NASAdude

Today I went to the Natatorium for the first time. Sam and Craig were there as well. We had a swell time, and got to catch up on each other's summer activities (or lack thereof).

Craig is a man of his word. In the IM notification of the pool plans, he said he'd dive off one of the high platforms. With only a little hesitation, he jumped off the 5-meter platform. Go Craig!

I got a lot of sun! SPF 30 makes a difference, but for someone as fair-skinned as me, four hours from 1p-5p at the end of July sure packs in the UV. It's been a long time since I've gotten this much sun. It should turn into a pretty nice tan, or at least an amusing shade of red. I sure do have a lot of freckles now. Usually when I get sun I mainly see them on my arms, but they've migrated to my chest, legs, and face. Aren't they cute? Look at all the constellations! My body is a diagram of the wonders of the universe; behold and be awed and amazed!

And of course I impressed all the women with my rippling muscles and tight abs, along with my swimming prowess. I couldn't keep them from flirting with me the whole time; it's a burden being me. Or maybe that was the onset of sunstroke. We may never know.

Thanks to Craig and Sam for a fun afternoon. You're the best.

Posted by NASAdude at 11:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Long story short, I just spent the last 24 hours rebuilding my computer's OS. The warnings you hear about being careful when editing Windows registry? Absolutely true.

It finally bit me. I've edited the registry hundreds of times (literally). Finally I made an error that I couldn't fix without extreme measures. Sure, I had a backup of the registry keys, but that didn't help me since 1) I couldn't get windows to load, even in safe mode, and 2) the problem wasn't with the key information, but the permissions associated with the keys.

A "repair" using the install CD didn't work. The system wouldn't reboot into the second stage of the install... blue screen.
I did a reinstall overtop the existing Windows directory. That worked, but a lot of the programs behaved badly, even after installing overtop their previous directories. Specifically, I was running into some network problems.
At least the last step got me into the hard drive. I made a backup of everything important (the previous data backup was more than 24 hours old). Then the partition got formatted and a clean installation put on it.

Of course, that means every program had to be reinstalled, configurations restored, scheduled tasks recreated, repaired damaged blogs (how did that happen?), reinstall engines for Tcl/perl/PHP, etc.

So be careful in the registry.

So why didn't I have a system partition backup? Besides being cheap, I've found that fixing problems with a more hands-on approach has really helped keep me on top of the game. That, and I enjoy overcoming obstacles.

I did manage to get into a utility with which I had done a full registry backup only one day before. It may have been able to help by doing a registry restore, but it would only restore the registry as part of a reboot action. Unfortunately, the system blue-screens before the registry is restored. That, or the registry *keys* are restored, but not the proper permissions, and permissions are where the problem is. Either way, I'm still in the same boat.

What was I doing to start all this? I was trying to install a software package that complained about insufficient rights for a few keys. I could manually go in to fix the permissions on the sub-keys of a branch. The software would install. When I tried to apply an upgrade to the software, it used the following method: 1) verify you own a legitimate installation, 2) uninstall it, 3) install the upgrade. Upon uninstalling, the key permissions were getting set/reset to the wrong value, so step "3)" would work. It wouldn't reinstall. My solution was to apply a parent permission that applied to all subkeys to the main 'root' registry branch. Unfortunately, my change overwrote all the existing permissions rather than being appended. When it was done applying, I saw there was a problem, but instead of fixing it then (I'm pretty sure I could have re-applied new settings), I exited and rebooted. I just didn't realize how serious the problem was. Blue screen.

General 'safe mode' wouldn't work, but I could get a command prompt in safe mode. I managed to get regedit open, but couldn't "add" any new permissions. I just got error messages.

So that led to 1) the attempted repair, 2) the over-installation, 3) the reformatting and clean installation.

It's been a long day.

I'm just glad it happened on my computer and not a client's computer. But note that I was able to restore full access to the data and everything is up and running in a relatively short time. That's a good sign for all my future clients out there who are reading this.

I guess it just goes to show that I'm certainly not infallible, and we all need to be careful with regedit.

Posted by NASAdude at 11:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)