How to Install GPMC on Server 2008, 2008 R2, and Windows 7 (via RSAT)

Can You See Me – Open Port Check Tool

Is a free utility for remotely verifying a port is open or closed. It will be useful for users who wish to check to see if a server is running or a firewall or ISP is blocking certain ports.

Setting up a Windows 7 Media Center

Windows XP Power Management and Group Policy Preferences

Windows XP only has one active power scheme for the entire computer and that scheme is based on the current or previously logged on user—that is to say Windows XP power schemes are only user-based. This means the power scheme can change as each user logs on. Also, it means that last logged on user’s power settings are the settings that remain once the user logs off. And yes, each user has its own power configuration; however, the entire operating system only has one active power scheme.

PHP and IE8 Web Slices

Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) shipped with a new feature for web users called Web Slices. … Essentially it lets you add enhanced links to your favorite bar that allow you to preview snippets of content from websites that you frequently visit without having to open up the page. It’s really useful to do little tasks like check on your web based Inbox, check the weather in cities you live or visit, traffic status, stock tickers, headlines, sports, the list goes on and on and you can check the IE add-on gallery for more examples of useful web slices and for inspiration.

How to customize default user profiles in Windows 7 (KB973289)

To customize a default user profile or a mandatory user profile, you must first customize the default user profile. Then, the default user profile can be copied to the appropriate shared folder to make that user profile either the default user profile or a mandatory user profile.

In the news the other day, there were some photos of Jennifer Hawkins, and I got to thinking how we measure beauty.

And I wish I knew. There would be a dollar in knowing the formula for sure.  Googling around, I found this quote from Helen Razer, which might explain why Jen does nothing for me:

If you’d ever met Jen, which I did briefly during Melbourne’s Spring Racing Carnival, you would only be happy that the dear lamb has something so extraordinary to offer. The woman seems unable to make a sentence. Seriously. This is not sour grapes but the truth. Her grasp on object and verb was so poor that my producer that day, an habitual sycophant when it came to celebrities, said “$^@$ me. What the @#@1 did she say? We can’t put her on the radio. People will cry.”

Helen has confirmed what I suspected.  Beautiful to look at, but only slightly more conversation than the average milking cow.

The picture on the right?  Found it on the motivatedphotos.com website.  Just goes to show; beauty does come in all shapes and sizes, and can be found anywhere.

With v0.8, I added the feature “don’t create the same attachment, in the same attachment folder, if it already exists.”

And I added a bug.  The bug would crash LNME when this happened:

1. Find duplicate attachment file name
2. Extract the new attachment to the %temp% directory.

It would crash if the “new” attachment was corrupted.  And here’s the irony, the old section of code had a trap for exactly this sort of behaviour.  When I coded the new section, I forgot to put in the error trapping.

Doh!

Like I said for v0.8, the next version (v0.91 maybe) will use a list table, which is a better way of detecting duplicate files/attachments across directories.

Other changes for the future:

• Export task entries
• Export to Outlook
  (unlikely to happen until Microsoft publishes the PST file format)
• Rich Text Export(?)
  An example of an Rich Text object is a picture which has been pasted into the message body.
• Appointments & Meetings are missing the body of the meeting/attachment.
• Tasks

You may download LNME v0.9 here.

Printer toner, depending on who you ask, is cancerogenic.

Or not.

The Material Safety Data Sheets I’ve seen, say not.  But I still wouldn’t breath toner in.

Now some of the printers I’ve worked on over the years, have conspired to leak toner over me. 

There was the StorageTek mainframe printer, with the toner hopper.  You’d open the 5 litre toner container and pour the toner into the hopper.  Great clouds of toner would float up and cover the FNG* tasked to refill the toner.  And because of this, it was only ever the FNG who had to refill the toner on this printer.

The DataProducts LZR960.   You know, you could ship most laser printers and not be to worried that they survive the journey.  The LZR960?  Like a nervous puppy, it would leak toner when the shipping box “This Way Up” sign was not rigorously followed.  Resulting in me being covered in toner, and one expensive service bill later.

Things have gotten better over time, and since I had not had toner leaked on me for a few years, I thought

how much toner was left in the Lanier|Ricoh Photocopier toner cartridge when it said it was “out of toner”?*

An impressively small amount as it turns out.  I’m very impressed that Lanier|Ricoh are not ripping me off on toner.

Other things.

• In theory, the cartridge is designed to be disassembled.
  Theory is good, but I used a Dremel tool.
• Cartridge seemed very well engineered.
• Benefit of hindsight, I would have cut the other end of the cartridge off.  This would have allowed me to have a nice pile like The Angry Technician did.
• You should wash toner off with COLD soapy water.
  Warm or hot water will cause the toner to bind to you.

* Friendly New Guy
* idea first seen over at The Angry Technician.

Ah, Australia Day, the day the British rowed ashore and claimed Australia for King George III.  Since 1988, it has been claimed by the politicians as a way to glad-hand the common folk and kiss babies.  Don’t believe me?  Our latest Prime Minister turned the announcement of the “Australian Of The Year” into a rock concert.

“After the official proceedings, popular bands Evermore and Rogue Traders rocked the crowd at a free concert.”

And I could bang on about many of the bozos picked for “Australian Of The Year”, but let me just pick one:
Pat Rafter, tennis player.  Chiefly known for living in Bermuda to avoid paying Australian income tax.

For me, Australia Day is about having a quiet beer and burning a few snags on the barbie.

SMS 2003 going extended support is not a real surprise.  It’s replacement, Microsoft SCCM 2007, has been out in the market place since November 2007.

It isn’t that big a problem for the IT Shop I work in.  Our SMS 2003 infrastructure is mature, and we’re running stable client operating systems.

And as I wrote in “Lonely little SMS 2003 PCK files”, SCCM is on the (distant) horizon, so I have hope.

When I say hope, I mean that Windows 7, which all our customers want, will force the replacement of SMS 2003.

Windows 7 is not compatible with SMS 2003.

Dealing with VMs, Snapshots and the dreaded broken security channel

The problem with that perfect world is that you might want to snapshot a single machine to perform a what-if test and then be able to roll back if the idea is a bust. But if you do not snapshot all the VMs at the same instance, you run the risk of one of the machines changing it’s secure channel password during the what-if period. When you revert the changes during that session and you attempt to login, you will get an error message saying that the trust relationship with the domain controller is broken. You only option is to remove and re-add the machine to the domain.

Windows 7 Application Compatibility List for IT Professionals

We released the Windows 7 Compatibility Center a few weeks ago. This lets you look up one application at a time. You can find that at http://windows.com/compatibility.

Today, we have a downloadable list indicating vendor support. If you want to write some automated matching against your list of application, you can use this – it is an Excel download of all known information from vendors. You can find that at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=890e522e-e39e-4278-aebc-186f81e29173&displaylang=en.

Support for Windows 2000 and Windows XP SP2 will end on July 13, 2010

How to open a parachute during free-fall: Introducing Quick Security References (QSRs)

A QSR is designed to provide the information necessary to quickly understand and address specific security threats from the perspectives of four IT-focused job roles (business decision makers, architect/program manager, developer, and tester). QSRs will also help establish security practices and provide a framework for addressing future incidents.

Package This

Package This is a GUI tool written in C# for creating help files (.chm and .hxs) from the content obtained from the MSDN Library or the TechNet Library via the MSDN Content Service. You select the content you want from the table of contents, build a help file, and use the content offline. You are making personalized ebooks of MSDN or TechNet content. Both help file formats also give full text search and keyword search.

I was sent a word document with "hidden data" in it.

"Hidden data" in Microsoft Word documents can be one of several bits of information, such as hidden data, change tracking, or even comments on the document.

Comments.

Such as this example:

This problem isn’t just limited to Microsoft Word, oh no.  It shows up in Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint too.

The solution for:
Microsoft Office XP/2003?  Download the Microsoft Remove Hidden Data add-in, and use it.
Microsoft Office 2007?  You already have it.  The option can be found under the Office Pearl –> Prepare –> Inspect Document menu item.

This post brought to you by the outside company who shared a comment-enabled document with me.

I needed to read the last line of a log file.  PowerShell made it very, very, easy.

All you need to do is Get-Content the file, and then pipe it to Select-Object with the –last parameter set to 1.

Here is the code snippet which does that:

$failure_reason = (Get-Content $file_txt | Select-Object -last 1)

And here is a (simple) version of the PowerShell script I wrote to read though a list of computers, and dump the last line to the screen:

$windows2000_PCs = (Get-Content c:\temp\pc-list.txt)
foreach ($computer in $windows2000_PCs)
        {
            $file_txt = "\\"+ $computer + "\c$\log\install.txt"
            $install_result = (Get-Content $file_txt | Select-Object -last 1)
            Write-Host $computer has install result of: $install_result
        }
Write-Host Done!

Which outputs:

BROOMFONDLE has install result of: Program installed successfully on 21 DEC 2010 – 1000hrs
MAGICTHIGHS1 has install result of: Program failed to install – Error code 1603 on 11 DEC 2010 - 1321hrs
Done!

Things to note:

• c:\temp\pc-list.txt contains the list of computer names you wish to scan.
• the script is not idiot-proofed error-trapped.
  ie. in a production version of this you would check that the computer being scanned is online, the install.txt file exists, and so on.

This collection of (mainly Australian) mobile phone friendly links was something I put together (almost) a year ago.
All the links still work from a mobile phone, which was a surprise that some of them are still around..  Some of the links, such as cricinfo, do not work from a normal web browser.
Do you, dear reader, have any others that you would like to share?

News
ABC Mobile
Google News
News Limited
The Age

News (Sport related)
CricInfo (Cricket)
Fox Sports

Email
Google gmail
Microsoft Mobile Live
Yahoo mail
Yahoo Mobile Solutions

Search engines etc.
Google Mobile
Metlink.Mobi – Melbourne Public Transport finder.
Wikipedia – Mobile Edition
Yellow Pages / Whereis Map / Trading Post

Other
eBay
Telstra collection of mobile friendly links
Weather
Yahoo Mobile