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If you’re trying to print EIIS from Peoplesoft, you may run into a spot of trouble. If you are unable to print it may have to do with your Peoplesoft ODBC driver. The driver should be 7.62, but in some cases a later driver has been installed.

You can check by going under Start – Settings – Control Panel - Administrative Tools – Data Sources (ODBC) – Drivers. If you don’t have 7.62 there, here’s how to get it there and be a happy Peoplesoft camper once more.

I needed to quickly identify the CDROM and hard drives present in one of my Sun machines. A quick way to get at your CDROM is to simply mount the disk using the simlink that Solaris 7 and up create called /dev/sr0. To find all the hard drive devices, I simply used the format command as if I were going to erase the disks. It gives you a list of all available devices, but be careful with that one!

If anyone ever asks you to install MathType on their machine, do everything in your power to persuade them otherwise. You will be unleashing a monster so unwieldy and horrendous that you will never forgive yourself. It is so much more trouble than its worth, and there are much better solutions to clean, consistent, and exchangable equation formats. This program was a disaster prior to our Office XP upgrades, but afterwards the two became my creature gone mad. And I fear that any subsequent upgrades are just as likely to mutate it further.
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Careful with Now Up-to-Date and Panther upgrades. The publisher notes:

We are currently testing a new version of Now Up-to-Date & Contact for “Panther” - Mac OS X 10.3 - compatibility. Our new Now Up-to-Date & Contact 4.5.1 includes several new features and stability improvements and will ship in December 2003.

This morning I installed ppower4, a great little script and java archive for TeX and PDFs. ppower4 will take your LaTeX-generated PDF and make it navigable and suitable for presentation. ppower4, according to the feature set and demos, and what I’ve heard back from my users, does a nice job of retaining transitions, effects, animations, tables of contents, etc.

I thought I would list the steps out for myself on Linux so I’m never caught without them. Hopefully I will have Windows instructions soon. Mac instructions seem unnecessary at this point seeing that there’s an Applescript that will work provided you’ve installed the TeX distribution by Gerben Wierda.

1. Download Java and install it wherever.
2. Download the ppower4 style files and put them in your local TeX tree. In my case this meant making the directory /usr/share/texmf/ppower4 and depositing the *.sty files in it from the website.
3. Run mktexlsr to refresh the TeX cache.
4. Copy the pp4p.jar file to the lib directory under wherever you placed your Java installation.
5. Edit the ppower4 script, also obtainable from the website, to point to the location of the pp4p.jar file.
6. Put Java and the ppower4 script in your system-wide path.
7. Tell your users that the command is available!

So what’s the deal with the fixworm7.iso file that OIT posted in September to help stem the tide of Stealther, Blaster, Welchia, etc? Its not an iso at all! I think someone just took Easy CD Creator’s .cif format and removed the extension, replacing it with .iso. Well, I know its long past due, but I finally stored it in my isoshare as a true-blue 9660.

And the real kicker? As a true iso the file is only 108megs.

Ran into the Linux 2.4 kernel’s 2gb file size limitation today. Can’t wait for 2.6. Anyway, had to resort to using dump for a multipart backup. Found a useful post (that I’ve mirrored in the full text of this entry) over on HP’s support site that allowed me to avoid sifting through dump’s man pages for now. I may go back to read up on it though because it apparently also does incremental backup.
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