Quotas Revisited for Windows XP

The other day I provided a post about quotas that contained a simple three step process for turning quota monitoring on and logging quota events, without actually enforcing the quota. It turns out that the process works just fine with Vista and Windows 7, but it doesn’t quite work with Windows XP. Microsoft made a fix between operating systems and didn’t mention the change to anyone. Of course, this is an old story with Microsoft. You have to watch carefully because you might miss a fix and find that your perfectly functioning batch file or script suddenly stops working.

It turns out that Windows XP does things a little differently. When you execute the FSUtil Quota Track C: command, you get the expected result; tracking is enabled. The next step is to turn on exception logging using the WMIC QuotaSetting Where Caption=”C:” Set ExceededNotification=True command, which also works as expected. However, when you execute the WMIC QuotaSetting Where Caption=”C:” Set WarningExceededNotification=True command to turn on warning logging, suddenly, the exception logging is turned off. Likewise, if you were to reverse the order of the two WMIC commands, you’d find that warning logging is turned off.

Fortunately, there is a fix to this problem and it’s a very odd fix indeed. In order to enable tracking and turn on both levels of logging, you need to follow this order in Windows XP:

  1. FSUtil Quota Track C:
  2. WMIC QuotaSetting Where Caption=”C:” Set ExceededNotification=True
  3. WMIC QuotaSetting Where Caption=”C:” Set ExceededNotification=True

That’s right, you issue the exception logging command twice and you’ll find that both logging check boxes are checked. Microsoft fixed this particular error between Windows XP and Vista, but I can’t find any source that tells me about the fix. If you find one, feel free to contact me at [email protected].

A Potential Eye Gaze System Replacement

I view the computer as a great equalizer. People who have special needs can rely on a computer to give them access to the world at large and make them productive citizens. In fact, I’m often amazed at what a computer can do in the right hands. People who used to be locked away in institutions are now living independently with help from their computer. That’s why I read a ComputerWorld article today, “Look, no hands! G.tec uses brain interface to tweet” with great interest. I don’t think this system could replace eye gaze systems for those who need them today, but the system holds great potential as an eye gaze system replacement in the future.

So, just what is an eye gaze system? Imagine you have two cameras mounted on either side of a monitor. The cameras are focused on someone’s eye position. As the person moves their eyes to look at a letter on a card above the monitor, the cameras record the position and use the information to tell the computer what letter to type. Of course, eye gaze systems can be used for more than simply typing letters. Some of these systems are extremely complex and can record the viewer’s gaze at any position on the monitor. Check out the LC Technologies setup as a modern example of what an eye gaze system can do.

The problem with eye gaze systems is that they can be slow, error prone, and tiring to use. Unless the system is properly calibrated, using eye gaze to interact with a computer can become frustrating and time consuming. This brain computer interface is exciting because it promises higher speed (0.9 seconds once trained) and the potential for errors is greatly reduced. However, this system is still in its infancy, so eye gaze systems will continue to be important for people with special needs well into the future. You can read more about accessibility topics in my book, “Accessibility for Everybody: Understanding the Section 508 Accessibility Requirements.” Let me know what you think of this new technology at [email protected].

 

Calculating an Hourly Wage

Yes, I know that most people work in the garden for the sheer joy of doing so. In fact, many gardens do really end up as places to putter around; there are a few of this and a few of that, but not a lot of anything. However, when you begin looking at your garden as a means to feed your family all year round, it takes on added importance. The garden is suddenly larger and consumes a great deal more time. It’s entirely possible to get sucked into a black hole of activity and to begin wondering what you’re really getting from your efforts.

It won’t help that many people won’t understand the obsession to produce the majority of your own food. Some people will make snide remarks about how much it must cost to garden in the first place and how you could better spend your time working a second job. A lot more people won’t make any comment except a halfhearted, “Wow” and think something completely different. So just how do you handle the naysayers?

Well, there is always the argument that food from the garden is significantly fresher than the food purchased in the store and therefore more nutritious. It’s almost certain that someone will rebut your argument with the latest article saying there is no significant nutritional difference between the food you grow and the food in the store. Of course, you can break out your equally compelling article, but fail to convince the other party of anything except that you must be a fanatic. The truth likely is that there are instances where your garden grown food is indeed superior, but that the effort in growing it will eclipse any benefit for most people. In short, they really don’t want to hear that your food tastes better or is better for you.

You could also make the argument that the food grown in your garden is pesticide free. Whether such an argument holds any weight with the person you’re talking with depends on their knowledge of the adverse effects of pesticides. Many people are of the opinion that the media has done a good job of denigrating pesticides and that they can’t possibly be as harmful as many people seem to think; some people simply don’t care.

The only argument that appears to hold weight with many people is how much you make when working in the garden. So, just how do you figure it out? The best approach is to start by weighing the food you bring in from the garden. For example, one year we brought in about 50 pounds of green beans from our garden. At the time, green beans sold for $1.50 a pound in the store (they’re over $3.00 a pound now, but that’s not an appropriate comparison; I don’t have any fresh green beans now either). So, it would have cost me $75.00 to purchase the green beans in the store.

Of course, I have costs when raising the green beans. The seed packet was $2.00. I also had to water the green beans. Computing the value of the water is a little harder when you have a well; you need to approximate the amount of time the water is used to water the green beans, multiply by the flow rate of your hose, and multiply by the electrical rate for your area. I estimated that I spent another $5.00 on water (mulching significantly reduces the cost of the water). I didn’t have any cost for fertilizer; my rabbits supply all I need free of charge. (Well, not precisely, but where else would I use it?) We also don’t use any pesticides on the green beans, so there is no cost there. The profit from our green beans then is $68.00.

My wife and I worked about ten hours total on the green beans. So, you take your profit and divide it by ten to come up with an hourly rate of $6.80. That’s below minimum wage, but you’re definitely not working free of charge. Now, you need to consider the supplementary benefits of gardening. For example, the cheapest gym membership in our area is approximately $43.00 a month. Because we were in the garden, there was no need for a gym membership and we can add that cost to our hourly rate. By working in the garden, I’ve also reduced my weight, which has reduced my blood pressure and blood sugar levels. Instead of four pills each day for my diabetes, I now take one; another cost savings I can add to my hourly rate. There are also fewer runs to town, which means a cost savings in gas. By the time I added everything up, I figured that I had earned about $8.00 an hour gardening.

Just how is it that I can say that I earned $8.00 an hour growing green beans though? After all, there isn’t any additional money in my pocket. The gain comes from not spending money. By making the money you have now go farther, you don’t have to spend as much time worrying about where to get more. In short, the benefit is real. By saving the money I did, I was able to use the money I earned for other things that I can’t produce myself.

There are some pitfalls when your self-sufficient and you need to consider them as well. For example, when you only grow food for the summer, you don’t need to worry about storage. If you’re like me and grow food to last all year, you need to consider the storage costs as part of the cost of the food. Many people turn to the freezer for storage. Some foods do require freezing if you want to keep them (some foods don’t store well at all). However, you need to consider other means of storage. The lowest cost long term storage method is canning. When you can your food, all you need to consider is the cost of the electricity or gas used to can the food, the partial cost of jars (they last nearly forever), and the cost of lids (around $2.50 for ten of them). However, don’t overlook techniques such as drying. My wife dries a number of vegetables in the form of chips. For example, nothing tastes better than a bag of zucchini or egg plant chips in winter; it’s a taste of summer from vegetables that don’t store particularly well in any other way.

I’ll discuss storage techniques in a future article. In the meantime, think about how much you make each hour growing your own food. You might be surprised at how much profit there is in having fun!

 

FSUtil and Quotas

There is more than a little confusion about the use of FSUtil with quotas. For one thing, precisely why would someone use the FSUtil Quota Track command when it doesn’t enforce the quotas you set? I’m sure Microsoft has some scenario in mind for just tracking and not enforcing the quotas. I did talk with one of my administrator friends. She uses just the tracking option at her company. The reasoning is that she can then talk with the user when the user goes over a limit. In this particular organization, it’s bad form to limit the user’s access to the hard drive when in the midst of an important procedure (as it might have dire consequences). She says that she does see the event log entries when someone goes over their quota. So, that’s one potential scenario—you have an administrator that has to work with the users to maintain the hard drive but isn’t allowed to enforce those limits directly because doing so could impede work.

Of course, one of the problems with the tracking feature is that it doesn’t automatically set logging. In order to configure drive C on your system to track user activities and log them in the event, you must initially configure the drive using these three commands.

  1. FSUtil Quota Track C:
  2. WMIC QuotaSetting Where Caption=”C:” Set ExceededNotification=True
  3. WMIC QuotaSetting Where Caption=”C:” Set WarningExceededNotification=True

The two WMIC commands set the two logging options for you. What these commands do is set the quota exceeded and quota warning flags for drive C. After you issue these three commands, the Quota Settings dialog box will look like this:

Quota1

You can now add quotas using the FSUtil Quota Modify command as described in page 89 of my book, “Windows Command Line Administration: Instant Reference.” Generally speaking, you can add an overall quota for the entire drive or individual quotas for each person. The overall quota affects everyone who doesn’t have a specific individual quota.

OK, now you’ve configured the C drive to provide quota information in the form of event log entries. So, you create a test case to make sure everything works and that’s when you figure out that you can’t see any entries in the event log. In addition, it appears that the FSUtil Quota Violations command doesn’t work either. Well, that’s a little disappointing.

The problem is a lot simpler to correct than you might initially think. Microsoft hides the information you need in the Knowledge Base article at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/228812. The short story is that NTFS only scans the drive once an hour for violations, so you’ll have to wait a while to see any test violations. Of course, you might not have all day to wait around for NTFS to get around to scanning the drive. So, you can use the FSUtil Behavior Set QuotaNotify 60 command to set NTFS to scan the drive once a minute. In order to get this command to work, however, you must reboot the system. It seems that NTFS also loads its settings once during each boot cycle and then ignores the registry settings thereafter.

Once NTFS starts scanning the drive at a reasonable interval, you’ll begin seeing entries in the System event log. In addition, you can use the FSUtil Quota Violations command to look for violations as shown here:

Quota2

At this point, you’re ready to go. Your system is setup to monitor quotas in a critical environment, but not to enforce the quotas (thus preventing people from completing tasks). I’ve had at least one person tell me that the FSUtil Quota Violations command tends not to work if the System event log gets too full; I’d like to find out whether other people are having the same problem. Let me know how you use quotas on your system at [email protected].

Health Benefits of Self-Sufficiency

I remember the discussion well; my wife and I were on a short vacation in the mountains of California one day (Julian for those of you who know the little town in Southern California) and we were talking about gardening. It sounds like a topic that is a long way from self-sufficiency or health, but there is a connection; even we didn’t know it at the time though. That discussion happened over 15 years ago. Today, we’re living a different sort of reality, much of it stemming from that innocuous discussion.

At the time, I weighed in at a gargantuan 365 pounds (perhaps a little more) and had a 54 inch waist. It was hard to find time to exercise and even harder to find money for a gym membership. Exercise consisted of walks, when time allowed. Today, I’m much lighter, having lost 127 pounds (so far) and my 42 inch waist is much smaller. My blood pressure has gone way down, my heart rate as well. In addition, I take far less medication today than I did at one time and my diabetes is under control. The technique I’ve used has also naturally decreased my LDL cholesterol and increased my HDL cholesterol. The entire process has required a little over 12 years to complete; a long time granted, but the process has been slow and continuous.

You might wonder how much it cost to lose that much weight. That’s the interesting part. My wife and I now grow about 95% of our own food. We eat higher quality and fresher food and spend a whole lot less money in the store. In short, instead of paying for a gym membership, we exercise and earn money (in the form of store and medication savings) while doing it. You won’t find that sort of deal anywhere on TV.

The interesting thing about the approach I’ve taken is that my weight loss has been slow and continuous. The exercise I get by producing the things I need has actually increased my stamina and strength, while reducing my weight. I never get bored exercising this way because each day brings something new. One day I’m stretching while picking weeds in the garden, another day I’m lifting bushel baskets full of produce. Each day brings something new and the tasks I perform change by season. There is no falling off the cart because the change I’ve made is a part of my lifestyle now; I wouldn’t consider living any other way.

This entry has been short, but I wanted to introduce you to the idea behind self-sufficiency. It’s a method of producing what you need, gaining some substantial health benefits, and making money while you’re doing it. No, you won’t get a pile of cash from your garden, but wouldn’t you like to spend less at the store? What would you do with the money you save by reducing the groceries you buy in half? That’s what self-sufficiency is about; it’s about doing for yourself.

Keep your eyes peeled for additional posts in this category as I have time to write them. In the meantime, I’d like to hear your thoughts about self-sufficiency. Write me at [email protected].

Regular Expressions with FindStr

Regular expressions are a powerful feature of the FindStr utility. However, they can also prove frustrating to use in some cases because the documentation Microsoft provides is lacking in good examples and difficult to follow. You can see some usage instructions for FindStr starting on page 82 of the Windows Command-Line Administration Instant Reference .

A reader recently commented that there is a problem with the dollar sign ($) regular expression. It must actually appear after the search term to be useful. Of course, the problem is creating a test file to sufficiently check the use of the regular expressions, so I came up with this test file:

TestFile

Now, let’s perform some tests with it.  Here is the result of some tests
that I performed using this test file and FindStr regular expressions:

TestResults

The first test case shows what happens when you try
the command on page 82 of the book.  It appears to work, but you’ll see
in a moment that it actually doesn’t.  Let’s take the two parts of the
regular expression apart.  Using FindStr “^Hello” *.TXT seems to work just fine.  However, the command FindStr “$World” *.TXT doesn’t produce any output.
Only when the $ appears after World does the command produce an
output.  Consequently, page 82 should show the rather counterintuitive
command, FindStr “^Hello World$” *.TXT to produce the correct output.

It’s also important to be careful about making generalizations when
using FindStr. For example, when working with the test file originally
shown in this example, the FindStr /B /C:”Hello World” *.TXT command produces the same output as FindStr “^Hello” *.TXT as shown here:

TestResults2

If you change the test file like this though:

TestFile2

you’ll see these results:

TestResults3

As you can see, you must exercise care when using FindStr to obtain the
desired results.  What other odd things have you noticed when using
regular expressions with FindStr?  Add a comment here or write me at [email protected] to let me know.