Justin.MadIrish.net

Remember the good old days when you traded C-64 games with your friends by carrying your floppy drive over to his or her house to copy disks? Back in those days very few people had the two drives you needed to copy a disk so the entire process was a bit clunky. The first sneakernet. Remember how, even in those days, people would warn you about virus infected disks? Yeah, the good old days. Well, those days may be back thanks to those handy USB keys that we all carry around.

This past Tuesday (May 6, 2008) Microsoft made Windows XP Service Pack (SP) 3 available. Automatic updates should find and download this update. In reviewing the documentation I found that SP 3 does little to actually improve XP, but some bug fixes are included. It seems like the main gist of SP 3 is to add Vista compatibility. The official Microsoft release notes can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=68c48dad-bc34-4....

Windows DNS queries annoy the hell out of me. Sometimes when I add a new DNS entry Windows simply refuses to find it. You query it using an nslookup and things are fine, but when you point a web browser at the location things just bork up. You can manually add entries to your hosts file by editing the file C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts.

The windows hosts file works in much the same way as the /etc/hosts file on a *nix system. Windows checks this file *first* before consulting DNS to resolve names to IP addresses. This functionality is handy if you want to force a specific URL to resolve to an IP address independent of DNS. For instance, if you wanted to test out a site, but couldn't (or didn't want to) modify the DNS entry for that URL, one hacky solution is to simply modify your Windows hosts file.

For instance, let's say I wanted to add a manual resolution for the domain test.mydomain.com. I could do this by adding the entry to the Windows hosts file like so:

So I finally kicked Windows to the curb at home yesterday. It's part of an ongoing experiment and my way of celebrating the Windows Vista release. Actually, I've been crushing on this project for my MCIT course at Penn and my home workstation keeps crashing. I get up and go to grab a snack and when I come back the machine has rebooted (and been so ungracious as to not even save any of my work). After this went on for several days I finally decided to investigate. Well, actually, that's a bit of a misrepresentation. I looked at what paltry logs Windows offers and they didn't have any clue. Occasionally I'd get a "Windows has recovered from a serious error." when I logged back in after the reboot.