November 2009 – bloggingIT

Stop Sexy Bookmarks from being filtererd

I’m quite a fan of the Sexy Bookmarks WordPress plugin. There’s clearly an element of grace in the design and the developers make no bones about how it should be perceived. Being ‘sexy’ has an inexpressible appeal for anything but it can cause headaches simply because of the connotations that are also brought up with it.

For example, searching in Google for Sexy Bookmarks is innocent enough at first until you get a few pages into the results.

The other problem is that corporate firewalls like WebSense can block words such as ‘Sexy’ if they appear in filenames. Continue reading Stop Sexy Bookmarks from being filtererd

A Quick Shutdown Command

Dos Batch File For shutting down multiple computers on a network:

<code>for /L %C in (1,1,30) do shutdown -f -s -t 0 -m \\ict-%C</code>

This shuts down all Windows computers named ict-X where X is a number from 1 to 30.

BBC iPlayer launches Wii channel

Well it finally happened. It was hinted at long ago when the Beeb first made the iPlayer available for the Wii via its internet browser, but now it seems that there will be a dedicated channel on the Wii.

I’m glad that it finally came along. After the recent Internet Channel update, the iPlayer hasn’t been working. Seeing as there is a supposed Flash upgrade in the update, it seemed daft that it would be disabled.

Hopefully the new channel will stream the video more smoothly. It’s been over a year in the making…

Read more at BBC iPlayer launches Wii channel.

Remove Network Printers from Users Before they Log On

Dos Batch File I had a little trouble with an HP Printer driver that was causing the Vista PCs to hang at logon.

Without going into the specifics of the problem (which comes down to poor HP drivers), I needed a way to ensure that the driver wouldn’t be active the next time that a user logged onto a computer.

A bit of quick thinking, and I quickly knocked up this command, that will enumerate all users in a folder and make the appropriate change while they are offline. Hurrah!

<code>for /D %D in (\\domain.local\users\*.*) DO (
  reg load HKU\UserLoad %D\profile.V2\ntuser.dat
  reg delete "HKU\UserLoad\Printers\Connections\,,domainsrv1,Suite Mono Printer" /f
  reg delete "HKU\UserLoad\Printers\Connections\,,domainsrv1,Suite Colour Printer" /f
  reg unload HKU\UserLoad
)</code>

This assumes that all of your users live in \\domain.local\users and that you are cleaning up vista profiles. Needless to say, you’d probably want to adjust this if you need to do something similar.

Install a Ranger Package Without Ranger

Following on from my remove ranger script, here is a VBScript that will automatically install Ranger packages without the need for the Ranger software on the network.

It’s a little rough around the edges but it gets the job done. At the moment, it doesn’t report any failures if a file cannot be copied etc.

Download the Ranger Install Package Script and save the file as ranger_installer.vbs. Now just drag a package folder onto the script to install.

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