Luke’s Blog

My wife and I discovered that many products that we use everyday or that claim to be safe are really dangerous. Everyday, people are taking supplements that may be hazardous to their health, all the time thinking that they are doing something to lead a healthier lifestyle.

Some supplements are synthetic, use dyes, perservatives or use other unatural ingrediants that some research has shown to be harmful in some cases. The research that I’m referring to is a study done by UC Berkeley. The following link is a published article in a reputable peer review.

http://www.nutritionj.com/content/pdf/1475-2891-6-30.pdf

The following couple sites have easy to view tables to show exactly what I’m talking about.

http://www.healthylife-healthyplanet.com/nutritional-supplement-study.html

http://angieupnorth.wordpress.com/2007/10/27/uc-berkeley-landmark-study-published-cnn-and-others-to-air/

In the spirit of the New Year, and the desire to help people meet the possible resolution of leading healthier lives, my wife and I set out to inform people of the bennefits of using all natural products. If you or someone you know might be interested  the please check out our site.

Acha’s Health

I had a client yesterday that was trying to install SP3 but was unsuccessful. So, I spent some time on it. I had run UBCD4Win to check for malware but nothing was found. I had forced Windows XP to boot into a  clean boot mode. Which gave me a the same access denied error as running the SP3 update. In the end, the problem ended up being Webroot Spy Sweeper. I uninstalled it and the Update worked perfectly.

Here is where things got interesting… Apparently the client said that they could not connect online, so after some quick over the phone help I told them to go into device manager and….It was blank!  I found a great list of common fixes for this issue at http://www.annoyances.org/exec/forum/winxp/1134095035. I talked the user through most of these but once I hit the Apropos Rootkit solution on the list I told the user to bring the computer back…. They live 2 houses down, so it’s not too much of an inconveinance for free IT work.

I ran the aproposfix tool in safe mode and removed some more entries in the registry associated with contextplus but that was of no help. Upon searching for the fix online, I ran across this arcticle on MS knowledgbase. After running fixccs.exe in safemode everything worked fine.

The MS article suggests the following “This problem may occur when an antivirus application is running during the installation of Windows XP SP3.” Well, this user didn’t have an AV client installed (I told them to try Avira Antivir, my personal favorite.) My theroy about this is that the Rootkit may have interferred during the SP3 update.

Hopefully this post will be useful to anyone else running into a simialr issue.

Today I passed the Cisco exam 640-822! Due to the NDA, I can’t really say anything about the exam. I can say that I studied for a couple months. I used the Sybex CCENT book, Cisco Press and hands labs with 3 2600 series routers, 1 1710 router and a 3500 series switch.

I should point out that I did have a 4 semester Cisco class in high school, but that was 8 years ago. It is amazing how much I remember from those classes. I know it helped me.

So, lately I’ve been studying for my Cisco ICND 1 exam, which I will be taking next month. I’ve been lucky enough to be able to borrow some equipment to set up practice labs. So I have been busy reading, and setting up labs. I’ve been doing Microsoft exams for so long, so the change of material is nice right now. Anyway, in my spare time, I’ve been camping, spending time with my family and playing games here and there. Mario Kart Wii, is fun, and recently on the Virtual Console we downloaded Ys… It’s rather additive. However I thought I would share another fun addicting game that I ran across.

Fantastic Contraption 

I’ll share a few of my design, though they pale in comparrison to some of the design I’ve seen online.

http://FantasticContraption.com/?designId=952256

http://FantasticContraption.com/?designId=956297

http://FantasticContraption.com/?designId=956995

http://FantasticContraption.com/?designId=993314

Virtualization is becoming a topic of increasingly popular discussion. This is because the technology offers great potential for cost savings. My blog today is about Virtualization (obviously). More to the point, I am going to be discussing my experience with beta testing the New Virtualization exam by Microsoft. First, a quick introduction to Virtualization for those who know nothing about it.
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Well, what can I say? We finally replaced our aging Mini-T Pro Leightronix with a new Mini-T Net at work today. So, what is this and how is it Information Technology related? Well, the leightronix is a device that switches between different broadcast outputs. For instance, most of the time I use a digital signage program called Scala to broadcast a bulletin board to the public. Think of this almost like a Power point presentation. So what about the times that I need to broadcast something else? Let’s say, I want to broadcast a city council meeting or a re-broadcast of the meeting. How can I easily switch between broadcast sources? The answer is by using a leightronix switcher.
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I bought a new surround sound system for my home theater setup at home. I already have the TV centered, the center speaker behind the TV, the Left and Right speakers at even height and distance from the center and the rear speakers at even heights and as close to even distance from viewers sitting area as possible. I had this all setup from my last system. I now only had one thing left to do, tweak my delay and speaker balance!

An old roommate of mine had the brilliant idea to use the movie Ghost Ship to tweak the sound. You know that scene at the beginning where the cable snaps? Yeah, that sound start at the rear left speaker and works it’s way around the room! Works wonders for setting the delay! After that is all setup, I throw in Jurassic Park! Watch the scene where it’s raining and make sure it sounds like it is raining outside! That’s when I know I have it! I also watches the series if lightning flashes and thunder to go with it, to double check my delay.

We just got the Blackberry curves at work yesterday. Today, I was helping a co-worker set up the Blackberry Desktop Manager to sync up their phone with their Outlook 2000 calendar. Well, the option for Outlook was not listed when I was attempting to set it up. I figured that it had to be the version of outlook. I use Outlook 2003 on my PC at work, but many co-workers are still using Outlook 2000. After a quick search online I found this on blackberryfaq.com. It’s not really a big deal, but that was really my only problem of the day. The rest of the day I was continuing to set up new computers.

This is not something that recently happened, but I do feel compelled to share this tale. Long before I was in charge of our Domain, we had an outside company set things up. We had a Windows 2000 Mixed Mode Domain with 2 domain controllers. It is a fairly simple setup. Well, some time last year we purchased the CALs for Windows 2003 and 2 new servers to replace our aging 2000 server domain controllers.

During the process, I intended to replace one server at a time, I had a plan all laid out. I first wrote my login script to replace the Static DNS entry for the first DC on all the computers in the domain with the new DC replacing it. I then transfered the FSMOs on the first DC to the second DC. I then ran ADPREP and then I hit a snag! Basically, the error kept telling me the following:

The schema master did not complete a replication cycle after the last reboot. The schema master must complete at least one replication cycle before the schema can be extended.
[User Action]
Verify that the schema master is connected to the network and can communicate with other domain controllers. Use the Sites and Services snap-in to replicate between the schema operations master and at least one replication partner. After replication has succeeded, run adprep again.
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When I got my laptop with Vista, I could not stand the fact that it was lacking the Run command when you click the Windows “Start” Button. At first I just settled on using the Windows Key on the keyboard + “R” to bring up the Run command. The shortcut key work fine, but I still was in the habit of click Start to get to Run. Finally, I had enough and added the Run Command to the Start Menu… It’s not hard, but I have been asked about it several times recently, so I thought I would share this little tip.

Right Click on your Windows “Start” Button located at the bottom left corner by default. In the menu, select properties, on the start menu tab select customize and scroll down to near the bottom and place a check next to Run Command.