Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Fedora 10 Released

ars technica has a great review on the newest release of the Fedora Project, version 10.

I'm downloading it as I type, can't wait to give it a try. Get it here.

Sunday, November 23, 2008

DSL

No not the Internet service, it's Damn Small Linux. Linux you can run from a thumb drive, even a zip drive and it easily runs from with Windows, no virtual machine needed.

Give it a try and have fun; as always it's Open Source and free.

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

How to Forge

Here's a great site I found through a Digg post. HowtoForge has a truckload of tutorials for the most popular flavors of Linux, even FreeBSD. I use this site to polish my little-used Linux skills and highly recommend it for training or helping with a project. They have screenshots, sources and references plus a fairly healthy forum.

Viva la penguin!

Monday, November 17, 2008

Script Headers

Okay, so you wrote a really cool batch script. Now what information do you put at the top?

After writing many, many batch scripts with really nothing but the filename and modified date as "information" I looked around a bit and put together this from what I saw.

rem **********************************
rem * Desktop System setup script
rem * Author: Thomas Thrush
rem * admin@company.com
rem * Last modified : 17-Nov-2006
rem **********************************

Now this is a pretty simple entry; other entries may include History, Notes, Revision Numbers, etc. Various scripting languages have there own way of commenting out text, but the information still applies.

The point is, put something there for future reference. When a script has to be modified many months down the road, the editor (which might be you) will be glad you did.

Update: It's been a while since this post and I've changed my header to reflect things I've learned...

:: ======================================
:: Script: NoPic.cmd
:: Desc: Find AD Accounts w/blank jpegPhoto Attr
:: Author: Tom Thrush - tom<at>tthrush<com>
:: Last modified: 22-Apr-2011
:: ======================================


One, the double colon runs faster as it's passed over by the scripting engine, where as rem is actually examined.

And two, with malware searching a system for addresses to spam or attack, it's best not to include a path to your door.

Friday, November 14, 2008

Holy Skydrive!

Thanks to Bink.nu for this post. Microsoft's free Skydrive, part of the Live.com suite of web products, now allows you to upload 25GB of data! That's an amazing amount of storage for free. Hmmm, how many pirated Metallica songs would that hold?

More from the source: Skydrive Team Blog

Saturday, November 8, 2008

Thursday, November 6, 2008

Active@ UNDELETE

This comes from a friend of mine who lost a couple hundred pictures of his family and friends the day after Halloween. Not sure if it was a glitch with the camera or operator error, but his wife was not happy.

This is when he found Active Undelete, using this he recovered all the pictures and was the hero.

It works on almost all Windows systems and allows you to generate boot disks, use it on RAID, etc. Hopefully, you'll never need it, but it comes highly recommended should the time ever come.

Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Windows XP SP3 Causes Windows Update to Fail

I've had this happen on a number of systems now, where installing Windows XP SP3 will cause Windows/Microsoft/Automatic Update to fail.

Thanks to Ron Crumbaker, a simple fix is all that is needed. The steps are listed below, the actual commands are in bold.

1. Stop Automatic Updates service - net stop wuauserv
2. Register wups2.dll - regsvr32 %windir%\system32\wups2.dll
3. Restart Automatic Updates service - net start wuauserv

Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Windows 7

Some people think it's too soon for Windows 7, if that's what they're really going to call it. But having been released to manufacturing in November of 2006, it'll be almost three years by the time Windows 7 is relased (and that's if it's on time).

Looking at Apple's OS X delivery model, not to mention the Linux community, the operating system gets a refresh every year or two. And peering into the past a little, the Wintendo platforms (95, 98, 98SE, ME) all were released a few years apart. For the 32-bit family there was a large gap between NT4 and Windows 2000 (Oct 1996 and Feb 2000 respectively), but XP came out in Oct of 2001 and XP SP2 (essentially an OS refresh), in August of 2004. There's a timeline on Wikipedia.

So how does this make Vista a failure if Microsoft is just staying on track with it's release schedule?

A great amount of information can be found at the SuperSite for Windows.

Sunday, November 2, 2008

Recalling Batteries Still... Seriously?

ZDNet's Adrian Kingsley-Hughes posted another chapter in the continuing saga of the Sony battery recall. Seriously, how long will it take to get over this?