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From: Streamline Refinance via LifeHacker.com

 

On several previous occasions I’ve needed to use the vSphere CLI (f/k/a RCLI) or the Perl SDK for specific tasks, but did not find them… intuitive. Sure, maybe if I had all the VMware commands and shell scripts memorized, but who has time for that?

Anyway, this morning I realized I had provisioned several new VM guests without selecting the Customization Specifications… so I had new Windows clones with no SYSPREP. Yes, I realize I could’ve blown them away and started afresh… but again I say: who has time for that? A couple minutes of Googling revealed a forum thread which mentioned the exact commands I needed.

So, for posterity’s sake, here are the simple steps you can take to apply the customization after the VM has been cloned or built from template:

1. Login to our vCenter: Connect-VIServer [VCENTER_SERVER_NAME]
2. List all the Customization Specs available: Get-OSCustomizationSpec | fl Name
3. Ensure that the target VM is currently powered down: Get-VM [VM_NAME] | Shutdown-VMGuest
4. Apply the spec: Get-VM [VM_NAME] | Set-VM -OSCustomizationSpec [SPEC_NAME] -Confirm:$true

That’s it! A few moments later I could see the event for the “Customize virtual machine guest OS” task completed, then I powered up the VM and SYSPREP ran like it should.

Of course, VMware has provided online reference and downloadable PDFs, but you may never need them. The PowerCLI supports all the ease of online help and command, object, and property discovery that PowerShell typically offers, so you can get started fast. When you open the console, PowerCLI helpfully reminds you to login with Connect-VIServer, list VMs with Get-VM, and get a list of all 258 cmdlets with Get-VICommand.

I hope that’s enough to get you started. Drop me a note on Twitter or leave a comment below if you find this kind of post helpful. Happy virtualizing!

 

Anyway, you can find this new content under my Technical Articles | Windows Domain Administration heading, and it’s called PowerShell Primer: Editors and IDEs. Let me know how you like it—enjoy!

 

But I don’t want to write about the Kindle Fire at the moment, because I’m not interested in an entertainment tablet like the Fire or the iPad—I spend more than enough time in front of a desktop PC or laptop every day, so I don’t need another LCD screen to look at.

What I do want to tell you about here is how, as someone who loves to read all kinds of books, I love my Kindle eReader… and I think, if you like to read, you might love it, too.

I’ve had my Kindle 3—well, now it’s called the Kindle Keyboard 3G—since Christmas, after my wife (and parents) had keenly heard me dropping hints about it for months. The gift didn’t disappoint.

I had long been interested in the idea of an eReader, especially since I am nearly always in the middle of several different books from various topics or genres, and I choose which one I will read based on my mood (or need, for example if a library book must be returned!). Carrying these around, especially when travelling, is a real pain… not to mention trying to hold hefty 400-page technical books over my head as I try to read lying on my back! (Warning: don’t try this when you’re in danger of falling asleep—it can hurt!)

Anyway, in the early years most eReaders fell short of something I would want to carry around and read from. This changed for me when the “eInk” displays came out, which are not brightly backlit like the LCD computer screens I use all day, but are much more like paper. These screens are quite easy on the eyes, like a book—or maybe even better than a book, since you can change the font style and size or tweak the paragraph spacing to completely optimize your view just how you want it.

As for books to read… at first I was a little worried, not wanting to spend a ton on new electronic books when I still have plenty unread paper books on the shelves. But I was pleased to find plenty of content available for free, from popular classics to lesser-known works… so much so that my “to read” list is expanding way too fast! (One freebie gem I’ve been reading this week is Andre Norton’s The Time Traders.)

Also, you may not know that many Kindle books can be borrowed and lent (with some restrictions, of course). I use a website called Lendle.me to both borrow eBooks from others and list the ones I can share. It doesn’t cost a dime, and Lendle will even pay you a bit for each time you lend a book out. (Caveat: You should know that with the very first book I borrowed from Lendle, The Future According To Me (Kindle Single), I liked it so much I went ahead and bought my own copy anyway so I could read it again and again!)

I’m hoping I haven’t overwhelmed you with info here; I’m trying to focus on the significant highlights without bothering about technical details and all that. (If you want those, you know where to find them.) But if you do decide to get yourself a Kindle, there are a few decisions to make. One is whether you want the ad-supported “Kindle with Special Offers”, or an ad-free one. The second is whether you can live with a common Wi-Fi connection for downloading new books, tweeting when you finish reading one, and saving your notes and quotes; or if you prefer the wide accessibility of the 3G cellular connection. (I have the latter, which I particularly like that I don’t have to enter the Wi-Fi settings for every coffee shop hotspot I might visit.)

For the new Kindles that Amazon just announced today, there’s aren’t a lot of details to be known yet (with the exception of a few hands-on reviews). But if I were buying today, I think I would lean towards the Kindle Touch, especially for the ease of the touch interface (and on-screen keyboard). I suspect that the smallest and cheapest of the bunch, just listed as the Kindle (not “mini” or something like that?) would probably be frustrating to use if you ever wanted to type notes in using just the four-way button. But the Kindle Touch looks to me like the perfect balance of portable size, ease of use, and unbeatable price. With these new prices, you no longer have any excuse not to go get yourself a classy eReader, right? If your spouse or significant other says no, maybe you just haven’t dropped enough hints about the upcoming holidays…

Addendum: Lifehacker/Gawker just published this “Pick Your Kindle Flowchart” decision-making tool that you might find interesting. It doesn’t answer nor explain a lot of the options, but it would be helpful if you’re the type who knows what you want.

 

Now I can resolutely say that using GVoice has been a total win for me. One major benefit is that GVoice can ring my office phone during normal working hours, since the cell hardly gets a signal in the lead-lined building I work in. And I love that I almost never have to dial into my voicemail to listen to a message, since GVoice transcribes them all for me and sends me an email just seconds after the call.

Of course, the transcriptions are less than perfect, but still pretty darn good for a machine. Most of the time I can easily understand and “read through” the transcription mistakes so I’m not missing out on any critical information. And you can’t beat the entertainment value in the mistakes in every transcription–it’s always a LOL-moment.

Don’t believe me? Take a look at some of these gems I have collected:

• From my wife: “…we were gonna pick up a Another Europe so and so I was wondering if you could do that for us please.” (It’ll be good to have a spare in case this one goes bankrupt.)
• “I was just calling. Because, I was remembering Part I, neck.” (I don’t remember there being any necking involved…)
• From my mom: “By the way in life. Hours are just gorgeous, sales. They’re opened maybe half way and doing really really great and I really like gummed anxious to hear how painfully strip plan.” (Huh?!?)
• “I didn’t see actually. In the accident but it’s clear that that big loud noise was something catastrophic like euchre, number in stinks.” (I have now adopted the new catch-phrase “something catastrophic like euchre” and prefer to measure things in “stinks”.)

I will continue saving these “best of Google Voice transcriptions” as I fully expect there are more LOL’s to come.

 

Of course, you may have not noticed the ads either, if you use an ad-blocker program like I do. And that’s fine with me.

In any case, you should know that (a) I will endeavor to advertise only things which I have used and can recommend, such as favorite books and music, and (b) this is still in the experimental stages, so it’s subject to change… especially if I find there’s a better way.

And as always, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this in the comments or direct email. Thanks for sticking with me!

 

But I am not talking about extensions now—I’m talking about “bookmarklets”. Yeah, you know: those tiny little JavaScripts that you save to your browser’s bookmarks. I confess that I ignored them for years, after only trying them once or twice. But recently I realized that some of my extensions could be replaced with simple bookmarklets—so I intentionally made a “Bookmarklets” folder as a drop-down in my bookmarks toolbar, so it’s always visible, and started populating it with useful and useless items.

Now I have narrowed my list of favorite bookmarklets to the top 8. Yup, you heard that right: this is not a “top 10″ list, so consider those 2 empty slots as less clutter in your browser, in today’s reading, and thus less clutter in your life (you’re welcome).

I have designed the page so that you should be able to drag-and-drop any of the bolded titles below, which are the bookmarklets scripts, to save them in your browser. (Lemme know if it doesn’t work for you.)

Add Feed to Google Reader

I use Google Reader daily, as I follow RSS feeds for various topics related to my work and my interests. This is an easy way to add an RSS feed without looking around for a link.
BTW: this is pretty much unnecessary in Mozilla Firefox, because (a) it puts the little orange RSS icon in the AwesomeBar if it finds feeds on the current page, and (b) once you have picked a default feed reader, the clicking the RSS icon always takes you there.

For more info, see this PCWorld article.

Bookmark this on del.icio.us

So I don’t use Del.icio.us Bookmarks as much as I should, but I do make an attempt to classify most of the “keeper” articles I read for later reference. The bookmarklet, then, is a fast way to do it—and it’s not a hog of your browser resources and toolbar space like the official Del.icio.us add-in is or was. (FYI: at the time that I’m writing this, Delicious is undergoing a change of ownership, so no bets on how well this will work in the future.)

For more info, see Del.icio.us’ official bookmarklets page.

Get Long URLs

The glut of short-URL services like bit.ly continues to trend upward and out of control, especially thanks to Twitter’s 140-character limit. I used to have a Firefox extension that would automagically try to convert all the shortened links on a page to the full-length ones, so I could see where they pointed without clicking on them—but this extension was super-buggy and slowed down every page significantly—removed! But this bookmarklet from the folks at LongUrlPlease.com only processes when you choose to run it, and updates the current page with the full URLs with ease. Highly recommended.

For more info, goto LongUrlPlease.com.

Get Short URL with bit.ly

For those times that I have to include a short URL—if, for example, I wasn’t using a Twitter client that automates it—I choose to use the aforementioned bit.ly because it works well and I can see how often people clicked on it. So, obviously, this bookmarklet makes that task easy.

For more info, see bit.ly’s tools page.

BugMeNot

For those inevitable sites that insist you must create an account with them in order to see the entire article or get a download or such, BugMeNot is the site to go. This bookmarklet just makes it that much easier.

For more info, got to BugMeNot’s FAQ page.

GMail this

My personal email is hosted by Google, and on my own laptop I’ve set GMail as the operating system’s default email client… but at work, my default is the company email program (usually Outlook or GroupWise). This bookmarklet will create a new outgoing message in GMail with both the URL and the prettified contents of the page, which is great for sending an article to a friend.

For more info, check out this about.com page.

Readability

Readability.com has become one of the many “read-this-later” services, akin to Instapaper.com. But I really appreciate their bookmarklet that gets rid of all the menus, ads, links, and other periphery around every web page and just shows you the content that you want to read. If you’re going to be reading more than a page, this is a great way to do it. And, they keep improving the service so it keeps getting better, still excluding useless interstitial ads but showing you diagrams and pictures essential to the reading. Highly recommended.

For more info, cruise over to Readability’s bookmarklet page.

(Word)Press this

It’s no surprise to you, dear reader, that I have built this website using WordPress as the CMS. This handy little bookmarklet allows me to select some text (or not) to quickly start a new post in my WordPress site. Note that this one is unique to your own WordPress site, so I can’t provide you with one here—you need to read how to get the Press This bookmarklet from your own WP admin panel.

For more info, look up the Press This documentation.

I hope you find my list as useful as I do. If you have any favorite bookmarklets that you use and I haven’t mentioned, leave a comment and let me know—I’d love to try it out. Happy surfing!

 

First, on this WordPress blog—I have been using the IntenseDebate WordPress plug-in which offloads some of the anti-spam processing, eases logins with authentication from many sources (so most users don’t have to create a new account they’ll never use again), and keeps the comments integrated in the local WP database. However, there are a couple frustrations with it:

• I still have to set the comments to require my approval, because 99% are spam. One by-product of this is that legitimate comments don’t get approved until I notice them pending, which may be days or weeks later.
• Worse yet, it slows the page loads considerably. All of the optimization I could do for WP caching and all that is nullified by the slow-loading IntenseDebate scripts and off-site content.

Any suggestions for me? I know Akismet is supposedly the unparalleled comment spam plug-in, but is it really up to the hype?

Secondly, I manage a phpBB Forum for a Kingdom of Loathing game clan I’m a part of, and I’ve had to set the new registrations to administrator-approved only due to the dozens of spammer logins. This means I get dozens of email a day requesting approval, which I promptly delete because I can’t keep track of who is legit or not.

So, anyone have any suggestions for a plug-in or other method to prevent comment spam in phpBB?

 

So as usual I pulled up my Del.icio.us bookmarks and dug into the performance and debugging tags. One of the best articles I’ve found for dealing with pool overflow is written by a Microsoft support engineer on the topic “Understanding Pool Consumption and Event ID: 2020 or 2019″. If you haven’t read that article before, go ahead and do so now, because I’m not going to duplicate Tate’s explanation—don’t worry, I’ll wait for you.

Okay now, with the page up on my screen I started in with the recommended steps:

1. First, I looked for high handle counts—but no program had more than 100 or so open handles, so nothing helpful there.
2. Next, I ran the Memory Pool Monitor (POOLMON.EXE) to check for processes that allocated a lot of memory but hadn’t released it, pressing ‘p’ once to show only the non-paged pool… but the key “Diff” column didn’t show anything unusual. So I used Task Scheduler to run ‘poolmon.exe -n poolsnap.log’ every 30 minutes so I could see the changes over time. Oddly, the server wouldn’t list its own pooltags for me, as ‘poolmon -c’ responded with the error “Poolmon: Unable to load required dlls, cannot create local tag file”—I guess I’l look at that another day.
3. This time I didn’t do anything with the Driver Verifier (VERIFIER.EXE) mostly because the machine was in production and active use.
4. I didn’t have a memory dump so the debugging tools were only marginally useful (I wasn’t the one to provision the server, or I would’ve configured it to dump memory at the BSOD.)

Google seems to suggest that there used to be a Pool Log Analyzer Tool to read the poolsnap.log, but I can’t locate a download anywhere. Maybe one of these days I’ll have to make my own (add it to the list!).

However, I didn’t need it, as I found another tool (developed by some Microsofties and released as Open Source) that helped immensely: the Performance Analysis of Logs (PAL) Tool. We were already using PerfMon to record all process counters, but making sense of that data on your own is nigh impossible. But my new PAL broke the data up into half-hour increments and created colorful and clear charts for the most useful data. Even better, it highlighted specific points of concern for each time period which led to the real source of the problem.

You see, one of the third-party programs had a small handle leak where it would fail to free up to 100 handles per hour after the threads finished processing. On its own, this would not be a big problem—but (a) this is a 32-bit Windows 2003 Enterprise Server with 9GB of RAM, and thus the non-paged pool is limited to no more than 256MB (and that only if it’s configured to use the maximum), and (b) it’s a Citrix XenApp server with 30 or more sessions all day long, and every one of those logins was running the troublesome EXE for 8 hour shifts. Now do you see the problem? Thirty programs leaking 100 handles each hour is 3,000 handles per hour, and it doesn’t take long for the aggregate to fill the poor little non-paged pool!

Anyway, now all we have to do is convince the software vendor that their app is the problem… And once again we’re left with the solution that “it’ll be fixed in the next release.” Until then I guess we increase the page pool to its maximum size and (edit: only the paged pool can be increased; the non-paged pool is only effected by the /3GB switch in boot.ini, which was not enabled here) reboot often!

 

A driving commute just doesn’t have the same effect, I suppose in part because driving involves a little more of the brain than walking, and perhaps due to other distractions like the radio or my fussing about bad drivers.

In any case, all that extra time to think has led me to a few conclusions:

Weather is no problem!

When I first considered doing this, I was unsure if I would enjoy it. I figured Maine’s harsh winters or rainy springs would be a major frustration in my day. Would I need to wear different clothes for the walk and change into my business attire once I arrived at the office? Would I be drenched and angry on the rainy days, cold and irritable on the chilly days? No to all of the above. Take-away lessons:

• Weather-appropriate gear is essential. In fall and summer, I always have a warm hat and gloves on hand (so to speak). Being ill-prepared for the weather will make you miserable; but having the right gear will keep you happy.
• The weather forecasts are wrong just as often as they are right. But that means if you’re leaving the house while it’s bright and sunny, but the forecast calls for rain—it won’t hurt you to take an umbrella or jacket.
• Today’s weather, right now, is the most useful to know. My cell phone has a page where I can get the current temperature and conditions, and I find it very handy to check as I select the jacket on the way out the door.

The average yellow light lasts only 3 seconds!

…and yet a majority of drivers assume that if they saw the yellow light, they can speed right on through the intersection before the red. Alas, this assumption is almost always wrong. I’ve seen people “gun it” when they see the yellow light from several blocks away, and then by the time they made it to the intersection, the traffic coming from the cross-wise direction had already had a green light for around 10 seconds. Take-away lessons:

• Don’t rush a yellow light—stop if you reasonably can.
• Don’t rush a new green light, because the yellow-light speedsters could still be approaching.

It is not always safest to walk when the stickman tells you to!

Maine is supposed to be a “pedestrian-friendly” state, where people on foot always have the right-of-way and there’s no such thing as jay-walking. Because of this, some people (especially younger ones) just step out into the road whenever they feel like crossing and expect traffic to stop for them. Obviously, in our speed-obsessed times this is not a wise choice, mainly because drivers aren’t on the lookout for pedestrians and bicycles—they are watching for other cars and maybe their next turn. Take-away lessons:

• At the moment the “Don’t Walk” sign turns to a “Walk”, it almost always means that the light has turned green for cars travelling in the same direction as those on foot. Sure, much of the traffic will be going right on past you, but some will be turning right where you’re walking—and drivers who are turning are even less likely to notice you there, especially as they are glad to have gotten the green light.
• A safer time to cross is near the end of the “Don’t Walk” sign, a few moments before it turns. As this point, it is likely that most cars are already past, and you have the opportunity to get at least part way across before traffic is moving again. This also gives you a higher chance of being seen by the drivers who are going to turn in your direction, since you may have been the only thing moving in the intersection before the light turned green.
• The obvious and important exception to the above rule is the cars who are rushing the yellow light; they are paying more attention to the fact that they want to beat the red light then they are to looking who’s in the intersection, so pedestrians must be wary.

Do you walk to work? Maybe you live close enough, but haven’t tried yet? If you live in Maine, many employers are supporting Commute Another Way Week right now, so it’s the perfect time to start. But no matter where you live, you can decide to “hit the pavement” any day you like. Why not give it a try?