Being St. Patty’s day, I felt obliged to go out and celebrate. After a quick stop at my new favorite place, Jake Melnicks, we headed over to Fadó Irish Pub. Being an Irish pub on St. Patty’s…there was a wait, but it wasn’t too bad (20 min?).

Fadó’s is a great place, but there were some crazy people pretending to jig to the music. I was getting annoyed with the people that kept slamming into me, but that’s part of going out. So I just push right back. ;)

The one thing that really threw me last night was the slightly older woman that was dancing around like crazy…with no shoes on. Oh, she had her stockings on, but they were so dirty they were black. The floor at this place was nasty - everywhere I walked my feet were sticking. Apparently…she didn’t care!

Until next year…

I was on a job a while ago where there were numerous VNC servers. Being the diligent auditor that I am, I wanted to a) document all the connections and b) determine if there was any juicy material on those computers.

I got tired of opening VNC, inserting the IP address, entering the password, taking a screenshot, saving it, and closing everything down again after about 10 hosts…so I scripted it!

Using Javascript and the sendkeys method, I was able to automate the entire process. I must say, it was quite amusing to just lean back and watch hundreds of VNC sessions get opened one after another. The code is pretty simple:

It loops through an array of hosts, and for each host it opens a VNC session, uses sendkeys to send the password, and then fires up Irfanview to take the screenshot. Again using sendkeys, the screenshot gets saved, I kill both apps, and it does it again.

I love making life easier…

Here’s a great cross site scripting cheatsheet. It’s the kind of text that shows you the things you didn’t even know were possible.

It’s freezing at work for some reason - maybe they turned the AC on early, who knows, but it resulted in this: [oracle@SQL02 ~]$ export DISPLAY=;)

oops… somehow I don’t think that’s going to work.

I had never come across S5 before, but it looks pretty slick. It amazes me what you can do with CSS and JavaScript these days.

/me returns to writing apps that output in XML and are formatted using CSS and XSL

Based on some recent statistics, looks like Chicagoist is telling me it’s time to move!

tents his fingers

After Firefox completely died on me for some reason, I am now completely in love with the SessionSaver .2 extension. I started firefox and it loaded all my tabs and windows exactly where I had left off. Being one that frequently keeps >20 pages open at any given time, this is a lifesaver!

I also just recently installed miniT, which allows me to dragreorder my tabs - one feature I’ve always thought was lacking in Firefox.

I came across all of these at rebelpixel.com.

I have finally decided to move my blog to a more complete blogging solution, WordPress. There are a few reasons for this. Probably the most important is that nobody links to me. My old custom-rolled blog didn’t provide for others to link back to me very easily. Nor did it allow for notifications of search engines such as Feedster and PubSub. I’m hoping that by using a blog engine that does these things, it will increase readership. We’ll see… Plus I get cool features now like search, categories, and soon a linkblog.

Fortunately, I was able to hack up some of the WordPress import scripts to pull in the posts from both of my old sites, even the Grand Opening! I’m pretty happy with it thus far, especially all the plugins.

I hope you enjoy the new site, and let me know if something doesn’t work.

As I mentioned, I’ve been working with Microsoft’s Virtual Server lately to build virtual lab environment for testing and research. The box we put it on can only take about 16 virtual machines started at once, but that’s nothing a few more sticks of RAM won’t fix. Here’s a nice screenshot of those 16 VMs starting up at once: screens/virtual_server_taskman_02.png

The box actually has two hyper-threaded cpu’s (which I need to disable), but the One Graph, ALL CPUs view was a little more impressive. And the systems were still very responsive.

Update: I did want to note that I was able to get those 16 VMs up and running that quickly through the use of the Virtual Server COM interface. The script creates difference disks for a given set of VMs, adds a user account to the system, and then sets permissions so only that user can access those VMs. I’ve also got another that can shut down the VMs and delete the associated user account.

I finished finished writing a script to create environments similar to the TechNet virtual Labs. This thing rocks! I can’t wait to deploy it.