Tips and Tricks
Little tips and tricks to do helpful but obscure things.
One of the biggest challenges of running a bleeding edge OS is the inevitability of running into software incompatibility issues. One such issue is running Forefront Client Security on Windows Server 2008 R2 x64. As of this posting you cannot run the Forefront Management Server yet, but you can run the client with a little bit of command line action.
Insert or mount the Forefront disc.
Open a CMD or Powershell prompt as admin.
Go to the following directory on the disc: \client\x64 (for x86 clients, just go to: "client")
...
Setting up a new Windows Server 2008 R2 has proven to be an interesting experience simply because it so different from Windows Server 2003. Most of the services are the same, it is just different (and sometimes difficult) to configure them. One of these is enabling audio through RDP sessions. I use my server as my sync hub for my iPod/iPhone devices, so being able to listen to audio through an RDP session is an absolute must. Unfortunately, Windows doesn't come with that loaded out of the box, so here's how you go about enabling it.
Start...
If you're like me, you run a Windows Server 2003 box and have iTunes on there for your various iThing devices. It makes the most sense since that's where your music/videos/etc. are too. Well, with iTunes 8.2 Apple decided to screw us over and not let AppleMobileDeviceSupport run on our machines. Luckily, I found a nice clean hack here on an Apple forum. Basically you download the Win32 components of the Windows SDK and an installer disassembler. You use the Windows SDK to remove the OS requirement check which allows the AppleMobileDeviceSupport installer to cleanly install and function normally.
One of the (many) things that has frazzled me about Xcode is the fact that you cannot change the 'company name' that appears in your classes directly through the Xcode UI. So, here's a way that you can do it, though it takes a simple Terminal hacking to accomplish. Like I just mentioned, pull up a Terminal window (Applications --> Utilities --> Terminal). If I wanted the company name to be waynehartman.com, I would type the following command in the Terminal window:
defaults write com.apple.Xcode PBXCustomTemplateMacroDefinitions '{"ORGANIZATIONNAME" = "waynehartman.com";}'
Go ahead and fire up Xcode, create a new class, and kapow! there...
Today I picked up a cool new Apple Bluetooth keyboard to navigate with my media center PC. It's small enough to easily fit into my coffee table drawers were it's out of the way when not in use, but I did have some difficulty getting it paired to my Kensington Bluetooth adapter. In order to get it working I performed the following steps:
Fire up regedit
Expand HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Widcomm\BtConfig\General
Find and set the key 'PinCodeWord' to a decimal value of 1111
Find and set the key 'UseFixedPin' to a...
I was writing some code that required that all text be hex encoded and was appalled that the .NET Framework didn't have a Convert method for doing hex, so I had to write my own. Converting text to hex is quite simple using the method below:
public static String ConvertToHex(String asciiString) { StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder(asciiString.Length); foreach (char c in asciiString) ...
With the whole DNS fiasco going down here recently, vendors have been scrambling to push out patches for the vulnerability that will be demonstrated next month. Unfortunately, it looks it like it has caused a few hiccups with Windows Server 2003 machines also running IAS.
Sometime after applying the patch for DNS, you might get the following error:
The Internet Authentication Service service terminated with the following error:
Only one usage of each socket address (protocol/network address/port) is normally permitted.
What's basically happening is that there are a number of services that use short lived UDP ports for conducting business. Unfortunately, it...
One of the first things that I wanted to do when I got my brand new iPod Touch was create a webclip icon. It really annoys my that a lot of mainstream sites like Digg.com, Weather.com, etc. haven't bothered to create one. So, here we go.
First, start off with a 128x128 image. One of the things to keep in mind is that your iPhone is going to automatically apply some 'glossiness' to your image, so a nice flat image is ok. The other thing to keep in mind is that because it does that, you should make sure that your...
When trying to log into a Windows Server 2003 server with a non-admin user, you may receive the following error:
The local policy of this system does not permit you to logon interactively.
This article explains how to grant a non-admin user logon access.
One of the biggest things that I've had a problem with C# is its complete, utter lack of string value enumerations. Enums provide strongly typed domain values that make programming easier to manage. However, since you can't include characters like wildcards, spaces, etc., this means that making a human readable enum a nearly impossible task. Until now. This takes a little more heavy lifting than I come to expect with the .Net framework, but is a relatively easy fix for what you get in return. This is broken into two parts:
Create the String value for the...
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