It’s a cliché, but the world’s best Vizsla passed away in my arms today.

Super Vizsla didn’t have an easy life, having had sarcoptic mange as a young dog, then a thyroid condition, and finally arthritis in his old age.

Vadar rekindled my love of dogs, and I’ll miss him terribly.

3 reasons:

1. Most of the examples out there are written in C#.
2. You can’t manipulate your post html source directly.
3. The SmartContentSource.GeneratePublishHtml Method insists on wrapping DIV tags around everything.

Sure, there are workarounds, particularly by using the ScottIsAFool.WriterUtilities, but it mightily peeves me that Windows Live Writer is difficult to write for.

Windows 7 Training Kit for Developers
“The Windows 7 Training Kit for Developers includes presentations, hands-on labs, and demos designed to help you learn how to build applications that shine on Windows 7″

How Do You Detect if Running OS is Windows 7 or Later?
… preferably by using the VerifyVersionInfo function.

Installing Applications Using Active Directory Group Membership
“With this solution you can dynamically install applications during a LiteTouch deployment based on the membership of Active Directory groups, this means that each computer deployment can be uniquely customised, without the need for complex scripting or advanced infrastructure.  All that is required is this blog post, a group created in Active Directory for every application that will be dynamically installed, and all computer accounts pre-created in the domain and added to the relevant application groups.”

Clint Edmonson, over at notsotrivial.net, has a great post about how to assess your developer team skills.

The short version, is characterised like this:

• Novice – “Just tell me what you want me to do.”
• Advanced Beginner – “I’m ready for my next task.”
• Competent – “I’ll have it done by the end of the day.”
• Proficient – “The XYZ pattern can solve that problem perfectly.”
• Expert (aka Master or Wizard) – “Did you need anything else?”

If you want to know where your developer’s skill level are at, I heartily recommend reading it.

And, since this is a Friday, it reminded me of this chart, back when I was working as a Computer Operator.

(click on the picture for a larger version)

Simple, once you know how.

It’s even in the manual, if you can find it in the 500 page tome.*

In Formula Workshop, under Selection Formulas/Record Selection,

"dont want this string" in {database_table.in-this-field-record}

Just like it is in this picture.
 

* there’s four hours of my life I won’t be getting back.

“Service call levels are aspirational.”

At work, I been busier than a one armed Sydney cab driver with the crabs.

Banks place a whole lot of responsibility on their tellers, to balance or “slicker” their cash draws at the end of the night.

And pressure.

No one goes home until every dollar is accounted for, or ultimately written off.  Talk about peer pressure.

I worked as a bank teller before I got into the IT game.  One night, over a beer after work, Ashley Brown* was telling the story about how he was $100 short.

“We balanced up, and found the cash draw was $100 short.”
(clearly Ashley overpaid someone, it happens).
As we were going though the receipts, we got a phone call..

‘G’day, I was overpaid $100’

Ashley was overjoyed that the money had been found, and was in the midst of asking the customer when he could return it, when he heard in the background of the telephone call.

‘What the f&*k are you doing.  They don’t know who you are, just hang up.’

CLUNK!

* Ashley was a high-flier.  Last I heard of him was that he’d transferred to the bank’s Internal Audit section.  Wouldn’t be surprised if he’s running the place now.

I expect that, when a fault is logged though to me to investigate, that some troubleshooting has been done.

“Printer jams.  Vendor technician has thoroughly tested printer.  I think it’s a driver problem.”

And that was it.  No other details.

What did they mean by ““Printer jams?””.

Is it physically jamming?

I’m never seen a printer driver cause that.  Perhaps it’s stopping mid-print.  ie. stopping at page 10 of a 20 page document.

I bounced the call back, as there was not enough details.

I’ve heard nothing further since.

Physical printer jams are caused by one of four things:

• Incorrectly loaded paper trays.
  (Lexmark Optra’s were infamous for this.)
• Non-laser printer paper being used in a laser printer.
• Paper stuck in the printer’s paper path.
  (this is caused by failing to remove all the paper from a previous jam)
• Paper not stored in the same environment as the printer, being used.
  Changes in temperature and humidity can cause paper to jam.

From Microsoft, February 2007:

Distribution Point
You must plan for the appropriate number and placement of distribution points. This kind of planning is basically the same as you would do for any other deployment of SMS packages. However, there are some considerations specific to Operating System Deployment.

Consider the number of computers that can be deployed at one time from a given distribution point. The processing speed and disk I/O of the distribution point must be considered along with the available bandwidth on the network, and the effect that the size of the image package will be on those resources.

For example, on a 100Mb Ethernet network, if no other server resource factors are considered, the maximum number of computers that can process a 2GB image package in one hour would be 23.

1 Megabit transfers 8 Megabytes of data
100 Megabits/sec = 12.5 Megabytes/sec = 750 Megabytes/min = 45 Gigabytes/hour= 23 images @ 2GB per image.

In reality, the number might be far less. So it you need to be able to deploy a specific number of computers within a specific time frame, you will need to distribute the image package to an appropriate number of distribution points, and use SMS features such as protected distribution points and branch distribution points to ensure that the appropriate destination computers receive the image.

- Planning ConfigMgr Site Systems for Operating System Deployment

Yes, I know the weblink states ConfigMgr.  Microsoft has a habit of revising content when they release new products.
This Microsoft advice applies to SMS 2003, and SCCM when doing Unicast transfers.

Real world?
50 PCs per night per site.

If you used mulitcast, with either Ghost Solution Suite, or Microsoft SCCM/WDS; you could do as many as you can support the next day.
Heck, I know of a 250 PC deployments a night project.  They could have done more, but the customer said no.

If you look under my Useful Links tab, you find some further information about SMS & WDS