As part of my Group Policy Rewrite I’m attempting to make use of Folder Redirection which lets you specify where common important Windows folders reside on the network.
Normally when you first log on, Windows makes a few folders under your user document folder for things such as Music, Favourites, Downloads etc. On a standalone machine these are usually stored under your user profile folder (C:\Users\{username}\Downloads in Win 7 for example) but they can be moved when you’re on a network.
In Group Policy, expand User Configuration > Policies > Windows Settings > Folder Redirection. Right click on one of the folders listed and select “Properties”. Documents is a good place to start, as I’ll show you how all the others can hang off that.
I’ve been sorting through our group policies and rewriting them ready for a switch over to Windows 7. During my thorough investigation it turns out our current policies overlap a fair bit, and it’s no wonder we have trouble tracking down why something we’re sure we’ve set in GP turns up unset on logon.
So my big project has been going through our settings one by one, and deciding which of these categories they fall into:
Common Computer settings — all the computers should get these as they are vital to the function of the network, or are likely to break something if they aren’t explicitly set for our staff and students.
Common User settings — everything else that just can’t be set in the Computer policy.
Staff Settings
Student Settings
Printers
The interesting trick I’ve learned about the printer GPs though is how to apply printers based on the computer’s OU without using local loopback! Read more »
Eager to dig up dirt on Julia Gillard (an alumna of Unley High School) the SMH visited the Unley High website and clicked on through to the Old Scholars page. HAHA! they yell, chuckling to themselves:
… it appears the website of the federal Education Minister’s former school, Unley High, has fallen victim to hackers. No doubt coincidentally, those curious to learn more about the Deputy PM’s school days in South Australia by clicking on the “old scholars” tab are confronted with an advertisement for “free black nude pictures”.
Of course, the site has not been “hacked” in any way. In setting the site up, I thought it a fun experiment to give the Old Scholars a way to re-connect, and create mini sites of their own within the pages of the Unley site. The hope was that they might create groups for the chess club of ’94, or the lazy boys of the class of ’67, or whatever. Then they could write messages on each other’s pages, write reminiscences of the times they had, and generally use the site in any way they saw fit to reconnect and share with one another. I installed the excellent open-source software Elgg, and enabled a feature called “blogs” (short for “web logs”) so people could fill the pages of the site with all their memories. I had hoped it would be a long-lasting record that would share some of Unley’s rich history. Read more »
There’s this newcraze on Twitter to get people to ask you questions anonymously and answer them on Twitter or your website. It uses this little site (run by FormSpring.com) called formspring.me to solicit questions, and people derive some amusement from it.
BUT
The day I heard about it, I thought immedaitely of skribit.com which I had only JUST installed on my site a week earlier and does exactly what formspring.me does only prettier, usefull-er and integrated-into-your-site-ier which for me are all important things.
I try a lot of new widgets and technologies on my blog, to see what they offer and make my website more exciting. While I can usually appreciate what they are trying to do, I more often than not find that the increased page-load times or disparity with my blog’s look usually compel me to uninstall the thing before too long. And I’m certainly not too attached to a thing to hesitate to uninstall it if it’s messing something up, or has some sort of bug.
This post is about one such widget that’s tenaciously holding on, and the reasons I’m still using it.
Finally got around to watching this. If Google’s Wave takes off (and it will), it will change everything. This is better than email, better than IM, better than a personal wiki. Within months of this going live, we will have a million new ways to communicate. That they’ve made it open source makes it more likely than any other tool to change how we communicate via the web.
When I was 13 I was around at my mate’s place as often as I could be just to play Wolfenstein 3D on his better-than-mine system. He had colour graphics and a sound card, while my Commodore 64 only had enough grunt for side-scrolling platformers and breakout clones and my IBM clone could barely muster monochrome. Wolfenstein was the pinnacle of gaming. It was just like you were there, with your little gun waving in front of you and meals left on the floor. And B.J. Blazkowicz’s face peering out at you to remind you to keep away from big men with chain-guns. I couldn’t play it enough.
Matt Mullenweg has declared today “Thank a Plugin Developer Day” to celebrate Wordpress passing the 4000 plugin mark. Often Plugins are created for free and have tonnes of hard work put into them for little or no reward. I currently have 22 plugins active on my website at the moment handling a variety of functions, but haven’t got much time to go into all the details of who made them and to thank them individually.
Instead, I’ll thank one man who made two of the plugins I use: Joe Tan. I use his excellent Flickr Photo Album for WordPress plugin on two sites and I love it. It integrates seamlessly with Wordpress and allows me to pull in my Flickr photos into posts and create galleries from sets. This plugin along with a Pro Flickr account have turned my crummy blog into a much more wonderful thing. I use it to keep all my relatives up-to-date with Amelynne’s progress as well. Joe also maintains an terrific plugin to pull files of an Amazon S3 account.
So thank you Joe! Your work and effort are greatly appreciated.
I told Joe that I’d send a donation, but found no way to do it on his site. When I do, I will!
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