Blog Test 1 2 3 Moving from Go Daddy to Blogger hosting test

This is a test blog that was introduced on June 22 from Trasente Dot Com. This blog could be used for ongoing technical discussions and / or business related topics. This topic will focus on direct interaction from me in publishing my first blog and will collect useful links and perspectives of how blog's are used along the way.

Lets get started!

Can we post a url back to the launching website here? http://www.trasente.com/
As a further test I also applied this link to the graphic in the top left corner which is now outlined in purple.


Here is a test paste from another random web link:

http://www.trasente.com/images/picasso189.jpg


as a picture link:






and a blog link:

http://science-community.sciam.com/forum.jspa?forumID=300001666


This is a test at a direct copy and paste of a graphic from another Windows application.



Looks like you can wrap text around the picture post's. Similar to that of web page HTML editor.

New Update 9/12/06 - Still playing with the blog thing a little bit. I think I have a much better understanding of how these work now. Seem to be an easy and effective means of administrating dynamic web content that changes a lot. This allows updates to content with no direct web site maintenance or html tagging required. It also allows for a quick way to allow multiple update from many users and administrates the publishing process, time stamping, content review, etc. I see now while these are becoming so popular and haw they can be used.

After some investigation, I found that the GoDaddy service did not have a link to the many RSS search feeds? They do not publish to any of the feed services and as such they are content unsearchable? This is a major malfunction to their offering as no one will find the content unless they specifically know where to look. What a marketing brain-fart! As usual their support is useless and rambles off some BS about updating the search engines directly which is of course not possible since the engines are updated by crawlers offline, anyways long story short, I am trying another hosting service to see how this one works.

More to follow ....

Windows XP Date and Time Keeps Changing Mystery

Yesterday I noticed last Friday that my weather page was being updated with the wrong date. This started a series of investigations to get to the bottom of what seemed to be a minor issue. The first action was to log on to the server and change the date and time back to current.

Issue solved, or so I thought. Several hours later I noticed the date was wrong again. Hmmmm, this is odd. Perhaps my battery in CMOS is failing? So my first test was to check out the BIOS. All appeared fine upon inspection and all other settings remained in tact. Back to XP to see if I could recreate the event. Sure enough a pattern is developing here. I noticed that the date and time were always going to January 2 1999 and +14 hours or so for the time setting. This is odd.

Virus? Mal ware? After a series of exhaustive searches, no joy! No other reports of similar patterns found in my normal support sites. Lets check, my PC-Cillin virus scans revealed no problems found. Subsequent scans with CA web scanner confirmed, no viruses found? Microsoft windows defender checks clean, Ad-Aware clean, Spybot clean? HiJackThis log shows no unusual events or recent changes, here is the current short version log:

Log file of HijackThis v1.99.1
Scan saved at 3:46:47 PM, on 7/17/2006
Platform: Windows XP SP2 (WinNT 5.01.2600)
MSIE: Internet Explorer v6.00 SP2 (6.00.2800.1106)

Running processes:
F:\WINDOWS\System32\smss.exe
F:\WINDOWS\system32\winlogon.exe
F:\WINDOWS\system32\services.exe
F:\WINDOWS\system32\lsass.exe
F:\WINDOWS\system32\svchost.exe
F:\WINDOWS\System32\svchost.exe
F:\WINDOWS\system32\spoolsv.exe
F:\WINDOWS\Explorer.EXE
F:\Program Files\Symantec\pcAnywhere\awhost32.exe
F:\WINDOWS\System32\svchost.exe
F:\WINDOWS\system32\ctfmon.exe
C:\initialed\Processes\procexp.exe
F:\WINDOWS\system32\wscntfy.exe
F:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe
F:\PROGRA~1\BEAGLE~1\CLOCKW~1\CWSrvc.exe
F:\Program Files\vws\vws.exe
F:\Program Files\Hijack This\HijackThis.exe

O4 - HKLM\..\Run: [Windows Defender] "F:\Program Files\Windows Defender\MSASCui.exe" -hide
O4 - HKCU\..\Run: [ClockWatch.exe] F:\PROGRA~1\BEAGLE~1\CLOCKW~1\ClkWtBkg.exe
O4 - HKCU\..\Run: [Regrun2] F:\PROGRA~1\Greatis\REGRUN~1\WatchDog.exe
O4 - HKCU\..\Run: [Registry] "F:\Program Files\Greatis\RegRunSuite\lsoon.exe" -1 30 "F:\Program Files\Greatis\RegRunSuite\rescue.exe" /a "c:\backreg\rstore.ini"
O16 - DPF: {6414512B-B978-451D-A0D8-FCFDF33E833C} (WUWebControl Class) - http://update.microsoft.com/windowsupdate/v6/V5Controls/en/x86/client/wuweb_site.cab?1138492117453
O16 - DPF: {7B297BFD-85E4-4092-B2AF-16A91B2EA103} (WScanCtl Class) - http://www3.ca.com/securityadvisor/virusinfo/webscan.cab

More searching continues but still no joy!

Having found no similar cases in web searching, I proceeded to using the "process of elimination". Using the system task tool I stopped all but the most basic system tasks and then sure enough after watching for hours the time remained the same. Therefore, I concluded, there is a software thingy that is changing the date. Staring up the applications one by one I determined that the weather Ambient VWS weather station application when running would recreate the condition. After numerous reconfigurations and reinstalls of the software, the mystery turned out to not be software at all. It was in fact the Oregon Scientific WMR-968 weather sensor collector. The batteries had run out and the unit was reporting the 1999 date through the collector. Apparently the software has a feature that changes the time of the PC to the time of the collector to ensure the database entries for historical weather data remains accurate.

After replacing the batteries and resetting the collector all has been running with no more date issues to report.

Joy at last

MSMONEY 2007 and GM Card (gmcard money MSMONEY gm card online error)

My GM Card automatic (background) Microsoft Money updates appear to have encountered an issue in my configuration. My online updates for only this one of my defined credit card accounts began getting an error about two weeks ago.

I can go to the GMCard website and everything is fine. I can also initiate a download via money and it works. However the automatic (Background) online services no longer recognize the userid.

GM Card online support rambled off something about a purchase of the GM Card by another company and the new company does not support online banking? Has anyone else experienced this? Is there another selection for the new company that will work? I will keep exploring and post any answers that I find.

An interesting update - On September 12 @ 13:03 the update started working again? Does this mean that help desk person corrected something on the GMCARD server to allow this to work again? Or did the help desk person no know what they were talking about when they said that this function is no longer supported since the merger? I am tempted to call back when time allows to force the issue and see what the real deal is. In the meantime the updates are working again. Joy

If anyone else is experiencing intermittent loss of update like this, please let me know so I can add to the history collection in case this returns. In the meantime ... Happy updating!