TechGrabage

After mangling several batch files and bastardizing a few other scripts I decided it was time to delve into PERL. I have been wanting to learn PERL for quite some time now and finnnaly wrote my first script today… Here it is in all its glory…

c:\perl\bin\perl.exe

Created on 9/15/2005 - Mike M

use File::Copy;

$dir=”c:\htrdata\keene1″;

$destdir=”\\cifp01\pubworks\wwtp\ZETABACKUP”;

opendir(MY_DIR, $dir) || die(”I can’t OPEN IT!”);

@files= readdir(MY_DIR);

closedir(MY_DIR);

foreach $f (@files)

{

$age=int(-M $dir."\\".$f);

if($age == 1) {

#print "$f $age\n";

copy($dir."\\".$f,$dest_dir."\\\\".$f) or die "Copy Failed!";

}

}

-mwm

Well, progress is being made on the IE front. I just today installed IE 7 Beta 1 on my laptop. The first thing that cough my eye is the tabbed interface. I am a very big fan of tabbed browsing. Just makes things easier for me. The big downfall is RAM consumption. The more tabs that are open the more memory iexplore.exe will swipe. RSS feeds are handles pretty nicely also. You can grab the feed and create a favorite for it pretty easily. I also noticed an anti-phishing mechanism which is pretty well implemented.

More to come…

Fox News Alert: “SENATE APPROVES $10.5 BILLION IN AID FOR HURRICANE KATRINA VICTIMS; HOUSE CONVENES AT NOON TO SPEED BILL TO BUSH FOR APPROVAL”

They meet at night and are set to SPEED the bill to Bush at NOON! NOON! What is so speedy about that?

-mwm

I must admit I am proud of the media during this terrible time. Even FOX is pissed off. Our leaders deserve to have their cages rattled over this. There are hard questions to be answered by all, from the top down.

To hear senators on TV slapping each other on the back, thanking each other for help. This pisses me off! It’s not time for ‘good ol boys’ to thank and stroke each other! It’s time to get the bodies off the streets. It’s time to make these people feel like they mean something to us! I dont give a shit that congress had an unprecidented session at 10:00 at night after returning from vacation early to get money to FEMA! What a pile of crap! All it speaks to is how utterly ill prepared we are!

What if Atlanta, New Orleans and Boston we hit by terrorist either all the day or in succession? I can’t even begin to imagine the chaos and stupidity that would prevail. This is completely unacceptable, completely.

-mwm

IS this America? What makes America America? What defines us?

The situation in the south is appauling. We are now a week into this and the situation is STILL going the wrong way. As far as I can see there is absolutely no excuse for the lack of leadership, the lack of organization, the raw lack of plain old help. I am disgusted by the fact that a week later we cant manage to get these people out of there. We are the wealthiest most technologically advanced country on earth but we just cant manage to get people out of a flooded city. It’s beyond belief.

I am sure I have no concept of what is happeing and the extent of the situation. I realize it is hard to get resources to a flooded city. But you cant simply cant tell me that we can send a ship from the North Pole to the South Pole, through very thick ice but we cant get a ship up the river to get people out? I just dont buy it.

This is a terrible display America. We should all be questioning our safety and preparedness. We should all be questioning our leadership.

This is a very, very sad week. My heart, thoughts and prayers are with those people.

-mwm

I am a user of VMWare, a software that speaks for itself. I want to use VMWare to create my base images for various tasks and hardware platforms. Today I will test this:

1) Add a new drive to a virtual machine 2) In the guest OS, format the disk (bigger than current c: drive) 3) Fire up GHOST32.exe within the guest OS. 4) Create an image of drive C: on the newly created/formatted drive D: 5) Move the image to a network location for depployment.

Sounds like it’ll work. I’ll post some results.

-mwm

I am using the newest version of the Ghost Corporate Console of late. Works very nicely. In conjunction with Universal Imaging Utility (UIU) I can deploy a single ‘universal’ image to many different machines. Once I have this universal image created I can deploy it to many machines with just a few clicks in the Ghost Console. For each machine the console can see I can create a custom cinfig for that machine that will give it the correct computer name and join it to the domain.

You can’t beat being able to click a machine and send an image to it that will rename it and join it to the domain!

The current version of Ghost Corporate Solution Suite in conjuntion with the UIU is something no network/systems admin should have to live without.

-mwm

Beta testing that is. I have been doing quite a bit of beta testing of late. Some pretty high profile stuff to. Tested a new inkjet printer from Dell and some cool stuff right now for Verizon. The best part are the incentives. For one of the most recent tests I received a DVD Recorder. Pretty cool. Hook it right up to the TV and record shows and movies directly to DVD. Only problem so far is my DirecTv receiver. The DVD Recorder can’t change the channel on the DTV receiver. I think I’ll hook up to the DirecTv TiVO receiver. This way I can transfer my hard drives recordings form the TiVO to DVD…

Kinda fun. I’d tell ya who I test for but that would decrease my chances for cool stuff!

-mwm

Users are objects in Active Directory. Shares via DFS can be objects in Active Directory. Printers are objects in Active Directory. There are so many objects in AD. Why do I need to create these convoluted scripts to attach printers and shares to users? Why? If they are all objects wouldn’t it make sense to be able assign printer objects to user objects as well as share objects to user objects? How about assigning a printer object to a group of user objects? This would make life a lot easier as far as administration of a Windows Domain goes…

Make sense right? Over simplified? Not possible?

-mwm

SUN… Of all companies. Perhaps it is the pinch SUN Microsystems has felt since the popularity of Linux and other open source initiatives picked up the steam they have of late that has made them be on the side of the user, not big business. SUN has created DReaM. An open source DRM methodology. DReaM is based on the user owning the license for purchased media for life. Current practice has DRM based on the DEVICE. Basing DRM on a device makes very little sense, for the user. When the device dies you lose all icenses for the media you have purchased, unless all your DRM license databases are backed up (are yours?).

Is there a good reason for not basing DRM on me instead of my devices?

-mwm