Rockin' Robin

Wow, I haven't blogged here in ages. I'll get back to it one day, really I will...

Today, a special announcement. Twikini (http://www.trinketsoftware.com/Twikini) is possibly the greatest Windows Mobile Twitter client ever. It's dead simple, relatively speedy, and talks to both the inbuilt camera and GPS modules in my HTC Touch Pro. In short, it's a fabulous piece of software and has made mobile tweeting a viable function of my phone... which it wasn't before - all the other apps I had tried were either completely unstable or took forever to launch.

As a disclaimer, yes, I'm writing this blog entry to take full advantage of the free Twikini licence offer. Not to worry... I don't whore myself out for just any piece of software.

Altiris Deployment Console Auto-Move PCs - SQL Query - Exceedingly Long Title - Honestly, this is just ridiculous

At some point, fairly soon (I hope), I'll continue the XP Scripted OS Install series... because it's quite fascinating and really rather cool - plus, I'm learning more than I ever wanted to about a) writing documentation, and b) the SOSI procedure itself; its slips, trip-ups and pitfalls make for mind-bending insanity.

In the meantime, I'll offer this: have you ever wanted your Deployment Server Console to organise itself - like Mary Poppins and those kids cleaning up the bedroom with a snap of their fingers? The organisation I work for had severe need of such magic (voodoo), what with all those computers being moved around between floors, buildings, suburbs, etc... so I set to work writing a SQL Query which arranges computers into Console Groups based on IP address/subnet - you provide the appropriately-named Groups, this Query populates 'em. The usual disclaimers apply - run it at your own peril, etc etc etc, but I assume EEEEEEEEEVERYONE will be testing it on a mock-up of their eXpress database before going berko in production. YES? Good.

Since I'm Google's bitch, the Query itself is kept in my Google Docs.
Clickety and enjoy (or fear) - oh, and instructions are enclosed.

Apologies, apologies...

...amazing how time gets away from you. I'll be updating fairly soon; sit tight, my self-absorbed cyberramblings will return.

Start at the beginning

Your SOE ("Standard Operating Environment" - which usually turns out a lot less standard once users start making demands of you) is where it's at. Everything hinges on this; the universe will unravel at the subquantum level if you don't get this right.

Just kidding - the universe won't unravel at the subquantum level.
Everything will just turn to shit instead.

So anyway. Your SOE, if it's automated, will probably be pretty damned standard. After all, the exact same scripts being run on different machines can only differ so much, right? Right! I mean, aside from little things like hardware, drivers and computer names, the only other things that'll change between PCs are up to you. For now, though, we're going to assume that absolutely everyone who expects these wondrous things of you is getting a bog-standard machine with an office suite of some description (OpenOffice, Microsoft Office, whatever) and an antivirus (Symantec, Sophos, McAfee). Anything else be damned... or delayed, at least.

Altiris-based deployment techniques in medium-to-large environments.

It's time to automate the living shit outta this muthafucker.
Yeaaah!

Installation

So the plan is to keep a tech blog in parallel with my new, regular blog.
Let's see what happens.