Where I’m @

20040727

Scripting Sound Volume and Copying Mozilla-Based Browsers
Backward first. We’ve been having a pesky little problem lately with our new Windows lab computer image, to wit, getting Firefox to play nicely with copying the same settings out to each new user. (And since this is similar to what we searched for in Google, we’ll rephrase it: “firefox windows copy settings to all users”. Heh.) Everyone knows that you can guide how each new domain user to log on to a Windows XP workstation gets profiled by creating a Default User directory in Documents and Settings. That was fine, but what seems to have been the stumbling block for us was that we were trying to name the default Firefox profile things like ‘baseline’ and ‘all_users’, when Firefox requires that it be called ‘default’ in order to be the default profile for all new user. Otherwise, Firefox creates a profile called ‘default’ and uses it for the logged-in domain user.

One of the front-line tech support staff at CLS asked us if we knew how to script the Windows system volume control, and we managed to find a nice little example in the newsgroup world. Herewith the altered example of scripting the Windows sound volume:

' Unashamedly copied from a 2001 Usenet posting by Jonathan Shay
' Altered to suit my purposes July 2004, Trip Kirkpatrick 

Option Explicit

Dim objShell

Set objShell = WScript.CreateObject( "WScript.Shell" )
objShell.Run ( "sndvol32" )
TimeToWait 1
objShell.AppActivate "sndvol32"
TimeToWait .1
objShell.SendKeys ( "{TAB}" )
TimeToWait .01
objShell.SendKeys ( "{END}" )
TimeToWait .01
objShell.SendKeys ( "{PGUP}{PGUP}{PGUP}" )

Sub TimeToWait( intSeconds )
    REM: pauses the script x seconds
    WScript.Sleep intSeconds * 1000
End Sub

Since the volume control seems to always open with the main level balance control highlighted, the initial TAB is necessary. The END keystroke sets it to minimum, and the PGUPs increment volume to about halfway. It’s not perfect (or field-tested), but it's a good start.

20040721

Would Someone Please Pick up that Phone?
We have decreased sharply the amount of personal material herein, but it would somehow be wrong not to mention the excellent concert we went to the other night. The SO surprised us with tickets to the Mission of Burma show at Toad's Place in New Haven on the 16th of July, and we were indeed surprised. We like them a lot and we had mentioned to the SO how good they were and the unfortunate circumstances of their dissolution and the excitement we felt when we saw news of a handful of shows in the Boston area a couple years ago — OK, so it wasn’t a stretch. But still, her capacity for remembering and assembling into something meaningful our scattered mutterings is constantly amazing. But back to the show.

Naturally, the crowd was very xy-heavy, and fairly hair-light. This because the band split up in 1983 after being in the limelight, as it were, for about 3 years, and is a very nerd rock band. Without going into a detailed set list, we’ll just note that they opened with “Falling” (the most wrenching reflection on the victims of the World Trade Center terrorism, in our eyes, even if that’s not what it’s really about) from the new album, and played some of the high points of their earlier work (including “That’s When I Reach for My Revolver”, “Academy Fight Song”, “The Ballad of Johnny Burma”, and “Max Ernst”) as well as more from the new album. Loud as legend would have it, and we’re glad we knew the legend, since we got tired some time ago of having ringing in our ears for as much as a day after a rock show and surreptitiously implanted ear plugs when they got going. Wouldn't have missed it for the world.

[Smacks Forehead Again]
When repeatedly getting a CVSNT error (to wit, something like The connection was actively refused by the server) in trying to update or get a module list or whatever, make sure that the CVSNT service is running on the appropriate server. Because it’s a little hard to make use of CVSNT when it isn’t running.

20040719

Shades of “Camaro Rock”
The SO watched Linklater’s School of Rock recently, and we peeked in on it from time to time. A predictable story in most ways, though graciously devoid of most of the schmaltz this kind of picture usually shovels on. Note: We said most. However, the satisfying part of it was the inclusion of AC|DC’s “It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock ’n’ Roll)” as the coda performance of Jack Blact et Cie. Sadly, they didn’t include the gonzo bagpipe solo performed by Bon Scott (raise your lighters, people!), but the tongue-in-cheek aspect of the recontextualization (if that word can be used here) of the track was sweet.

20040709

Sites of Interest
Republicans for Kerry, Version 1 and Version 2. We don’t know whether to believe these sites (and their sister sites) or not. Are they genuine, or just fronts by Democrats? That’s an indication of how debased politics is these days, that a website supporting the guy from the other party can be viewed with suspicion because it might be a scam. (Perhaps politics was ever thus. At least these days nobody gets a beat down on the Senate floor.)

20040707

Notes on Moving OUs
We are moving a decent number of computer accounts in Active Directory from one OU to another, and the first OU is not under our control. After some hemming and hawing and them wanting to do one thing and we wanting to do another (in our case, at least and frankly, it was not unrelated to wanting to minimize the amount of work we had to do for the move), we settled on creating new accounts in our OU, removing the machines from the domain, renaming them, and rejoining them to the domain. Some things we want to remember if we have to do this again:

• Verify that the local admin account is active. We removed one box from the domain, only to find that we could not log in as the admin, which meant we could not rename it. The old OU was, you’ll recall, not under our control, so we couldn’t rejoin it. We ended up having to get the old OU folks to rejoin it there.
• We used the netdom utility to remove and rejoin the machines, and on one repeatedly got an error of “The network path was not found.” Adding a proper WINS server resolved this problem, though using a full DNS name rather than the NETBIOS name might have worked as well.
• For the first few machines, none of them were able to rejoin the domain, saucily telling us that “The parameter is incorrect.” when we knew everything was fine. What turned out to be the case was that the machine accounts all had the userAccountControl attribute incompletely set. Should have been 0x1020 when it was 0x0220. This because we had not set that attribute at all when we created the machine accounts via script.