At work I try to use as many free software alternatives as possible, after a bit of hunting I came across an MSI that someone has built for IZArc.

The only problem the MSI above is that it’s in French. Here’s a transform (mst) to change the language to English and remove the “What’s new” and “Help” shortcuts.

IZArc is the ultimate freeware archive utility with a modern easy-to-use interface. IZArc provides support for most compressed and encoded files, as well as access to many powerful features and tools

In the last 12 months I’ve been through the acquisition once and am now going through it again. In June 2007 Immediacy (the company I work for) was acquired by Mediasurface PLC. A month or so ago Alterian PLC announced their intention to acquire Mediasurface.

As part of the acquisition I’ve had to change our IP addressing so that it ties in with Alterian’s. My plan was to run both subnets at the same time and then quietly drop the old one. I ran in to a problem when adding an additional IP to the network cards, Windows would only register the primary IP in DNS and insisted on dropping any other records from DNS. That was obviously problematic when wanting to run two subnets off one NIC.

As I saw it, there were three options:

1. Disable automatic registration on connections addresses in DNS;
2. Manually create the record, then set the permission of the entry so that the computer account couldn’t delete the record;
3. Use multiple NICs per server;

Either was a reasonable solution, however I opted to manually create the additional records and adjust the permissions.

Still, it’s nice to know you’ve done your job right when nobody even notices a major change like re-addressing the network 🙂

I usually try and avoid blogging personal things, but am going to make an exception just this once. For my birthday back in May by friends teamed up and bought me a 300ft bungee jump in Datchet, Berkshire. I finally managed to pluck up the courage and take a jump. See below for the video evidence.

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