May 20, 2005
Prime Minister charged with Animal Cruelty
According to reliable sources, British Prime Minister Tony Blair 
engaged in Cruel and Unusual Behavior towards a feline. It appears that after watching several episodes of MTV's Beavis and Butthead, a favorite pastime of the boyish PM, Blair decided to go couch-fishing.
After a few fruitless hours hooking menials from the House of Commons, Blair "landed a frisky kitty" View image that put up a "right few hours of fight" before being gaffed by a Blair staffer.
While Blair himself was unreachable for comment, the Queen Mum was quoted as saying "Huh Huh, that was Cool."
Posted by crowej at 01:15 AM | Comments (1)
May 19, 2005
GPO
Posted by crowej at 12:28 AM | Comments (0)
May 17, 2005
Voltage Montage
Turns out that the new SunFire v20zs are more Mac-like than at first blush. Do I mean innovative and stylish? No...they're not THAT Mac-like. They just seem to spurn standardization the same way as Papa Apple. PCI comes in two flavors of voltages. The one most familiar to folks is 5V. A newer standard is the 3.3V. You can tell the difference by simply looking at the slots...
...3.3V breaks the pins very early (relative to the back of the machine). If it follows PCI-X standards, then it can take newer 64-bit cards as well as the older 32-bit cards. 5V cards won't fit into a 3.3V slot. There are a few cards that are Universal, that is, hybridized (or bastardized...you pick).
All this came about simply because I needed to install a sound card into a server. Any whitebox server or Dell would have the 5V and MAAYYBEE a 3.3V. Nope, Sun has gone the way of Apple and moved to the latest and greatest quickly. I scoured our junk-piles and repositories of crud, but to no avail. I despaired of finding anything in existing machines.
Those who know how big of a Mac fan that I am will recognize that I can't get too irritated at Sun for doing this :-)
I ended up getting one from Best Buy (after I convinced the saleman to open the box so I could check the pin-out). Despite the fact that you could end up getting the wrong physical setting, nowhere on the box does it tell you about the card type. Boo to all people not Mac!
Posted by crowej at 05:47 PM | Comments (1)
May 16, 2005
WSUS test implementation
With Patchlink no longer being funded, I needed a quick and cheap (free) source for patch management. SUS via Group Policy Objects (GPOs) looked alright. It looked alright in the same way that your 2nd cousin looks alright when you've not had a date in awhile. You know that you shouldn't...and you don't really want to... However, the supped-up implementation originally entitled Windows Update Services (or WUS) looked more promising.
After installing and applying to a test batch of computers, I can say that I'm fairly excited. Not Lord of the Rings excited...but far more than Episode II excited.
Posted by crowej at 09:37 PM | Comments (1)