I've also spent a while today playing with the new M1100 shotgun, and have added a page to the airsoft section. All I have to do now is to learn how to say "I'll be back" in an Arnold Schwarzenneger voice...

It was a long, dreary day at work, enlivened only by the news that we've been accepted onto the Rapid Adoption Programme for Titanium, Microsoft's upcoming new version of their Exchange mail server. This should kick-off around the start of the summer, by which time there should be a nice, stable Active Directory all ready for it to plug into - excellent timing. We'll be on the RAP-1 programme for Titanium, too, rather than the current RAP-2 for Server 2003, which means even more hand-holding from Microsoft themselves. Neat!

CNet brings news that Apple will finally stop manufacturing the original iMac, after five years on the market. I never used one, and I really never wanted to either, but one has to admit that the iMac was undoubtedly one of the most successful computers of recent times - PC companies often retain the same branding for just as long, but a Dell Dimension built in 2003 bears almost no resemblance, either internally or externally, to one built in 1998. Although the iMac sprouted upgrades from CD to CD-RW to DVD, for example, and from USB to FireWire, it remained basically unchanged throughout its lifespan and only last year's launch of the LCD-on-a-stalk version has significantly dampened sales.

Elsewhere, MSNBC has an article about a "mysterious object" that fell from the space shuttle Columbia after it had been in orbit for about a day. The foot-long debris, which re-entered and burned up completely, was tracked and logged automatically by the Air Force's missile warning radar systems but apparently didn't ring alarm bells and wasn't noticed until the accident investigation teams started gathering in any data that could possibly be of interest.

“It was something that more than likely came loose,” Air Force Brig. Gen. Duane Deal speculated last month. Deal, a member of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, is also commander of the 21st Space Wing at Peterson Air Force Base.

So, we've set a date for the Active Directory migration at work - the weekend of the 5th and 6th April, a little over two weeks away. I'm half excited and raring to go, and half paralysed with fear - which is fairly normal for a major network upgrade. We have an excellent fall-back path if it all goes pear shaped, but after all the fuss I've made that isn't an attractive option - this one has to work well, and straight out of the box. However, for virtually the first time in my twenty year career in IT I have some major league hand-holding available in the shape of consultancy Eurodata and Microsoft themselves - and they have as much to lose as I do. It's a reassuring thought.

I always forget how bad I actually am at soldering until I'm sat there with solder and hot iron in hand... It's not something I have to do very often, and it usually takes me four or five joints to regain the knack -unfortunately, I usually only have to make two or three joints, and often at an awkward angle on some subsystem in situ. I opened up the PC at the weekend to replace a blown disk activity LED, and it was a painful experience indeed - and if it had been a data-bearing connection rather than just secondary monitoring, I would not have been satisfied with my work. I'll be making some power distribution cables for the new UPS system at the weekend, so I'll have to remember to practice a little before the real thing.

The new UPS arrived today, so I'll just toss a few news links out and go back to thinking about cables...

CD price-fixing suit nears payout - 3.5 million US consumers to get $13.60 each

SETI@home to start doing something useful with all that data.

Airsoft Retreat has published an excellent article on converting a stock Marui SR-16 to a Knight's M5 match rifle - full of useful techy details and comparisons between different manufacturers' components, and provides an interesting counterpoint to the M4 assault rifle conversion performed on my gun. Oh, and I ordered the damn shotgun, too, which really must be the last one for now. I'll need to bolt on some real-steel cosmetic oddments before I have quite the look I'm after, of course, and then buy an extra gun case, and a sling, and some lightweight BBs for the faux shotshells, and more gas, and... but after that I'll stop!

Elsewhere, via my friend Graham's sometime-blog Ting! - which Infamous Criminal are you? Apparently I'm the Marquis de Sade, which should come as no great surprise to anyone who knows me...  [Aside: I disagree that de Sade counts as a criminal, though - history has successfully blurred the boundaries between his imagination and reality, but most experts now agree that his behaviour was far less outrageous than is commonly thought]  I was at Graham's site to check out his new airsoft pistol, though, having infected him with the bug last time he visited. But, "Dude, you're getting a Glock!"  <shakes head>

A story on AP today says that measurements made by the Mars Odyssey spacecraft show that the high radiation levels on the surface of Mars would make manned exploration especially dangerous - but ironically the same report suggests the presence of massive amounts of water! At the North pole, apparently, frozen water makes up as much as 75 percent by volume of the top 3 feet or so of soil. "We're talking ice with a little bit of dirt mixed in it", says JPL mission scientist William Boynton, "and not the other way around".

Elsewhere, Dan of Dan's Data has posted what must surely be the definitive guide to lighting up one's PC -  fluorescents, electroluminescents, LEDs, illuminated fans and drive cables, bubble tubes, you name it... when Dan tackles a subject, it goes down hard. I'm extremely fond of Dan's writing, actually, as much for his wonderful geek-humour style as the rigorous, in-depth technical content, and I often dip back into the huge list of articles online for fun - I'm currently giggling over http://www.dansdata.com/topten.htm.

Yesterday evening I was just thinking about starting a weblog entry when we had another power cut, apparently the same problem that plagued us for several days over the new year. This was annoying enough in itself, but when the power was restored sometime overnight the surges and spikes killed off our ADSL router - one of the few hi-tech devices in the house that isn't protected by some kind of filter or UPS. BT turned up and replaced it without too much fuss, but I guess I'll have to buy that third UPS I promised myself after all...

"For every fatal shooting, there were roughly three non-fatal shootings. And, folks, this is unacceptable in America. It's just unacceptable. And we're going to do something about it."

Mad, bad, and dangerous to know... Well, definitely the latter, at least, from what I read elsewhere...

Today I finally managed to solve an annoying problem that has been nagging at me since I first noticed it last summer. We have a little radio receiver that synchronises one of the main servers with the atomic clock time signal from Rugby, and this time is then distributed to the other members of the network - the desktop PCs via a NET TIME command in the login scripts, the NT servers with Doug Hogarth's excellent TIMESERV service, the new Server 2003 systems through the built-in W32TIME, and various other network devices via industry standard SNTP.

This had all been working very nicely for three or four years until, for no readily apparent reason, it all started to fall apart... When I noticed a one minute discrepancy between the time server and the other NT servers, I restarted the appropriate services and didn't think too much about it - but the next time it caught my eye the difference had risen to two minutes, and then shortly after that to three, and it was plain that something, somewhere was badly wrong... The clock and the time server stayed in perfect synchronisation, and every other server slowly drifted further and further out of step.

I've been fiddling with this on-and-off all through the winter without success or even insight, but without too much urgency as I knew that the complete change of architecture due with the imminent Active Directory installation would almost certainly take care of the problem. The difference wasn't really visible to the users, but of course eventually someone in my department noticed, although fortunately it was the junior department manager and not the (considerably less tolerant) senior one. Either way the cat was out of the bag, though, and I had to do something about it.

To be honest, I'm still not sure what was actually causing the problem, but some experimenting with NET TIME soon showed that querying the time at the domain and querying the time at a specific server yielded the two different values... although the primary time source in the client configuration was set to the time server itself, the NT servers also had a secondary source set to the default domain, and for some reason they were synchronising with the latter.

I've found a marvellous little PC gadget in the shape of the MoJoMeter from remarkable newcomer Retrosystem. It connects to the motherboard header in place of the usual LED, and displays disk activity on a cute little analogue VU meter - illuminated by blue and red LEDs to show medium and heavy disk activity. I would have ordered a pair in a second if I was still in case-modding mode, but now I think they'll have to wait until the novelty of airsoft has worn off a little. Meanwhile modding site GideonTech, where I found the link, has an article on making the DIY equivalent. As usual at GideonTech, it's an excellent guide - if you have sufficient electronics cojones...

The rubberised Hogue grips fit very nicely into the hand, and the entire gun is very solid and weighty - heavy enough, in fact, to stand upright balanced on the base of the magazine. I've decided to use the webbing combat holster for this gun (in spite of the all-in wrestling with industrial-strength Velcro that reconfiguring it will involve) and move the Beretta into a rather elegant shaped leather shoulder holster now on its way from Dowlings - another of the handful of UK companies facing extinction under the proposed (and highly misguided) ban on Brocock air cartridge replicas.

Ahhhhh, the end of the week at last. Phew!

The silencer is purely cosmetic, of course - most of the noise with airsoft is from the internal mechanics, in an AEG, or from the exhaust as the slide moves back in a gas gun... no significant sound energy is emitted from the muzzle of the gun, so there is very little to silence! However, this Tanio Koba model certainly looks the part, doubling both the weight and length of the weapon and making a wonderful steel-on-steel grating sounds as it screws on... I need to replace the foam lining of the case, however, as the M11 is rather fatter than most handguns and the lid is a struggle to close, but a quick trip to a foam rubber stall at the local market tomorrow will probably suffice - I anticipate having to modify the rifle case I bought for the assault rifle, as well, to accommodate the bulk of drum magazine and side-by-side lo-caps.

All I seem to have done here, recently, is to bitch about work - so:

With most of the lawsuits resolved in one way or another Microsoft are attempting to corner every remaining market niche - the last few months have brought the acquisition of Connectix's virtual machine technology, the release of their first entries into the potentially lucrative human resources and customer relationship management markets, a smart new release of the Picture It image editing app intended to go head to head with Adobe's Photoshop Elements and the venerable PaintShop Pro, and a new "youth-orientated" instant messaging app which is probably as bad as it sounds. Go, Bill, go!

However, Microsoft are still embroiled in several non-government court cases, including one they brought over use of the name "Lindows" for a commercial Linux distribution. These proceedings suddenly became very peculiar yesterday, when the defendant, Lindows.com, was granted the right to bring various internal Microsoft documents covering the historic 1988 Apple vs. Microsoft case over ownership of the graphical user interface itself. I really don't think it's relevant, as the heart of the case was whether fundamental concepts such as the waste bin, pull-down menus, and overlapping windows could be actually copyrighted themselves. Apple lost their claim that they could, and Lindows.com evidently hopes to show that the word "window", as well as the concept of one, is a generic term and therefore cannot be trademarked.

It's a clever defence, if not a valid one - but anti-Microsoft feelings still run high and with Bill's habit of telling it like it is in email there may well be enough background material to guarantee a prejudiced trial - and Bill is selling shares, this week...

Another day, another dollar - well, 70¢ after tax... It turns out that our soon-to-be-defunct R&D department was hosting some fairly important IT services for another department of which I was barely aware, and once R&D is dissolved I'll have to take them into my network. It will only be another thirty-odd users, which is not a problem in itself, but they mostly seem to be some kind of electronics design engineers and have all sorts of awkward requirements - fat pipes to the main R&D facility in France, unfamiliar high-end CAD software, their own email domain, and several other little annoyances. I'm sure that I can integrate them well enough, but only if I'm given the time to do it - and time is something that I'm extremely short on right now. Oh, well...

STOP PRESS: Apple computers not perfect, after all!

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