This week I’ve spent a couple of days at a customer’s site setting up some new servers for them in a (pretty) new Active Directory environment. That all sounds nice but its also quite limited as these guys only have control over a specific OU, so high level tasks are not an option here - now not that I would usually require them for the stuff I need to do here.. Just let me create some service accounts and domain local & global groups and I’ll be happy on my way in this setup.
However there are 2 types of high level accounts… One gives you control over the specific OU this site has, and has nice ‘Full Control’ rights and everything to prove it, a second one is to administer GPO objects. Now as this thing I’m doing requires some setting up of policies on the boxes in particular I’m in requirement of this GPO administrative account, which can create and edit GPO objects but has no other rights on the OU, including the creation of the required ACL’s. This ends up in the GPO account not being able to create them.. Not to forget that the OU administrative account has no right to create any GPO’s whatsoever…
So we’re stuck..
Or aren’t we ? After having a look around in the group membership of both accounts the OU admin is a member of the “full control” group that corresponds with this OU. Now usually you would expect this group to be outside the OU where it applies on, to prevent you from increasing your own access level. BEHOLD !!! Not over here.. The group in question is under my control so what happened when I added the GPO admin to it ? Nothing, well, it joined the group - no error box - nada - niente - hoplakidee - everything returned error code 0×00. So I end up with a GPO administrator that I was able to elevate myself to the level of an OU administrator. Although the overall design is pretty good these little design quirks do make it possible to circumvent the entire gizmotron and give users (or nasty admins :-D ) the possibility to end up with access rights they’re not supposed to have.
Sometimes it feels good to outsmart those who claim to know it all…
With Primary Star last weekend the 8bit electrons got flowing again in the bloodstream. The advantage when you’re not organizing a party for once is that you have the time to actually do something with the hardware except doing stuff for the competitions. The overall party feeling was there with the right people that I’m used to meeting at all the other parties and some new faces that hopefully we’ll see around for some more as well. To finish the party off we ended up at DCMP’s place where we had a small after party meeting going thru the snapshots and generally bullshitting from various topics moving from Breakpoint organizing to cat vomit.
Downpart was the chaotical organizing, if any in total… The room was not finished when arriving, the compo’s were delayed without any announcements, the fast compo rules were not clear whatsoever and a huge list of mistakes were made during the competitions - mostly in selecting the correct SID version for demos and music competitions… Some would consider this utter blasphemy but lets just say it would be nice if it were a bit more prepared the next time.
So as I found the time for some computer activity for once I joined Bud (Warriors of the wasteland) to create a fast demo. I quickly did some general background layout and some sprites while thinking up a scenario and overall look and feel. Bud threw it all together with some fancy 6510 assembler code and additional graphics. The music, normally used by Bud as a placeholder while coding, we found lying around on a disk. For the remainder of the compos the music competition was the highlight of this party, again if you forget that multiple tunes were launched on the wrong SID, with the Democompo looking promising as well. Some nice releases here with a good outlook on the future competitions - not only on Primary Star but on other parties located on mainland Europe as well.
At the same time I’ve goofed around with my camera for about half an hour and took some snapshots. Most of them are of Commodore sceners but the 2 snapshots I like are posted below.
Yes they are Commodore related but hey you have to stay within the spirit of the thing, no? The first one is DCMP’s C64 with this old sticker “Geen Printmogelijkheid” (No printing possibility) attached to it. Most likely a leftover from a former life of this C64 where it was some kind of shared computer in a classroom or library - but with sadly enough no printer attached to it. The second ‘flying datasette’ is a scene found during the treasure hunting funcompo where a small patch of forest was decorated with Commodore stuff such as datasettes and joysticks.
This weekend its time for Primary Star, a Commodore 64 party held in the little village of Reusel in Holland. The last 2 editions I helped to organize but this year I’m no longer a part of the organizational crew. Mostly because I’ve already got too much stuff on my hands with Tum and Breakpoint on one side, and the Fiberlan events
on the other.
However this is a good chance to get out the breadbox again and fire up the required updates, new gizmos and demo downloads for everyone to enjoy. First of all I upgraded my MMC64 to BIOS v1.0 that was released some time ago. At least I seem to be able to play SID’s now without any crashes and I can start stuff with a Retro Replay connected on the passthrough slot - a very nice improvement. Quiting to BASIC with the Retro Replay (or any other ROM image I put on it, currenty an original Action Replay 6) however does not work yet. Also a sad point is that my RRNet still refuses to operate in combination with the MMC64.. The RRNet is not detected when connected to the Retro Replay, and when connected to the MMC64 card the C64 will not start.. Damn…
In the meantime some extra nice software was made available.. First of all there is a new version of WarpCopy ! Many improvements seem to have occured on the client side (thats, on the PC - harhar) but I havent launched the software yet on C64 or PC.. Will have to do this over the weekend. Secondly there’s the MMC64 browser that has to be used in cooperation with the MMC64. This litle addon is far more handy then the MMC’s original filebrowser and has the added (and priceless !) functionality that it can browse inside .D64 and .T64 images and load the applications to memory after wich they are launched - Mega Sweet !
Links:
Primary Star
MMC64
MMC Bios V1.0
WarpCopy
MMC Browser
Went down to the local Kinepolis buildings here in Brussels and had a look at Transporter 2, the latest movie written by Luc Besson but this time produced by the people form hollywood. This is one of those movies where you dont really need your brains I guess, therefor they got switched off for mots of the time but don’t let this stop you, or me for that fact.
Somehow it shows that this is a “Besson” film. Carchases, and lots of them.. And done very nicely… I don’t think they actually beat the Taxi series here but nonetheless the camera viewpoints, nice editing and the lack of all the huge explosions - ok, some exceptions exist - really lets them shine in originality. Also a nice surprise were the fighting scenes without all the pumped up metal or techno music but just the nicely choreographed action scene to look at.
For the performances in the movie I think I can be very brief… Jason Statham is maybe a wee bit too cool in his transporter role but is compensated by the comedical sidekick feature that François Berléand offers to the movie. The villans ‘Gianni’ and ‘Lola’ are just too stereotypical but as I left my brains out this didn’t really matter.
After the movie some of my companions claimed that the first ‘Transporter’ movie was actually better then this second one so I had to find out if they are correct or not. Luckily a coleague had the DivX version on his laptop one day so what better chance to have a peek at this movie. Copied it over to my laptop and onto the DivX player at home.
Basically, this first movie in the series is not really all that much different from the second installment (or should it be the other way ’round ?) with a transporting job gone wrong and an added kidnapping. So as the storyline is the same the result will be decided on the general look and feel of the first versus the second movie. And for me this is where ‘Transporter 2′ wins for me. It all feels better, somehow the storyline makes more sense - or maybe it’s just that I’ve seen way too many movies about asian maffia people that bring poor people into europe for a lot of money.
After looking at both movies, the second one is the clear winner for me.. Maybe I’d have to watch them again someday but with this kind of features, a second showing usually is not one of the possibilities as it is all too simple to predict, and well.. if you want to see repeatable action scenes you still have to go to hong kong based action movies, altho it is very clear where Luc Besson gets his inspiration.
With the passing of Bob Moog some time ago the time has come for some memorials. One of these was broadcasted on Studio Brussels’ ‘Antenna’ this evening where a private tour was given by Dan Lacksman of Telex fame thru his collection with the required demonstrations.
As I wasn’t planning on being home I had to record this show one way or the other but as I’ve got no more tapedeck around I’d had to look for an alternative. As StuBru streams on the internet in 96K the best would be to capture the stream… But how do we do that, and preferably with some freeware software.
Google turned up some hints and the program of my choices is something called ‘Silent Bob’. Its a really simple interface and basically it dumps everything that is played to your speakers to a .wav file on your harddisk.
The only configuration you need to do is to get the correct ouput level on your soundcard, as it’s very easy to set it too loud and you’ll get distortion. Once you’ve got the wave file on your disk it is ofcourse no problem to convert it to mp3 or wma.
All in all a nice tool for some quick audio capturing…
Links:
Silent Bob
Antenna
I’ve had this site spotted in my bookmarks for quite some time and by chance I spotted it’s banner on C64.sk earlier on today, so why not post about it ?
Site I’m talking about is Doc Snyder’s C64 (and some Amiga) Flashtro site.. If you wonder what a flashtro is, its a classic cracktro re-done in flash. Cracktro’s are those irritating things you would always find in front of your favourite copied game on the C64 and Amiga - for you unknowing people. I’ve already seen many of my favourites from Hotline, Bros, Genesis Project, The Movers and WOW. Also check the Amiga intro from Tristar, its Sah-Weeheet.
Now if you want to run it on “the real stuff” or ,if you should be a total sissy, an emulator (may the SID have mercy on your code !) there is a huge C64 intro archive online as well hosted by the lovely people of C64.org. At the moment it totals over 2300 intro’s.
For more Amiga (270+) and some GBA cracktro’s there’s Flashtro.com. Yes hey’re all there.. Crystal, Anthrox, Angels, Fairlight and even the ‘Fuck You Angels’ intro from Paradox. Droolarama… The site also features some intro’s from various games.. I’ve found the one from my old time favourite : Wings. Great !
Enjoy the trip down memory lane, and cranck up the volume for that SID and Paula music ;-)
Links:
Doc Snyder’s Page
C64 Intros
Flashtro
Work | FRaNKy | 
September 30, 2005 4:00 pm | 
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