From Lockergnome I found Process Explorer v6.03, this is a super tool for seeing exactly what process is doing what to what on your machine.

Microsoft drops development of Internet Explorer for Mac – well it was always a force fit. I remember when Brad and I hired the Mac IE team – so many hurdles to overcome – hiring up a new team, based in the valley, to do Mac software. Seemed like I spent half my life justifying their existence and protecting them from the Redmond antibodies. Don and gang, you were great to work with. Wish you all the best.

Kevin Kelly has a great list of gear and gadget recommendations.

So what does Neuheisel’s firing mean for the Buckeyes? While short term it seems the UW program is in turmoil, the scuttlebutt out here is that Gilbertson is a more than adequate replacement. I suspect that the Huskies will be just as well prepared, and maybe even more driven to show the world that they are a great program, come the opener in Columbus.

Just finished Shutter Island. Great book, would be a good movie (some plot points similar to this year’s Identity). I see that Mystic River, Lehane’s earlier book, will be a movie later this year with a strong cast.

Pings are working again from my blog, I had a rocky week this week. I upgraded to Windows Server 2003 last week – why? Well, it just seemed like a fun thing to do. Plus I know how fast Microsoft dev resources migrate away from old platforms to the new platform, if you want great ongoing help and support you need to bite the bullet and run the latest stuff.

But the upgrade initially hosed me. The IPSEC service failed to load with a really vague error message, and when IPSEC doesn’t load it takes the machine off net. You can turn IPSEC off, but critical services like DNS Client depend on it. For a week I limped along with IPSEC off, and my web server worked, but the machine couldn’t do any client name resolution (among other problems) and so trying to ping DNS names didn’t work.

Thanks to the responsiveness of guys at Microsoft – Dave, Jawad, Stephen, Raymond, David, Osman, and more – we got it figured out. I had installed Port Explorer beta a long time ago and had quit using it. But it installs Winsock providers and these were hanging around on my system – we discovered these by using the sporder.exe tool from the windows platform sdk. On an upgrade to WinServer2003, these make IPSEC unhappy, it refuses to load, and things go to sh%t.

Once I uninstalled Port Explorer, things righted themselves.

I tried to use the online Microsoft support options to get this resolved – the KB, the support forums – but there was no info about, and the folks in the support forum just told me to reinstall. Thankfully the dev teams at Microsoft were super responsive. Thanks much guys!

Microsoft Next-Generation Secure Computing Base - Technical FAQ – OK I don’t totally understand all the features in here but “nexus” sounds all Terminator/Matrix kind of creepy.

OK after a pretty rocky week things should largely be working again on the site. Notably comments should be working, and my server should be pinging all the appropriate sites again.

Comments weren’t working because I had security cranked up on some directories which made it hard for anonymous users to force archive page regeneration when they posted a comment. I relaxed some settings and this should work now. I am not totally happy with the relaxed settings but decided I needed comments and trackback listings to work right. I may make more modifications here in the future.

Escapable Logic:

If you spend all your time and energy on the small stuff, you will never have room for the things that are important to you

From the New Scientist: Young male salmon raised in fish farms mate more aggressively than their counterparts in the wild.

We ate at a premier seafood restaurant in Seattle last night and it was hard to get non-farmed salmon. Out of about 9 salmon dishes, only one was line-caught. Sad. And the menu totally obscures this by calling the farm-raised salmon “Pacific Northwest Salmon” on all the dishes – you have to ask a lot of questions to find out that this is == farm raised Atlantic salmon from farms in BC.

Clear Channel Purchases the FCC – JD’s New Media Musings: June 08, 2003 Archives

Gosh I hope the government stays the course on this – BUSTED LINK – the vendors will whine til the last on this. Next we should advocate for email address portability.

After reading all the great comments on Mitch Kapor’s Weblog re Switching to Mozilla, I decided to try Firebird. It installed nicely and seems really zippy.

One big problem area tho is that I get a really poor experience with Exchange2k Outlook Web Access pages; it could be the server deciding that I am an unsupported client and sending me highly defeatured pages. OWA pages with IE make heavy use of DHTML and so I suspect the exchange server is picky about what clients it supports fully.

A lot of people talking about playing around with EL Wire for halloween effects. Could be fun.