The next Willy Mosconi…
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Ok, so maybe not, but I can dream, can’t I? After watching the Smoky Mountain Shootout nine ball tournament this weekend, it’s more obvious than ever that I’m probably not cut out to be a top-flight billiards pro. But now that I have the table set up at home, maybe Skyler can be. I’m trying not to push him too hard, but then again, if it worked for Tiger Woods, maybe it’ll work for Skyler… |
When will I be able to get Ethernet through my water pipes?
I was exploring options for my friend (and mechanic) who wants to network his office and detached garage when I came across this Netgear product. If this really works, it will save me a huge headache in burying ethernet cable, etc. We’ll just have to see if it performs as advertised.
Windows Vista: making the formerly trivial nearly impossible every day since 2007.
So yesterday my daughter got herself into trouble. Normally, she’s a really well-behaved girl, but last night she made up for a few months of good behaviour with one well-timed failure to obey her mother and some poor choices regarding a school orchestra recital. So to punish her, I’ve taken away her access to the computer for a week. Should be a snap, I think. In every version of Windows since NT I can just go in and disable her account. Child’s play. Wrong, sooo wrong.
I tried several approaches, some obvious, some not, but for some reason Microsoft decided that the account lock out feature is too dangerous for primitive Windows Vista home users. They don’t provide any access to it in the User Accounts applet through the Control Panel, and they’ve disabled access through the Computer Management MMC plug-in. After flailing around for about fifteen minutes (which for such a trivial thing felt like a lifetime), I suddenly remembered the old tried-and-true user account command line tool: NET USER.
Not to be confused with NET USE (which is for accessing shared network drives), NET USER lets you manage Windows user accounts from the command line. Feeling like I was only seconds away from my goal, I started a command prompt and got the command line help for the tool (NET USER /?). I get this output:
NET USER [username [password | *] [options]] [/DOMAIN]
username {password | *} /ADD [options] [/DOMAIN]
username [/DELETE] [/DOMAIN]
username [/TIMES:{times | ALL}]
Arrgh! Nothing remotely resembling the disable command I remember from 10 years ago. But, not willing to give up yet, I try NET HELP USER, and I see this:
(boring stuff elided)
Options Are as follows:
Options Description
--------------------------------------------------------------------
/ACTIVE:{YES | NO} Activates or deactivates the account. If
the account is not active, the user cannot
access the server. The default is YES.
(more boring stuff elided)
Victory! So I disabled her account, and it disappeared off of the login screen. She’ll think I deleted it, and I’ll go to sleep tonight satisfied that I have yet again managed to do something in 1/2 hour that could have been done with three mouse clicks a mere three years ago. Sigh.
I’ve seen the future, and the future is … COBOL?
Ok, so in the process of migrating to my new laptop I’ve been forced to look at several of my old projects. I don’t remember where I found the time, but ten years ago I must have written a _lot_ of code. One of the more bizarre projects I did back then was a Y2K solution that involved cross-compiling COBOL programs to Java bytecode. I only implemented about 50% of the COBOL feature set back then, but it still turns out to be 600+ source files and who-knows-how-many thousands of LOCs.
So rather than let it sit on my hard drive gathering virtual dust, I’ve created a Sourceforge project for it. Check out the Universal COBOL Compiler project when you have a chance. There’s nothing out there but a one-paragraph synopsis and a bunch of code in the CVS repository, but at least it’s not hidden on my computer anymore!
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