… this just in (via email) …

A major earthquake measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale, has hit Australia in the early hours of this morning, with the epicentre believed to be the North Katherine suburb of Palmerston.

Victims were seen wandering around aimlessly muttering, "F’kin ‘ell" and "Whadda carnt". The earthquake has completely decimated the area, leaving  a damage bill expected to exceed more than $3000.

Several priceless collections, including mementos from the Torana Appreciation Society and the Palmerston Progress Hall, were destroyed in the quake.  Three areas of historic burnt out cars were disturbed.  Many locals were woken well before their welfare cheques arrived.

Darwin radio reported that hundreds of residents were confused and bewildered, still trying to come to terms with the fact that something interesting had happened in the area.

One resident – Tracy Sharon Smith, a 15-year-old mother of 5 said, "It was such a shock, my little Chardonnay Mercedes came running into my bedroom crying. My youngest two, Tyler-Morgan and Megan-Storm slept through it  all.  I was still shaking when I was watching Jerry Springer later in the morning".

The people of Palmerston are a resilient community and evidence of a full recovery can already been seen, with looting, muggings and car crime carrying on as normal.

The aid response from local charities has been swift. The Red Cross has so far managed to ship 4,000 crates of Vegemite to the area to help the stricken locals. Rescue workers are still searching through the rubble and have found large quantities of personal belongings, which include Centrelink booklets, Western Bulldogs shirts, Priceline jewellery and fine bone china  from Go-Lo.

The Red Cross seeks to raise money for food and clothing, to be air-dropped  as parcels for those unfortunate to be caught up in this disaster.  Donations  of clothing are in demand. Items most needed include baseball caps; tracksuit tops (his and hers); flannelette shirts (female); white sport socks; sturdy boots; and any other items usually sold in "Op" Shops.

Food parcels may be harder to come by, but are needed all the same.
Required foodstuffs include, Dagwood Dogs, doner kebabs, McDonalds, KFC, ice cream  and cans of UDL Bourbon and Coke; Passion Pop and Victoria Bitter.

Charities are also accepting cash donations through any Liquorland outlet.
$0.25 buys a ball point pen for filling in compensation forms;
$5.00 buys chips, sausages, gherkins, crisps and blue fizzy drinks for a family of nine;
$10.00 will buy a packet of Winfield Blues 25s and a lighter to calm the nerves of those affected.

Aid agencies have requested that no tents be sent into the affected suburb, as the sight of posh housing is unfair on the population of the neighbouring  areas.

Back on the 16th December, I mentioned that I use the WordPress Mobile Edition Plugin.  Here are the three reasons why.

Size
This is one of those times where small is good.  The Standard version of blog.wisefaq.com is 190kb.
The WordPress Mobile Edition is 6kb.
A 3000% difference!  Or to put it another way, the Standard version is 30 times larger than the Mobile version.  This smaller size means less mobile data charges.

Some individual page measurements:

Speed
blog.wisefaq.com pages load much quicker, as they are smaller.

Looks
On a Mobile phone, I prefer it over the mess of the page that Windows Mobile Internet Explorer, and BlackBerry Browser make of the page.

Standard version compared to WordPress Mobile Edition
vs.

“What about Opera Mini?”, I hear you cry.

Opera Mini does a superb job of rendering the page, but because of speed and size (think mobile data charges), I prefer the WordPress Mobile Edition version.

You can download WordPress Mobile Edition here.

Been using Windows 7 for the last week.  Ever since I saw a series of Windows 7 posts over at Kevin Remde’s blog.

First impressions?  It’s a refined Vista.  It’s a lot more production ready in comparison to the Vista Betas I was beta testing back in 2006.

Now some people will tell you that Windows 7 is missing features, but I’ve not seen that.

EXCEPT FOR WMDC, Windows Mobile Device Center.  The replacement, Sync Center, doesn’t work either.

The WMDC team has past form for this.  An (almost working) WMDC for Windows Vista shipped after Vista was RTM’d.  It is a shame that an otherwise great Windows 7 experience has been spoilt by those WMDC team punks (Mel Sampat etc.).

I was greatly annoyed then, and I’m greatly annoyed now.

Update: the folks over at Xda-developers have the solution, un-install and re-install.

IBM
This is your suit

EDS
Many suits, pick one of our suits

CSC
Which suit would you like?

- George Bell

I liked George, and that was the theory during his reign.  But in the world of Desktop Management Software, it was CA Unicentre or nothing.

With eTrust 8, those pack of clowns at Computer Associates seem to think it’s a good idea to distribute eTrust Anti-virus system file updates via the automated virus signature update process.

So, in the past, you as an eTrust AV admin might have distributed DRVUPDi.exe updates manually (or not at all).  CA  now forces that update out.

So why is that a problem?

• An update requires a reboot.  The update includes the INO_FLTR.SYS & INO_FLPY.SYS files which hook into the file system.  Which requires a reboot.
• When you reboot, say as part of regular maintenance, or a scheduled change, CA throws you a curve ball because they’ve changed something without telling you.
• Yes, it truly is a problem.  Back in April 2004, a faulty INO_FLTR.SYS caused Citrix desktop clients to take 25 minutes to boot up.

Conclusion: CA are a pack of bastards.

So if you need to debug ino_fltr.sys
You use DebugView to capture what’s going on with INO_FLTR.SYS.

1. Set the following registry key:
   [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\INO_FLTR\Setting]
”DebugOption”=dword:0x20400D
2. Restart the PC.
3. Run the Sysinternals DebugView tool to capture the output.

Originally pinched from here:

The following command line switches can be used with the uninstaller (IsUnist.exe or IsUn16.exe for InstallShield 5.x Professional, and Uninst.exe or Uninst16.exe for InstallShield3 and InstallShield Express).

Note: When passing a path and file name in a command line parameter, as you do with -f, -c, and -d, you must enclose a name containing one or more spaces in double quotation marks. If you don’t, the command line will misinterpret the command.

-y
Suppresses the message box that asks the user to confirm that uninstallation should proceed. The feedback dialog box is still displayed, as is the shared file dialog box (which is displayed when the reference count of a shared .dll is decremented to zero).

-x
Deletes all files, including those core components that normally are not removed. (All user interface elements are displayed.)

-f<log file name>
Specifies the location and name of the uninstallation log file. The syntax is as follows:
-f"C:\Program Files\Company Name\Deisl1.isu".

-c<DLL file name>
Specifies the location and name of the external DLL that is to be used at the time of uninstallation. The syntax is as follows:
-c"C:\Program Files\Company Name\Custom.dll".

InstallShield3 users can download the file UnDLL.exe (1,556 KB), which contains the InstallShield white paper "Calling a Custom DLL Function from unInstallShield" (Uninst.doc) and files for creating a complete InstallShield3 sample setup. Download UnDLL.exe to an empty folder. Execute it with the -d command line parameter in order to preserve the folder structure when you extract the files.

Note: This parameter cannot be easily used with InstallShield Express. This switch is already used by Express’s uninstaller and advanced modifications would have to be made to call another external DLL.

-a
When running in silent mode if unInstallShield encounters a shared file for which it would normally display the dialog box asking the user whether to remove the shared file, it will automatically reduce the reference count to zero and not remove the file. Therefore, running unInstallShield in silent mode is functionally equivalent to an uninstallation in which the user selects the "No to all" option when this dialog box first appears.

-d
Identifies a single file that is to be deleted. The display of user interface elements is the same as when the -a switch is used. The syntax is as follows:
-dC:\Temp\filename.ext.

The Wyse 286 PC (model WY-2108 for the curious) used to have an LCD display on the front panel.  You could write messages to it using a MS-DOS based utility.  In theory, you could use it to display messages when something failed.  But, I always wondered, how could you do that when something failed?

No, I don’t know either.

Some junior computer operators, who should have known better, used to write *naughty* words, which would greatly annoy Kathy the Supervisor.

The PicoLCD display, I fear, is headed for the same fate.  I’m yet to be convinced of it’s usefulness.  If it had a Linux driver, it WOULD be useful for my proxy box.

But if I had one right now, it would sit with the other 7 crap IT products I shouldn’t have brought, as the Linux support is poor.

The Wyse PC picture is courtesy of Mike’s Computer Museum and it is a Wyse WY-2116i PC
(looks the same as the WY-2108, except for the LCD panel).

Our Wyse 286, when not displaying *naughty* words, was used for creating system availability reports, with the MultiMate word processor.

Windows Stops Responding During Shutdown with Mapped Drives
map.exe /Q /r:n   

Windows 98 Second Edition Shutdown Supplement
shutdown.exe /Q /r:n

ScanDisk Runs Even Though Windows Shut Down Correctly
273017.exe /Q /r:n

Spend a night in hospital.  All very civilised, and so it should be at the cost.  Good thing I have not cancelled my private health insurance yet.

Seems I might have a cause of sleep apnea, with a side order of heart problem.

To test for sleep apnea, you get to stay in hospital overnight.
The process is:

1. attend the hospital by 8pm.
2. have a sleep technician wire 20ish wires up to you.
3. try to sleep.

Word of advice for guys having this done:

• make sure you have been to the toilet before you are wired up.
• short hair is easier for the sleep technician to attach the electrodes.
• if you have lots of body hair, getting the electrodes off will hurt.
• you don’t need to buy full pajamas, but you do need to wear something.  Boxer shorts are fine.
• You should cut your toe nails as well, as you’ll get a couple of electrodes on your toes.

By Heather Hayes (with additional BLUE color comments by me)
June 30, 2003

Which biometric to use- (June 30, 2003)

E-government applications that use biometrics to authenticate the person making a transaction are likely to rely on one of four types of identification: fingerprints, facial recognition, iris scan or voiceprints. Choosing the right biometric for the job could mean the difference between success and failure.

All the biometric choices have pros and cons in an e-government environment.

Voiceprints.
Because it relies on a telephone, voiceprint identification doesn’t require any special equipment or training for the user. It’s cost-effective for both the customer and the agency and is often seen by users as the least invasive biometric technology. But there are downsides. If the telephone connection isn’t clear or the user has a cold, a voiceprint can be difficult to identify.
Or if someone records your voice …

Fingerprints.
Fingerprint readers are now being integrated into keyboards, and stand-alone units are dropping in cost, making them easy enough to use in the privacy of one’s home. And they are especially well-suited to government- to-government and government-to- employee applications, because agencies typically already have federal employee fingerprints on file. On the other hand, the criminal connotation associated with fingerprints can make this method a hard sell with the general public.
Gummi bears are one way around this.  Disney has been collecting fingerprints from theme park visitors since 2005.

Iris scans.
This is by far the most accurate of the biometric choices, but it is also the most invasive and expensive.
I’ve seen this in use.  It was used to protect one (Windows NT4 PC), which reportedly had confidential, BUT not classified information on it.  The reason for the particular agency buying it?  The CIO was a gadget freak.

Facial recognition.
Users can rely on their own Web cameras as readers, making it more cost-effective than other technologies, but it must still be perfected to reduce the number of false positives and false negatives.
Only now starting to see wider deployment of this.