Fascinating article about the real roots of the economic meltdown, by the author of Liar’s Poker

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A woman who my mother knows,
Came in and took off all her clothes.
Said I, not being very old,
“By golly gosh, you must be cold!”
“No, no!” she cried. “Indeed I’m not!
I’m feeling devilishly hot!”

Roald Dahl (of course)

Another series of names for servers:

Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus, Pluto, Ceres, Phobos, Deimos, Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto, Titan, Atlas, Sedna, Eris, Charon, Gaspra, Mathilde, Eros, Nix, Hydra, Nereid, Prometheus, Pandora, Hyperion, Tethys, Calypso, Leda, Kuiper, Oort, Aldebaran, Altair, Antares, Arcturus,  Sirius, Rigel, Polaris, Regulus, Procyon, Deneb, Betelgeuse, Castor, Pollux, Bellatrix

“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” — H. L. Mencken

Updated to WordPress 2.6.3 this morning. Piece of cake, as usual, and no issues so far.

I make a point of avoiding politics here, but the New York City Council really ticked me off today by passing an extension to term limits, in direct defiance of 2 public referendums, in what can only be called a backroom deal. You can find how your individual councilperson voted here…personally I think everyone on this list who voted yes needs to be thrown out of office, particular those who were coming up against term limits in this election season. I’d be hard pressed to think of a more self serving conflict of interests.

Tools, both online and off, for creating technical documentation (among other things). I’ll add more as I find them.

Gliffy: online diagramming software, for everything from network diagrams and technical drawings to flowcharts and floorplans

Pencil: opensource add-on to turn Firefox 3.x into a sketching tool

This may have just become my favorite music video.

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…at defining moments like this one, the change we need doesn’t come from Washington. Change comes to Washington.

Change happens — change happens because the American people demand it, because they rise up and insist on new ideas and new leadership, a new politics for a new time.

America, this is one of those moments.

Acceptance speech, Barack Obama

Sometimes chaining application objects just doesn’t cut it. Say you’ve got some files you need to distribute after an MSI finishes running, but you don’t want to call the MSI install every time. Now, you could add the files to the original MSI, but if this is one that gets updated regularly, you don’t want to have to make the same modifications for every update. The easier solution is to create a second ZENworks app and call it from the Launch after Termination script.

The following syntax will load the application object without firing up the Application Launcher and without refreshing every other object association:

NALWIN /a=”TREENAME:.App-objectname.ou.ou.o” /f /h

Stick an @ in front of the line and you don’t even need to specify a scripting engine, as it will just use the Novell Client login script processor.

This will likely become a page unto itself as I add more of these.

Search the contents of ALL filetypes (by default Windows only searches inside files with known extensions)
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\ContentIndex
Create a DWORD named FilterFilesWithUnknownExtensions and set it to 1

Sidhedevil, recommending therapy:

But ultimately, you’re going to need to go back and fix the errors in the operating system, not just tweak the scripts.

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Apple hasn’t done ZENworks administrators (or Active Directory ones for that matter) any favors with iTunes 8. The install is needlessly complex, and installs some crap you’d probably just as soon not have on your end users machines. Why would I want to give non-administrative accounts Apple Software Update? Additionally, the setup tries to start the iTunes services during setup and users don’t actually have the rights to do so.

The new version of iTunes also includes (and requires) QuickTime to be updated to 7.5.5, so we’ll include that with this distribution. That application object can also be used as a standalone app to update the users’ QuickTime installs, regardless of whether they’re using iTunes or not.

We’ll edit the MSIs to remove the call to start the services, pull out unneeded icons and prevent calls to the Apple Software Update.

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Usually Prompted Macros in ZENworks application objects only prompt for values on their first runs. To create one that will prompt for a macro value every time, add the following to a Run after termination script (or append it to the end of your script if you already have one):

RD C:\NALCache\ETREE\.Application-Name.OU.OU.O /S /Q

REG.EXE DELETE HKCU\Software\NetWare\NAL\1.0\Distribute\TREE_NAME\XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX /f

REG.EXE DELETE HKLM\SOFTWARE\NetWare\NAL\2.X\Macros\TREE_NAME\XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX /f

Script Engine: %*WINSYSDIR%\cmd.exe /c
Script Extension: .bat

Replace .Application-Name.OU.OU.O with the DN of your application object.
Replace TREE_NAME with the name of your eDirectory tree.
Replace XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX with the GUID of the application object.

I was trying to write an AutoIT script to manipulate the Firefox user.js preferences files, which are stored in the users’ Firefox profile folders. Unfortunately with Firefox, the initial user profile is created in a “salted” directory under %appdata%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles. The folder name uses a randomly generated 8-character string followed by a dot and the word default, like this: df3etnz3.default. This can make scripting modifications of the user preferences a real pain in the ass, as you can’t be sure what the name of the user profile folder is.

Fortunately, there’s a file named profiles.ini in %appdata%\Mozilla\Firefox that lists the folder name, so we can pull the information from there. The initial profile will be listed on line 7 of the profiles.ini so:

; Find the Firefox user profile
 $file = FileOpen(@AppDataDir & "\Mozilla\Firefox\profiles.ini", 0)

; Extract the raw profile path
 $rawpath = FileReadLine($file, 7)
 FileClose($file)

; Extract the actual Firefox profile directory
 $mozfolder = StringRight($rawpath, 16)

; Create Profile Path variable
 $mozpath = @AppDataDir & "\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\" & $mozfolder

Now you can just reference the profile path using $mozpath.

Because I work for a large advertising conglomerate -

BrainStorm, ThinkTank, BrightIdea, WowFactor, BreakThrough, TechSavvy, PopCulture, MediaBlitz, StarPower, FastTrack, ComfortZone, GamePlan, TouchBase, HotConcept, MindSet, NextLevel, DayDream, KnowledgeBase, CriticalMass, RazorsEdge, OldSchool, TeamPlayer, WinWin, TaskForce, MileStone, CoreValue, MasterPlan

Of course, I’ll never get to use these…we’ll wind up giving them some ridiculous set of numbers and letters that no one can remember like NYNWPRPZPSN0104 or something equally inscrutable.

In most situations, when I need to run an installation using Local Administrator rights on a locked down workstation, using ZENworks I can just set the Application Object to Run as unsecure system user and be done with it. This allows the installer to interact with the desktop so I can still give the users progress bars and dialog boxes, but the install runs with administrative rights.

Unfortunately Run as unsecure system user requires an imported workstation object, and while the workstation import service is working flawlessly at many of our sites, it’s not hitting every computer in others and broken in some (thanks in large part to servers being moved around in the tree as part of an ongoing re-engineering project). »

שֵׁת ירד

Another server naming scheme, discarded because we have offices in places that actually experience these conditions.

Maelstrom, Typhoon, Hurricane, Tsunami, Vortex, Whirlwind, Cyclone, Tempest, Tornado, Monsoon, Sandstorm