SnakeLegs

The Problem
Multimedia performance over RDP on WAN links is suboptimal.  Users will complain of the painfully slow rendering of Flash-enabled websites.  Internet Explorer will block, so that you can’t scroll the browser window while Flash images are being rendered.
If you’re the Fed and can print your own money, Citrix’s Speedscreen Multimedia Acceleration can help.
Provision Networks, [...]

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I saw in Popular Science today that someone (Logitech or Kensington?) has a wireless keyboard with a battery life of three years.  Pretty good.  And then I thought, why not just use the energy of the person pressing the keys — I’d think there’s enough force applied that it could keep a battery charged for [...]

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Choco 2.0 is out.   Open-source constraint satisfaction, written in Java, and business-friendly BSD-licensed.
It’s the Holy Grail of computing.

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   MsRdpClient.AdvancedSettings2.BitmapCacheSize    = 48000
   MsRdpClient.AdvancedSettings2.BitmapVirtualCacheSize = 48

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Might as well use the cache — that’s what it’s there for.  Like Vista’s Superfetch, or XP’s prefetch, or precompiling JSPs, or what have you.
For example, to load up your squid http proxy cache, just run:
 wget -r -nd -H –delete-after http://your.portal.company.local/
or
 wget -r -nd -H –delete-after -i some_file_with_URLs.html
wget’s –no-cache will force the proxy to download fresh [...]

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The Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth’s Spreadsheet Engineering Research Project publishes some interesting research on errors in spreadsheets, including causes and financial impact (”Among the remaining 70 confirmed errors, the largest error was $100 million; however, 9 of the 25 spreadsheets tested had no errors at all.”).  Collection of stories.

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Do you have old print drivers hanging around?
Use the Print Migrator utility to back up your printer config:
printmig -b “server_name.cab”

And then remove the unused print drivers:

cd /d %systemroot%\system32
cscript prndrvr.vbs -x

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As mentioned in Mark Russinovich’s newest blog entry, here’s a quick introductory video on ZoomIt, the 44KB screen zoom and drawing utility that should be in every IT toolbox (along with everything else from Sysinternals).

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Corporate mail should be filtered for viruses and spam at the gateway — that’s just a given.  It’s much more efficient to filter incoming email in one spot than to check it at 300 or 25000 desktops.  Web browsers should go through a scanning, filtering proxy.  Again, it’s much simpler to secure and maintain.
So, what [...]

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Java developers and testers should use FindBugs to find and fix Java bugs.  It’s free, and the FindBugs team has concentrated on having a high hit ratio, as developers won’t use lint’ing tools that spew out pedantic non-errors.  FindBugs can run standalone or as an Eclipse plug-in.  Watch the Google Labs video linked on the [...]

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Pie charts are worse than useless.  Use a simple table or bar graph.

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I encourage most everyone I talk to to view the online Stanford Energy Lectures given by Amory Lovins, of the Rocky Mountain Institute.  There are five lectures of about an hour and a half per, and Amory is an interesting speaker.  It’s great knowledge and pertains to efficiency in general, not just electrical.

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PowerPoint presentations almost always suck.  There’s a reason for that.

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A lot of junior Windows admins think that the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer (MBSA) is sufficient to test the security of IIS websites.

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Server BIOS time should be set to GMT (Greenwich Mean Time).  Doesn’t work with Windows, though, which is why a lot of people don’t bother.  POSIX systems use GMT, so follow something like OpenBSD’s FAQ on the matter.

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I was searching for an old essay today and ran across this, so I’m tagging it for future perusal.  Computer reading.

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PCMag collection of free software
Noticeably lacking in the Finance list is Microsoft’s Accounting Express.

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Sacrilege!!!

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Here are good sources of free TrueType/OpenType fonts.

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I spend a good deal of time now working on effective, efficient communication. It is a sin to waste someone’s time. If you have to produce documentation, investigate sparklines (”Intense, Simple, Word-Sized Graphics”). Edward Tufte’s writing should be required reading for almost any profession I can think of.

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