Work Journal

For Week of September 13, 1999

Page Updated Tuesday, March 21, 2000 07:18 PM

Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday / Saturday / Sunday

I remembered that I have some valuable data on Zip disks so decided it was time to get the data off the Zip disks and onto my server and archived on CD. I attached my external Zip drive to my production PC and installed the driver for it. NT then did a memory dump which did not impress me. Here I am trying to save data and my operating system is working against me. Well lucky me after rebooting all is fine except my drive letters are all messed up which I expected to happen. With the drive letters fixed and the data on the Zip disk accessible I copied all the data first to my server and then to a backup CD.

My friend Tom Syroid has had some trouble with loosing data this week due to a hard drive going belly up, and I also had questions about data transfers and backups put to me this week. This got me thinking about my own data. I do a backup most every night of the data I use on a regular basis and update the backups of drivers etc. on a random basis. A more regular backup of all my data, drivers, utilities is required, so I created a new backup batch file that I will run on a weekly basis, which will backup all my stored files which I would not want to lose. I checked what all I have stored on my server to see if I can get rid of any of it. I found that I have 1.57 Gig worth of stuff in my download directory on my server. Some day soon I will have to go through all 1.57 Gig of it and clean out the trash and keep only what is relevant.

I started testing a few things which I believe will speed up unattended NT installations to verify my theory. This is time consuming but necessary work, as I don't want to document anything that I can't backup with proof. My documentation on unattended NT installs is taking shape but I need to do a few things like the speed test I am running to put the finishing touches to my documentation.

While doing some work on creating DOS boot disks with CD-ROM support for my documentation on unattended installs of Windows NT, the floppy drive I have been using in my test PC decided to die on me. Actually the drive did not go totally belly up but was being very selective about what floppies it would read, probably due to a reading head alignment problem. Any of the Dos 6.22 boot disks I made on another PC, the drive in the test PC would not read. Well it is a very old floppy drive from one of the very first PCs I ever owned, so I think I have got my money out of it. It's just the timing stinks as I had a good train of though going and the drive going sour on me broke my train of thought. I took the floppy drive out of another PC and got back to work but never got totally back on track. 

Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday / Saturday / Sunday

I found out today that Novell has announced that the Continuing Certification Requirement (CCR) for current CNEs requires that by August 31,2000 that they must demonstrate proficiency on NetWare 5 to  remain current and retain their CNE certification status. To complete the CCR, CNEs will be required to pass the exam for one of the following Novell courses: 529 NetWare 4.11 to NetWare 5 Update (50-638)  OR 570 NetWare 5 Advanced Administration (50-640).

This means I have 11 months to study and write one of the qualifying Netware 5 exams to maintain my certification. Seems like lots of time, but if the next 11 months fly by like the past 11 months have, I had better get planning or August 31, 2000 will be upon me before I know it. I put monthly reminders in Outlook to help me remember this deadline.

Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday / Saturday / Sunday

If you have a Palm Pilot or would like to get one but are put off by not being able to input data via a keyboard take a look at Think Outside. Think Outside makes a portable full size keyboard that folds up to about the size of a Palm Pilot. They also have models for the new Visor and are developing models for Windows CE based PDAs.

Tonight the eject button would not work on my HP 8100 CD Writer. To eject a CD I had to right click on the CD in Explorer and select eject. Then when I put a new CD, in explorer it would look like the previous CD was still in the drive. I have only ran into this once before, and that was on a different PC running Windows 95A. The only way I could fix this problem was to reboot my PC.

I have posted a partial copy of my documentation on basic unattended Windows NT installations for anyone who wants to take a look at it. I have also put a link to it on the Reports page. I still have quite a bit of ground to cover in my documentation, but what I have posted provides an introduction, and covers some of the requirements for doing an unattended Windows NT installation.

Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday / Saturday / Sunday

I can just see hackers having even more options of things they can do to your computer with viruses in the future versions of Windows like Neptune - " Neptune, a future version of Consumer Windows, will build on the Windows 2000 kernel and use a new HTML-based user interface that will take Windows into the world non-PC devices." Will future computer viruses instead of threatening your data, possibly deface your HTML based desktop just as hackers do to web pages today, or corrupt your data and put an notice on your desktop telling you that that your data has just been toasted.

Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday / Saturday / Sunday

I can't believe the month of September is half over already, where has the time gone. Not only is the month half gone but my current work contract is now half over and ends on the 30th. I have fallen behind in my job search and have only just made the dead line for applying to a few positions.

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I have been a bit skeptical of how Linux is going to fit into the computing world, primarily in the personal computer area. I am starting to change my tune a little bit as I have been reading how some resourceful people have been porting Linux to run on some of the more popular Personal Digital Assistants. I know Linux can run very well and quickly, on a computer with a very small amount of resources, you only have to look at the ultra small match box size and smaller web servers being built with off the shelf components. It seems to me that Linux may have a place in the market place where small fast computing devices are desired. It seems to me that if the current ground swell of interest in Linux, which is growing by leaps and bounds, gains more support in the PDA area, that it could easily knock off Windows CE and challenge the Palm OS. The Palm OS owes much of its success in being very simple and working very well on a small device with few computing resources. Windows CE devices are just like there big brother desktop computers, the more resources the better. Now that it is possible to buy a PC with Linux pre installed can a PDA with Linux pre installed be very far away. Then you can truly have the same operating system on your desktop computer, your laptop and your PDA.

Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday / Saturday / Sunday

Trying to find how to get statistics on my web page from Shaw. Shaw's web site is very slow today making this a painful experience. I finally located and got my web page statistics. For the month of September to date, the summary is as follows:

Program started at Sat-18-Sep-1999 12:06 local time.
Analyzed requests from Wed-01-Sep-1999 05:05 to Sat-18-Sep-1999 04:55 (17.0 days).

Total successful requests: 1,400
Average successful requests per day: 82
Total successful requests for pages: 1,100
Average successful requests for pages per day: 65
Number of distinct files requested: 50
Total data transferred: 3,003 kbytes
Average data transferred per day: 180,936 bytes

When I compare this data to the statistics for the whole month of August it looks like September is on track to at least meet the August stats. I probably account for a sizable portion of the overall stats as I refer to the bookmark pages on the site from work to access many of my favorite sites. But when I look at the page by page stats for the Work Journal, a page I only look at when I do my publishing to verify my upload, and check links I see a nice stable number of requests for these pages for the past few weeks. 

Requests	% Bytes	File
50:	13.45%:	Week of Sept 13
63:	14.22%:	Week of Sept 6
52:	19.48%:	Week of Aug 30

When I go back and look at the stats for August they range from 30 to 119.

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Now back to work on my much neglected project on unattended Windows NT installations.

Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday / Saturday / Sunday

I have finally gotten through my first draft of documentation on a basic unattended installation of Windows NT 4.0 Workstation from top to bottom. I have posted the full rough draft and am in the process testing the documentation, by using it as my guide to doing an unattended install of NT.

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When is Spam not Spam, well apparently when the law the says that it isn't. Below is information from an unsolicited email offering credit card collection services, which names a U.S. Congress Bill on Spam. The Bill states that as long as an email contains contact information and a method of removing your name from the mail list, email cannot be defined as Spam. By the the definition of Spam I found at Dictionary.com the message I received is not Spam, but I certainly would at least call it unsolicited email. I never give mailing lists permission to sell my address so I can avoid getting this type of email. I get this very same message several times a week even after trying to get removed from the mail list in the past. Now I am trying again, and will hopefully be successful this time.

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