Very cool, Google is adding ski slopes to Google Maps.  You can see the slopes that they have already added here.

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Spiceworks is a free piece of software I have been using for a while now that can monitor your network.  The software runs on a Windows server however you can access the website interface from anywhere.

Spiceworks allows you to create alerts on many things on your network that can email you and let you know if there are problems.  You can create alerts if a server or network device is offline.  You can also create alerts if one of your printers is getting low on toner.

Creating alerts in Spiceworks

Spiceworks also has a user portal which allows your users to be able to submit trouble tickets if they are having problems with their computers.  The user portal is totally customizable in the back end and you can add anything to it.

Manage User Portal Content in Spiceworks

Spiceworks has a great reporting tool.  You can get reports on all software installed on the computers, disk usage, RAM, CPU and more.  The reports are also customizable so you can make you own.

Spiceworks Reports

If you click on a specific device in Spiceworks, you can get all of the information on that device including, what antivirus is installed, how much free hard drive space, how much memory and a lot more.

So if you are looking for a network monitoring tool, I would definitely check out Spiceworks.

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1. Copy DVDs fast and easy with 123CopyDVD
2. Pictures from HGTV Change the World
3. Project Management for Web Designers

123CopyDVD

If you are like me, you like to make backup copies of your DVDs in order to make sure nothing happens to the originals.  Unfortunately a lot of the DVD copying software that is available is buggy or doesn’t make copies of most DVDs.  I have many different pieces of software and none of them are perfect however I have found one piece of software that is close, 123CopyDVD.  I have been using this software for a few months now and haven’t had any problems.  So if you are looking for a great program to copy DVD’s, give 123CopyDVD a try.

Download a free trial from www.123copydvd.com

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You can save yourself a lot of time down the road by creating a signature in Outlook using a template and applying it to everyone in your company automatically using Active Directory.  Using a Windows Powershell script and Group policy, you can do just that.

1. Download the Powershell script from Microsoft’s website.

2. Open the script and edit some of the variables at the top.  Company name, domain name, etc..

3. Using Outlook, create the signature that you want everyone to share.

4. Copy the signature from %appdata%\Microsoft\Signatures to the UNC-path specified in the SigSource-variable

5. Open Company Name.rtf and Company Name.htm in Microsoft Office Word and insert these bookmarks

Mark each word, “EmailAddress”, go to “Insert”, press the “Bookmark”-button and name the bookmark “EmailAddress”. It`s important that the names of the bookmarks are “DisplayName”, “Title”, “TelephoneNumber” and “EmailAddress”.
This is because these bookmarks are replaced by the information retrieved from Active Directory for the logged-on user.

6. Deploy the script using a logon script through group policy

If you get an error like:

“File xyz.ps1 cannot be loaded because the execution of scripts is disabled on this system. Please see “get-help about_signing” for more details.”

Try running this command: Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted

Now this script only works with a few variables: Email address, display name, title and telephone number. If you want to use other variables it is pretty easy to do by adding more lines to the code.  You can get the names of the Active directory variables at this page.

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It’s taken me a while but every day I become more of a believer in SaaS (Software as a Service), at least for small businesses.

No worrying about hardware failing

If you have ever done any system admin work for small businesses, you know the worst possible thing that could ever happen is a hardware failure. Usually if you have a hardware failing on a server, you have to diagnose the problem and figure out the best way to fix this problem. Usually it takes at least a day to get the part you need. During this time your server is down and anything on it is inaccessible.

No worrying about updating software

With SaaS you don’t have to update any software. No OS updates, OS components updates or program updates to do. Not a huge deal but updates can cause problems sometimes.

Don’t have to worry about backups

I’m not saying you don’t have to do backups, I would still backup your SaaS data. However there isn’t as much of a worry for it. You don’t have to deal with real complex backups, just backup your data nightly and you are fine.

Of course SaaS doesn’t only have positives, with SaaS you have to pay monthly usually and you’re not in total control. I think that the positives outweigh the negatives, at least for me. I would much rather focus on growing rather than working on the maintenance of my systems where I would never make money.

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Here are some pictures I took today from the HGTV Change the World Start at Home event. You can find more information about this event here.

HGTV getting set up before the kick off

View from Above

St. Louis Rams cheerleaders and the band getting ready

The kickoff has started

Some of the crowd watching

Monica Pedersen with the band

Scott Mosby from Mosby Building Arts discussing the patio

Construction on the Front Porch begins

The living room is being painted

Landscaping going in

Painting the built in bookshelves

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Flash flood in front of the office in Kirkwood, MO

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This is something I have been putting up with forever. Firefox on OS X is just horrible. It is either using 99% CPU or else it is just running slow all together.

Yes I do use plugins however disabling them really doesn’t help. Even if it did, what would be the point? The only reason I am still using Firefox is because of the plugins.

I was happy when Mozilla released Firefox 3.5 beta, hoping that would fix the problem but no it didn’t.

I’m really hoping that either Safari or Chrome allows for plugins to be created in the future.

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rTorrent is a very cool torrent client used in *nix based systems. I have been using it on my Apple TV now for a few weeks with very good results.

Recently the weather here in St. Louis has been stormy and it knocked out my electricity. When the power came back on, I couldn’t get rTorrent started and I was getting this error:

rtorrent: Could not lock session directory: “/Users/frontrow/.rtorrent_session/”, held by “appletv:+189″.

The fix was pretty easy, I went into the .rtorrent_session directory and removed the rtorrent.lock file.

cd ~/.rtorrent_session/
rm -f rtorrent.lock

That was all there was to it, once I removed the lock file I was able to start rTorrent.

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1. Fixing Windows XP login/automatic logout
2. Create an Outlook Signature based on Active Directory

I discovered a problem on a Gateway laptop running Windows XP. As soon as I would log in, the laptop would automatically log me off. It did it in Safe Mode and normal mode.

I ended up discovering the Userinit.exe file was completely missing from the c:\windows\system32 directory. I eventually found out the machine had a virus which probably infected the userinit.exe file and antivirus removed it.

All I ended up doing was I popped in the Windows XP CD. Started recovery mode and copied the file back to the c:\windows\system32 directory by doing:

cd d:\i386 (cd rom drive)
expand userinit.ex_ c:\windows\system32\userinit.exe

If the userinit.exe file already exists

There could be a situation where the userinit.exe file is already in c:\windows\system32. If that is the case then there is probably a messed up registry key. The key can be found in:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon. The key is named Userinit and should contain this value:

c:\windows\system32\Userinit.exe,

Yes the comma at the end should be there. The easiest way to access the registry without being able to access the system is to use BartPE. Once you boot off a BartPE CD, you can load the SOFTWARE hive right into the registry and edit it.

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