Mike Norman's Blog

I just moved DHCP services from a Windows 2003 server that’s about to be decommissioned to a new Windows 2008 server during office hours with no service interruptions; the scope, reservations and all were moved over to the new server with no issues. here’s how i did it:

First log into your 2003 DHCP server with an administrator account. click start, run, type “cmd” and hit enter. in the command prompt type

netsh dhcp server export C:\dhcp.txt all

That will back up all your DHCP settings to the specified location, in this case “C:\dhcp.txt”.
Next up login to your soon to be 2008 DHCP server as an administrator and copy the dhcp.txt file over to the c: drive. now verify that you have the DHCP role running, and open up another cmd window, but this time type

netsh dhcp server import C:\dhcp.txt all

That should do it! just shut down the old DHCP service and your migrated!
Note: my first try i did get this message:

Error while importing option “6.”
This option conflicts with the existing option “” An internal error occurred.

Nothing to worry about, just go into your 2008 DHCP settings and remove the server options that were automatically imported. I had to remove my 006 DNS Servers and time server stuff.
If you have any questions or need help leave a comment.

Not really, I just love sensational titles! So there’s allot of noise being made recently about the IPv6 changeover; when it should happen, how, etc. and the consensus is that we’ve already waited too long and we are pretty much boned. That is to say, we don’t have enough time to make the IPv4 to IPv6 transition go smoothly.
For those of you unfamiliar with how ip addressing and the internet works, more specifically how the numbers are handled. that job falls to the NRO (Number Resource Organization) which was formed by the RIRs (Regional Internet Registries) to “protect the unallocated Number Resource pool, to promote and protect the bottom-up policy development process, and to act as a focal point for Internet community input into the RIR system” which basically means, they’re the guys who release IP blocks and addresses to the IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) who then hands these over to the RIRs, who will distribute them to the LIR (Local Internet Registries – usually an ISP), who then gives you the end user your ip address.
Sounds like a big mess but each step is very important for managing our addressing space. So here’s the bad news. The NRO warns that only 10% of the IPv4 addressing space is unused. Meaning, there’s very very little room for more addressing under our current system. DOOMED!!!!!

Well not entirely. IPv6 is here to save the intarwebs! It allows for a possible 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 addressed. So we will not have any issues like this anymore. The next problem will be the conversion. Which if you’re reading this you probably have no control over; this is a job for the big guys to sort out: the ISPS and backbone folk. But one thing is for sure, the transition should already be underway if it was going to go unnoticed. It’s going to be a bumpy road, but by 2012 you should have a whole new IP address to memorize!

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Something alittle different today. I Think the title sums it up, but ill elaborate. Conan O’Brien is getting screwed with my NBC to move the geriatric Jay Leno to the time slot he gave up. Conan has this to say in a press release:

People of Earth:

In the last few days, I’ve been getting a lot of sympathy calls, and I want to start by making it clear that no one should waste a second feeling sorry for me. For 17 years, I’ve been getting paid to do what I love most and, in a world with real problems, I’ve been absurdly lucky. That said, I’ve been suddenly put in a very public predicament and my bosses are demanding an immediate decision.

Six years ago, I signed a contract with NBC to take over The Tonight Show in June of 2009. Like a lot of us, I grew up watching Johnny Carson every night and the chance to one day sit in that chair has meant everything to me. I worked long and hard to get that opportunity, passed up far more lucrative offers, and since 2004 I have spent literally hundreds of hours thinking of ways to extend the franchise long into the future. It was my mistaken belief that, like my predecessor, I would have the benefit of some time and, just as important, some degree of ratings support from the prime-time schedule. Building a lasting audience at 11:30 is impossible without both.

But sadly, we were never given that chance. After only seven months, with my Tonight Show in its infancy, NBC has decided to react to their terrible difficulties in prime-time by making a change in their long-established late night schedule.

Last Thursday, NBC executives told me they intended to move the Tonight Show to 12:05 to accommodate the Jay Leno Show at 11:35. For 60 years the Tonight Show has aired immediately following the late local news. I sincerely believe that delaying the Tonight Show into the next day to accommodate another comedy program will seriously damage what I consider to be the greatest franchise in the history of broadcasting. The Tonight Show at 12:05 simply isn’t the Tonight Show. Also, if I accept this move I will be knocking the Late Night show, which I inherited from David Letterman and passed on to Jimmy Fallon, out of its long-held time slot. That would hurt the other NBC franchise that I love, and it would be unfair to Jimmy.

So it has come to this: I cannot express in words how much I enjoy hosting this program and what an enormous personal disappointment it is for me to consider losing it. My staff and I have worked unbelievably hard and we are very proud of our contribution to the legacy of The Tonight Show. But I cannot participate in what I honestly believe is its destruction. Some people will make the argument that with DVRs and the Internet a time slot doesn’t matter. But with the Tonight Show, I believe nothing could matter more.

There has been speculation about my going to another network but, to set the record straight, I currently have no other offer and honestly have no idea what happens next. My hope is that NBC and I can resolve this quickly so that my staff, crew, and I can do a show we can be proud of, for a company that values our work.

Have a great day and, for the record, I am truly sorry about my hair; it’s always been that way.

Yours,

Conan

All i have to add is, I’m with Coco!

I somehow manage to get myself into many debates where the other party asks “Whats the harm in holding X belief”. most are about religion or the supernatural, or even things as seemingly unharmful as Feng shui. I usually don’t research the harm ahead of time due to the spur of the moment nature of these conversations. if you’ve been in situations like that or are just interested in what the harm is in holding some absurd beliefs then check out WhatsTheHarm.net. It has definatly earned a Mike’s Seal Of Approval!

The first virtue is curiosity. A burning itch to know is higher than a solemn vow to pursue truth. To feel the burning itch of curiosity requires both that you be ignorant, and that you desire to relinquish your ignorance. If in your heart you believe you already know, or if in your heart you do not wish to know, then your questioning will be purposeless and your skills without direction. Curiosity seeks to annihilate itself; there is no curiosity that does not want an answer. The glory of glorious mystery is to be solved, after which it ceases to be mystery. Be wary of those who speak of being open-minded and modestly confess their ignorance. There is a time to confess your ignorance and a time to relinquish your ignorance.

The second virtue is relinquishment. P. C. Hodgell said: “That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.” Do not flinch from experiences that might destroy your beliefs. The thought you cannot think controls you more than thoughts you speak aloud. Submit yourself to ordeals and test yourself in fire. Relinquish the emotion which rests upon a mistaken belief, and seek to feel fully that emotion which fits the facts. If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is hot, and it is cool, the Way opposes your fear. If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is cool, and it is hot, the Way opposes your calm. Evaluate your beliefs first and then arrive at your emotions. Let yourself say: “If the iron is hot, I desire to believe it is hot, and if it is cool, I desire to believe it is cool.” Beware lest you become attached to beliefs you may not want.

The third virtue is lightness. Let the winds of evidence blow you about as though you are a leaf, with no direction of your own. Beware lest you fight a rearguard retreat against the evidence, grudgingly conceding each foot of ground only when forced, feeling cheated. Surrender to the truth as quickly as you can. Do this the instant you realize what you are resisting; the instant you can see from which quarter the winds of evidence are blowing against you. Be faithless to your cause and betray it to a stronger enemy. If you regard evidence as a constraint and seek to free yourself, you sell yourself into the chains of your whims. For you cannot make a true map of a city by sitting in your bedroom with your eyes shut and drawing lines upon paper according to impulse. You must walk through the city and draw lines on paper that correspond to what you see. If, seeing the city unclearly, you think that you can shift a line just a little to the right, just a little to the left, according to your caprice, this is just the same mistake.

The fourth virtue is evenness. One who wishes to believe says, “Does the evidence permit me to believe?” One who wishes to disbelieve asks, “Does the evidence force me to believe?” Beware lest you place huge burdens of proof only on propositions you dislike, and then defend yourself by saying: “But it is good to be skeptical.” If you attend only to favorable evidence, picking and choosing from your gathered data, then the more data you gather, the less you know. If you are selective about which arguments you inspect for flaws, or how hard you inspect for flaws, then every flaw you learn how to detect makes you that much stupider. If you first write at the bottom of a sheet of paper, “And therefore, the sky is green!”, it does not matter what arguments you write above it afterward; the conclusion is already written, and it is already correct or already wrong. To be clever in argument is not rationality but rationalization. Intelligence, to be useful, must be used for something other than defeating itself. Listen to hypotheses as they plead their cases before you, but remember that you are not a hypothesis, you are the judge. Therefore do not seek to argue for one side or another, for if you knew your destination, you would already be there.

The fifth virtue is argument. Those who wish to fail must first prevent their friends from helping them. Those who smile wisely and say: “I will not argue” remove themselves from help, and withdraw from the communal effort. In argument strive for exact honesty, for the sake of others and also yourself: The part of yourself that distorts what you say to others also distorts your own thoughts. Do not believe you do others a favor if you accept their arguments; the favor is to you. Do not think that fairness to all sides means balancing yourself evenly between positions; truth is not handed out in equal portions before the start of a debate. You cannot move forward on factual questions by fighting with fists or insults. Seek a test that lets reality judge between you.

The sixth virtue is empiricism. The roots of knowledge are in observation and its fruit is prediction. What tree grows without roots? What tree nourishes us without fruit? If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound? One says, “Yes it does, for it makes vibrations in the air.” Another says, “No it does not, for there is no auditory processing in any brain.” Though they argue, one saying “Yes”, and one saying “No”, the two do not anticipate any different experience of the forest. Do not ask which beliefs to profess, but which experiences to anticipate. Always know which difference of experience you argue about. Do not let the argument wander and become about something else, such as someone’s virtue as a rationalist. Jerry Cleaver said: “What does you in is not failure to apply some high-level, intricate, complicated technique. It’s overlooking the basics. Not keeping your eye on the ball.” Do not be blinded by words. When words are subtracted, anticipation remains.

The seventh virtue is simplicity. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said: “Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” Simplicity is virtuous in belief, design, planning, and justification. When you profess a huge belief with many details, each additional detail is another chance for the belief to be wrong. Each specification adds to your burden; if you can lighten your burden you must do so. There is no straw that lacks the power to break your back. Of artifacts it is said: The most reliable gear is the one that is designed out of the machine. Of plans: A tangled web breaks. A chain of a thousand links will arrive at a correct conclusion if every step is correct, but if one step is wrong it may carry you anywhere. In mathematics a mountain of good deeds cannot atone for a single sin. Therefore, be careful on every step.

The eighth virtue is humility. To be humble is to take specific actions in anticipation of your own errors. To confess your fallibility and then do nothing about it is not humble; it is boasting of your modesty. Who are most humble? Those who most skillfully prepare for the deepest and most catastrophic errors in their own beliefs and plans. Because this world contains many whose grasp of rationality is abysmal, beginning students of rationality win arguments and acquire an exaggerated view of their own abilities. But it is useless to be superior: Life is not graded on a curve. The best physicist in ancient Greece could not calculate the path of a falling apple. There is no guarantee that adequacy is possible given your hardest effort; therefore spare no thought for whether others are doing worse. If you compare yourself to others you will not see the biases that all humans share. To be human is to make ten thousand errors. No one in this world achieves perfection.

The ninth virtue is perfectionism. The more errors you correct in yourself, the more you notice. As your mind becomes more silent, you hear more noise. When you notice an error in yourself, this signals your readiness to seek advancement to the next level. If you tolerate the error rather than correcting it, you will not advance to the next level and you will not gain the skill to notice new errors. In every art, if you do not seek perfection you will halt before taking your first steps. If perfection is impossible that is no excuse for not trying. Hold yourself to the highest standard you can imagine, and look for one still higher. Do not be content with the answer that is almost right; seek one that is exactly right.

The tenth virtue is precision. One comes and says: The quantity is between 1 and 100. Another says: the quantity is between 40 and 50. If the quantity is 42 they are both correct, but the second prediction was more useful and exposed itself to a stricter test. What is true of one apple may not be true of another apple; thus more can be said about a single apple than about all the apples in the world. The narrowest statements slice deepest, the cutting edge of the blade. As with the map, so too with the art of mapmaking: The Way is a precise Art. Do not walk to the truth, but dance. On each and every step of that dance your foot comes down in exactly the right spot. Each piece of evidence shifts your beliefs by exactly the right amount, neither more nor less. What is exactly the right amount? To calculate this you must study probability theory. Even if you cannot do the math, knowing that the math exists tells you that the dance step is precise and has no room in it for your whims.

The eleventh virtue is scholarship. Study many sciences and absorb their power as your own. Each field that you consume makes you larger. If you swallow enough sciences the gaps between them will diminish and your knowledge will become a unified whole. If you are gluttonous you will become vaster than mountains. It is especially important to eat math and science which impinges upon rationality: Evolutionary psychology, heuristics and biases, social psychology, probability theory, decision theory. But these cannot be the only fields you study. The Art must have a purpose other than itself, or it collapses into infinite recursion.

Before these eleven virtues is a virtue which is nameless.

Miyamoto Musashi wrote, in The Book of Five Rings:

“The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means. Whenever you parry, hit, spring, strike or touch the enemy’s cutting sword, you must cut the enemy in the same movement. It is essential to attain this. If you think only of hitting, springing, striking or touching the enemy, you will not be able actually to cut him. More than anything, you must be thinking of carrying your movement through to cutting him.”

Every step of your reasoning must cut through to the correct answer in the same movement. More than anything, you must think of carrying your map through to reflecting the territory.

If you fail to achieve a correct answer, it is futile to protest that you acted with propriety.

How can you improve your conception of rationality? Not by saying to yourself, “It is my duty to be rational.” By this you only enshrine your mistaken conception. Perhaps your conception of rationality is that it is rational to believe the words of the Great Teacher, and the Great Teacher says, “The sky is green,” and you look up at the sky and see blue. If you think: “It may look like the sky is blue, but rationality is to believe the words of the Great Teacher,” you lose a chance to discover your mistake.

Do not ask whether it is “the Way” to do this or that. Ask whether the sky is blue or green. If you speak overmuch of the Way you will not attain it.

You may try to name the highest principle with names such as “the map that reflects the territory” or “experience of success and failure” or “Bayesian decision theory”. But perhaps you describe incorrectly the nameless virtue. How will you discover your mistake? Not by comparing your description to itself, but by comparing it to that which you did not name.

If for many years you practice the techniques and submit yourself to strict constraints, it may be that you will glimpse the center. Then you will see how all techniques are one technique, and you will move correctly without feeling constrained. Musashi wrote: “When you appreciate the power of nature, knowing the rhythm of any situation, you will be able to hit the enemy naturally and strike naturally. All this is the Way of the Void.”

These then are twelve virtues of rationality:

Curiosity, relinquishment, lightness, evenness, argument, empiricism, simplicity, humility, perfectionism, precision, scholarship, and the void.

via -Eliezer Yudkowsky

As it turns out windows 7 loves you. there is a way to get pretty much every setting on the OS all in one spot. and that is by creating an admin folder! just go wherever you want this, create a new folder, and name it

Admin.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

Then bask in the majesty that is an easy to use config page!

So lets say your on a domain with a WSUS (Windows Server Update Services) server and its either down, or you need to get some updates it hasn’t authorized, well here’s how to bypass it and revert to getting your windows updates from Microsoft.
Open up regedit, then navigate to

“HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\AU”

and locate the “UseWUServer” Key. Change the 1 to a 0 and your all set! The key name is the same in all versions of windows Ive had to do this on, so if the path fails just do a search for the key.
These steps can also solve randomly failing updates (Specifically Code 80072EE2)
Hope this helps someone out there!

For those of you who aren’t familiar with BOINC it stands for “Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing”. And what it does is offer a platform for distributed computing. Basically different groups have huge amounts of data to go through, and don’t have the resources to process it. so they send it to BOINC, and BOINC sends your computer tiny parts of the data that will take your computer a couple hours or so to process, then your computer sends it back to BOINC. You get hundreds or thousands of computers all doing this and you accomplish what a supercomputer can. that’s the thought behind distributed computing, and the goal of BOINC. To offer supercomputing style results to organizations that need alot of data processed but don’t have the resources to do it.

To get started with BOINC you’ll first need to find some projects that your interested in and want to help out! There’s a full list Here, but some of my favorite projects are listed below:

• Einstein@home
• SETI@home
• Rosetta@home

So now you’ve picked your projects, If your running windows click Here to download the BOINC client. If your running ubuntu, install the boinc client by opening up a terminal and typing “sudo apt-get install boinc-client boinc-manager”. (note: that last command is why I’m composing this article, it was surprisingly hard to find)

Now that you’ve installed boinc just run the program and attack it to some projects. if you wanna be a badass about it though, i recommend using an account manager like BAM! Have fun using BOINC! if you have any install or operation questions feel free to post them in the comments!

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So i finally got my Fitbit in Monday after pre-ordering it a year and 2 months ago. and its well worth the wait! If your not familiar with the fitbit its a tiny device that helps you track your fitness, here’s how they describe it:

The Fitbit accurately tracks your calories burned, steps taken, distance traveled and sleep quality. The Fitbit contains a 3D motion sensor like the one found in the Nintendo Wii. The Fitbit tracks your motion in three dimensions and converts this into useful information about your daily activities.

Basically its a hella accurate and awesome pedometer. the hardware is cool, but the software is where the fitbit really justifies its pricetag. the steps, calories burned, and miles traveled is Very accurate, like data from it, compared with data from my GPS were almost mirrors asfar as distance traveled. steps were easily determined to be accurate aswell. that’s all well and good, and will help people track their fitness and whatnot. An unusual but awesome part of it is the sleep tracking. your body behaves and moves in different ways when your in different stages of sleep. and how often you wake up at night and all that, so fitbit can measure your sleep patters by measuring the way you move when your asleep. it uploads this all to their website so you can track your sleep! its hella awesome, and id like to mention, i am a kick ass sleeper!

That brings me to the next selling point for the fitbit, which is their website! all the data collected by your fitbit is auto uploaded to their site every time you pass near your docking station, and translated into cool graphs and whatnot of your steps taken, calories burned, distance traveled and other spiffy things, so you can track your daily activity. You can also use the site to track your intentional workouts, like weight lifting, swimming, or other things the fitbit by its nature cannot track. It will calculate calories burned during those activities somehow using your BMI and all. so it can supposedly get a pretty accurate count of calories burned!

Ive only had the fitbit for 2 days, and haven’t been biking or swimming, but just wearing it and having it track my steps has made a pretty spiffy graph of my daily calorie burn.

You can also track your diet which is pretty awesome, put in what you eat and it will tell you how many calories it was and if your a net positive or negative for the day/week. Great way to keep on a reasonable diet and find out how your workouts/diet are paying off. you can do some other things like track weight and whatnot, but I’m not going to post screenshots of that, at least not till i get in better shape

So in short, the fitbit is awesome, i love it after only 2 days use. defiantly recommend it for anyone trying to get in shape. Especially recommend it to anyone trying to loose weight that had an affinity for spiffy gadgets. More pictures of the web interface after the break.

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Just discovered a whole new world of happy today with Google Chrome Extensions!!! i was still hanging onto Firefox for some tasks because chrome didn’t yet allow stumble-upon or anything yet. but its a brand new browser today! To play with any of these awesome new toys the first thing you will need to do is upgrade to the newest version of the Chrome Beta. after your upgraded just click here for a list of awesome extensions. Here are a few of my favorites:

• Chrome Milk – Remember the milk for Chrome
• Number One – Gmail, Google Voice, Google Wave and Google reader notifier
• Chromed bird – For all your twitter needs
• Chrome Reload – reload page every X seconds
• Stumble-Upon – Its stumble upon for chrome!!!!
• Ad-Thwart – An ad-blocker for chrome! Finally!!!

Love it!!