I was watching a rerun of Star Trek the other night when I came across the uber-famous Borg catchphrase:

“You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.”

Futility, now that’s a word that’s quite apt for today’s events. An “exercise in futility” is what some people say about the Comelec’s ongoing voter’s registration process.

If the government spent billions of Pesos to computerize the elections, then how much of it was allocated for improving the voter’s registration process? Isn’t this process supposed to be the foundation of a good electoral system?

The Comelec stated that they won’t extend the registration deadline, because they need time to sort out the registration database and come up with the final voter’s list for their regional offices – time, in the above context, is unfortunately measured in months.

It’s quite ironic that they heavily tout the new computerized election system as being capable of tallying all votes and declaring a winner in a span of just a few hours, yet they need a span of several months before the elections so that they can prepare the final voter’s list.

In hindsight, had a ‘proper’ voter’s registration system been in place, then people wouldn’t have procrastinated or put off registering for a later date – most of whom were either turned off by the extremely long queues or slow process, or turned down Comelec staff because they didn’t meet the voter’s cut-off criteria (a combination of cut-off period or number of registrants/application forms per day). Had a ‘proper’ voter’s registration system been in place, then there wouldn’t be a need for such a long preparation “lead time” between the voter’s registration deadline and the actual election date – ensuring a higher voter-to-population percentage turnout.

At any rate, late is late – no excuses and “pasensya na lang po, ‘no?” Let’s just hope that those who were able to register on time will vote wisely come election time.

If you cannot open Microsoft Outlook 2007 and get the following error when opening Microsoft Outlook 2007: “Cannot start Microsoft Outlook. Cannot open the Outlook window.” after previously being able to open it, then you might want to try the following:

Go to Start > Run and type the following: “outlook.exe /resetnavpane” (without the quotation marks) and press Enter.

This should fix the problem.

The “/resetnavpane” Outlook command switch clears and regenerates the MS Outlook navigation pane for the current profile.

In CA Audit,  formerly eTrust Audit, you can group your audit nodes (or audit clients) into logical groups depending on the audit events that are to be monitored.

You can also group audit nodes based on geographical and physical location, workgroup or domain, and you can also group them based on the audit recorder (iRecorder) agent.

Some of the common iRecorder agents are the Windows NT Log iRecorder, Microsoft ISA iRecorder, and the Microsoft Exchange iRecorder.

The following steps show how to add an audit node group to CA Audit:

1. Open the CA Audit Policy Manager and click on “Audit Nodes”

2. To add a new group, right-click on “Targets” and select “New Group”.

3. Configure the group name. Key in the desired name for the Audit Node (AN) group. You can optionally add a short description for the AN group. Click “OK” to save and close. The newly created AN group will be added to the “Targets” list.

4. Associate an Audit Node (AN) Type to the newly created group.

There are instances when you need to run a script or program every time a user logs into your Windows network. One way to automate this is to configure and assign a Windows logon script to a particular user or group account.

Enabling Windows logon scripts is a two-stage process. The first stage is to create the script itself, and the second stage is to assign the logon script to a domain user (or group) account.

I. Where to save the logon script:

1. Create your logon script and save it in the appropriate format (Example: logon.bat, logon.vbs).
2. Go to your domain controller and copy the script into the %SystemRoot%\SYSVOL\Sysvol\DomainName\Scripts local folder (Ex. C:\WINDOWS\sysvol\sysvol\ENTIIS.COM\SCRIPTS).

This folder corresponds to the domain controller’s NETLOGON network share folder.

This makes the script accessible over the network via the \\ServerName\Netlogon network share folder.

To summarize:
If your domain controller’s name “DC01”, and if you have a script named “logon.bat”, which is saved on DC01’s “C:\WINDOWS\sysvol\sysvol\ENTIIS.COM\SCRIPTS” folder, then you can access the script over the network by going to the “\\DC01\netlogon“ network share folder, or by simply running \\DC01\netlogon\logon.bat.

II. How to assign a logon script to a user or group:

1. First, open “Active Directory Users and Computers” on the domain controller.

2. Now right click on the user you want to have the logon script and select the properties menu.

A properties dialog like the one shown below will appear. Select the ‘Profile’ Tab

By default, if no exact network path is given, as shown in Figure 3, above, Active Directory will assume that the user profile logon script will be at the %SystemRoot%\SYSVOL\Sysvol\DomainName\Scripts folder.

3. Click Apply.

4. Click OK.

Once configured, the logon script will run (on the local machine where the user logged in) every time the user logs into the network using the corresponding account.

Note: You have to check if the user account used to log into the local machine has the appropriate rights to run or execute programs.