Ed Stoffel

From the folks that brought us BugMeNot comes a new great site.

RetailMeNot offers an interface where users can submit or pickup coupon codes for sites across the net. It's so new, there aren't codes for everything just yet, but it's a great idea and there are a lot of codes already there.

"Daring to trust God to do the impossible, Coach Taylor and the Eagles discover how faith plays out on the field --- and off."

Fred J. Gaffney, Jr. of The Washington Times wrote:

Viewing this documentary should hereafter be considered a prerequisite for participating in the debate about the national security challenges we face, and what must be done to address them. "Obsession" is an unblinking, and deeply disturbing, portrait of our most immediate and dangerous enemy, in Iraq and elsewhere -- the ideology best described as Islamofascism.

It has now come to this...

The Church of England has broken with tradition dogma by calling for doctors to be allowed to let sick newborn babies die. Christians have long argued that life should preserved at all costs - but a bishop representing the national church has now sparked controversy by arguing that there are occasions when it is compassionate to leave a severely disabled child to die.

 Continue Reading: Outrage as Church backs calls for severely disabled babies to be killed at birth, Daily Mail

With the emergence of Google Earth, designers are rethinking those ugly rooftops. This has me wondering about the impact on satellite imagery for intelligence purposes.

 Architects change their view of the lowly roof, LA Times

I'm continuing to work the problem of not being able to file share from my desktop computers to other computers on the home network. I've narrowed it down to the fact that I can't ping my own machine.

I can ping the loopback on 127.0.0.1, but not the IP address issued by DNS (192.168.0.3). I can ping every other machine on the local network, and they can ping each other, but not this machine.

I tried uninstalling Zone Alarm, and made sure no remnants were running (Start | Run | Msconfig | Startup) but nothing was left behind. I've made sure XP's firewall is off. I also went through Admin Tools | Services to compare what services are running on this machine compared to my laptop -- nothing different that should affect this.

I hate the idea of having to reinstall XP just to solve this, but it may come to that.

I tried a few other things today to get file sharing to work on my desktop computer. I read that I have to include the subnet mask in the firewall rules so I entered the IP addresses of machines I want to share files with individually using Zone Alarm's "Subnet" tab. That didn't solve the problem.

So then, I tried just pinging my desktop machine from my laptop... and it won't answer the ping. I tried pinging the desktop machine from itself, and it still won't answer the ping. I turned off its firewall - (Zone Alarm and confirmed that Windows firewall was also off). I made sure that "echo" was turned on in two places. It still wouldn't answer the ping.

Since my laptop computer will share files, I've gone through everything I can find under Networking to make sure both machines are the same. Next, I will go through Administrative Tools > Services on both machines, to see if there's something that's set differently on the desktop that's keeping it from sharing. I don't believe it's a hardware problem with the ethernet adapter because I can get on the internet just fine... but I'll try that later if I have to.

Permission to Use Network Resources

Awhile back, my ability to share files on a local network ceased... from my Windows XP Home desktop computer. When I try to "View Workgroup Computers" inside "My Network Places", the I get the error message: "\\xxxxx is not accessible. You might not have permission to use this network resource. Contact the administrator of this server to find out if you have access permission" where xxxxx is the name of my local workgroup.

The other computers on the network share files just fine including my laptop computer. A search of the phrase "permission to use network resources" turns up lots of comments about the problem but few solutions. Microsoft's Knowledge Base has one article instructing a change in the registry, but that bit was already off on my offending machine. Another KB article suggests starting the computer browser service. It was already running. The article also suggests running Netbios over TCP/IP. I already was.

I've also set a trusted range of IP addresses in Zone Alarm's firewall on each machine. I have file sharing turned on, and the workgroup name is the same on all machines. I even tried David Lawrence's suggestion of naming the user on two machines the same.

Maybe those articles will help you, but the search for my solution continues...

Gator searches for a god who will listen to him...