iPod Classic not as good as the original

I purchased an iPod Classic for my wife hopping to use it with some of the cool video accessories in the market, only to find out that Jobso decided to screw his customers by requiring new decoder chips to play video off of them. Decoder chips that can only be bought from Apple as far as I know, thereby ensuring that if you make an iPod accessory you had to register and pay tithe for the privilege of building iPod accessories. So that lovely iLuv 1155 I bought won't work with her new GD iPod. Lucky for me, I had a buddy that didn't use the video part of the iPod looking to get rid of a gen 5 30gb iPod on the cheap. I went from a 1 iPod household to a 2 iPod household because Jobs is a prick.

Working for cheap

So I haven't been up to much projectwise lately as I have been spending a lot of time doing the good son/grandson/son-in-law etc. lately. This weekend will be pretty much shot on installing cabinets for my father, rebuilding a pc for my aunt-in-law, and another pc for the Grandparents. I blame my mother-in law for the most of the work, as she got a new pc and wanted to gift her old one to her sister. My mom heard about that and asked me to cook up a computer for the grandparents. Apparently they got off the dial-up internet and the PII 350mhz is not cutting it for the internet age anymore. The good news is that they are the same motherboard so all I need to get one setup, patched up and ready so I can image it and go.

Oh well, between that and the xbox360 there is little project work being done. I have one project cooking to re-arrange my network project box and a shopping list for a new media center setup. With a HDTV, my wife is asking for HD content.

Exchange Migrations suck

I realize that the Exchange 5.5 Platform has been end of life for a while, but I cannot believe the lack of information, or how high the degree of difficulty is to migrate from the unsupported to supported. What really surprises me is that Microsoft is so disinterested in taking my money to help me move off of their old software onto their new software.

I paid a "Migration Specialist" to come in and consult and he had even less success than I did in playing with migration (he deleted all of my executive staffs email boxes by mistake). I am getting close to completed which is good, and I will be using the tool from Priasoft to migrate our mail boxes. The software that I demoed was fantastic, and it looks to be a great time saver. I will report back after the 20th on the success or failure of this little project.

Permanently decline Safari forced download

UPDATED

So for those keeping track recently Apple decided that the update utility was the ideal way to leverage itself some market share in the browser wars and tried to jam it down the throats of windows users. Apple stated to decline the update all you have to do is uncheck it, however unchecked updates continue to show up waiting for you to accidentally forget to decline that update and stealth its way on to your computer.

I for one don't want the piece of software that was the reason that the Mac was "the easiest [platform to hack] of the three" running on my machine for any reason. Here is all that it takes to permanently decline this update.



It appears I was wrong, this will not keep Safari out completely. Other Safari updates will nag in the future. The reasonable option for non-quicktime users is to delete the task in Scheduled Tasks. iTunes has the good sense to check for updates every time you run it so your covered there, Quicktime is another matter. I suggest trying the Quicktime Alternative or another media player (VLC maybe?) until Apple cleans up their act.



At the corporate level you can block the safari.msi; at the proxy block access to apple.com/*.msi, or for us running (Sophos Antivirus), we will block the exe and/or path to executable and flag it malware.

Wines for Summer

If you are bored, and I am sure that I will be, here are some of the wines that I will be trying this summer. These go out to the girls Julie, Jenny, Vid. You know.

Miguel Torres Chile Santa Digna Cabernet Sauvignon Rosé
Vega Sindoa Rosé Navarra
Muga Roja
Château Morgues du Gres Fluer D’Eglantine Costieres de Nimes
Domine Tempier Rose
Comman Derie de Peyrassol
Domain de la Mordorée Côtes-Du-Rhône

Data Retention

It turns out because of certain portions of the organization I work for we are required to retain some records (payroll and accounting) for nearly 200 years which can cause real headaches when it is ignored for too long. In discussions with the Accounting manager I found out that some records (nearly 10 years of them are currently only available on one single desktop machine running windows 3.1.

Someone made the decision sometime ago that it wasn’t a priority to migrate this to a platform that was sustainable, and as such it is on a machine that no one is sure will power on. If something isn’t assigned a priority, then it is guaranteed to fall of the horizon of IT folks. My predecessor never mentioned the situation to me, I assume because he had dismissed it as unimportant. Thankfully I was assured that the data was safely backed up on a disk somewhere, but it doesn’t stop that I need to come up with some way to preserve that data in an accessible format for 200 years. So far I am thinking hello virtual machine.

Moving back to Windows from Mac

Infoworld has and article about why one Mac evangelist moved back to Windows for work. I am glad that one engineer sees the light. IT shouldn't have to work twice as hard for a tiny faction of rebels. This has been my experience everywhere I go that I am forced to support Mac hardware; Mac users refuse to acknowledge the work they require IT to sustain just for them to run their pet OS. At the end of the day my hourly rate may be a sunk cost, but it isn't free and until it is Mac costs most businesses more money than it saves.