XP Remote Shutdown

I picked up a nice little tip the other day (via, I think, Life Hacker). It’s an easy way to shut down an XP machine remotely. I know, it’s nothing new. We’ve been doing it via the command line for years. But, can you remember the command line syntax? Nor me. I have to refer to the help every single bloody time. Well, fret no more. Shutdown.exe has a GUI!

Go to the run command and type

shutdown.exe -i

You get a nice little interface to play with. I used this successfully on Wednesday to reboot a non-responsive machine in the yard that was far too far away to walk to in the rain. Worked a treat I tell ya. It recognised the Active Directory machine reference and away it went. Sweeet!

blah blah blah…

Image via Wikipedia

Just a post to test previewing options within the WordPress editing suite and to see if Zemanta is gonna play nice today…

Update: Well, zemanta played nice (ish) but it would be nice to see an option screen to choose the alignment of the image. It threw it on the right automatically with no easy options to re-set it if you’re using the rich text editor.

The Preview button doesn’t auto-save before producing the preview, but it is opening it in a new tab in Firefox 3, beta 5. A problem for Mike in this forum thread.

BBH For Sandbox FTW!

Well, it’s not really surprising. A BBH* wins the Sandbox Design Competition. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great looking theme, but it looks so much like so many others it’s no different to any of them. Personally, I think Prima is the best looking theme. Ok, I’m not a beige kinda guy so the colours might change a little but it’s not blue and, from the screenshot, it looks to be well laid out too.

Andy also mentions that Sandox will be upgraded for wordpress.com “very soon”.

*Big Blue Header. Ask That Girl Again.

The Evil Of The Dot Doc Format

Everyone’s heard of Microsoft. Everyone’s heard of MS Word. Some people think that MS Word is the most evil piece of software ever created. I suspect this was written by a Linux geek:

* Proprietary format which can only be read if you’ve got specific software
* Are helping Microsoft take over the world
* Unnecessary
* BLOATWARE

As most people that use Microsoft Word (not corporate users) tend to use a ripped off version, it’s only helping MS take over the world as “everybody” uses it.

Unneccessary? Bullshit. The computer generation needed a decent wordprocessor. Microsoft provided that. Did you ever try using Word Perfect?

Proprietary format? Maybe. But there are many many other applications that can read the .doc format this argument is pretty much moot.

Bloatware? Yes. This fact I can’t disagree with. Write something in MS Word and then copy and paste the full text into a WordPress blog bost “write” window. You won’t see the bloat, but the extra code that gets put in can really screw with the post.

These recommendations are from the original post for freeing yourself of MS Word:

1. For any file that’s plain text with no fancy formatting (italics, bold etc), send as .TXT

2. For text files with fancy bits in, send as HTML (.htm), or as an early form of rich text format which you have reason to expect the other person has something generic to read it with.

3. For photographs, use .JPG (which is surprisingly compact)

4. For images which are solid graphics, use .GIF or .PNG (.PNG is better and is free of the patent/copyright problems associated with .GIF)

All reasonable suggestions with a couple of major problems. Most of it is utter shit. While I agree with all the points given these recommendations do absolutely NOTHING for the person that wants to write a letter and then print it.

1. Plain text will not support the layout formatting that most require for letters.
2. Most people do not know how to write HTML. Who the hell wants to spend a couple of hours writing HTML to format a letter, print it and then delete it. I’m sorry, but Word is just so much better at it.

As for recommendations for 3 and 4, who uses Word for photos in the first place? Nobody with any ounce of sense. If the user is taking photos from their camera then the camera usually comes with some sort of imaging software that does the job. Solid graphics? Not usually created with Word anyway!

My recommendations?

If you want to avoid MS Word altogether (and it’s no bad thing if you do!) use OpenOffice. It’s free and it does 99% of what MS Office does anyway.

Image manipulation? The GIMP. Again, it’s open source and allows you to do most of the things you need to your photos and graphics.

Block IE? Don’t Be Stupid!

This is a direct copy of the post over at my main blog. This is intentional.

Pressing that damned Stumble! button for yet another evening’s inane entertainment brought me to a forum thread for a Linux community called Open Addict. The first post in the thread says:

I’ve blocked Internet Explorer from viewing our front page and will implement that code on the rest of our site as we roll out the new format.

I’m sorry, you’ve done what??? You’ve blocked IE? Ooookay…

The reason, which you can read for yourself if you fire up IE and browse the front page, is that the dynamic menu code and other formatting issues looked like pure crap or didn’t work at all with Internet Explorer. Everything looks and works fine with Firefox, Opera, Konquerer, etc… but not IE and I’m sick and tired of hacking and tweaking things because IE has rendering bugs and doesn’t adhere to web standards like better browsers.

So, rather than make your website cross-browser compatible you’re just going to block one of the major browsers? Actually, your website doesn’t display properly with Firefox. I am running FF 2.0.0.5 (updated automatically today) and your front page has a horizontal scroll bar. Okay, it’s just 20 pixels or so, but it really is a sign of crap design. No website should have a horizontal scroll bar.

What’s the big deal? Well, believe it or not, most people coming to our site are using Windows and IE. This could hurt out traffic potentially, but I’m just fed up with IE rendering issues. So if you’re an IE user, I hope you’re not offended by any of this - it’s nothing against you as a user. Just please install and use Firefox or Opera if you use Windows. Better yet, use Linux and all of your dreams will come true.

The Big Deal? You freely admit that “most people coming to our site are using Windows and IE”. Does that not tell you something? Most Linux people are the advocates of the OS. They believe they “have seen the light” and are bent on converting the unwashed masses away from the evil of Microsoft and IE. And then you block IE visitors from seeing the “Linux Goodness”? That’s the big deal.

I have ranted about this before as it really gets up my nose. I agree that Internet Explorer is the root of browser evil, however, it’s the most used browser. Let’s do some stats:

Since 02 July (when I started running Google Analytics) I have had 2,992 visitors. 2,992 is 100% of my visitors. 2,064 or 68.98% of those visitors are using, yep, Internet Explorer. 771 or 25.77% use Firefox. The other 157 or just 5.25% visits are made up of 7 different browsers. Guess what’s on the bottom. Yep, Konquerer. Just 1 visit.

With almost 70% of my visitors using IE, If I would to block the browser then 70% of my measly 150ish visits per day would disappear. Do I want to risk that? No.

So, want my recommendations? Heres’s two:

1. Put a bloody big banner at the top of the page that simply states “Internet Explorer Sucks” and recommend alternative browsers.

Or (and this is much better)

2. Simply allow “Most People” to visit by fixing the sodding scripts, and menus.

There are millions of websites out there that don’t need funky scripts and shit to make their websites work with IE. All you are doing is re-enforcing the opinion (Wrong I know, but still it’s the consensus) that Linux users are all geeks, nerds, fanboys. or all three. Linux should not be elitist, yet you seem to think it is.

Folks - If you’re here because you got blocked by the Open Addict website, try this Linux Operating System instead.