Wednesday 27 February 2008

Earthquake in London

This early morning, at around 1AM, I was laying down on the sofa talking with a friend, who was sitting on a small table in front of the sofa.
At some point I felt like an earthquake, and I said that to my friend, who answered me: "we are in London, there cannot be earthquakes, it was just me shaking the table". Then he moved again his body, and I felt another shake.

Well, this morning news were full of reports about an earthquake in London, shouting things like "Biggest earthquake in London in 25 years", it seems of about 5.3 Richter, just before 1AM!!!!

So I felt a real earthquake, not just my friend shaking his bottom side :)

Tuesday 26 February 2008

Remember the license, remember

Have you ever got any issue with the license of a command line tool?
Well, I've got one that caused me to loose half a day!
The tool I am using is PsExec, part of the Windows Sysinternals suite.

Wonderful suite, but when you use for the first time most of its tools, a dialog like this appears:

If you are working interactively, that's obviously not an issue, you read the license, you print it if you wish so, and then you freely decide if agreeing or not, but what if you are not in interactive mode? What if psExec is being used by some service, which is running using the Local System Account?

Yeah, probably after loosing half a day you will have an intuition, and you will log on as Local System (i.e. like i did here) to accept that license, but possibly you will not, and you will go on banging your head on why in earth that service is running perfectly in machine1, but stop to work somewhere in the middle in machine2.