Work Journal For Week of November 29, 1999
Last Update: Wednesday, December 22, 1999 10:03 PM
Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday / Saturday / Sunday
No post today.
Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday / Saturday / Sunday
Well my health is slowly returning and I have returned to work after falling ill Monday evening last week. I succumbed to some major stomach acid reflex problems which made life most unpleasant for me. I cannot recall ever being sick for more than a day at a time before, and almost never missed a days work or school due to illness. Missing 4 full days of work in a row due to illness was a new experience, which I hope to never have to go through again.
I have lots of email to catch upon, as well as the postings of all the other daynoters from last week, from what I have seem so far it was an interesting week, with a few friendly rounds being volleyed between a few of the daynoters.
Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday / Saturday / Sunday
Well my energy seems to be back to normal today, but I think I will wait one more day before I try and get back to my daily exercise routine.
Since most of the daynoters seem to have bought into Brian Bilbrey's fabulous idea of using a redirection page to point viewers towards their current weeks work, I thought I would give it a try myself. As Brian has done a fine job of writing the redirection code, and I being one who rarely tries to reinvent the wheel, I copied the entire contents of his page, pasted it onto my current.htm file, and modified it for my own use (Hey Brian thanks for the code).
Today my monthly reminder in Outlook, reminded me that I have not done nearly enough work on my NetWare 5 studies. To add salt to the wound I also received a letter from Novell encouraging me to upgrade my certification. At least Novell sweetened the pot by offering qualified candidates to enter a draw to win a new Harley Davidson if they upgrade their certification to CNE 5 by February 29, 2000. And yes that date is correct as 2000 is a leap year.
I wanted to make a copy of an entire web site I evaluated for someone, so I could see how the site had been constructed. I did a quick search of Tucows to see if I could find a utility which would let me copy the web site. I was not able to find any useful utilities so instead I created a bookmark for the site and set it to view off line. Then after synchronizing the site, I copied all the necessary files out of the temporary internet files directory to a new directory where I could work with them. All the files names had been appended to end with [1], but a few minutes in Explorer and I had the names all straightened out. I made a backup copy of my work then imported the site into FrontPage 2000. FrontPage did not seem to do a very good job of importing the site but it at least gave me a chance to see how the tables had been setup for the pages.
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I have been hearing good things about VMware so wanted to give it a try. I download all the necessary files and got it installed on a test PC. The minimum RAM requirement is 96 MB and I only have 64 in the PC and VMware will NOT run with 64 MB of RAM. A quick upgrade to 96 MB and VMware is now happy, and playing nice.
I was going to try something quick and simple like a DOS install first, but my Windows NT Workstation CD was handy so I threw it in the CD tray. The install seemed to go smoothly except for chocking a bit during the first reboot during the installation. This is very nice, I can in under a minute have Windows NT booted in a virtual machine while I have Windows 2000 up and running as the host operating system. There is no need to shut down one operating system then starting up another to do testing if you only have one PC.
Next I figured a Linux install would be a nice test so I created a Linux virtual machine, powered it up with my OpenLinux CD in the CD tray and the install started up automatically. Well Linux is now running but I have messed up the configuration for KDE bigtime. I have no idea how to use keystrokes to close the GUI so I can try and reconfigure the video settings. I also believe that I need to install the VMware tools for Linux if I want to get the display to work properly.
I tried to open VMware twice but got a message that I have insufficient resources. This makes me think that if I had enough RAM in a PC I could run multiple virtual machines and thus have multiple operating system running at the same time on the same PC. This is an intriguing idea.
Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday / Saturday / Sunday
No Post Today
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Beautiful day here in Calgary. While the tire shop was putting new tires on my truck I went for a walk around the car lots and to make a stop at the barber shop. The barber actually had the door to his shop propped open so everyone could enjoy the fine weather.
My current job is doing Tier 2 desktop support for Telus which is a large telecommunications company in Canada. Telus uses SAP for financials etc. and is in the midst of upgrading their SAP systems. Yesterday I had a call dropped in my queue for troubles with the newer SAP graphical user interface. It seems that some brainiac used SMS to push out versions 4.5 and 4.6 of the SAP GUI to several of the SAP support people. The initial problem is that they installed both version of the GUI into the "same" directory which is a recipe for disaster. Needless to say neither version of the GUI would work. In what I was sure would be waste of time I tried to uninstall version 4.5 which did not achieve anything. While watching the uninstall I could see that the GUI had many connections to Microsoft Office. After the uninstall of version 4.5 of the GUI, version 4.6 still was not functional which was no surprise to me. The user had some work in MS Project that had to be done, and Project still seemed to function. All Office application I tried would open but I could not get into the options at all. The user had Word set as the email editor for Outlook 98 which caused Outlook to crash if we tried to start Outlook. In the end I had to leave the user to get the work they need to get done in MS Project and will have to see about fixing their PC next week.
Back working with VMware and creating a second OpenLinux virtual machine which hopefully I can configure properly this time. I have kept my original Linux install intact as I hope to learn how to go back and fix my mistakes. After much playing with the display settings I finally have KDE working on my newest Linux install.
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Beta 1 of the Millennium version of Windows showed up at my door, so I thought I would see if I can install it under VMware. The CD will not auto-boot for me so I tried booting with a Windows 98 startup disk and then accessing the CD. This worked until the setup could not find a FAT partition to work with. I then created a partition using fdisk. Then with an existing virtual drive, and booting with a Windows 98 startup disk, I was able to get setup to run successfully. The setup was very slow which I attribute to doing the install in a virtual machine and not with the actual install program.
Even though Windows Millennium is to be the next version of Windows for the home user, it seems that the networking portion of the OS has been updated. I mistakenly had used the same computer name for this install as I had for the VMware host OS. Windows Millennium detected that the computer name was already in use, which is something that Windows 95/98 never did. I also ran into problems with the Compaq NC3121 NIC in my test PC. Windows Millennium did not detect it properly during installation of the OS even though it is in the hardware list. Trying to manually add the NIC only succeeded in my crashing the control panel. I then tried auto detecting new hardware which did not find the NIC.
Now if I do not have a working NIC operating with Windows Millennium how did the OS know that there is already a computer on my network with the same name as I had just used. All I can think of is that some how through VMware that Windows Millennium detected the computer name used by the host Windows 2000.
Copyright © 1999 John Doucette. All Rights Reserved