been granted the requested logon type at this computer. Verify that the task's Run-as name and password are valid and try again.”  I would re-enter the userid and password and try again. It would work.

It finally clicked for me when I was checking the security log file. It was generating a 534 audit failure for logon type 4. Logon type 4 is a batch logon. A quick check of the GPO showed that my userid was not authorized to logon as a batch job. I was surprised since I was a member of the administrator group.

This should clean up my problems with the Quickbooks weekly backup and Norton Anti-Virus.

by

Sunday Mirror.

Saddam – Eager to strike a deal?

Saddam Hussein has been in secret negotiations with US forces in Iraq for the past nine days, we can reveal.

The Iraqi dictator is demanding safe passage to the former Soviet republic of Belarus. In exchange, he has vowed to provide information on weapons of mass destruction and disclose bank accounts where he siphoned off tens of millions of dollars in plundered cash.

President Bush is being kept abreast of the extraordinary talks by his National Security advisor Condoleezza Rice. She is co-ordinating negotiations in Baghdad which are led by Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of American forces in Iraq.

The United States has vowed never to negotiate with Saddam and want to take him dead or alive, but the White House hopes the clandestine talks will allow them to pinpoint the tyrant's exact location.

Paul Martin
Sunday Mirror

When Men Lie
One day, while a woodcutter was cutting a branch of a tree above a river, his axe fell into the river. When he cried out, the Lord appeared and asked, “Why are you crying?” The woodcutter replied that his axe has fallen into water, and he needed the axe to make his living.

The Lord went down into the water and reappeared with a golden axe.

“Is this your axe?” the Lord asked.

The woodcutter replied, “No.”

The Lord again went down and came up with a silver axe.

“Is this your axe?” the Lord asked.

Again, the woodcutter replied, “No.”

The Lord went down again and came up with an iron axe.

“Is this your axe?” the Lord asked.

The woodcutter replied, “Yes.”

The Lord was pleased with the man's honesty and gave him all three axes to keep, and the woodcutter went home happy.

Some time later the woodcutter was walking with his wife along the riverbank, and his wife fell into the river. When he cried out, the Lord again appeared and asked him, “Why are you crying?”

“Oh Lord, my wife has fallen into the water!”

The Lord went down into the water and came up with Jennifer Lopez.

“Is this your wife?” the Lord asked.

“Yes,” cried the woodcutter.

The Lord was furious. “You lied! That is an untruth!”

The woodcutter replied, “Oh, forgive me, my Lord. It is a misunderstanding. You see, if I had said 'no' to Jennifer Lopez, You would have come up with Catherine Zeta-Jones. Then if I also said 'no' to her, you would have come up with my wife. Had I then said 'yes,' you would have given me all three. Lord, I am a poor man, and am not able to take care of all three wives, so THAT'S why I said yes to Jennifer Lopez.”

The moral of this story is: Whenever a man lies, it is for a good and honorable reason, and for the benefit of others.

That's our story, and we're sticking to it!!

[The Braden Files]

by

Automatic LiveUpdate and other tasks in the Task Scheduler do not run after you install Norton AntiVirus

Situation:
After you install Norton AntiVirus (NAV), you notice that none of the tasks in Microsoft Task Scheduler, including Automatic LiveUpdate, are running as expected. You examined the Scheduled Tasks and notice that all of your tasks, including Symantec NetDetect, show a status of “Could not start.”

The rest of the article gives you a how to fix your configuration. Check it for details.

I ended up using scenario 2 with limited success. It appears to reschedule itself to run in 4 hours if it was successful. If it fails it leaves a message of “Could not start” in the Scheduler. Logging off and back on appears to fix the problem.