wisefaq.com

Once heard a story from a bloke which claimed that Victorian truck drivers would stock up on Victorian Coke Cola before they crossed the South Australian border.

Now I don’t have access to a truck driver but I DO have access to a couple of genuine South Australia Coke Cola cans* courtesy of a couple of friends. 

And four taste testers from the office.

The taste results were 50-50.

South Australian Coke Cola has a stronger flavour and smell.

Victorian Coke Cola has a mellower flavour, and while you can’t see it in the photo of the two glasses side by side, the Victorian Coke Cola has a darker colour to it.

And the reason for the stronger flavour is that South Australian water tastes awful.  Or in the words of SA Water:

South Australia’s relatively dry climate and diverse range of water sources provide significant challenges to ensuring clean, healthy water for the State’s urban and rural communities.

So Coke is masking the taste of the water by adding more flavour.

Me?  I prefer Victorian Coke.

* – ironically the six-pack of Coke Cola I purchased from Coles in Footscray Victoria, was packaged in South Australia.

So I was building a Windows 7 virtual machine, so I could play “Gardens of Time” as GoT doesn’t work on my Windows 2008 R2 box …, and I went looking for MaxPatchCacheSize setting in the registry.

I didn’t have access to the internet* and I wanted to set the setting so I could save space on my VM.  But the setting isn’t in the registry by default!

So as it’s a “policies” registry setting, I was able to find it in the Local Group Policy Editor (gpedit.msc):

The policy is called “Baseline file cache size”:

This policy controls the percentage of disk space available to the Windows Installer baseline file cache.

The Windows Installer uses the baseline file cache to save baseline files modified by binary delta difference updates. The cache is used to retrieve the baseline file for future updates. The cache eliminates user prompts for source media when new updates are applied.

If you enable this policy setting you can modify the maximum size of the Windows Installer baseline file cache.

If you set the baseline cache size to 0, the Windows Installer will stop populating the baseline cache for new updates. The existing cached files will remain on disk and will be deleted when the product is removed.

If you set the baseline cache to 100, the Windows Installer will use available free space for the baseline file cache.

If you disable this policy setting or if it is not configured the Windows Installer will uses a default value of 10 percent for the baseline file cache maximum size.

Changing the setting in the Local Group Policy Editor created the HKLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Installer\MaxPatchCacheSize key.

* - if I did have access to the internet, I would have remembered that I could have done this with a simple reg.exe command:
reg add HKLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Installer /v MaxPatchCacheSize /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f

I wrote about that here.

If you were going to do a “taste test”, this would be fairly important to know.

Was that Coke Cola can purchased from a South Australian Petrol Station REALLY canned in Adelaide, or was it imported from another state?

So I did a search around the internet, and found mmmmmcoke’s collecting guide on eBay.  For the current series of Coke Cola can, if you look on the bottom, you’ve see information like this:

The general stamp format is as follows:
BEST BEFORE DATE  MANUFACTURED LOCATION  TIME OF STAMP  PRODUCTION LINE NUMBER

So for the two cans pictured above:

The complete list of manufacturing locations you may see are:
T = Townsville, Queensland
B = Brisbane, Queensland
S = Sydney, (or they also use X for Sydney)
M = Melbourne, Victoria
L = Launceston, Tasmania
A = Adelaide, South Australia
P = Perth, Western Australia

“Bag Bag” plastic bag holders were a 1990’s thing.  Essentially a “Bag “Bag” was a cloth bag with openings at the top and the bottom.  You put bags in the top, and draw them out the bottom as you need them.

Now Ikea has a “Rationell Variera Plastic Bag Dispenser”, but they’re only available in white and pink.  I like a bit of colour so white was out.  But since my manliness lately has taken a bit of a hit with pink-ish bed sheets, and then my hi-visibility pink phone cover, do you think I’d be silly enough to select pink this time around?

Not on your nelly.

So I kept looking.  Coles/Kmart/Woolworths etc. didn’t have them.

I was walking past the local “asian” bargain shop.  You know the kind of places, crammed full of “stuff” at dirt cheap prices…

After much searching, I found some.  In blue and *cough* pink.

Of course I went for the blue.

Saw this recently

From the Victorian Safety Road Rules 2009

141 No overtaking etc. to the left of a vehicle
    (1) A driver (except the rider of a bicycle) must not
        overtake a vehicle to the left of the vehicle
        unless— 
       (a) the driver is driving on a multi-lane road and
           the vehicle can be safely overtaken in a
           marked lane to the left of the vehicle; or 
       (b) the vehicle is turning right, or making a 
           U-turn from the centre of the road, and is
           giving a right change of direction signal; or 
       (c) the vehicle is stationary and it is safe to
           overtake to the left of the vehicle.

I did some hairy things when I worked as a motorcycle courier, but I would never have been as stupid as that.

Having spent time investigating slow network logons, I dislike using WMI for Group Policy filtering.  It just adds a layer of slowness to logons.

WMI filtering does has it’s place, and I do still use, and occasionally recommend it for very specific reasons.  Such as when we’re piloting a new version of Microsoft Office (2010), and we need to only apply the specific Office 2010 group policies to Office 2010 pilot users.

But what I’ve done, and I suspect most people do though, is grab the first applicable WMI class and use that.  The first applicable WMI class I’ve grabbed is Win32_Product.

Which would be a silly thing to do.  In the words of Microsoft:

Win32_product Class is not query optimized. Queries such as “select * from Win32_Product where (name like ‘Sniffer%’)” require WMI to use the MSI provider to enumerate all of the installed products and then parse the full list sequentially to handle the “where” clause. This process also initiates a consistency check of packages installed, verifying and repairing the install. With an account with only user privileges, as the user account may not have access to quite a few locations, may cause delay in application launch and an event 11708 stating an installation failure.

- Microsoft KB 974524 Event log message indicates that the Windows Installer reconfigured all installed applications

Far better in this case to follow Microsoft advice and use Win32reg_AddRemovePrograms.  For the sharper eyed readers, you can see that very thing in the picture above.

With thanks to SDM Software, where I first saw this issue written about.

Since someone asked, this is the dog soap I use with Nikki occasionally.

“This soap is especially formulated to disenchant fleas, ticks and other pests that may irritate your pets.  NEEM oil has a long tradition in animal care and is often used on the Sacred Cows of India.  The extraordinary NEEM tree, Azadirachta indica, is a tropical evergreen, native to India and Burma which can grow to 50 feet tall, tolerating drought and poor soils.  It can live up to 200 years, bearing fruit at 3 to 5 years of age.  The tree is extremely hardy and impervious to most pests.  In India it is known as the ‘village pharmacy’.  All the parts of the plant have been used for at least 4000 years in the treatment of a wide range of conditions for both humans and animals.  NEEM soap will bring an unprecedented freshness and sense of well-being to your pets.”

A cake of Neem Oil dog soap should cost you approx. $6.00 from pet shops.

On a newly imaged Windows XP client, I decided to activate “Automatic Updates” via a newly installed WSUS 3.0SP2 server.

But I was seeing this error on my Windows XP client:
2011-11-14    10:31:58:524    1788    2a0    Misc    WARNING: DownloadFileInternal failed for http://download.microsoft.com/v7/windowsupdate/redir/wuredir.cab: error 0x80072f78

What the WinXP client is trying to do, is Selfupdate the Windows Update Agent.  For some reason, the existing (older) agent wasn’t looking at my new WSUS server.  After some Googling, the suggested solution was to run the proxycfg –u command, to import the user’s proxy exclusions into the PC’s WinHTTP settings.

And it worked, but I wasn’t comfortable with the solution.  Because it’s changing the machine’s proxy setting, and since I’m going to be doing this to 2500+ desktops …  who knows what problems it would cause.

So I gave it some thought, and wondered what would happen if I MANUALLY updated the WinXP client with the new Windows Update Agent, before trying to speak to the WSUS server.

It worked!  So what I plan to do next is:

• download the latest Windows Update Agent clients from here:
      x86: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=43264
      x64: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=43265
• apply it to our WinXP client image, so new machines get the update out of the box*
• deploy it to our existing WinXP machines, which don’t have WSUS enabled yet.
• the command for the Windows Update Agent is:
      WindowsUpdateAgent30-x86 /quiet /norestart

* For Windows SP3 and WSUS, Microsoft KB898461 (Package Installer for Windows) is a mandatory patch, so I’ll applying/deploying it as well.

After the first batch of frozen treats, a friend made a suggestion of adding water to the peanut butter mix.

Since I also wanted to try Vegemite frozen treats, I though it would be a good time to whip up another batch.

Vegemite frozen treats

Was a failure.  The vegemite failed to set solid,  Maybe if I add enough water to it, I’ll be able to.  Something for batch 3.

Peanut butter frozen treats

Adding water does make it easier to mix, but it makes the peanut butter “melt” quicker when you take them out of the freezer.  Not that Nikki the Official Taste Tester complains.
Maybe I need to buy some ice or sugar tongs.

The heading alone should tell you the answer, particularly if I add ACTIVE FTP to it.

You see, most Corporate IT people consider ACTIVE FTP a bad thing, and block it at the internet gateway.  Sure FTP works within the company network, but as soon as you try to FTP something from outside the company network, it will fail.

The FTP clients that ship with Windows do not support passive mode. Therefore, they always need to negotiate a data port when issuing a command that returns data.
- Windows FTP Client Receives Error Message 425 (MS KB271078)

But here’s the strange thing, it DID work on our network until two months ago.  I suspect our corporate IT security people have finally gotten around to locking down ACTIVE FTP, which was identified as a vulnerability back in 2000.

After much searching around, I settled on MOVEit Freely, as it’s a “drop-in” alternative to Microsoft’s FTP.EXE.

Some of the alternatives I looked at:

Send quote PASV within the FTP client.
Does not work.  It only sets the server to PASSIVE mode, not the client.

FTP_FOR_WIN32 from the GNU Project
Works, except it’s missing a couple of features, such as –s batch command(s).

NcFTP Client
Works, except it’s missing a couple of features, such as –s batch command(s).

MOVEit Freely
This is the one I decided to use, first saw it discussed here:
FTP Clients – Part 5: MOVEit Freely Command-Line Secure FTP Client

Passive FTP
Would definitely work, except that it’s a commercial product (at $29.95USD).  We’d prefer free.

TransSoft FTP Performer
Commercial product

GNU Wget
Yes it works, but the customer would have to modify their VBA scripts quite a bit to work with it.