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Healthmon is healthy again.

I know I talked earlier about fixing IISLockdn but I ended up fixing the Perflib problem that stopped Healthmon from being of any use. During SBS installation the performance counters had gotten screwed up and I could not monitor cpu utilization, memory paging, etc. Those performance objects gave me WMI errors?! The rest of the counters were working fine but I really wanted to monitor cpu utilization and paging. My first tries at fixing this were a failure and my searches of M$ Knowlegebase were fruitless. The best I could find was a Q that recommended rebuilding the perflib counters.  So I turned off alerting in Healthon and went on to more pressing problems. When I started the IISLockdn analysis today, I remembered I had this outstanding problem with Healthmon/perflib. Since I was in a very technical mood I decided to a quick search of the M$ Knowlegebase. A couple of searches later I started to focus on a utility in the W2K resource kit that may be of some use, exctrlst.exe. It displays registry settings for performance objects and allows you to modify them. It was worth at least a try. My initial searches did not find a copy online that I could download. Then I found the entire W2K resource kit online. The utility doesn't show up in a normal search but its there. I downloaded the utility and to my surprise, performance monitoring was turned off on all of the objects that were giving me WMI errors. I turned on performance monitoring on my problem performance objects and rebooted the server. Now I have all of the performance objects available for Healthmon reporting. This was not part of my original plan but I am very happy to Healthmon doing its job correctly.

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IISLockdn cleanup

Yesterday I installed Windows XP and Office 2003 Beta 2 on my son's computer. He actually needed Word since he left his laptop at his friends house and we are trying to send out birthday invitations. It locked up on him and he lost the first version. Oh, well!

Maybe I'll have time to play with IISLockdn version 2.1 today. The intranet website was stopped again so I uninstalled IM server. I think these problems all started when I tried to install Software Update Services and it ran IISLockdn. I will probably chase down a http error 502 out of the exchange system manager before proceeding. I fixed some path errors(case sensitive?) that gave me little red icons stop sign icons for some of the exchange directories.

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Today is beautiful. It was supposed to be stormy but that will probably come later. I will try and get a good soaking of the arena while Andi is gone. It's probably time for me to add more magnesium chloride. I'll have to spread compost on some other day. The fields are too wet.

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Iraq News Hound?!

Debka expects the surrender of two Iraqi divisions. “They are the forces charged with defending the oil fields of region and represent two-thirds of the Iraqi army in the south.” [Scripting News]

It is interesting to see this news/rumor reported by Debka and not confirmed by the rest of the media. Hmm..

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Time to go to bed

The war has started and it is in God's hands.  Andi is out of town and a baby horse may be born in the next couple of days. Despite everyone's interest in the “war”, I will try and stay focused on my problems. The mare is late but she is not dripping milk so I should be safe sleeping through the night.

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Just War Theory

I recently got an e-mail from a relative that enclosed a sermon that discussed the differing viewpoints about war within the church. Since I have debated with myself whether this “proposed war” was necessary I was very interested. Misery likes company. In the sermon by Mike Robert, he said “that what Jesus expects from individual Christians is often different from what He expects from our national leaders.” He explained the differences and that helped me. He said it is normal for Christians to not feel good about a war even though they may believe the war is necessary. He went on to discuss the underlying guidelines for a “just” war can be traced back to the 4th century theologian, St. Augustine. Since I wanted to know more about St. Augustine and the “just” war, I did an Internet search. The best source for an explanation of the “just” war theory is at this BBC site.

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Step Away From the Spell-Checker. A University of Pittsburgh study reveals that using the spell-check button can create problems for writers and editors who rely too heavily on the software. While a spell-checker can identify some misspelled words, it is not always so reliable when used to correct grammatical errors. [Wired News]

Actually this problem has existed for some time in different forms. Way, way back in time when I was going to school the same concern was expressed over calculators. At the time the concern were expressed that the general population would gradually cease to be able to add, subtract, multiple, and divide without the benefit of a calculator. I don't see where people's computation skills have been affected. Most people are too lazy to find their calculator. The challenge has always been to avoid complacency and laziness when using a tool like spell-check. Spell-check requires a higher mental effort since you are looking at two more refined and sophisticated groups of errors, errors that you have made and spell-check does not catch and those errors that spell-check finds but are not actually errors.