Locking Firefox Settings

At work we run two web browsers namely IE and Firefox.  IE usage is on the decline as everyone is working out that IE is crap for AJAX interfaces which is what our webmail system uses.  So most people are using Firefox as it is so much faster this posed a little problem.  With Active Directory you can easily push out and lock Proxy settings for IE. 

To do with Firefox some file changes on the application itself must be set, so on our terminal servers we’ve done the following;

  1. Open a Text Editior and create a file called mozilla.txt in it add the following lines.
    •  lockPref(“network.proxy.http”,”mypoxyserver”);
    • lockPref(“network.proxy.http_port”,3128);
    • lockPref(“network.proxy.type”,1);
    • lockPref(“browser.startup.homepage”, “myhomepage”);
  2. Then byte shift the file with an offset of 13, you can use this service to do it for you.
  3. Copy the new file without editting it again, to the Firefox.exe directory as mozilla.cfg
  4. Navigate to C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\greprefs and open the file all.js in a text editor
  5. Add the line pref(“general.config.filename”, “mozilla.cfg”); to the start of the file and save.

Now when any user starts the application the homepage and proxy settings will be locked.

Cost of Diesel

Having recently purchased a new Turbo Diesel four wheel drive for my wife I have taken more notice of the cost of Diesel and I must admit it just convinces me more that Australian’s are being taken for a ride in almost all aspects of our lives.  Seriously has someone declared us as the suckers of the Global Market?

Historically Diesel has always been cheaper then Petrol where ever you go in the world by at least ten cents per litre, so why is it in Australia Diesel is nearly always more expensive?  Well according to the industry even though Diesel uses less crude oil to produce per litre then Petrol in Australia the reason the cost of Diesel has gone up and continues to go up is that we now have more complex refining methods on Diesel due to new Commonwealth Fuel Quality Standards.

I take exception to this as I contacted a refiner in Singapore to ask them if they process Diesel any differently for Australia as to their other markets and was told that these new refining methods are about reducing the sulphur content to 50 mg/kg (50 ppm) which is aligning Australia with international best practice for sulphur content in diesel fuel.  Ie these methods do not make Australian Diesel more expensive then our oversea’s cousins.  The reason I asked a Singapore vendor is because firstly Singapore accounts for a quarter of Australian Petrol and Diesel supply, with the other three quarters being produced domestically.  Secondly Australian fuel pricing is set via an import parity system governed by the Singapore Benchmark Price (Gasoil).

Which brings me to my next issue why the hell do we allow the Industry to base their pricing on the Singapore benchmark when it only accounts for a quarter of our fuel supply?  Shouldn’t they be forced to base their pricing on local production costs rather then what it costs in Singapore?  I can understand why they want to, they make more money this way, but the ACCC needs to grow some balls and do something about it because it’s just an excuse to bash us based on international crude oil pricing.

But lets look at it from the industries import parity system for a second, lets forget we produce most of our fuel domestically for a moment.  Considering that the Australian dollar is the strongest it’s been in decades with it hitting 0.87-0.88 USD cents this should have a dramatic and felt positive effect on local fuel pricing, yet it continues to go up with the industry claiming they are passing on great discount cycles.. sorry but I call shenanigans.  

Lets do a quick comparison on fuel pricing around our neck of the woods, all pricing is relevant as of 9:30am this morning for today;

  • Auckland, NZ            Diesel 0.88, ULP 1.34
  • Brisbane, AU             Diesel 1.22, ULP 1.18
  • Singapore                 Diesel 0.95, ULP 1.29
  • United Kingdom        Diesel 2.23, ULP 2.28

All pricing above is in AUD based on cents per litre.  As you can see Australia is the ONLY place where the cost of Diesel is higher then ULP, what more telling is the pricing comparison for New Zealand, that’s the type of ratio I’d expect to see here in Australia given that according to Shell 25% of all Diesel in New Zealand in imported from Singapore. Wow that’s exactly the same amount Australia imports from Singapore, so why is there such a dramatic bloody difference in pricing.  Shell also state this Diesel conforms to New Zealands NZPPSR regulations on fuel standards, which are the equivalent of the Commonwealth standards.

Even in Britain where fuel pricing in General is monstrous Diesel is cheaper then ULP, so why then in Australia are we paying more for the stuff?  Think it’s time to write a letter to the minister.

Nothing to watch…

I don’t watch a lot of TV in the normal sense even if I do pay through the nose for my Foxtel Platinum package.  I might watch the cooking channel or discovery once in a while but by and large the TV is the domain of my children.  What I do do however is watch a lot of shows from the net, and it has occurred to me lately that during this part of the year there is sweet fuck all around.

I mean when they are available there is plenty of stuff I love but they are all on at the same bloody time, so I won’t see most till the end of the year or next year. 

Here’s the list;

  • Heroes (though it is over rated)
  • Star Gate Atlantis
  • Star Gate SG1
  • Top Gear
  • Prison Break
  • Dexter
  • Hotel Babylon (wtf is with 8 episode seasons?)
  • Battle Star Galactica (wish they’d stop the whole messiah shit)
  • Torchwood

I mean to combat this void I am getting Hell Kitchen 3, but the yanks mess with it an bleep out all the profanity so every second sentence out of ramsey’s mouth is “come here *bleep* you *bleep* *bleep* *bleep*” and then if it’s not Ramsey it’s the contestants getting hit with the bleep stick.  So I’d actually rather wait and watch it on foxtel where it gets aired in all it’s glory.

All in all Australian TV even paid for has turned to shit.  There is all this hype at the moment about the local production called “Sea Patrol” omfg it’s a train wreck on film, they could have at the very least hired some ex-navy NCO’s as consultants, I have rarely seen something soo bad… I mean this is in the same league as the monstrosity that was the Wing Commander movie.  At this point I think they should have just asked the ABC for the scripts from the old Patrol Boat series and remade them.

Australia is always told by the Government how well off we are and how great we benchmark to the other OECD countries, well I’m sorry but as far as development goes I feel we are bordering 3rd World Country status technology and infrastructure wise.  Lets look at this, we are taxed though our eye balls and then when you add all the extra things we have to pay for in reality we pay more in tax then France.  I don’t mind paying taxes they are very much a part of a developed societies life, however you are ment to get something for these taxes, they should add to national development and provide services.

 I live in Brisbane, that’s meant to be a great modern city.  I pay $300+ a week in taxes, yet I still have to pay for private health insurance as at the moment you wouldn’t want your pet relying on the current public health system since the Government has starved it of resources in a bid to force everyone into a HMO type system the US has since we all know how great that is right?  I am only allowed to use 140 Litres of water a day, I mean ffs I have to have a 4 minute shower and can’t wash my damn car, what modern city runs out of water?

It gets better though because our road network is so messed up I can’t get any where on the north side of brisbane in under 2 hours.  Sorry did I say road network? thats a tad misleading as it doesn’t really work well enough to be called a network but they’ve come up with such a great plan to fix this that only requires us all to pay 4 buck tolls if we want to use it.

Hello??? isn’t this shit my rates, taxes and car registration is ment to pay for???  Someone please for the love of god tell me what value for money I am getting here?  Oh I know it must pay for the ambulance service right? wrong we get slugged extra there on our power bills to pay for that.. ok so it must be the Police yeah? opps nope forgot last time I called them about a stolen car they didn’t even bother showing up guess their quota was low and they had to get more speeding tickets issued.

Don’t get me started on the state of our Telephony and Data costs comparies to other nations or the bullshit that goes on with fuel (comments on that to come later).

Australia sorry but we are being taken for a ride, income tax and a GST that’s just criminal to start with, don’t forget the duty taxes as well.  If you sit down and calculate the tax we pay plus all the additional essential services we have to pay for, you come to the conclusion we are one of the highest taxed countries in the world, not the lowest.  Every year our cost of living increases, at this rate we’ll be passing on our mortgages to our children and working till the day we die.  What a sad state of affairs we have allowed to occur.   We are paying the price of apathy and gluttony.

Windows Deployment Services

Microsoft in the wisdom released WDS as a stealth nerf to RIS with Service Pack 2 of Windows 2003 server.  Service Pack 1 versions shipped with the tried the tested Remote Installation Service (RIS).  Personally I feel Microsoft has jumped the gun a bit here by introducing WDS in the R2 release, documentation is very very light on and there is alot of confusing about how to deploy XP via WDS. 

 WDS is the intended Deployment system for Server 2008 and is focused on deploying Vista and not XP systems.  They key to deploying XP with WDS basically comes down to the understanding that you will require a copy of Vista, even if you are not intending to deploy it.  Below are the rough steps I use to deploy XP and Vista with WDS.

  1. Install WDS (do not configure)
  2. Install WAIK – Windows Automated Installation Kit, this is an external download from here. Be warned it’s quite large, but required none the less.
  3. Start WDS Legacy Services – Use the Wizard to add your XP unattended image, I use nlite to create mine you can find it here.
  4. Now configure WDS, running it after Legacy puts WDS into Mixed Mode.  Configurations options to check are;
    • ‘PXE Responce Settings’ = ‘Respond to All’
    • ‘Advanced’ = ‘Allow windows deployment services to dynamically discover valid domain servers’ and ‘Yes, I want to authorise the WDS server in DHCP’
    • ‘DHCP’ = ‘Do not listen on port 67’ and ‘Configure DHCP option 60 to PXE Client’
  5. From the WDS console you need to now add the ‘boot.wim’ from the Vista installation media to the boot images and add ‘install.wim’ to the install images.  The later is only required if you want to deploy Vista.  However you must use the ‘boot.wim’ from vista, without it your XP clients will not get a boot image via tftp when they try to start with PXE.
  6. At this point you should be able to boot a client machine from PXE and have a selection of OS’s to install.

The above assumes that WDS and DHCP are running on the same server and that you have a domain.  WDS is easier to setup then RIS, but at the moment its still alittle bit of voodoo as very little seems to be known about it.

What is it about Vista?

I am yet to have a pleasent experience with Vista, and trust me it’s not like I haven’t been trying.  I’ve had some version of Vista installed on one of my many machines since it went RC1.  At work my new laptop runs the 32bit Buisness versions and well it’s just plan slow, I look over to one of my developers offices and the same machine running XP Pro is nice and fast.  Add to this the daily frustration of Vista’s intolerably slow tcp/ip stuck and the fact it doesn’t remove deleted file icons from its cache decently and well in my world it’s rubbish.

 So given this one may wonder why on earth I would want to take my perfectly working gaming machine with XP Pro 64bit and install Vista Ulitmate 64bit.  The answer “World in Conflict”.  See the Beta looks magic with dx9 and my twin 8800GTS cards, but as it’s also a dx10 title it should look more magic on Vista.  Hense I began traveling down the road to oblivion.  The nano second after I blew away the partition it occured to me it might have been prudent to image my old installation first as this in all likely hood would end in tears and much raging.

The machine in question is;

  •  Tyan K8WE Motherboard 
  • 2x AMD Opteron 265 Processors
  • 4Gb ECC Memory
  • 2x 150Gb Raptor Hard Drives
  • 3ware Raid Controller
  • 2x Geforce 8800GTS 640mb Video Cards 

So first thing on the agenda is the SLI, gotta get those twin beauty video cards rocking again so we can see WiC in all it’s glory.  Installed the lastest Nvidia beta drivers for Vista 163.x as these even contain a special patch just for WiC, reboot and whoa whats this? Code 12?? Device cannot find enough free resources?? WTF??

After alittle head scratching I figure out this is caused due to the way Vista now talks to the bios, in fact Tyan as well as other vendors have had to release new bios revisions to correct problems just like this one.  See if I drop my memory back down to 2Gb it’s all fine SLI works, but um like I’m gonna do that.  So I tweak with the memory hole settings in the bios but alas I’m not having much joy. 

After a good 4 hours of swearing at it, the conclusion once more is Vista just isn’t ready.  SLI has been around for a bloody long time now, but you just have to visit the nvidia forums and will see countless threads on Code 12 without solutions.  Disappointing to say the least.  At any rate at 10pm I reinstalled XP Pro 64 and everything is back to normal.