Well, this week has been very busy! Starting with my vacation being over for work last Monday (woohoo?), going to a Windows Server 2003 training for two days in Denver, CO (more on that later). Monday and Thursday were the only days where I wasn't doing anything special, because on Friday I am flying out to Las Vegas with my dad to celebrate my birthday that happened earlier this month... and I'll be gone until Tuesday morning (taking the red-eye flight back home Monday night). Thankfully I'll be able to get online though, so I'll have time to write about my flight experiences (hopefully better), my time up in Denver for the training, and my time out in Las Vegas - not to mention what is going on at work right now too!

Over the last few days since I've rebuilt my network (which still has problems, grrr), I noticed my website visits dropping. A lot. Like from about fifteen unique visitors a day to none... none at all. At first I thought it was because my site was down for about 9 hours, so some of the search engine web crawlers decided to write my site off for a bit... but then I posted to my site, and told friends to check it out... and they got "Page cannot be displayed". That made me think about a few things... first off I have been using Bit Torrent recently, downloading music from Alex Hephaestion from his Ambient Nights website. Don't worry, all of his music is free to download! So I stopped the download, thinking it has saturated my connections (not speed because I was only averaging about 40KB/s, my pipe tops out at around 165KB/s for now) but that still didn't fix the problem. Next up was checking it from my phone, thinking those people aren't smart enough to troubleshoot on their own, heheheh... also down. Then I decided to check my traffic policy on Kerio WinRoute Firewall, and sure enough, I forgot to add an entry to allow traffic on port 80 to the server! Man did I feel stupid! Yup, me feeling stupid - who would have guessed?

Anywho, I apologize for my gazillions of readers who visit this site every 2 seconds for an update, and for those lurkers out there that refuse to leave comments!

Hopefully GibixOnline will stay online from now on.

Well, it has finally happened... the government is watching me. Why? I do not know... I have done nothing illegal at all! At least, not to my knowledge. My guess is that you don't believe me at all... but guess what? I have proof! Yeah, that's right! Real, undeniable proof, taken from my own living room window with my own camera!

When I first saw this truck across the street, I thought nothing of it. Recently everyone in Colorado Springs has decided that it costs about the same to run air conditioning in your house compared to 17 fans (fans include window fans, box fans, and ceiling fans). Well, I should say everyone in Colorado Springs but us... but that is a different story (hell, my room lights flicker when my neighbor has his a/c turn on, it's quite annoying!). I almost ignored this big truck, but I decided to look closer!

Look at that equipment sitting on top of that truck! I don't think a plumbing company needs three antennas and a satellite dish! Here is the full, unedited photo (2032x1524 ~ 4.3MB).

A close-up view of the equipment on top of this so-called plumbing truck. It is looking quite believable now isn't it? I'm not done yet though... there is another piece of evidence that I want to show you. Look closely at the upper left of the truck's logo.

Do you see it? I do, but for those of you who are still being stubborn I will provide you with a slightly modified picture, only the color levels have been edited in this picture.

There! Now you see it, it looks like that the truck used to be an Airborne Express truck. Yeah, very spooky now. It looks like the truck used to be labeled something else before Airborne Express though, let me clean it up for you.

There, clear as day! "TOP SECRET GOVERN I SPY TUC" which looks suspiciously familiar to "TOP SECRET GOVERNMENT SPY TRUCK" if you ask me.

I hope this opens your eyes to the fact that the government will spy on anyone with no reason at all! Whatsoever! I haven't done anything, yet look at the truck across the street! This is scary, so if you don't hear from me later you'll know what happened! SPREAD THE WORD PEOPLE, EVERYONE NEEDS TO KNOW! WELL, EXCEPT FOR PEOPLE YOU HATE.

Don't forget your tin-foil hats people... they're important too! They keep the government from reading your mind! And your wallet!

Well, the website has been down for about 10 hours today, due to me thinking I can rebuild this network better than it was.

Apparently not, but it did consist of rebuilding 3 machines. Two domain controllers and one member server. Thankfully the internet was only down for three hours here, and my SMTP server for my mail was only offline for five hours, so hopefully I didn't miss too much email. My longest strech was getting the webserver back online, I can never remember what steps I need to have the domain account access the web pages and have the proper privilages. This time, I did remember all of the user security settings I needed, but I forgot to allow ASP.NET 2.0 access to launch in the Web Service Extensions Manager.

But hey, it all seems to be working right now, so woohoo! I'll post more later I think.

For those of you who install Visual Studio 2005 and the Windows Mobile 5.0 SDK, everything should be fine and dandy. If you have Internet Explorer 7 installed (whether in Vista or as the beta on Windows XP), you'll notice that you can't really create a project using the New Project Wizard (by selecting Visual C++ -> Smart Device -> Win32 Smart Device Project). All the information you'll receive from Visual Studio 2005 is a simple "Creating Project <Project> Failed..." in the status bar. Helpful isn't it? Well thankfully Visual Studio for Devices blog has the answer.

All you have to do is add a registry key to allow the wizard to open an internet explorer window.

Open the following registry key:

Windows XP x64 or Vista 64-bit:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Ext\PreApproved
Windows XP or Vista:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Ext\PreApproved

And add the following Key

{D245F352-3F45-4516-B1E6-04608DA126CC}

Retry creating the new project and everything should be fine!

[NOTE: This was written during the flights on 2006-06-30]

Well people, it is official now, I am going to attemt to get MCSE certified in the ways of Windows Server 2003! Hopefully they won't require me to take the courses/classes because there are none offered here in the state of Colorado... makes for an exciting time. What is quite neat about taking the exams and whatnot, is that the actual exams cover some of the basic ideas behind Active Directory and security, among others... and they come with a nice "self-paced training kit" which contains the step by step directions I've been looking for to set up Active Directory, Systems Management Server 2003 (which just came in my MSDN subscription!), and Exchange 2003 (also in my MSDN subscription).

If any of you have any tips, or know anything I should know... drop me a line!

(Pearson VUE, a testing company that offers a ton of certifications, has a location right next to the interstate! That is about a 5 minute drive from my house!)

Well, right now as we speek, or rather type, I am downloading the new version of Vista that was released to us MSDN subscribers on Thursday. I believe the build number is 5308, the February CTP release. Downloading using the new File Transfer Manager (don't notice the speed increase... I'm capped at 160 KB/sec (that's kilobytes, not bits, if it was in bits it would be about 1,280 kpbs and that is a very *general* approximation). So hopefully it'll be done when I wake up.

Well, here at work, I ran into a nice little problem with a pseudo-server. I have a Windows XP machine running as a file server, which unfortunately entails a 10 concurrent user limit (no big deal here). The problem arose when they were viewing the contents of the hard drive, loaded with .tiff files, over a 100Mbit network. Mind you, the system itself is a 350MHz, 128MB RAM system, with an 8GB (os), 30GB, and 10GB striped together. Long story short, they were having issues where the server itself just stopped responding. Looking at the event log revealed an ID error of 2021 from the process Srv. Googling that (quite simple) I came across this article: KB 317249. I ran the registry edits Microsoft recommended, and all seems to be well right now, which is nice. For those of you who didn't follow the link, long story short, the network/file viewing requests were quickly filling the non-paged pool... and once it ran out... boom.

For those of you following my blog, it seems IE7 Beta 2 (7.0.5296.0) seems to have issues using the hyperlink tool in the RichText window editor.