Eric.Chromick.com

The first video from the DayCon 2008 PACKETWARS game is up at YouTube!

This was my first year volunteering at DayCon / PACKETWARS and it was a blast! Lots of hard work and long days, but I’m ready to do it again. 

Check out the video & PACKETWARS.com for upcoming games, more videos and news.

It’s that time of year again – time to find a printable calendar for 2009. I should have done this months ago, but I didn’t.

My all time favorite for planning purposes is David Seah’s Compact Calendar: Click here to go to his site, read the philosophy behind “The Candy Bar Theory of Calendar Design” and download. There are Microsoft Excel templates if you want to customize it and .PDF’s if you just need to print and start using it.

WordPress 2.7 has been out for 3 weeks or so, and I have yet to hear of any reason not to upgrade.  I’m just now getting chromick.com updated due to holiday insanity, but mostly because it’s been such a PITA to upgrade at this webhost.

However, after upgrading, I discovered that 2.7 has the ability to do ftp via the admin interface and I was able to update all my plug-ins by entering the ftp info & clicking!

Lorelle on WordPress has a great post here on upgrading, with a nice collection of links to more info for specific issues & questions.

This is a very simplistic VBscript I hacked together to help deploy the patches for MS08-078 / KB960714. In brief it checks the registry to see if Internet Explorer version 6 or 7 is installed and then runs the appropriate updater.

Things you should know:

• Automatic updates will probably do this for you
• The script does no error checking
• It was tested on XPPro, running as an administrator, from a network public share
• MS08-078 lists a bunch of switches you can use with the installers. The only one I’m using is “/passive”
• You’ll need to download the installers from Microsoft and put the correct path in the code where you see \\SERVER\SHARE
• If you use this script, you do so at your own risk. I take no responsibility for any damage to your computer, data, hairline, or anything else. This is intended as an example of something you could do, not something you should do. If you have any doubts don’t use it!

Code:

Set objShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
strValue = objShell.RegRead("HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Version")
intVersion = CInt(Left(strValue, 1))
If intVersion = 7 Then
strCommand = "\\SERVER\SHARE\IE7-WindowsXP-KB960714-x86-enu.exe /passive"
objShell.Run strCommand, 1, True
Elseif intVersion = 6 Then
strCommand = "\\SERVER\SHARE\Windowsxp-KB960714-x86-enu.exe /passive"
objShell.Run strCommand, 1, True
End If


Download: Security Update for Internet Explorer for Windows XP w/ IE6 (KB960714)
Download: Security Update for Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP (KB960714)
Security Bulletins: MS08-078
Knowledge Base (KB) Articles: KB960714