IIS logfile rotation is pretty decent these days but archiving is, as far as I know still non-existent. IISFAQ has something in Article 141
but I think that's rather rudimentary.
My linux box already came with cron preset to take care of all this.
Today I wrote a rather crude batch file that looks at the date, gets the previous month from it and copies log files from that month. I needed that to get input to be processed by WebLog Expert but this could be easily modified to zip last month's logs and then delete the originals.
I need to polish the code a bit. When I'm done with it I'll post it here.
Won't be soon because next week I'll be on vacation.

I dug up my old Zenith EM camera to show to some collegues and found that someone took the trouble to put the Zenith, Zenith EM instruction manual online. It's a sturdy, heavy and robust camera which has always served me well. Perhaps I'll put my Fuiji digital and my Nikon F60 aside for a while and put a few rolls of film trough this beauty.

This morning I sat my 70-270 exam (XP pro) and boy, was it a though one! I managed to scrape trough with 922 points but that took work! Also, something funny happened, I got the same question twice.
I prepared for it with the MS-Press book a transcender CD . My strategy is always to read the book, write a summary and then take a test examn, study what I did wrong, take another, etc.. Usually 4 test examns is sufficient.
Despite other people's opinions up until now I had the impression that transcenders were a decent way to prepare for an examn. Not for this one! The transcender questions are hopelessly outdated, a large part seems to come directly from the old 2000 exam.
What to study:

• Basic TCP/IP
• Policies, what they can do and how to check if they are applied and how to force them onto a machine
• All the different ways to install and upgrade XP
• PXE booting
• Printing (spooling, queues, operating rights, pooling)
• Dial-up networking
• ICS
• Firewall
• Remote assistance and remote desktop
• What rights are needed to install hardware (printers, removable media devices)
• IIS and especially the limitations of the XP implementation
• Encryption and what you can and cannot do for a user
• Offline files
• Disks, basic, dynamic and what you can do to extend them

I'm glad it's over. In my opinion it was a lot ground to cover in a single exam. Also, 58 questions is rather a lot. Anyway, I passed it and with my old NT 4 MCSE this should make me MCSA certified now.
Next exam: 70-284, Microsoft Exchange!

Update: According to the friendly people at Transcender next time I should try and get the exam from their site instead of from the CD.

Esther wijnands's Blog My wife also made an attempt at blogging (in dutch). In my unbiased opinion (ahum!) she's not a bad writer but lacks a bit in perseverance.

Finally, Better Batteries - Technology Review
Way better batteries, commercial space exploration, am I the only one getting the idea that Heinlein is finally right? OK, the old geezer project the "shipstone" battery for the 1950s and Harriman's space exploration for the 60s and 70s but still....
Even the space elevator, which many SF writers deem a necessity for decent space exploration is now getting some of the attention it deserves. Granted, it will take quite some materials research but at least some people are taking the idea serious. (remember the space elevator from Kim Stanley Robinson's "Red Mars" which was shot down? Excellent reading though, the whole trilogy)

Jetze Mellema has an outstanding Homecomputer Collection. Who doesn't remember the old MSX machines, the commodore family and the old clunker on which I got started in the early 80s, the Acorn Electron. Those were the days...........

Kinderboerderij was, as always, a succes. Bas feeding the guinea pigs some carrot ends:

And Pien, the sow that will eat just about anything:

Looks like today won't be nearly as nice as last sunday when it was sunny enough to go to the beach at Zandvoort. Sunny enough that it was nice and warm in a sheltered spot behind a dune and my daughter managed to get her nose a bit sunburned. Still chilly wherever the wind could get at you.
(picture taken with my motorola v3 phone)
Also, tomorrow is my wife's 31st birthday and in this culture that means a lot of visiting family today. With any luck I'll find the time to take my son to the Groenendaal "kinderboerderij" to feed the pig there some scraps but I won't be able to do much else today. Not that that's bad since the weather is lousy and I haven't seen a lot of family in a while :-) While googling for a translation for kinderboerderij I came across this nice description of dutch (sub) urban living.

A new Lara Croft model seems to have been chosen. Karima Adebibe is here name. Some more here. Tasty enough but we're not going to forget Angelina Jolie's interpretation that quickly either.



I can already hear the discussions amongst the hardcore tombraider fans. "Karima!" "No Angelina!"

Me? I'm not taking sides in this. The only lara I've ever had on my computer was a tombraider the movie wallpaper.

Just like most men I like to see a woman on high heels, the higher and narrower the better. I like to see them to a calm, hip-swining casual stroll. The editors at the dutch Glamour magazine take a different view. Different enough to organize the first "stilleto run". 150 young ladies (and 1 man)on high heels do a 100 meter dash trough the most expensive shopping street of the country. All for a good cause of course. See for yourself, click on the link, vids behind the pink squares in the top-center.

Cyberhome
makes some nice DVD players including a divX player on sale here for about 60 euros. I almost bought one today. Almost because the only dealer in my home town, a branch of this chain: http://www.scheerenfoppen.nl/default01.htm but they refused to demonstrate it and wouldn't allow me to test it and bring it back if it was terrible. Shame but on such conditions I'm not buying a budget DVD player. Customer service apparantly. Well, perhaps other people do it but I'm not going to throw away a 60 euro DVD player if it's crap. Sent Cyberhome an email asking for dealer adresses.

A collegue just send me this:

Memory was something you lost with age
An application was for employment
A program was a TV show
A cursor used profanity

A keyboard was a piano
A web was a spider's home
A virus was the flu
A CD was a bank account

A hard drive was a long trip on the road
A mouse pad was where a mouse lived

And if you had a 3 inch floppy . .

. . . you just hoped nobody ever

Found Out

Memorex revives 1970s tape look for Flash disk era | Reg Hardware
Is it a tape reel? Is it a floppy disk? No, it's a tiny 16mb stick in a pretty cool exterior.

Might be a nice present for my dad, remind him of his start in IT in the mid 1970s.

Some more US sabre rattling Iraq war still in full swing and they're making threatning noises at Iran an Korea. Especially nice since North Korea always gets nervous when the south holds a major excercise. Nervouse enough to
threaten a pre-emptive attack.
It reminds me a bit of Larry Bond's Red Phoenix which is set in a second korean war in the early 90s.

Google Has a new feature which allows you to customize a startup page with RSS feeds and your gmail account. It has been available for some months now but surprisingly few people seem to know about it.

Started doing MCSE last november. Passed 70-290 with flying colors, 70-290 a litte less spectacular but still with a respectable 833 points.

Today I was doing examn training for 70-270 (win xp) which I'm starting to despise when I came across a rather bizzare registry key.
According to http://support.microsoft.com/kb/244139/en-us it's possible to set a key which allows you to generate a stop error by pressing right controll and scroll lock twice.
WTF? Whoever came up with that one?