Remote computing with Logmein

There are many ways to connect to your home computer and do some sort of remote control operation. I’ve discussed in the past RDP and Powershell options, but today I’m going to focus on another tool that I find myself using quite a bit. That tool / service is Logmein http://www.logmein.com . Continue reading

Dearest Halo, I don’t love you anymore.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.  There’s a new Halo release today and I’m not sick with the Halo Flu.  I’m not even buying it today.  Does this mean I’ve fallen off the gamer wagon?  Absolutely not.  It’s just… Well it’s not you, Halo, it’s me.  Just kidding, it’s you.  ODST was bad.  Don’t lie to yourself.  The only thing ODST was good for was being traded in for credit on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.  Yup.  I said it.

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Google’s Android is not quite ready for the tablet platform

Google is saying that the current version of it’s mobile OS Android, is not yet ready for the tablet pc platform.  They have said that the current build Froyo is not a platform for iPad rivals, though they are hinting that they will have a tablet oriented OS soon.

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Powershell and Mysql featuring the null byte (x00)

For those of you who follow our blog, Brett does a lot of articles about PowerShell and how great it is. So the other day when I need to do a mysql dump of some data on a Windows 2008 server, I fired it up. The deep blue background touched my inner California beach bum, and the verbose bright red error messages made my inner programmer smile.

“This is pretty neat,” I thought. “Maybe Windows has finally made something to compete with Unix’s shell in a real and meaningful way.”

The dump finished and immediately my Common Sense began tingling…
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Free cloning software that works well with windows 7 and server 2008

Cloning a hard drive can be done through a variety of methods, and for a variety of reasons.  In this blog I’m going to make a couple assumptions. The first, is that you the reader, are looking to clone a drive on the basis that you would like to use this as part of a backup solution. The second, is that you are running windows 7, windows vista, or windows server 2008.

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Multiple parallel audio streams from multiple audio sources on one Wirecast license.

We were recently presented with an interesting problem by a long time local customer and friend to many of us here at High Speed Web. WRHI is a local media center running some 6 radio stations. They stream these stations over the internet with us currently via RTMP, Adobe’s proprietary streaming protocol. This works great when streaming to flash enabled browsers, but when their customer base increasingly demanded mobile device compatibility, WRHI had a problem. With Adobe and Apple, the maker of the famous iPhone, iTouch, and iPad, in a pissing match over the future of streaming mobile technology, WRHI needed to be compatible with both. After some research, Wirecast was chosen as the streaming encoder and Wowza as the streaming server. These were chosen based on their flexibility and inter-compatibility. The bigger issue was streaming 6 streams from the same box. Their original solution had them running 6 separate streaming servers.

But that didn’t sit well with my inner nerd.

Plus Wirecast is $500 per license, and 6 licenses versus 1 didn’t sit well with my inner banker.

So here’s what we did…
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Remote computing and PowerShell 2.0 part 1 – Getting started

It’s a pretty routine event for me to be remotely logged into more then one Windows server through Remote Desktop, or even occasionally sending a command from CMD to a remote server. PowerShell has not been left out of the game, when it comes to remote computing.  If you have a Windows 7, and a Windows 2008 machine, then everything you need has likely already been installed. In this blog I will discuss the steps needed to make and accept connections from PowerShell, and discuss running a single command on a remote computer. If not then you will need to download and install the Windows Management Framework Core package. You can find it here: support.microsoft.com/kb/968930

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Monitor your IPs with SenderScore automatically.

In a world of increasing SPAM, IP reputation has become a must-know statistic if you want to be able to send an email to a customer, prospect or even grandma. So if you are running an ISP, as we are, maintaining a good IP reputation isn’t some nice frill that makes you feel good, it’s a necessity. The problem is, no one wants to tell you what the reputation is. Sure, you can monitor the hundreds of various block lists out there, and probably should, but that only tells you when the IP’s reputation has reached a critical low. Luckily, most big email providers are turning to ReturnPath their spam complaints, feedback loops, and all those other tedious tasks that need handling when dealing with customer level email delivery. This places ReturnPath in a unique position where they can monitor, generate, and, more importantly, display the IP reputations of our IPs.

And so they do. Enter SenderScore.
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