I am performing a repair install of an XP virtual machine by mounting an image of a windows CD to a virtual CD rom drive all via RDP.
Just typing that made me have a little “Holy shit I really am a computer guy” moment.
Anyone else done something consumately geeky in the last few days that would sound impressive even to fairly skilled novices in your trade.
Meh. I remoted into our Oncall service’s domain controller today to put a manual entry into their forward lookup zones pointing to our RDP server in order to defend against a DNS poisoning attack. I’m just that awesome.
I managed to let Microsoft do a Security Update without crashing my machine. Does that count?
I had some friend’s computer that wouldn’t power up after a lighting strike. I went home and tested it and determined it wasn’t the power supply. Since it was a 9 year old computer, I figured it wasn’t worth trying to replace the motherboard. The computer was a Dell was a Dimension 2400 and I had a 4550 I wasn’t using anymore, so I moved their hard drive over to the 4550 and it booted up fine. I just had to install drivers for ethernet and video card. A lot less work than installing all the application software on the computer.
The DSL modem and the wireless router also died. Someday I hope to actually get a replacement DSL modem to work without a call to the AT&T’s help number.
How do people without geek friends survive?
I’m currently using a CUDA front-end to try and crack a RAR file password because, well, honestly I can’t remember it and none of my ordinary ones work. Damnit.
On the other hand, it completely boggles my mind that home computers can actually do that purely with raw power nowadays. And tomorrow I’ll be replacing all my E-mail passwords with random 32-character strings, most likely.
I installed a cap kit on my Satan’s Hollow arcade monitor, installed a new blacklight tube in the fascia which illuminates the control panel, and did general cleaning and maintenance of my other arcade games.
Yes, my back bedroom is an arcade.
I had a customer who insisted on running a DOS version of MS MoneyMate (circa 1989) on his new Windows 7 computer, and he wanted it to print to a his Windows 7 printer. I accomplished this by supplying him with Windows 7 Professional, which runs a Windows XP shell, which runs a DOS shell. I then installed a program that captured the LPT1: output from MoneyMate (which knows nothing of Windows printers) and redirects it to the proper printer port.
I right amazed myself when it worked.
I did something similar to the OP last month where I had RDPs to two customer sites and to a test/dev virt. We were trying to repro a problem on one customer machine & using the other customer for a configuration reference, while trying fixes on the test/dev box.
What made it cool was the test/dev virt was across town from our offices in our secure data center, the good customer machine was 4 states away from our offices, and the bad customer machine was on another continent in the opposite hemisphere.
And I was in a hotel several states away from my office. Sometimes the 21st Century is really, really cool.
The set-up I have for downloading torrents:
On my PC I have a Greasemonkey script that runs on several websites. When I right click on a torrent download link the script causes an iframe to open up next to the cursor like a context menu. The iframe displays a page that is served by a Perl script with a built in web server running on my file server.
The webpage has one tab with a list of common places on the server to download the torrent to, while the other tab has an AJAX interface for browsing the directory structure. Once I choose a download location, it sends another request to the Perl script, which has the torrent URL, the download directory, and the URL of the page with the torrent link.
The perl script uses LWP to download the torrent file (with the referer header set to the address of the page with the torrent link on it). Once it’s downloaded it sends command line arguments to utorrent, containing the torrent file that was just downloaded, along with the directory to download into.
The end result of all this is that I can download a torrent to any directory on my server, with a couple of clicks, directly from the site the torrent file is listed on.
It’s one thing to do obscure nerdy things. It’s another to get a buzz from doing them. Do you get a buzz?
I think the last thing I got a buzz from is helping a friend integrate a QR-code feature into his url shortening website (the feature being that each shortened url is accompanied by a qr code that points to that url, with an accompanying permalink thingy.
I tend to get buzzes from doing programmingy stuff that does a new thing that I’ve never done before. My most recent was writing a windows script that grabs some files from an sftp site, emails some of them, unzips the contents of one of them, imports those contents (pipe delimited files of data) into a microsoft sql database.
Edit: I just wish I got to do stuff like that on a regular basis. Alas no. (Anyone hiring? I know PHP, Javascript, jquery, asp, css…)
I use Ableton Live, a program for music recording/production. It embeds Python (a script language) for programming control interfaces. By using this embedded Python, other people have extended the functionality to allow a wide range of devices to be used, and in a variety of ways.
On Sunday, I extended one of these scripts with my own code to turn the Session grid into a programmable Finite State Machine, with inputs from my FCB1010 foot-board. I can now set up a song with a bunch of elements (intro, verse1, chorus, verse2, bridge, extro etc) and navigate through the song with a few foot-stomps, and it will always do something sensible. The next step is some on-the-fly recording/looping and back-referencing previously recorded loops.
Extended loop guitar/harmonica solos, here I come.
Si
You can do the lpt redirect without using a third party app (probably).
Go into the properties of the printer and share it. Then create a bat file with the following line and run it.
net use lpt1: \127.0.0.1\printer /persistent:yes
Substitute the share name for the word ‘printer’. You can also sub in the workstation name for 127.0.0.1 if you want. Shouldn’t make a difference either way.