I consider myself a real coffee drinker. But am I really one, if I don’t know the difference between the various kinds of the related beverages? Though, the regular house brewed coffee is what I consume the most. But occasionally, I’ll have a cup or two of it’s cousins from Europe. Either Lattes or Cappuccinos.

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!

Read more »

Being domain administrator in a complex network, you don’t want to walk around to fix issues or to install a software. You rely on remote desktop solutions to get into other devices. I use the admin share (\\node\x$) command very often. However, when the devices you’re working with has Windows firewall enabled, you’re out of luck. 

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…

If you are not in the IT business. You won’t think it’s funny. Basically, my whole department was laughing for a couple of hours and we kept on talking about it.

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

The first thing I did after I came into my office this morning was watching this episode of South Park, because on my way in, a co-worker said it’s too funny (Well, it’s funny to us because we’re geeks) to be missed. It appears the Internet was down throughout the nation, and the “Internet” was a bigass router. The yellow light was flashing.

And, the “Internet” was fixed by power cycling the router. Hey, it works in reality too!

So, your friend signed onto MSN or Live messenger on your computer. They happened to have new emaill messages and they choose not to check’em. After they sign out, you noticed the number of new emails is shown at the logon screen. Don’t worry, you’re not the only person that’s paying attention to the details. I personally dislike this stupid message too.

You have two options to get rid of it. Either ask your friend to come back and sign on to messenger again. Or you can to tweak the windows registry a little to make it disappear. So, click on Start > Run > Type in “regedit” > Enter. Then navigate to:

HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersion
UnreadMailyourfriend@somwhere.com

Double click on MessageCount and change the Value Data to 0 (zero). This is how to get rid of the annoying email message count at the logon screen.

This kick-ass real superhero is for sale on ebay. It’s a Optimus Prime Peterbilt 1:1 Scale Replica! How cool is this? I remember watching Transformers at 6:00 PM sharp on CCTV (China Central TV) right after home work. I would have to finish all my elementary school home works before my mom would let me turn on the TV. It was everyone of my classmate’s favorite. But I never thought there would be something realistic like this! This beautiful truck is going for $55,000 right now, but I think it can easily go wayyyy more than that. Do you have some extra cash laying around? Would be so cool driving it around on highway 880!