Apr 7 2009

New photos added to Flickr

imageI’ve been adding some new photos to my flickr account today.

After recently getting a new scanner that can handle slides (more about that in another article) I’ve started scanning all my old slides (I have thousands).

To start with, I’m working through the photos I took during my time working in Antarctica.  Don’t worry, I’m not going to inflict the whole collection on anyone, I’m just picking out a selection that I like.

imageUnfortunately, the years haven’t been exceedingly kind to my slides.  It’s about 20 years since I took many of these photos.  In some cases, they were then ‘home developed’ in the dark room that was available to Antarctic expeditioners on the bases.  I guess they’ve actually survived pretty well but colours are starting to shift.  Either that, or my memory of how the colours are supposed to have looked has shifted I guess.

Anyway, you can see the latest additions here (with this blog wrapped around them) or go directly to my flickr page here.

Enjoy.

By David • Antarctica • • Tags: , ,

Apr 6 2009

Holidays with Dogs

imageLast Christmas my wife, Meredith, and I decided to go away over Christmas.  Normally, we’d leave our dog with someone to be looked after but this time it wasn’t really a good option.  Time to find somewhere “pet friendly” to stay.

One of the first things I learned is that “pet friendly” seems to be a loose translation for “we don’t mind if you bring your dog along but it isn’t allowed inside anything (house, shed, carport, etc) and we don’t have any fences anywhere“.  Needless to say this wasn’t our idea of pet friendly. More →

By David • Personal • • Tags: , , , ,

Apr 6 2009

The Build Disc – Part 4b (wrap-up)

Next ButtonOver the past week or so I’ve posted separate articles on each of the standard utilities that comprise the unattended installs portion of my standard build disc. Now I’m going to build on the starting point of unattended installs and talk about how to implement these installs as a component of the overall standard build.

The benefit of using unattended installs is that all of these tools get installed with no interaction required on my part.  Just set it going and come back when its done.  How did I do this?  Largely be combining each silent install into a single batch file that does the whole install process.

Unfortunately, it’s not just a matter of doing a cut and paste on each item.  In order to do this properly I need to work out which operating system I’m dealing with.  For example, there’s no point trying to install Sidebar Gadgets under Windows XP.

More →

By David • Build Disc, Unattended Installs • • Tags: , , , , , ,

Apr 6 2009

Unattended Installs – Vista Sidebar Gadgets

Vista SidebarVista Sidebar Gadgets

A sidebar gadget lives in it’s own separate directory (that might have sub-directories), all the files needed for that gadget live in that directory.  Vista then stores these gadget directories in a number of places, each offering a different level of visibility on the computer.

Some gadgets are stored in

C:Program FilesWindows SidebarGadgets

These are accessible on all user accounts on the computer.  Unfortunately, I’ve yet to find a reasonably reliable way to work around the various security systems that prevent a batch file from putting data into this directory (UAC and other protections exist for copying data into the Program Files directory in Vista).

Gadgets that are only visible to a particular user of a computer are stored in

%USERPROFILE%AppDataLocalMicrosoftWindows SidebarGadgets

and this directory is far more accessible for a batch file.

While I’d prefer to install my standard gadgets in a globally accessible location, this would require me to have a less automated approach.  The whole idea of an unattended install is to keep it unattended.  Therefore, I’ve chosen, for now, to go with the user profile location for gadgets on the basis that most of the computers we deal with really only have one normal user set up on them anyway.

Microsoft seems to prefer that we don’t download the installers for our sidebar gadgets but, rather, install directly from the web.  This also doesn’t help for a silent install.  While there are undoubtedly other solutions to this problem, in the end I did some experimenting and found that you can just copy the whole directory for an installed gadget to the correct directory on another computer and it will work.

So, I grabbed all my ‘standard’ gadgets out of “%USERPROFILE%AppDataLocalMicrosoftWindows SidebarGadgets” and then use this command to install to a new computer:

@xcopy ".CPUUtilization v1.2.0.2.Gadget" "%USERPROFILE%AppDataLocalMicrosoftWindows SidebarGadgetsCPUUtilization v1.2.0.2.Gadget" /e /i /c /q
@xcopy ".DriveInfoByChris.gadget" "%USERPROFILE%AppDataLocalMicrosoftWindows SidebarGadgetsDriveInfoByChris.gadget" /e /i /c /q
@xcopy ".iWeather.gadget" "%USERPROFILE%AppDataLocalMicrosoftWindows SidebarGadgetsiWeather.gadget" /e /i /c /q
@xcopy ".MemoryMeter.gadget" "%USERPROFILE%AppDataLocalMicrosoftWindows SidebarGadgetsMemoryMeter.gadget" /e /i /c /q
@xcopy ".NeptuneDigitalClock.gadget" "%USERPROFILE%AppDataLocalMicrosoftWindows SidebarGadgetsNeptuneDigitalClock.gadget" /e /i /c /q
@xcopy ".SysShutdown.gadget" "%USERPROFILE%AppDataLocalMicrosoftWindows SidebarGadgetsSysShutdown.gadget" /e /i /c /q

Once copied, these gadgets can be added to the sidebar normally.  I haven’t tried to automate adding them to the sidebar display yet – mostly because the final step on our build process is running through the Control Panel and finalising some other configuration options as well as doing a QA on the build.  It doesn’t add much to this process to manually add the relevant sidebar gadgets.

(This article is part of a series about the build disc I use to standardise system builds. The series starts here and this particular article follows on from this one.)

By David • Unattended Installs • • Tags: , , ,

Apr 6 2009

Unattended Installs – Registry (XP)

ControlRegistry Hacks for XP

Along with the standard utilities I install, there’s also a selection of little registry hacks that I’ve chosen to standardise on.  I should note that this is by no means an exhaustive list of possibilities.  I’d also note that my agenda here is to keep things relatively “normal looking” for the customer.  As a result, I only really do a few small things that, in my opinion, enhance XP rather than substantially alter how it operates.

Integrating registry changes is fairly simple in XP.  First up, you need the changes saved out to a file (e.g. reghacks.reg).  Here is the one I use.

This file has to have a certain format in order for this to work.  This MS knowledge base article provides details about the syntax of a .reg file and also includes details about how to add, modify and delete registry keys.  This KB article was the basis of my implementation:

regedit /s .InstallersXP_Reg_Hacks.reg

There are heaps of sites that offer registry hacks to achieve different results.  As with many things, Google can be your friend in finding the ones you want.

(This article is part of a series about the build disc I use to standardise system builds. The series starts here and this particular article follows on from this one.)

By David • Unattended Installs • • Tags: , , ,

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