Looking for the answer to a problem we found with our lab printers today, I went searching the Microsoft Knowledgebase for “DisableStrictNameChecking”. An interesting result comes up: 298692. Why is this article so interesting? It doesn’t contain the string, but it is applicable to the problem you are trying to solve if you are searching for that string.
Odd. Very Odd.
We’ve had many requests for better international language support in our labs, especially in our graduate halls. Many years ago, I tried and miserably failed to get something going with Windows NT 4.0 and Internet Explorer 5.01. In the last couple years, we’ve gotten international fonts working in Internet Explorer 6 sp1 (and Mozilla/Firebird/Firefox) without too much trouble.
This year, we’ve made some pretty good headway using some good documentation from Microsoft. While some of it is straight forward, figuring out which of the many locale ids/Input Locale combinations correspond to what is not. For example 0804:00000804 is Chinese_PRC with the US keyboard, while 0804:e00e0804 is Chinese_PRC with the PinYin IME. Thanks to this page, I know I need the second one to be able to enter Chinese characters. Chinese_Hong Kong was similar, with the first being a US keyboard and 0404:e0080404 being the one with the IME. Japanese and Korean both install IMEs without anything special.
As for AutoCAD 2005 that I mentioned earlier, it seems to be working pretty well, but the multiple install server support is still untested.
Next up is testing somewhere besides our limited test machines.
On Friday night, after driving to my parents house and then on to Hoopeston (to eat), the Honda decides it doesn’t like it’s original battery anymore. My parents jumped me from their Honda, drive over to the grandparents house and see my aunt for several hours. Playing poker at 10:30 pm, so my parents were nice enough to let me drive their car, and they took mine. It even started using the headlight trick. Saturday morning, Dad hooks it up to the roll around battery charger, and nothing. Oh well, it’s got 7+ years and 67,500 miles on it, more than you could expect from most things anymore. I’ll drive it back to Champaign and run to AutoZone in the truck and pick up a new battery, no big deal. Broke even at poker, got to sleep at 2 am.
Dad has been slowly fixing up his loader tractor, an Oliver 1755, replacing parts here and there to get it to run better and start more reliably. He noticed that there was no fuel filter, even though the shop manual said there should be one inline after the sediment bowl. Looking at the fuel line routing, it seemed like we could get one in there with some creative thinking. We ran over to John Deere in Hoopeston and picked up one for a 3020 Deere, came in a CarQuest box, so I’m sure it’s probably just a standard part. Once we got back, we cut out a couple chunks of the steel fuel line and slipped in the filter, not too tough, but it took quite a bit longer than we thought it was going to. It started easier and ran better than it has in almost as long as I can remember.
Next, we went over to Fred’s house and picked some sweetcorn for me to bring back, and he gave us a whole bunch of jalapeno peppers. Guess I’ll be bringing most of those in to work to give away. Then we went home and had lunch. During lunch, mom happened to get up to get a soda from the fridge in the garage and looked out at the shed door. Sitting there next to the door was a groundhog. Of course, he chose to run IN to the shed. We spent 15 minutes finding him, and the dog finally tipped us off that it was under a pallet with dual wheels stacked on top of it. And, without moving a bunch of stuff, there was no way to get the forklift to the pallet. We managed to tip the first wheel off without too much trouble, but on picking up the bottom wheel, dad dislocated his pinky finger. After that, we spent some time beating on and trying to chase the groundhog. He didn’t want to leave the pallet, probably didn’t help that the dog was barking and biting at him. After a bit of stabbing and prodding, we decided to lift up the wheel and pull out the pallet. That worked, but he ran the wrong way, back into the shed. The dog cornered it again, and we ending up having to stab the groundhog and kill it to get rid of it. Haven’t heard how dad’s finger turned out yet, they were headed to the emergency room as I headed back to Champaign.
Changing the battery went smooth, $49 later it’s got a new economy battery with a 1 year free replacement warranty and a 6 year prorated warranty.
And now I’m at work because one of our SDLT librarys decided it didn’t like life anymore late last night. Hopefully the firmware and driver updates for the SCSI interface card will fix that.
I got quite a bit accomplished for our lab rollouts today: upgrade to MatLab Release 14 and a good start on AutoCAD 2005.
MatLab has to be one of the easiest installs ever: it runs just fine off a read only share on a server and needs no files outside of what’s in that directory.
AutoCAD has been a serious pain in the past, but this year seems to be better, with baked in support for network share based installs, very similar to Office 2000/2003. Now I just need to make it work with our multiple distribution servers model, but I think I’ve got a way to do that.
And a random bit of news: Drug companies are pushing doctors to prescribe drugs people don’t really need?
I spent most of the day today trying to get all the new hardware in the new workstations for the student sites working with my antiquated OEM style Windows 2000 setup. This is almost always something between visiting the dentist and trying to buy a new car: it either all works very quickly or you spend hours googling for tidbits of knowledge. But this year, I had a bit of an advantage: we ordered our Dells with Windows 2000 preinstalled, so I knew we’d have working drivers there.
But, I went racing off towards ‘cutting edge’ drivers from all the vendors, blindly erasing the Dell install on my test machine and stuffing on ours, assuming it would all just work. Ha, was I wrong, just like putting the case back on before you boot up your freshly built computer. Using the most recent NVidia Unified Drivers (56.something), GUI-mode setup locks up at the end of the Detecting Devices progress bar. Something isn’t right there. So, after a few more tweaks and adjustments of what I had downloaded, I gave up and went to dig through a Dell that hadn’t been formatted. I found a much older version of the drivers, from December 2003. Once I copied that set of drivers over to my $OEM$ directory structure, all was much better. Now I get to move full steam ahead into updating applications and other fun.
Apparently either the aic7xxx or the megaraid driver conflicts with the aacraid driver starting somewhere around gentoo-sources 2.4.25-r2. Pulling those two out of the kernel lets the machine boot. Had my heart skip a beat or two when our backup MX wouldn’t boot on a newer kernel because of this.
Well, the pictures are up. And, for your info, don’t ever put unprocessed film in checked bags. That’s what gives the pictures that nice, grainy look. And, as promised, the view from my hotel room.
One of the freebies (well, they do have my contact info) from TechEd was a full copy of VMWare Workstation. I’ve been messing around with it a bit, but my laptop doesn’t have anywhere near the RAM it needs to run it well. This screenshot should be enough to scare most people.
Well, I’m back from TechEd 2004, actually got back around 7, just haven’t done much other than unpack the swag and dirty laundry. Hopefully the race will run tommorrow: rain rain go away.
So, I’ve been to 7 TechEds in a row and this was, by far, the best one for technical content for a ‘jack of all trades, expert of none’ type person like myself. While some of the free stuff wasn’t quite as good as previous years, attendees are getting the post conference DVDs for free. It’s a worthy trade.
Thank you for a wonderful conference. Now if I could just get that free license for VMWare?
There are lots of things that I’ve taken away from here that I should be able to apply in the real world.
Commnet is closing up shortly, so unless I pay the fee for internet access in the hotel (which I’ve heard is not worth it, thought the geek percentage is probably much lower tonight) this will be the last entry from San Diego. Hopefully the pictures will come out well.
Now to go buy some trinkets/gifts for friends and family.
