Running Scheduled XP Tasks Without A Password

Posted on April 24, 2006 by Cam

Sometimes it’s handy to have a scheduled task do something in Windows XP. I use a couple for different reasons. One is to do a weekly backup of data from one disk to another, and the other is to do a daily grab of the TV guide from IceTV to process and deliver to my Topfield PVR.

Annoyingly, but probably appropriately, XP doesn’t let you run scheduled tasks by default without a password set on the user account. This is described in Microsoft knowledge base article 310715.

Instead of creating a password for my login at home, and instead of creating a ‘dummy’ account with a password just for scheduled tasks, I found this: Scheduled Tasks – Running Tasks Without A Password.

For XP Pro: Go to Start/Administrative Tools/Local Security Policy/Security Settings/Local Policies/Security Options
Accounts: Limit local account use of blank passwords to console logon only. This is enabled by default, disable it.For XP Home: (Keith Miller) Go to Start/Run/Regedit and navigate to this key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa

Value name: limitblankpassworduse, Type: REG_DWORD, Data: 0 (disabled) 1 (enabled)

Anyway, it works…

Posted in HandyHints | 6 Comments
Posted on April 7, 2006 by Scrummy | Comments Off

links for 2006-04-05

Posted on April 6, 2006 by Scrummy
Aardvark Firefox Extension This is a neat tool that plugs into Firefox and allows you to see and manipulate css and html elements dynamically

Firefox Extensions for Web Developers One of the great things about Firefox is the ability to customise and extend the browser to suit your needs with extensions. Here is a list of some useful extensions for web developers.

(tags: Firefox Extensions webdev)

theory.isthereason » From Del.icio.us to WordPress: How to automatically post daily links

BlogRolling – The best link manager for your weblog and more! BlogRolling is a one-stop linklist manager for your blog or journal, helping you manage your ever-evolving linklist with ease. There are a lot of tools out there to help you blog without getting your hands dirty – but managing your linklist still means ha

That Strange Falling Sensation hey, now I know. Seems that there may be a link between those drifing off to sleep muscle twitches and fatigue. At least it’s not just me.

(tags: sleep science)

Iconize Me! Becoming very popular now is iconising yourself for your site. I contemplated doing this for a while, and recently discovered this site putting people in touch with artists.

Micro Persuasion Steve Rubel’s blog on “Social Software”. Social Software? Right. Anyhoo, he actually has some very interesting articles and pointers to new stuff.

Posted in Del.icio.us Links | Comments Off

BlogRolling – The best link manager for your weblog and more!

BlogRolling is a one-stop linklist manager for your blog or journal, helping you manage your ever-evolving linklist with ease. There are a lot of tools out there to help you blog without getting your hands dirty – but…
(tags: blog blogging tools)

That Strange Falling Sensation hey, now I know. Seems that there may be a link between those drifing off to sleep muscle twitches and fatigue. At least it’s not just me.
(tags: sleep science)
Iconize Me! Becoming very popular now is iconising yourself for your site. I contemplated doing this for a while, and recently discovered this site putting people in touch with artists.
Micro Persuasion Steve Rubel’s blog on “Social Software”. Social Software? Right. Anyhoo, he actually has some very interesting articles and pointers to new stuff.
Posted on April 5, 2006 by Scrummy | Comments Off

Thanks

Posted on April 3, 2006 by Cam

Thanks to all the wonderful folk at Telstra who wished me such a fond farewell last week when I finished up. It was kind of overwhelming. The many lovely sentiments in the card were really great and really encouraging. Thank-you!

The gifts were grouse too:

  • A Fisher Space Pen (Bullet) which writes really well – obviously people know that I love pens. This one is great because it is very small, but when using it the cap makes it a very practical length.
  • A Global knife – the Global Large Granton Santoku which is absolutely bloody fantastic! These knives are so sharp, I can highly recommend them to everyone, and their range is huge. This Santoku is a good size (not too small and not too big) but the best thing is the granton edge (scalloped grooves on the side) that prevent food from sticking to the knife. This is great for potatoes and hard wet foods.
  • Some lovely Haigh’s chocolates – some delicious assorted hand made chocolates filled with many wonderful flavours, and a huge gold wrapped chocolate frog! They were delicious!
  • And finally, a pack of recycled printer/copier paper. Someone in particular knows that I like to write on blank paper because I draw mind maps rather than write notes. Obviously frustrated with me using new paper, they have been encouraging me to use recycled paper, and seemingly want this habit to continue!

So thank-you very much all of you!

As I said at drinks last week, working at Telstra with all the people in the wireless and online content technology area has had a great influence on me, both professionally and personally. I’ve had opportunities to grow and learn many new skills, face and overcome many challenges, work with some truly wonderful, talented people and form some good and hopefully long lasting friendships. I wish you all the very best.

Cam.

Posted in Cool Stuff, General | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

Serving mediawiki from a subdomain

Posted on March 27, 2006 by Cam

I just managed to get MediaWiki working from a subdomain, rather than from /wiki. There are two changes that you need to make to localsettings.php when trying to serve MediaWiki from a subdomain. The first is to change

$wgScriptPath = "" ;

from whatever the path was, and the second is to insert:

$wgServer = "http://subdomain.yourdomain.tld";

The first setting stops the scripts from being called from the wiki subdirectory (which is now your subdomain) and the second tells bits of MediaWiki where to find things like the skins and images. That's the best explanation I can come up with right now!

Reference Installing MediaWiki on a subdomain? and Serving MediaWiki from a Subdomain

Posted in HandyHints | 10 Comments

Is ugly good?

Posted on March 23, 2006 by Cam

Really interesting article over at SiteReference about how good and profitable ugly websites can be. Have a read of The Surprising Truth About Ugly Websites and see what you think… I found it particularly interesting as Mark Doust touched on a number of interesting issues – conveying trust; people dealing with people, not websites; and usefulness and usability.

For me, attractive sites can be good too, just so long as they are meaningful, useful, let me do the things that I want to do, or get the information that I want, and if the visit involves buying something that the site conveys the sense that there are actually people at the other end that are really interesting in dealing with me, not just taking my money.

Posted in Blog Notes | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Back from a weekend of Camping

Posted on March 17, 2006 by Cam

Just arrived back safely from a long weekend away camping down at Nicholson in Gippsland Victoria. Photos are up in the photo section.

Kyla, Tambo Camper and Pathfinder We stayed at the Lakes Bushland Caravan Park which is a few kilometres past the town of Nicholson, and much nicer than the caravan park in the town. That one is more like a “trailer park” with lots of permanent residents and hardly any decent campsites. The Lakes Bushland is very bushy, and very well spaced. The facilities are good, but the prices have gone up recently, but are still pretty reasonable.

We’ve had the Tambo camper trailer for about 18 months now, and it still continues to perform really well. It’s great to tow because it is a reaonable weight, and we are pretty organised, so we are really quite comfortable.

Get ready for that scratchy soundThis was the second trip in the new Nissan Pathfinder and it still continues to impress. We took it down some great tracks that led down to the Tambo River with one being so tight that both sides of the car are scratched quite convincingly. Oh well, that’s what we got the car for, wasn’t it? Off road the car is great, and on road it is a pleasure to drive.

We also ventured to Nicholson River winery where we tasted some outstanding wine, and ended up spending a small fortune on a whole stack of wine. This place is really work a visit if you are down that way – the chardonnay’s are worth the visit alone, but everything else is great too!

The camping was lots of fun, and we really enjoyed ourselves.

Posted in Camping | 4 Comments

Hard Disk Recovery (or “what a way to spend a weekend”)

Posted on February 12, 2006 by Cam

Last weekend, I had a hard disk failure on one of my external drives. It was kind of frustrating, but I have recovered data from a failed disk before. Of course, the corruption occurred late at night, and just after I had archived some data off my Shuttle XPC. Note I had “archived”, not “backed up” so I really did need to get it back.
This is an external enclosure made by Welland ME-740 Classic with a Seagate 160GB drive with USB2.0 and Firewire connectivity to my Shuttle XPC. I had it connected to the Shuttle via the firewire port.

First up I ran Chkdsk and it fixed up some errors and I was away again. But not for long. Soon the entire disk was unreadable!

Given the suspected disk crash, I turned to a product called SpinRite, which although required a bootable CD to run in DOS mode to directly access the disk, did its job of scanning the disk. Mind you, I had to remove the disk from the external enclosure and plug it into the PC’s IDE port, because the standard bootable SpinRite disk did not include firewire or USB drivers.

SpinRite reported Continue reading →

Posted in HandyHints | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off

Heath’s 2nd Birthday

Posted on January 29, 2006 by Cam

Happy Birthday Heath!

Crikey! Two years ago Heath was born!

We had a fantastic party for Heath today.

Posted in Family | Tagged , , | 1 Comment