Got a pair of computer glasses from a local optometrist. What’s so “computer” about these glasses? Well, they come with yellow tint to ease your eyes while looking at bright monitors. And the prescription that it came with will make whatever you see a slight bigger.

After a few hours of experiment, I approve this product to my fellow Computer Dudes. For less than $300 bucks, you can get one too!

http://www.gunnars.com

Some coworkers of mine left this on my desk as a Joke. This isn’t the 5¼ yo, this is the legendary 8 inch from the 1970′s. This vintage disk holds 175 Kilobytes of your precious data! About the size of a piece of your hair in a picture taken by modern digital cameras.

I surely knew nothing about this disk, because I wasn’t around when it was popular. I found the information here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk

Truth be told, no one really cared about the desktop before we started talking desktop virtualization.  If a desktop failed, it really only impacted a single user, not a big deal unless the user is the CEO or Payroll. Unfortunately for that user, they could be out of commission for days/weeks.  But in a desktop virtualization world, that user can automatically reconnect and get their desktop back, albeit it is technically a different entity as it is now running on another hypervisor with a fresh OS install and Apps, but it looks and acts the same.

What happens if there is a major glitch, issue, failure, etc with the environment?  Even if your environment is rock solid, someone is going to do something that will bring down a very critical component. You might lose one user, but chances are you will lose hundreds or thousands.  If the failed component is critical, those users might not be able to reconnect.  Now you are in a world of pain.  If you are in IT and in charge of the desktop virtualization solution, it might be time to either

1.    Change your name

2.    Update your Resume

3.    Convince everyone that you are trying to save energy costs and shut down the entire system (not likely to work)

How do you avoid the name change or career change?  By doing your job correctly and designing a desktop virtualization solution that can withstand the failure of components without denying user access.  A High-Availability Reference Architecture and Implementation Guide for XenDesktop have been released to the Ask the Architect site.

The choice is yours, design an environment that has high-availability or design your own rapid exit plan.

Daniel – Lead Architect – Worldwide Consulting Solutions

via What happens if Your Desktop Virtualization Infrastructure has a Failure? » ocb – Citrix Community.

I rec’d a copy of Windows 7 Ultimate by attending the “New Efficiency” conference last week. I’m planning to install it on my new laptop. As much as I love to have it’s 64bit version, the one I got is 32bit. I’m gonna wait till someone releases the 64bit ISO and activate it with my key.

Microsoft did a great job on this release, it is the best version of Windows I’ve ever used. During the conference, I’ve learned a lot of new features, though they have to be implemented on the Server 2008 and IPV6 architecture. A lot of works to be done in the coming years for the IT team!

Problem: “I selected the printer, and hit the delete key a few times. But it doesn’t delete, though the status says deleting.”
Answer: “Cancel all the unfinished documents in the queue first. Damn it!”

Problem: “I cannot cancel or restart a job in the print queue. It’s just stuck!”
Answer: “Right click on My Computer > Manage > Services and Applications > Services > Right click on Print Spooler > Restart.”

Check this out, apparently shouting at your disks causes extreme latency. So, either keep your noises down in the datacenter, or upgrade to solid state drives! Click read more to watch the video.

I’m once again up-to-date with it’s current version: 2.7. And I think I’m gonna stay with this version for a while. Happy new year!

I make my own espresso at work, due to the reason being most of my co-workers are coffee-holics. We don’t have a regular coffee maker like the one at home. Instead, Espresso machines (2 of them) are placed in our break room. When I first started working there, I didn’t understand where the pressure release sound (Sssssssss…) came from. I thought they were using liquid nitrogen [N₂] to overclock our servers… LOL!

As explained by my Italian co-worker, Lattes has more milk and less foams while Cappuccinos contains little milk with heavy foams. Espresso is brewed under heavy pressure which makes it taste much stronger and darken it’s color. Did I mention it has more textures than house coffee when tasting?

To enjoy a cup of fancy caffeine drink isn’t easy, it takes a longer time to process and cleanup when making your own. Or you can get in line and spend $4 in a coffee shop.

Turning off Windows firewall remotely seems to be impossible in enterprise networks. Of course, in a network with 20 desktops, you could just simply walk over and do it. I’ve done a lot of searches and tried various of methods, the conclusion is: No Go!

A guy once wrote an au3 script, some people confirmed it works. But when I tired it recently, it works only if the target client is yourself. When I tried the script targeting another node, it does nothing. The way I see it: If windows firewall blocks incoming ICMP packets, it’s pretty much it. I have to walk over to the node and manually turn WFW off.

Maybe, creating a global policy on the domain controller would be the way to go…

Whoever did this, is very creative and I’m sure himself is a real network administrator as well.