SEKOconcepts - Blog

Windows 7 Failure to Update

sean — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 08:27:52 +0000

I had a new install of Windows 7 Pro x86_64 on my Mac using Boot Camp. I was frustrated when after a fresh install and a single software install, I was getting errors trying to update Windows using Windows Update. When running the tool, I would get:

Windows Update cannot currently check for updates, because the service is not running. You may need to restart your computer.

Of course the Windows Update service was running, restarting both the service and computer did not help. What did, was turning off the service and removing all the files in C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution, then restarting the service. It appears that either the software install or an attempt to check for updates had corrupted the update files.

Kidneythieves New Album

sean — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 20:59:00 +0000

What! Kidneythieves released a new album and I didn’t know? Just got my digital copy of Trypt0fanatic, going to listen for the first time on my way out to get a few things. Nice!

Apress eBooks – No more DRM

sean — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 18:49:50 +0000

I was happily surprised buying an eBook through Apress today that they no longer DRM the PDF copies of the books. I had done some reading before about their eBooks and saw that they required passwords. This concerned me since I would like to read the books on my Droid, Linux and OSX machines. Which could all have issues if the DRM was specific to the Windows platform.

Apparently the lack of DRM is new for Apress, starting in August. Way to go Apress! I will not have an issue getting more books through them now.

As a side note, I wish Safari Books Online had the book I wanted. For whatever reason, this one was not present.

Droid X and D-Link DIR-615

sean — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 05:00:26 +0000

I just got a new Droid X. First off, I love the phone. Its got great hardware and features, and is a pleasure to use. And no, I do not think its to big.

Only issue so far with the phone itself, is WiFi connectivity. Unlike some others who have dropped connections and slow speeds on WiFi, I actually had router freezes when the Droid was connected.

I am using WPA2 with AES. Once I changed to TKIP, my issues went away. Hopefully this will be fixed soon with a software update. Would be a shame to let something very minor effect such an amazing phone.

Worldcup Updates

sean — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 06:41:58 +0000

I wanted to get text updates to my phone for the World Cup. Rather than pay ESPN $4.99, use New York Times. It’s free.

http://www.nytimes.com/pages/sports/soccer/index.html

Text WORLDCUP to 698698.

Apache Breach

sean — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 04:08:55 +0000

Wow, what a great report on the post mortem of the Apache breach.

OS X site statistics

sean — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 06:07:27 +0000

Going through the site statistics for sekoconcepts.net, it appears OS X is on the rise in my logs.

Windows – 49%
Macintosh – 16.3%
Linux – 11.9%

And for browsers:

Firefox – 40.9%
IE – 13.2%
Safari – 8.5%
Opera – 0.8%

Certainly higher shares of Linux and OS X than I previously was seeing, of course this could have something to do with the subject matter on posts. The highlight for me is seeing IE so low on the browser share. The quicker IE dies off the happier I am.

Ubuntu 9.10 – Samba Shares

sean — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 07:14:09 +0000

A while back, rather than add in a new Samba share through the /etc/samba/smb.conf file, I used the GUI tool to add the share. When I went looking to edit some shares tonight, I started digging through the config files… to my initial surprise I was unable to find the share locations in the config file.

A little more searching, and I found the files located in /var/lib/samba/usershares/. I guess the GUI adds a text file for each share into this directory. In a way, I like this slightly better for organization. Yet it confused me at first expecting to find the results in the main config file.

After searching, apparently the smb.conf is old school for share locations. This was introduced into Samba v3.0.23, which itself is from 2007 or so. Guess I need to get out more. Now I want to look if this is the “default” for Ubuntu Server.

Realism in Media

sean — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 04:37:35 +0000

Lately I try to avoid politics in my posts, yet I thought this was a really good quote.

“To listen to talk radio, to watch TV pundits, to read a newspaper’s online message board, is to realize that increasingly, we are a people estranged from critical thinking, divorced from logic, alienated from even objective truth…. [O]bjective reality does not change because you refuse to accept it. The fact that you refuse to acknowledge a wall does not change the fact that it’s a wall. And you shouldn’t have to hit it to find that out.” – Leonard Pitts Jr

HFS+ Case Sensitive

sean — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 04:41:33 +0000

A while back, I had reformatted my system with HFS+ Case Sensitive. I didn’t have a good reason, other than I was familiar with Unix/Linux file systems. So after a few months of running this way, I reinstalled with HFS+. Reasons? Application support, or lack of. Its been a few months, but off the top of my head the following would not work on HFS+ CS.

-Adobe CS4 Suite
-Oracle IRM
-World of Warcraft

On top of the application issues, it is highly annoying when my backed up data cannot be copied from my HFS+ CS DMG due to file name conflicts. I had to manually change names, and merge folders. Ugh!