I’ve just come across a really helpful and useful keyboard shortcut.

When in remote desktop, it is difficult to return to the local computer unless your logging off. The keyboard shortcut for minimising the window seems to be undocumented anywhere!

Press control, alt, pause and break to restore the window then straight away, before you do anything else, minimise it before using alt tab. When you return to the window, use control, alt, pause and break again to restore the full screen mode.

No more using the task manager to jump between the local and remote machines.

I’ve been looking around for a while but I’ve only found one recently.

I was looking for an image gallery that supported enlarging images, showing them as thumbnales and showing them in a presentation or slide show.

The interface for displaying these images had to be integrated into what ever theme I used or created and the process of uploading the images had to be really straight forward.

Finally, nextgen gallery for word press Is perfect.

Installing it is really simple as well. There about three steps to follow.

I’m not even a word press person. I’d have limited knowledge of installing and configuring it but even I was able to install it and have the module running successfully within less than ten minutes yesterday.

The only problem I had was actually that I edited the wp-config.php by hand and it wouldn’t connect to the database but when I used the create-config.php script it did the same thing but it worked. I don’t know if I was missing something really simple. I don’t think I was…

The anti-spam in Exchange 2007 seems to catch about 50% of the spam I get every day. Not too bad, but surely there’s something that can do better? When I use to host my Email on Google apps a lot more was caught. In fact, I could go weeks without receiving spam.

I’ve run a few updates today so lets see how that does. Hopefully it will make it better.

I’m going to set up a new server shortly to host forefront anti-virus. That will help with a lot of the crap I’m getting. Because it has databases and hooks into loads of other systems, I don’t want to install it on another server. It should be on a dedicated VM.

I think this is just the best day ever.
So. Join me today for a pint to mark System administrator day

An extract from the Sys admin Day site reads:

A sysadmin makes sure your network connection is safe, secure, open, and working. A sysadmin makes sure your computer is working in a healthy way on a healthy network. A sysadmin takes backups to guard against disaster both human and otherwise, holds the gates against security threats and crackers, and keeps the printers going no matter how many copies of the tax code someone from Accounting prints out.

A sysadmin worries about spam, viruses, spyware, but also power outages, fires and floods.

When the email server goes down at 2 AM on a Sunday, your sysadmin is paged, wakes up, and goes to work.

A sysadmin is a professional, who plans, worries, hacks, fixes, pushes, advocates, protects and creates good computer networks, to get you your data, to help you do work — to bring the potential of computing ever closer to reality.

So if you can read this, thank your sysadmin — and know he or she is only one of dozens or possibly hundreds whose work brings you the email from your aunt on the West Coast, the instant message from your son at college, the free phone call from the friend in Australia, and this webpage.

I’m one of the lucky ones. I love my job. I love when something breaks because I get the satisfaction of fixing it again.

Still though, could things only break between normal social hours like between 9AM and 11PM? That would be fantastic.
I got a text this morning at 4AM to tell me that one of the archival servers were down. Great. That’s exactly what I want to hear at 4AM in the morning.

I haven’t caught up with you in ages!
How are things?
How’s life treating you?
Are you having a good summer?
Any holidays planned?

There are a few of you who read this and lerk in the background. Don’t worry. I can see you all. Yes. Even you down the south of the country coming over every week or so to have a read through loads of old posts. The walls have ears don’t you know.
Even though you sneek around in the shaddows I hope your doing well too.

I got a few new readers last week from around the north of the country. A few from England too. Great to see you!

I’m in a great mood. I got in early this morning and got everything done over half an hour before work was even due to oficially start. I’m also enjoying a little bit of a cafeen buz so my fingers are skimming over the keyboard. Hay, my iPhone has just played the same track twice. Why is that? That’s irritating. Let me go fix that.

Right. Done…

What else is happening. Oh, in a few weeks, Emma and I are heading off on holiday for two weeks off to a hotter country. Well, it wouldn’t be hard to find somewhere hotter than Ireland. What’s the story with our attempt at a summer? I want good weather! for at least a month. Is that really too much to ask? People say we’re lucky this year that July wasn’t a complete wash out. Are we though? Where was the sun. Overcast skys do not make for a summers day.

I’ll write more about the holiday closer to the time. I wouldn’t want to tease you. hahaha. Who am I kidding. I’ll love teasing you. 🙂

A lot has happened since my last major update. So, here’s a brief breakdown.

• I’m still in the job I was promoted to a few months ago. Ok. There’s been a bit of a change in that role lately but I’ll not go into that much. At the start, I experienced a lot of accessibility related issues. There was a lot of push back from other members of the team as they didn’t believe I could do the job. They were convinced that the job was too visual. This is nothing new though. For people who can see, they can never see an allternative to using their eyes even if that alternative may even be more efficient. I’ll write about that little point at another stage. There are certain things that are still not very accessible however I’m making up for that by taking a lot of other work that is a little more suited. It means that in the long run, I’m taking more than I should but it all balances it’s self out. It’s a constant that any person who is blind will most likely relate to. No matter what your doing, or how good you are at it, there are always times when you’ll need to proov your self more than others who you work with to those who cant see far enough past the end of their nose to see that your doing the job to the same level as anyone else. Now that I’ve jumped through that extra hoop, things have settled down and accessibility is no longer such an issue.
• I purchased a new server just over a month ago. It’s a 2900. There’s around 4TB of usable disk space in it, 16GB of ram, 2 quad core processors at 2.1GHZ. It’s a huge beast. In fact, I’m going to have to look at storing it somewhere else as where it currently lives is not suitable. This server generates more noise than any other I’ve used in the past and it can be heard almost anywhere in the house. Plans are a foot that will solve this within the next month or two. The server is currently hosting virtual machines. These are hosting My domain controler, exchange mail server, linux web server, and a lot more. There are around 8 virtual machines in total on it and there is space for more to fit easily. Over the past few months I’ve been porting everything over to it. It’s been a very slow and difficult process but I’m very near the end now. In the past six months I’ve updated our home network substantially. As some of you will know, when we baught the house, I wired every room with a number of network points with Cat5E cable. Origionally, this was all connected together with an access point going to a 100MB switch. Wireless functionality was provided by the ADSL router. Now, the patch panel connects to a 48 port 1GB managed switch with POE. the broadband connection is provided by Irish broadband and I couldn’t praze them highly enough. Their really fantastic. the broadband is connected directly to the server removing the need for an external router. The server contains a customized Linux installation running on Debian that only contains the required services for routing and the firewal. The wireless is now provided by a dedicated 802.1N access point. Thanks to Blueface the house now has VOIP instead of an actual phone line. This is considerably cheaper and allows international calling without needing to even consider the implications in terms of the cost. Internally, the server hosts a trixbox virtual machine. This routs calls internally to either my self or Emma depending on who the caller wants to speak to. Messages left on the answering service are even Emailed to one of us so we can respond even when we’re out of the house. Thanks to the softphone software we have installed on our PC’s this integrates nicely with the contacts saved on exchange. We also have a cisco VOIP phone in the living room. I’ve also removed the old server running Windows 2003 and created a virtual domain controler running Windows 2008. That’s only scratching the surface. I’ve also implemented a VLAN just for servers that has IEEE-802.1X authentication installed. I’ve a management VLAN that has access to remotely manage and monitor the servers internally and then I’ve an unsecured VLAN that allows Internet access. It’s all a little bit over the top for a home set up but it’s been a great learning experience.
• In terms of music, I’ve not done a hell of a lot. I’ve had a at least one gig a week and I’ve been learning some new stuff that’s not necessarily traditional. My weekly radio show Mad For Trad is still going strong on a Tuesday from 7to 9PM in Ireland.

That’s all for the moment. There was a lot of technical rubbish in there too. Sorry about that. I wanted to write about that at some stage but I didn’t really mean to include it in this post.