Small Business Tech Ramblings

Simple tip for PowerShell

Brian — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 05:14:40 +0000

Been doing more in PowerShell every week and while I’m far from being an expert I definitely enjoy what it offers. I’m always looking for tips and tricks to get the most out of PoSh and one came in my inbox today.

A short article by Jeffery Hicks pointed out something simple that makes perfect sense. Color coding the output to distinguish between your function info and the actual output.

Function Do-Something {
#run some code here
Write-host "Starting update process" -foregroundcolor Green
$procs=Get-wmiobject win32_process
Write $procs
}

When his above sample is run, the function message shows in green and the sorted and filtered output is sent to the pipeline.

Have to remember this for re-doing some of the early scripts I setup to see if I can clean them up.

Just Fix It

Brian — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 12:25:48 +0000

A new addition to the Microsoft support documents, the Fix It button.

Rather than having to go down and do a list of 15 steps, the Fix It button will run a script to do the steps for you. It’s not on everything yet but it’s starting to show up on more pages.

Online Ringtone creator

Brian — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 02:18:23 +0000

Came across this site that makes it really easy to convert your own audio files into ringtones. Conveniently called www.makeownringtone.com

Boot Windows 7 from VHD

Brian — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 13:00:40 +0000

Just read this from The Lazy Admin about booting Windows 7 from a VHD and thought this was pretty cool for testing. I like the idea…currently running Windows 7 as a virtual system but may give this a try to really put it through the paces.

Ideal Home Network

Brian — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 01:08:18 +0000

I was watching some video from CES earlier and started thinking about the amount of electricity we use with idle devices around the house…especially the computers. Usually there are 2 computers, 1 server, and a Tivo on every night (not including the little night lights from the TV. coffee pot, and every other electronic device that sucks energy when off.)

I was thinking how nice it would be to just be able to have one GOOD system with a small touchscreen display that could be in the living room and serve multiple functions. It would need to be a decent system with multiple-redundant hard drives to function as a home server for backups and file storage, media server to record & playback TV, and a Virtual Server so we could have little dumb terminals with instant on to use for desktops. Heck even a blade server for home would be cool. Somehow I don’t think I could get away with putting even the smallest of the blade servers in the living room currently…one day maybe they’ll come out with a Home Blade Server!

Emailing with PHP

Brian — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 22:02:15 +0000

While adding some more features to the recent Intranet Portal, one thing that came up was to have an email sent with a copy of the order for a quick check. I originally did this sending it as plain text however it was a little difficult to read. I wanted to set it up to have both text and HTML emails so it was nicely formatted for reading on the desktop but still useable when viewing on a mobile phone.

Enter PHPMailer. This is a great PHP class that makes the whole process of dealing with MIME headers and all the other crap painless. Using PHPMailer I was able to get the email sent with both a text and HTML version (including inline images) and it’s working great.

Windows 7 Beta…first impressions

Brian — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 05:19:15 +0000

Just installed the Windows 7 Beta. I should point out that I’m one of the few out there that seem to actually like Vista and have had great success with it….could it be better, sure, was it as bad as everyone makes it out to be, no way.

So, first thoughts of the new beta:

Install went well, no issues there. I like how the requirements seem a little better and am looking forward to seeing how it performs on netbooks. I think people will have less issues as they most likely already have newer hardware from upgrading to Vista or if they are still on really old hardware, they’re due for a new system anyway.

Look & feel is nice…I like the built in desktop slide show feature. It’s trivial but a cool touch (and I know someone who’s been asking for this feature for a while now.) Gadgets are no longer tied to the gadget bar but rather can be dropped anywhere on the desktop.

Powershell is built-in of course as is PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment which is a nice looking application that allows you to write, test, and debug scripts with all the syntax formatting and all.

UAC has a new settings adjustment. Honestly haven’t looked at this much as I don’t have too many complains about the one in Vista.

A new feature called HomeGroup is now available…not too familiar with this one yet but seems like it is from an old Longhorn feature called Castle.

Looking forward to playing around with it some more but so far it’s looking good.

Palm Beach IT Association – January 2009 Meeting

Brian — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 12:23:17 +0000

This coming Tuesday the PBIT meeting will be hosting Tish Boyles and Jose Gomez from D-Link. If you haven’t already done so and are planning on attending, please sign up so we have an accurate head-count.

NOTE: The meeting will not be held at our normal location due to a scheduling conflict. We will be meeting at Panera Bread in the meeting room, directions and map are available on the PBIT site.

Feature request for Windows Home Server

Brian — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 12:11:00 +0000

So far I’m really enjoying the little MediaSmart WHS that my wife got me for Christmas. I’ve been playing around with the various add-ins (there are some great ones!) and am still tweaking the IIS setup so I can have my photo sharing just the way I want (I don’t like the HP app as it’s too much of a pain to have to import the photos over the web to share them.)

So one thing that I think could use some improvement is oddly enough one of the great features of WHS…the backups. The one way I would like to see the backup improved on is to use VHD’s or at least have an easy way to create them from the backup. The reason this came up is my laptop started having issues with the fan…I wasn’t worried about losing data as I have it replicated via Live Mesh for some things, backed up to a removable drive, and now my new WHS. But the one thing I realized is that if my laptop were to fry itself, how would I access that data from the backup on another system?

The best thing I could come up with is that I could create a new Virtual system (using your choice of Virtual PC or VMWare) and use the WHS recovery CD to “restore” the backup of the now dead system. I’m sure it’s not going to boot up but at least you would then have a VHD image of the drive that you could mount and access the data.

What I’d love to see, either natively in WHS or via an add-on, is the ability to mount a backup image as a drive/folder in WHS so it is accessible over the network.

Oh well, maybe one day.

Online Ordering Intranet Portal

Brian — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 03:42:55 +0000

While writing an online ordering portal to be used internally between multiple locations to standardize their purchases, I needed to create an easy, web-based way to add and modify product entries in a MySQL database. I started trying to put this together using PHP and after a little while decided to start browsing the web for other options to get it done quicker as I realized this was not going to be a quick thing to put together.

I came across a great little project called phpMyEdit. This is a great PHP tool that will create an interface for your table(s) that can be customized a great deal and easily integrated into your site. So rather than having to spend hours reinventing the wheel I was able to complete the project and have a cool looking administration page to go with it.

If you go to the actual download site and look at some around, there are some other projects there that look pretty interesting as well.