Eric.Chromick.com

Here’s a brief look at Day-Con III & the PACKETWARS game held in October. For more info goto Day-Con.org.

There’s also a nice collection of pictures here.

I have no intention of bashing bing or participating in a holy war of search engines but this was a little hard to ignore.

So, I’m doing the update dance trying to fix a severely mangled XP Home install. 4 .Net updates fail a couple times and I startup the newly installed IE8 to search for fixes. Bing’s results:

We did not find any results for microsoft update Error Code: 0×64C.
Try one of these related suggestions
Windows Update Error
Microsoft Update Patch
Error Internet Explorer Update Microsoft
Microsoft Update Vista
Microsoft Update XP
Microsoft Update Drivers
Microsoft Update Download

Other resources that may help you:Get additional search tips by visiting Web Search Help.
If you cannot find a page that you know exists, send the address to us.

Not surprisingly, Google had a few thousand results, with the first one pointing to a page at support.microsoft.com.

Seems to me that Microsoft content would be a pretty easy target for bing to index…

DayCon III schedule, speakers & abstracts for October 15th are here.

October 16th is a PACKET WARS event. This is invitation only, but you’re welcome to come watch some of the best security pros in the world battle each other!

I do a lot of repetitive things on Windows pcs and servers. Often, I’ll need to do the same thing on 10 or more machines, like delete old log files or database backups older than a certain age. In the past, I created a complicated batch file to do a bunch of tasks, but it was annoying to customize it for each location. I tried adding a “profile” for each machine that had path info for common programs and file locations, but that quickly got out of hand too.

I could have installed any one of a number of scripting “languages” to make it easier, but that would have just added another layer of complexity. I just needed a simple way to read a text file and pipe each line to a command. Then I re-discovered FOR…
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Wow! I can’t believe how much has changed since I wrote this post! Puppy has evolved several times, VMware Server is readily available,  so you can create your own virtual disks and host USB support works, in most cases.

Most of the time I boot Puppy 2.02 from CD and store my data on a USB Flash Drive, so my goal was to set up a virtual machine that was as much like my normal Puppy setup as possible. With this .vmx file, I can easily change the name of the ide1:0 ISO file and boot from a different CD image without having to burn a CD. My pup_save.3fs data is stored on the virtual hard drive and I can experiment with the various installation options and “install” alpha and beta releases without having to worry about screwing something up. Read the rest of this entry »

I did a quick test of the Moblin V2.0 beta running from USB on my Aspire One a few days ago.

I realize this is a Beta, but the first thing I tested after wireless was the Intro video, which didn’t work! I wasn’t able to install the Flash player from the browser so I gave up on that.

Sure, I could have gone to the commandline and installed it, but that’s not the point. If you include a video showing how awesome your new OS is, you need to make sure it “just works”! Read the rest of this entry »

Via the Puppy Linux developer’s blog.

NorhTec has announced the upcoming release of the Gecko EduBook. Specs here.

I’m especially excited about this because it really makes me think of the old Tandy Model 100. Decent battery life from AA’s, no moving parts, instant on, just works. Despite having an Aspire One, I have 2 Model 100’s that still get some use, even today. Yes, I’m living in the past, but compared to the laptops of today, well there’s just no comparison. Read the rest of this entry »

For the last week or so, I’ve been very frustrated trying to watch anything from YouTube on my RoadRunner account at home. The tracert suggests that somewhere between Montgomery (Cincinnati) Ohio and Columbus, Ohio they’re dumping packets on the ground.

Up until today, I’d been using HideMyAss.com to get around their problem, but this evening, even that isn’t working. Example – a 3 minute long video of Mike Rowe / Dirty Jobs has taken over half an hour to play. Normally, I wouldn’t wait that long, but I just wanted to see how long it would take to complete.

Anyone have any other proxy ideas for me while TimeWarner discovers and (hopefully) fixes the problem?

I’d like to say I understand this new “feature” from Google, but I can’t. Read the rest of this entry »

“QuickBooks was unable to open the company file” is not the kind of error message I like to hear about the morning after an upgrade. I had applied QB Enterprise Update V9R6 to the server and all the client machines, following the instructions to the letter, rebooting when prompted and logged in from each pc. Everything looked fine. Read the rest of this entry »